Amygdala

Donate to American Red Cross here. Donate to The National Coalition for the Homeless here.

All The News That Gives Me Fits

Our Mysterious Name.

Our
mission.

Our
task.

Photo (©) David Hartwell. August 7th, 2010.

Home

Blog advertising supports bloggers!

I currently blog politically/policywise at Obsidian Wings.

Scroll down for Amygdala archives! You know you want to. [Temporarily rather borked, along with rest of template.]
Amygdala's endorsements are below my favorite quotations! Keep scrolling!

Amygdala will move to an entirely new and far better blog template ASAP, aka RSN, aka incrementally/badly punctuated evolution.
Tagging posts, posts by category, next/previous post indicators, and other post-2003 design innovations are incrementally being tweaked/kludged/melting.

Blogroll is now way down below! You may be on it!

Site Feed

Feedburner RSS Feed

LiveJournal Feed

Gary Farber

Create Your Badge

Above email address currently deprecated!

Use gary underscore farber at yahoodotcom, pliz!

Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a traitor since 2001!

Commenting Rules: Only comments that are courteous and respectful of other commenters will be allowed. Period.
fi

You must either open a Google/Blogger.com/Gmail Account, or sign into comments at the bottom of any post with OpenID, LiveJournal, Typepad, Wordpress, AIM account, or whatever ID/handle available to use. Hey, I don't design Blogger's software:
sorry!

Posting a spam-type URL will be grounds for deletion. Comments on posts over 21 days old are now moderated, and it may take me a long while to notice and allow them.

I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting 1974, a variety of other work experience, but have been, since 2001, recurringly housebound with insanely painful sporadic and unpredictably variable gout and edema, and in the past, other ailments; the future? The Great Unknown: isn't it for all of us?

I'm currently house/cat-sitting, not on any government aid yet (or mostly ever), often in major chronic pain from gout and edema, which variably can leave me unable to walk, including just standing, but sometimes is better, and is freaking unpredictable at present; I also have major chronic depression and anxiety disorders; I'm currently supported mostly by your blog donations/subscriptions; you can help me. I prefer to spread out the load, and lessen it from the few who have been doing more than their fair share for too long.

Thanks for any understanding and support. I know it's difficult to understand. And things will change. They always change.

I'm sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer, editor, researcher, or proofreader. I'm sometimes available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.

If you like my blog, and would like to help me continue to afford food and prescriptions, or simply enjoy my blogging and writing, and would like to support it -- you are welcome to do so via the PayPal buttons.

In return: free blog! Thank you muchly muchly.

Only you can help!

I strive to pay forward. Please also give to your local homeless shelter and street people: you can change a person's life.

Hundreds of millions of people on planet Earth are in greater need than I am; consider helping them in any small way you can, please.

Donate to support Gary Farber's Amygdala:

Please consider showing your support for Amygdala by clicking below and subscribing for $5/month! Free koala bear included! They're so cute!

To subscribe for further increments of $5, simply click above again, after completing one, for as many $5 subscriptions as you desire!

Advance notification of cancellations are helpful, but it's all up to you.

Thanks so much for your kind generosity.

Additional options! $25/month Supporter subscription: click below!

$50/month Patron subscription: click below!

Variant Button!

Subscription options

NetworkedBlogs
Blog:
Amygdala
Topics:
Politics, weird science, science fiction

Join my network

Change.org|Start Petition

"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 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....
-- 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

"Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue." -- François, duc de La Rochefoucauld

"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

"The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, & someone else's ignorance." -- H. W. Fowler

"Rules exist for good reasons, and in any art form the beginner must learn them and understand what they are for, then follow them for quite a while. A visual artist, pianist, dancer, fiction writer, all beginning artists are in the same boat here: learn the rules, understand them, follow them. It's called an apprenticeship. A mediocre artist never stops following the rules, slavishly follows guidelines, and seldom rises above mediocrity. An accomplished artist internalizes the rules to the point where they don't have to be consciously considered. After you've put in the time it takes to learn to swim, you never stop to think: now I move my arm, kick, raise my head, breathe. You just do it. The accomplished artist knows what the rules mean, how to use them, dodge them, ignore them altogether, or break them. This may be a wholly unconscious process of assimilation, one never articulated, but it has taken place." -- Kate Wilhelm

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-- Albert Einstein

"The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual."
-- Franz Kafka, Aphorisms

"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-- Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."
-- Nicholas Klein, May, 1919, to the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (misattributed to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1914 & variants).

"Nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well, that no one could find fault with it."
-- Lecture IX, John Henry Cardinal Newman

“Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.”
-- John Henry Cardinal Newman

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-- James Madison

"Those who are free from common prejudices acquire others."
-- Napolean I of France -- Napoleon I of France

"Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency."
-- Napoleon I of France.

"The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only."
-- Napoleon I of France.

"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know."
-- On the subject of torture, in a letter to Louis Alexandre Berthier (11 November 1798), published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol. V, No. 3606, p. 128

"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."
-- George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (1926)

"American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."
-- George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, (1920)

"If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big."
-- Hesiod, Work And Days

"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
-- Eugene V. Debs

"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign

"All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qaida," in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
-- Osama bin Laden

"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman

Gary Farber is now a licensed Quintuple Super-Sekrit Multi-dimensional Master Pundit. He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
He is presently single.

The gefilte fish is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left or I'll shoot this cute panda. Don't you love pandas?

Current Total # of Donations Since 2002: 1181

Subscribers to date at $5/month: 100 sign-ups; 91 cancellations; Total= 9

Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 16 sign-ups; 10 cancellation; Total= 6

Patron subscribers to date at $50/month: 20 sign-ups; 13 cancellations; Total= 7

This page best viewed by you.

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world

[Blogroll now far below the sea line! Dive, dive, dive!]

You Like Me, You Really Like Me

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

...Darn: I saw that Gary had commented on this thread, and thought: oh. my. god. Perfect storm. Unstoppable cannonball, immovable object. -- Hilzoy

...I think Gary Farber is a blogging god. -- P.Z. Myers, Pharyngula

...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

‎"Gary Farber is a gentleman, a scholar and one of the gems of the blogosphere." -- Steve Hynd, Newshoggers.com

"Well argued, Gary. I hadn't seen anything that went into as much detail as I found in your blog." -- Gareth Porter

Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is.
-- Fafnir

Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy

Gary Farber gets it right....
-- James Joyner, Outside The Beltway

Once again, an amazing and illuminating post.
-- Michael Bérubé, Crooked Timber

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

Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit."
-- Jim Henley

...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

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

Gary Farber is a straight shooter.
-- John Cole, Balloon Juice

I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber

Favorite.... [...] ...all great stuff. [...] Gary Farber should never be without readers.
-- Ogged

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

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

One of my favorites....
-- Matt Welch

Favorite....
-- Virginia Postrel

Amygdala continues to have smart commentary on an incredible diversity of interesting links....
-- Judith Weiss

Amygdala has more interesting obscure links to more fascinating stuff that any other blog I read.
-- Judith Weiss, Kesher Talk

Gary's stuff is always good.
-- Meryl Yourish

...the level-headed Amygdala blog....
-- Geitner Simmons

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

...the all-knowing Gary Farber....
-- Edward Winkleman, Obsidian Wings

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

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 IS MY AROUSAL CENTER. -- Justin Slotman

Gary is certainly a non-idiotarian 'liberal'...
-- Perry deHaviland

Recommended for the discerning reader.
-- Tim Blair

Gary Farber's great Amygdala blog.
-- Dr. Frank

Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott

Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit

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

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

Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this?
-- Natalie Solent

You nailed it... nice job."
-- James Lileks

Gary Farber is a principled liberal....
-- Bill Quick, The Daily Pundit

Archives:
December 2001 January 2002 February 2002 March 2002 April 2002 May 2002 June 2002 July 2002 August 2002 September 2002 October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 December 2003 January 2004 February 2004 March 2004 April 2004 May 2004 June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 August 2009 September 2009 October 2009 November 2009 December 2009 January 2010 February 2010 March 2010 April 2010 May 2010 June 2010 July 2010 August 2010 September 2010 October 2010 November 2010 December 2010 January 2011 February 2011 March 2011 April 2011 May 2011 June 2011 August 2011 September 2011 October 2011 December 2011 January 2013

Blogroll is Always In Progress:

Roger Ailes
Alas, A Blog
AlterNet
The American Street
The Aristocrats
Avedon Carol
Between the Hammer and the Anvil
Lindsay Beyerstein
The Big Con
bjkeefe
CantBlogTooBusy The Center for American Progress
Chase me Ladies, I'm in the Cavalry
Chuckling
Doghouse Riley
Kevin Drum
elementropy
Eschaton
Fables of the Reconstruction
Gall and Gumption
Gin and Tacos
House of Substance
Hullabaloo
The Hunting of the Snark
If I Ran The Zoo
Lawyers, Guns & Money
Lotus: Surviving a Dark Time
Matters of Little Significance
Nancy Nall
Charlie Stross bastard.logic
Daniel Larison
Afro-Netizen
American Conservative
American Footprints
Andrew Sullivan
Angry Bear
Attackerman
Attempts
Balkinization
Balloon Juice
Beautiful Horizons
Bitch Ph.D.
Brad DeLong
Cato-at-liberty
Cogitamus
Crooked Timber
Cunning Realist
Daily Kos
Debate Link
Democracy Arsenal
Edge of the American West
Eschaton
Ezra Klein
Feministe
Glenn Greenwald
Governing.com: 13th Floor
Hit & Run
Hullabaloo
Juan Cole
Kevin Drum
Lawyers, Guns and Money
List Project (Helping Iraqis who worked with us get out)
Marc Lynch
Mark Kleiman
Katha Pollit
Market Square
Matthew Yglesias
Megan McArdle
Metro Green
Mightygodking
Newshoggers
Orcinus
Pam's House Blend
Pandagon
Paul Krugman
Pharyngula
Philosophy, et cetera
Radley Balko
Sadly, No!
Shakesville
slacktivist
Southern Appeal
Stephen Walt
Steve Clemons
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Taking It Outside
Talking Points Memo
TAPPED
The Poor Man
The Progressive Realist
The Sideshow
TPMCafe
U.S. Intellectual History
Unfogged
Unqualified Offerings
VetVoice
Volokh Conspiracy
Washington Monthly
William Easterly
Newsrack Blog
Ortho Bob
Pandagon
Pharyngula
The Poor Man
Prog Gold
Prose Before Hos
Ted Rall
The Raw Story
Elayne Riggs
Sadly, No!
Snarkmarket
TAPped
TBogg
Texas Liberal
Think Progress
3 Weird Sisters
Tristram Shandy
Washington Monthly
Ian Welsh
James Wolcott
World o' Crap
Matthew Yglesias
Buzz Machine
Daniel Larison
Rightwing Film Geek About Last Night
can we all just agree
Comics Curmudgeon
Dum Luk's
Glenn Kenny
Hoarder Museum Juanita Jean
Lance Mannion (Help Lance!
Last Words of the Executed
The Phil Nugent Experience
Postcards from Hell's Kitchen
Vanishing New York
a lovely promise
a web undone
alicublog
alt hippo
american street
city of brass
danger west
fact-esque
fierce urgency of now
get fisa right
great concavity
happening here
impeach them!
jensscholz.com
kathryn cramer
notes from the basement
sideshow
talking dog
uncertain principles
unqualified offerings
what do i know
balkinization
crooked timber emptywheel
ezra klein
Fact-esque
The F-Word
glenn greenwald
governmentality
hullabaloo
Lifehacker
schneier on security
ta-nehisi coates
talking points memo
tiny revolution
Roz Kaveney
Dave Ettlin
Henry Jenkins' Confessions of an Aca-Fan
Kathryn Cramer
Monkeys In My Pants
Macadamia
Pagan Prattle
As I Please
Ken MacLeod
Arthur Hlavaty
Kevin Maroney
MK Kare
Jack Heneghan
Dave Langford
Epicycle
Onyx Lynx Atrios
Demosthenes
Rittenhouse Review
Maxspeak
Public Nuisance
Scoobie Davis
MadKane
Nathan Newman
Whiskeyfire
Echidne Of The Snakes
First Draft
Corrente
Rising Hegemon
NTodd
Cab Drollery (Help Diane!
Hullabaloo
Southern Beale
The Kenosha Kid
Culture of Truth
Talk Left
Black Ag=Q< Report
Drug WarRant
Nieman Watchdog
Open Left
Meet the Bloggers
Dispatch from the Trenches
Frameshop
Crooks and Liars
LiberalOasis
Campaign for America's Future
Iraq Today
Daily Kos
Lefty Directory
MyDD
Infothought
Balkinization
News Hounds
The Brad Blog
Informed Comment
UN Dispatch
War and Piece
Glenn Greenwald
Schneier on Security
Newshoggers
Krugman
Jim Henley
Arthur Silber
Julian Sanchez
The Agitator
Balloon Juice
Wendy McElroy
Whoviating (LarryE)
Scott Horton
Tennessee Guerilla Women
Looking Glass
Charles Kuffner
Brad DeLong
Busy, Busy, Busy
Blah3
Norbizness
Oliver Willis
The Carpetbagger Report Shakesville
Firedoglake
Pandagon
Down With Tyranny
Professor B
Monkey Media Report
The Grumpy Forester
Majikthise
Uggabugga
Ian Welsh
Pacific Views
Alas
Booman Tribune
Matthew Yglesias
Skippy
The American Street
Slacktivist
Xymphora
Media Bloodhound
Liz Henry's Composite
Eccentricity
The Heretik
Arizona Eclectic
Sisyphus Shrugged
Interesting Times
Talking Dog
Liberal Desert
TBogg
Under the Lobsterscope
Seeing The Forest
Sean Paul Kelley's The Agonist
Orcinus
King of Zembla
Mark Kleiman
Liquid List
Elayne Riggs
Wampum
Skimble
No More Mr. Nice Blog
Fanatical Apathy
Blue Gal
Linkmeister
Mark Evanier
Roger Ailes
Scratchings
Suburban Guerrilla (Help Susie with money!)
BadAttitudes
Peevish
The Mahablog
Brilliant at Breakfast
The Group News Blog Scrutiny Hooligans
Respectful of Otters
Max Blumenthal
Two Glasses
Feministing
Running Scared
Sadly, No!
WTF Is It Now?
Attytood
William K. Wolfrum
Rox Populi
Alicublog
Angry Bear
Crooked Timber
No Capital
Alternative Hippo
Newsrack
The Rude Pundit
Ezra Klein
Trish Wilson's Blog Jon Swift, RIP
Jeremy Scahill Mercury Rising
Cup 0' Joe
Fact-esque
Lance Mannion (Help Lance!)
Lawyers, Guns and Money
Feministe SF
Agitprop
Progressive Gold
PSoTD
Paperwight's Fairshot
Biomes Blog
Progressive Blog Digest
A Tiny Revolution
Yellow Doggerel Democrat
Pros Before Hos
Michael Bérubé
Notes From Underground
Bob Geiger
AintNoBadDude
StoutDem
Adam Magazine
Reptile Wisdom
Steve Gilliard archives
The Poor Man
Neal Pollack
Jesus' General
Fafblog
Running Scared
Paul Krugman
Hendrik Hertzberg
Murray Waas
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Kevin Drum @ MoJo
Political Animal
The Big Con (Rick Perlstein)
Talking Points
Altercation
Dan Perkins
Conason
Tapped
TomPaine weblog
MoJo Blog
Sirotablog
Jim Hightower
Chris Floyd
*
Michaelangelo Signorile
Naomi Klein
James Wolcott
Bear Left
Lean Left
Left i
The Left Coaster
Upper Left
Here's What's Left
Left in the West Daily Howler
Common Dreams
Buzzflash
Smirking Chimp
TomPaine
Intervention
Moose & Squirrel
Make Them Accountable
Failure is Impossible
Ampol
White Rose Society
Velvet Revolution
Cursor
Political Strategy
The Daou Report
Meryl Yourish
Memeorandum
Peek
IceRocket
Blogpulse
Technorati
Blogwise Paul Krugman
Gene Lyons (or)
Joe Conason
Engadget
Gizmodo
SFNovelists
Boing!Boing!
Futurismic
Sadly, no!
Walter Jon Williams
Stiftung Leo Strauss
Crooked Timber
Gordon's Notes (John Gordon)
Bruce Sterling
Ian McDonald
Antick Musings (Andrew Wheeler)
I, Cringely
I Blame The Patriarchy
LawClanger (Simon Bradshaw)
Carrie Vaughn
The Sideshow (Avedon Carol)
This Modern World (Tom Tomorrow)
Jesus's General
Mick Farren
Dave Clements
Early days of a Better Nation (Ken MacLeod)
Terra Nova
Whatever (John Scalzi)
Michael Swanwick
GNXP
Demography Matters
Justine Larbalestier
The Law west of Ealing Broadway
Inspector Gadget
The Yorkshire Ranter
Newshoggers
Kung Fu Monkey
Pagan Prattle
Gwyneth Jones
Brain Windows
Informed Comment: Global Affairs
RBN Exploits
Progressive Gold
Kathryn Cramer
Halfway down the Danube
Fistful of Euros
Orcinus
Shrillblog
Joe Conason
Frankenstein Journal (Chris Lawson)
The Panda's Thumb
Martin Wisse
Wave Without a Shore
Kuro5hin
Scrivener's Error
Advogato
Talking Points Memo
The Register
Plagiarism Today
Cryptome
Juan Cole: Informed comment
Global Guerillas (John Robb)
Information Warfare Monitor
Shadow of the Hegemon (Demosthenes)
Simon Bisson's Journal
Econospeak
Ethan Zuckerman
MetaFilter
NTKnow
Encyclopaedia Astronautica
Fafblog
Warren Ellis
Sociopath World
Brad DeLong
Hullabaloo (Digby)
Jeff Vail
Jamais Cascio
Rebecca's Pocket (Rebecca Blood)
Mark Safranski
Dan Drake
Geoffrey Wiseman
Libby Spencer of The Impolitc
Zeno is always HalfWay There
Aaron Krager may Have A Point
Scholars & Rogues
Blog Sisters
Better Things to Waste Your Time On
Taking Barack To The Movies
Not An Accident: Peace To All
Scott McLoud
The Secret Recipe Blog
Terri Windling's The Drawing Board
Damn Dirty Hippies Are Everywhere
Progressive PST
Ryan Harvey's Even If Your Voice Shakes
Matthew Cheney's The Mumpsimus
Jazz From Hell
The Angry Black Woman
Computational Legal Studies
Laure lives at Apt. 11D
Vylar Kaftan
Spocko's Brain
bastard.logic
Twistedchick's Wind in the trees
Greg Palast
Jeff VanderMeer has Ecstatic Days
Nadyalec Hijazi has Velvet Migrations
Emily Jiang is Writing with Iceberg in Tow
Global Voices Online
Ethan Siegel Starts With A Bang
Don Herron goes Up And Down These Mean Streets
Punditry Nation
Frank Denton still has a Rogue Raven
Geri Sullivan is On The Funway
Emily L. Hauser – In My Head
The League of Ordinary Gentlemen
Carl Brandon Society
John Hodgman
PsyPost
Streetsblog San Francisco
William Cronon is a Scholar As Citizen
SourceWatch
Right Wing Watch
Democracy For America
Hoyden About Town
Bernard Avishai Dot Com
CrunchGear
RealTimeSatelliteTracking &ISS
Rachel Holmen's Maple Leaf Rag
SF Signal
Tachyon - Saving the World One Good Book at a Time
The Duck Of Minerva
Abu Muqawama
Abi Sutherland's Noise2Signal
Clarisse Thorn
Whirled View
Adam Serwer
Stuff White People Like
LiberalLand
Berkeley Today
Berkeleyside
The Disorder Of Things
Howling Curmudgeons
The Gun is fired by C. J. Chivers
Raven Brooks's Coffee Is For Closers
Spin Your Web
paidcontent.org
More Red Ink
infotropism
Rickety Contrivances Of Doing Good
Brad Ideas
Asking The Wrong Questions
Ambling along the Aqueduct
Committee To Protect Journalists
The Bloggess
Ultraphyte

People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, Bob Doyle, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost, Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Mike Glicksohn, Jay Haldeman, Neith Hammond (Asenath Katrina Hammond)/DominEditrix , 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, it only gets longer, many are unintentionally left out. And She of whom I must write someday.

Amygdala

Monday, January 31, 2005

THANKS muchly to whomever it is in Savage, Missouri, who has now sent three care packages in recent days. You can stop now, though, as thanks to many who donated money over the past couple of weeks, and immense thanks to you all, I'm okay through at least the beginning of February on all reasonable expenses, food, and rent. That is, donations are still gratefully accepted, as ever, so long as I have no stable or regular income, but mailing cans of food isn't necessary (I'll try donating the evaporated milk and some others to the food bank, although my past experience is that they won't take cans that are past their sell-by date; I did get your last note saying you'd just ). The palm-sized plastic radio was a nice touch, though, but I have no sure idea what I'm supposed to do with the black velvety cloth velcro thingie; is it a eye-covering for sleeping? In any case, the thought and effort are vastly appreciated!

While I'm thanking people, thanks to Nick Gillespie, editor-in-chief of Reason for the review copy of Best Of Reason; it looks quite interesting, and I look forward to perusing it. If I have thoughts on it, I'll try to post them.

1/31/2005 01:10:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

FREE SPEECH: WHO NEEDS IT? Perhaps charging for it is the way to go.

It turns out the First Amendment is a second-rate issue to many of those nearing their own adult independence, according to a study of high school attitudes released Monday.

[...]

Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.

“These results are not only disturbing; they are dangerous,” said Hodding Carter III, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which sponsored the $1 million study. “Ignorance about the basics of this free society is a danger to our nation’s future.”

The students are even more restrictive in their views than their elders, the study says.

When asked whether people should be allowed to express unpopular views, 97 percent of teachers and 99 percent of school principals said yes. Only 83 percent of students did.

Indifference, misunderstanding
The results reflected indifference, with almost three in four students saying they took the First Amendment for granted or didn’t know how they felt about it. It was also clear that many students do not understand what is protected by the bedrock of the Bill of Rights.

Three in four students said flag burning is illegal. It’s not. About half the students said the government can restrict any indecent material on the Internet. It can’t.

“Schools don’t do enough to teach the First Amendment. Students often don’t know the rights it protects,” Linda Puntney, executive director of the Journalism Education Association, said in the report. “This all comes at a time when there is decreasing passion for much of anything. And, you have to be passionate about the First Amendment.”

[...]

The survey, conducted by researchers at the University of Connecticut, is billed as the largest of its kind. More than 100,000 students, nearly 8,000 teachers and more than 500 administrators at 544 public and private high schools took part in early 2004.

Trust the government and the courts to know what we should be allowed to say, and lock up those who say bad things! It's the only way to be safe!

Read The Rest Scale: 2.5 out of 5.

1/31/2005 12:28:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

LET ME EXPLAIN RELATIVITY TO YOU, PROFESSOR EINSTEIN. Greg Benford fooled me for about a minute with this alleged review of a book about Einstein's "found" notebooks with a secret code, revealing his little-known interest in science fiction, but the April 1st date of alleged publication raised my doubts to a near-certainty, confirmed by a few second's Googling, including an earlier publication of the same piece in the April 1st edition of Locus ("by Ben Gory Gerdorf").

It's still rather amusing, though, if not as much so if you credulously thought it might be real for a brief moment. :-) (This shopping page seems to believe the book is real.)

Read The Rest as interested.

1/31/2005 10:54:00 AM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

Sunday, January 30, 2005

CHIP DELANY ON "GENRE." I quote myself quoting Chip on rec.arts.sf.fandom on Usenet in 2000, so I can more easily find this again in the future (I've slightly reformatted it from my original Usnet posting for ease of reading in this post):

rec.arts.sf.fandom

Damon Knight's Pointing (was Re: Hugo results!)

Gary Farber

So I was casually listening to Jim Freund's Hour of the Wolf sf [radio] show, finding myself awake this a.m., and listening to his cuts of the new (or is it still upcoming, did he say, in January?; I fear my attention beyond the music was less than rapt) Steeleye Span album, and Jim gave me cause to wander past his website, www.hourwolf.com, and my eye was caught by a selection from a chat with Chip Delany that seems to me apposite to Damon's quotation. It also pretty well mirrors the approach I've always taken to the "definition of sf" question, which I can, on infrequent occasion, find mildly entertaining, and on extremely rare occasion, edifying, but, possibly due to excessive early exposure since childhood, have, as a rule, overwhelmingly found boring.

[UPDATE, August 31st, 2009: Link to http://www.eventhorizon.com has now rotted and been removed; the whole site is long gone, sigh]:

Chip said:
Until fairly recently, by that I mean 6 or 7 yrs ago, the fanzines you saw were peppered with all sorts of terminology that had its origins in Stalinist lit-crit of the 30s. The rest of academia had gone on from that, but no one had ever told US there was anything wrong with that stuff. This by the way is the reason that the first question anyone in fandom who wants to be serious about science fiction asks is, "What is your definition of science fiction?" This is not an innocent objective question ordained by God and self-evidently logical. It is was ALL leftist critics were asking of various genres in the 1930s. We just never got out of the habit. It happens to be a silly question and unanswerable.. and in other genres no one asks it today! But it is not a sign of our purity. Only of our isolation.

[. . .]
EH_Rob:
I wanted to follow up on your comment that a "definition" of sf is a silly endeavor, and unanswerable. By that do you mean that we shouldn't use these genre terms? If we can't define them in any reasonable way, of what use are they?
Delany:
If you mean define "definition." No that term can be defined. What can not be defined are genres. You can't define poetry, the novel, tragedy, pornography, comics... and you cannot define academic criticism either. Now, you can describe all of them in perfectly useful ways. You can describe them so people can recognize them. So that particular provisional job that you have to do can get done. You just can not specify their necessary and sufficient conditions. So there are no root examples, no borderline cases. With different descriptions, different borderlines come into being. I think the genre or at least genre criticism, might take a major step forward if it simply threw out the term "definition." The term "description," would do perfectly well. The point is, if someone asks you, "How would you "describe" science fiction," the proper answer is: "For what particular purpose do you want this description?" This is not the mood in which the question "How do you define sf?" gets asked.

The assumption there is that there exists an absolute description, necessary, sufficient, that will do for every case. For every job you might want to do. It's that transcendent absolutism in allits imperialistic arrogance that today's literary theory is trying to get away from.
EH_Rob:
Is this sort of like the Platonic idea, that you can't define "chair" but you can describe a chair well enough so that others can recognize one?
Delany:
Rob, well, the Platonic idea is, of course, at least as Plato had it in mind, was that there did exist some absolute concept of "chairness". The more provisional notion is precisely what Plato wanted to get away from. It was too changeable, too ephemeral, too primitive and for Plato the changeable, ephemeral, the impermanent, were one with the bad... only what was immutable and eternal was identified with the good and the beautiful. Yes, living in the provisional world, the contingent world of Derrida and Davidson undercuts lots of authorities if not the concept of authority itself, but that's the one we've got to deal with.
jrc:
But it seems that a definition is certainly possible and even warranted. If you settle for the term science fiction, then you'd somehow expect an expansion of current scientific theory to be promoted in the literature (for as many nebulous reasons as science itself exists); if you adopt Harlan Ellison's "speculative fiction" tag, then you'd somehow expect there to be some message (theme?) attached to the speculation.
What do you see as your purpose, if any, writing sf?
Delany:
Well, the only problem there is your belief that you are giving a definition, it is a perfectly good description, to be a definition it would have to be an absolute that answers all question about sf and nothing, no linguistic construct can. I want to throw together some interesting ideas, some interesting images, organized in such a way as to make you think and, of course to feel a little bit, too.
And now Jim is starting a reading of a Sheckley short story. . . .

Read The Rest Scale: 0 out of 5, though you might want to read the follow-up comments, if you're interested.

(Note deeply important change in my mental style sheet: I used to put spaces between the dots in my ellipses online; nowadays I use no spaces! Radical, eh!)

I was stimulated to find this again by John Holbo's post here.

UPDATE, August 31st, 2009, 8:39 p.m.: The Google Groups/Usenet link is now rotted, as well. Good idea I blogged this.

You can actually find a link via a Google Groups search confirming this post was made, but the link remains broken. Google never was very good at maintaining its Usenet archive, after buying it from Alta Vista. Say, remember Alta Vista?

For the record, the thread was:

Damon Knight's Pointing (was Re: Hugo results!)
rec.arts.sf.fandom - 1898 posts - 158 authors - Last post: Sep 30, 2000

1/30/2005 01:30:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 1 comments

DON'T WORRY, BE HAPPY. The estimable Timothy Burke ponders the reality of online connections between people and various related issues. More or less at the end of his post, he says:

I do worry sometimes, as Justin worries, that what makes it all valuable and generative also increasingly afflicts me in a real, lived, everyday context with intellectual and emotional aphasia, that I am constantly transformed and affected by relationships with are entirely in my own head as far as everyone around me is concerned.

Of course you are constantly transformed and affected by relationships which are entirely in your own head as far as everyone around you is concerned, Timothy!

Everyone is.

And it has nothing whatever to do with being online or offline. It simply is the way we, as conscious human beings, are. Not solipsistic, but nonetheless trapped inside of our heads&bodies, communicating with others outside them by mechanisms (words, expressions, gestures, body language, behavior, creations), not pure telepathy or mass consciousness.

It's not something to worry about insofar as there seems, at present with our contemporary technology and understanding, at least, nothing much we can do about this, save to strive to learn to use our communication mechanisms as best as possible, both in making connections with the people we desire to, and in trying our best to understand, and give ourselves the best possible tools to understand, what other people are trying to say.

I don't think this is in the slightest a question about online vs. offline. But, then, I generally find highly questionable most suggestions that there is some sort of drastic or major dichotomy between the world of being online, and the rest of the world. The online is, in my view, quite clearly and indubitably, as much "the real world" as anything else is. It's precisely as much between people, as well as only inside our heads, as is the rest of our world, it seems to me.

Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5.

1/30/2005 08:58:00 AM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

LESS BIG SCIENCE. I wrote about Laurie Anderson becoming NASA artist-in-residence back in June. Now she does the Deborah Solomon thing in the Times Magazine.

I have to say right off that the Solomon feature drives me crazy. 90% of the time her questions seem to be literally deliberately thick-headed and wacky, as well as being frequently down-right stupid. She seems to choose to channel a badly disturbed six-year-old in her choice of questions. Why the editor of the Magazine finds this entertaining, I have no idea.

Add to that the fact that most people are completely clueless as to how the Magazine is, for most intents and purposes and facts, an entirely separate production from the New York Times newspaper; they have separate editors, distinct offices, different rules, and other distinctions; but this is entirely obscured to most because of the name, distribution, and some very limited overlap of writers, which has been largely exemplified solely by William Safire (and now that connection has finally been slashed).

So this results in a gazillion blog posts linking to Solomon and then ranting about the stupidity or bias or what-have-you of the NY Times, which is completely off-target, but endlessly tedious to read in blogs.

I do dearly wish they'd fire Solomon, or if she has some other, less visible, talent, put her somewhere she'd show it.

Having said that, Anderson is as amusing as usual:

Whom is your art intended for?

I think I do my work for some sadder version of myself, a woman who would be sitting in Row K. I am trying to make her laugh.

Although your show is headed for the hip Brooklyn Academy of Music next month, it relates to the fashion for one-person shows that are now flourishing on Broadway and overshadowing boisterous musicals.

I have never seen more than four minutes of a Broadway musical. I went to see ''Cats,'' and that is the closest I have ever come to a nervous breakdown.

[...]

Have you ever been psychoanalyzed?

No. I started a couple of times, but then I had to leave for the airport.

At 57, do you worry about aging and wrinkles?

Not really. I think some prunish people look pretty good. I am more worried about turning into a schlump than into a prune.

How would you define a schlump?

A schlump is someone who doesn't care about anything and who is just protecting their own turf, which is getting smaller and more meaningless, and then they disappear.

Schlump.blogspot.com is available.

Read The Rest Scale: 2.5 out of 5.

1/30/2005 07:14:00 AM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

Saturday, January 29, 2005

FIGHTING POVERTY is a moral value.

In Chicago last weekend, Dr. Frenchak joined a gathering of 20 Christians, mostly evangelicals, to produce a book defining moral values to include a focus on poverty. At the meeting, one man held up a Bible from which he had cut every verse that addressed poverty. "There was hardly anything left," Dr. Frenchak said. "He said, 'I challenge anyone in the room to take their Bible and cut out every verse about abortion or gay marriage, and we'll compare Bibles.'"

This is one of many reasons I have no interest in beating up on religion, per se.

Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5.

1/29/2005 08:50:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

WHO DOESN'T LOOK FORWARD TO BEING OLD AND POOR after reading this?

Crucial fact:

Others, when their assets are gone, will go to nursing homes, which charge 40 percent more on average [than the assisted living facilities the article is primarily about] but accept government reimbursement.

So, policy in the U.S. is that the government will pay for you to live in an absolute shithole horrshow nursing home, which costs 40% more than a merely dreadful asssisted living facility, which the government won't pay for.

Numbers:

Most states in the last few years have begun small, experimental programs that permit Medicaid to pay a portion of the cost of assisted living: the personal care and medical services that are tacked on to the monthly charge, but not the rent itself. Nationwide, according to a 2002 study by the National Academy for State Health Policy, 102,000 assisted living residents, or 11 percent of the total, received this benefit, double the number in 2000. But rarely is it enough to allow people to stay in an apartment for more than a few extra months.

That is because of the traditional fee structure in assisted living. At Atria Stratford, for example, a studio costs $3,400 with no special services. Medication management adds $400 a month. Help bathing, dressing or eating can cost an additional $1,400 a month, for a total of $5,200. Of that amount $1,800 would be covered by Medicaid if Atria participated in Connecticut's tiny waiver program. It does not.

Statewide, Mr. Vail said, there are 9,800 assisted living units and only 75 Medicaid waiver slots. So he advises families to calculate when their money will run out and move before that point, since nursing homes, if they have a high enough percentage of Medicaid patients, can push those with assets to the top of the waiting list.

Can anyone make anything even vaguely resembling a coherent argument for this policy of Medicaid paying for nursing homes, but not cheaper assisted living? Surprise me.

Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5 unless your plan is to die young.

1/29/2005 08:10:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

I DO JAMES NICOLL A FAVOR, and point out that it was he, James Nicoll, who first wrote:

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.

A comment which has been endlessly paraphrased and linked to around the net as by "anonymous," which it most certainly is not.

See also his comment at the end of comments here.

I feel his pain.

If you see someone quoting a version of this, give credit where due, please.

Read The Rest -- they're both extremely short -- as interested.

1/29/2005 07:34:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

THE ARGUMENT FOR CREMATION is here:

Drive slowly down the main high street in Teshi, Eastern Accra, and you would probably glance at showrooms and wonder why anyone would want to exhibit a large red fish, or an oversized hammer.

It is as if you have arrived at some strange storage area for a local drama group or even film set.

But, further into town, you will see another couple of "film set" workshops, and another, and goodness, is that really an aeroplane?

On closer inspection each of these objects turns out to be a wooden casket highly crafted and lovingly finished to transport the newly deceased on their journey to the afterlife.

And at only 22 he has seen it all and he has made it all.

Coffins crafted as hammers, fish, cars, mobile phones, hens, roosters, leopards, lions, canoes, cocoa beans and several elephants.

It seems there is nothing Isaac's company would not consider.

[...]

Isaac and his team of carpenters work with many different types of wood in the open-air workshop.

One employee is crafting a cocoa bean, another is chiselling the fine details of a complicated pineapple design.

Many of their clients want to bury loved ones in something that reflects their trade.

Even if that means being buried in a Coca-Cola bottle.

[...]

It became a bit of a challenge to guess how each of these coffins actually opens.

To my untrained eye, I had no idea how you would get a body into an enormous snail that would not have looked out of place on the film set of "Dr Dolittle".

Isaac gently explained that the shell came off.

And I felt even more foolish when I had to ask who it was for. A snail seller, of course.

Who wouldn't want to be buried in these?

The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5; seven more pictures here.

1/29/2005 05:35:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

THE FREE SPEECH THING. Anyone who knows me at all, or has read much of my writings knows where I stand on this, but it doesn't hurt to say so again and again, from time to time.

One Sunday in the summer of 2003, the Rev. Ake Green, a Pentecostal pastor, stepped into the pulpit of his small church in the southern Swedish village of Borgholm. There, the 63-year-old clergyman delivered a sermon denouncing homosexuality as "a deep cancerous tumor in the entire society" and condemning Sweden's plan to allow gays to form legally recognized partnerships.

"Our country is facing a disaster of great proportions," he told the 75 parishioners at the service. "Sexually twisted people will rape animals," Green declared, and homosexuals "open the door to forbidden areas," such as pedophilia.

With these words, which the local newspaper published at his request, Green ran afoul of Sweden's strict laws against hate speech. He was indicted, convicted and sentenced to 30 days in jail. He remains free pending appeal.

[...]

On Wednesday last week, about 200 people gathered outside the courthouse in the southern city of Jonkoping to voice support for Green during his first appeal. Many who showed up were homosexuals who said while they disagreed vehemently with what the pastor said, they defended his right to say it.

Albeit it is not for me to tell Swedes what laws they should or should not have, I, too, would defend the right of anyone to voice an opinion, no matter how hateful or disgusting, so long as it does not cross a line of inciting immediate or specific violence.

Not so, say supporters of the law. In their view, the issue is stopping people -- whether or not they are pastors -- from promoting intolerance of gays and lesbians.

"Ake Green is only using his religion to say very bad things about gay and lesbian people as a group," said Soren Andersson, president of the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights.

"If you look at his speech, and take away the word 'gay' and put in the word 'Jew,' you have a different picture.

"I don't think it's okay to say those things about Jews," Andersson said. "But when it comes to gays and lesbians, it's okay? Why? . . . This is about people -- it's about living people who are already treated very badly here."

And people need to be able to live with mere words, no matter how awful and upsetting. Is it "okay"? No. Should it be legal? All I can say is that I don't want to live somewhere where it isn't, somewhere that criminalizes speech, including saying dreadful things about Jews, says this Jew.

Sticks and stones. Sticks and stones. When actual violence occurs, laws worth upholding are broken. (Usual exemptions regarding libel, copyright violations, and incitement to violence go here.)

Read The Rest Scale: 2.5 out of 5. Tangential note: I recently saw the uncut version of West Side Story for the first time in decades, as opposed to the edited version shown on U.S. broadcast tv; I had completely forgotten how the preliminaries to singing "I Like To Be In America" include numerous repetitions of the epithets "spic" and "polack."

1/29/2005 04:39:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

MONKEY BUSINESS. We learn here how chimpanzees deal with unfairness:

Chimpanzees will tolerate unfair treatment, as long as it benefits someone they know well, say US researchers. This is the first time such behaviour has been demonstrated outside the human race.

Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, primatologists at Emory University in Atlanta, gave chimpanzees a piece of plastic and rewarded them for giving it back. If a subject is given a paltry payoff, such as a cucumber slice or celery stick, and it can see another getting a grape, the short-changed ape refuses to cooperate.

But the strength of each chimpanzee's response depends on its social life. Those that had lived together for more than 30 years ignored the unequal treatment; whereas animals from a group formed eight years ago and pairs of chimpanzees reacted strongly, the researchers report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B1.

Meanwhile, elsewhere we learn that Monkeys Pay to See Female Monkey Bottoms: (I have to seriously note the sexism in the headline, since there seems to be no indications that female monkeys are so interested, and, yet, I am under the -- admittedly vague -- impression that female monkeys are actually, in fact, also monkeys.)

A new study found that male monkeys will give up their juice rewards in order to ogle pictures of female monkey's bottoms. The way the experiment was set up, the act is akin to paying for the images, the researchers say.

The rhesus macaque monkeys also splurged on photos of top-dog counterparts, the high-ranking primates. Maybe that's like you or me buying People magazine.

The research, which will be detailed in the March issue of Current Biology, gets more interesting.

The scientists actually had to pay these guys, in the form of extra juice, to get them to look at images of lower-ranking monkeys.

Curiously, the monkeys in the test hadn't had any direct physical contact with the monkeys in the photos, so they didn't have personal experience with who was hot and who was not.

"So, somehow, they are getting this information by observation -- by seeing other individuals interact," said Michael Platt of the Duke University Medical Center.

Next, Platt and his colleagues want to see how people will perform in a similar experiment.

I'm just guessing here, but my suspicion is that not so many humans are interested in monkey bottoms, regardless of gender on either side. I could, of course, be wrong.

"At the moment, it's only a tantalizing possibility, but we believe that similar processes are at work in these monkeys and in people," Platt said.

[...]

The study, announced Friday, is far from monkey business. It was sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health and the Cure Autism Now Foundation. The goal is to learn more about the social machinery of the brain with an eye toward helping autism patients.

All very interesting, but I'm interested in getting in on some of that hot monkey pay: where do I sign up to get my grape? I'm even happy with cucumber slices. But if it's a celery stick, I say we strike until we get some dip!

Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5 for both.

1/29/2005 04:22:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

THE JOYS OF LIVING IN THE U.S. WITHOUT HEALTH INSURANCE. Darn those trial lawyers for their meddling interference!

From those humble beginnings, North Mississippi Medical Center has grown into the largest non-metropolitan hospital in the country, a booming enterprise with a complex of glass and marble buildings and 40 satellite clinics stretching into Alabama and Tennessee. The company, incorporated in Delaware, has nearly $300 million in the bank and "exceptional profitability," according to one Wall Street rating agency.

And it pays no taxes. As one of 4,800 nonprofit U.S. hospitals, North Mississippi Medical Center is exempt from federal, state and local taxes in return for providing care to "charity patients."

But when Gardner, who is uninsured and suffers from heart trouble, asked for more time to pay off a $4,500 bill, the response came in the form of a summons. The hospital sued him for the balance plus $1,100 in legal fees.

Now Gardner and hundreds like him are at the center of a nationwide battle over whether nonprofit hospitals -- often flush with cash, opulent buildings and high-paid executives -- are fulfilling their mission as charitable institutions. Since last spring, a phalanx of trial lawyers who made millions suing asbestos makers and tobacco companies have been targeting tax-exempt hospitals, accusing them of gouging the poor.

"I was paying the best I could," said Gardner, who on his $18,000-a-year cook's salary had managed to pay $1,000. "I'm not trying to run. At the end of that week I was going to pay them some more."

Forty-six suits have been filed in 22 states, including one against Virginia's Inova Health System, alleging the hospitals violate their tax-exempt status by charging uninsured patients the highest rates and employing abusive tactics to collect.

"Their goal is to discourage these uninsured patients from returning," said Richard F. Scruggs, the lead attorney. "If they paid taxes, I couldn't complain. But these hospitals are given freedom from taxation for doing something."

Included in the cases is a California hospital with $1 million in an offshore bank account, another in Louisiana that owns a luxury hotel and health clubs, and a Georgia hospital that flew its executives on private jets to meetings in the Cayman Islands and Florida's Amelia Island. Because private insurers and the government negotiate deep discounts for their clients, the uninsured are usually the only ones charged the list price -- up to six times as much as for insured patients.

[...]

For people such as Kathy Millican, 50, nothing has changed. After an emergency hysterectomy, she was flooded with bills totaling more than $11,600, she said. With her husband making $12 an hour hauling rocks, the best Millican and her mother-in-law could do was send in periodic checks for $50 or $100.

Bill collectors began calling at odd hours, suggesting she put it all on a credit card or deliver a bank note. After her second request for charity care, the hospital forgave $700 but added $1,000 in finance charges.

I recently read on ablog how lovely it is to live in Colorado, no matter, nay, because of the TABOR Amendment to the State Constitution, which sets a cap on tax revenues equal to revenue from the prior year multiplied by a growth factor which includes the rate of inflation.

It is undoubtedly a coincidence that Colorado is one of the few U.S. States in which the amount of Medicaid -- medical treatment paid by the State and Federal governments together -- given to single male adults is: zero. Nada. Zip. None. No matter what. Absolutely nothing. (Some benefits are available if you are a parent.)

Also a coincidence is that despite state law making it illegal, if you apply for food stamps, you have to wait about eight months:

November 6, 2004

Some needy Colorado families will have to wait until May or June for the welfare benefits they should have received this fall, say county officials still wrestling with a new computer system for processing applications.

Workers are giving emergency food stamps to families in greatest need, "but we're having problems getting those through the system, too," Katrina Seymour, spokeswoman for Arapahoe County Social Services, said Friday.

[...]

As the backlog of Medicaid applications grows, workers are asking families if their medical problems are emergencies, so they can be moved to the top of the list.

Thousands of others wait.

"Our cases are piling up," Seymour said. Her agency has received 4,300 new applications for aid since Sept. 1 and has processed just 900 of them. The county hopes to finish the backlog by June.

But we do feel terribly free here. It's great!

I'm just saying. (We're free to move to other states, of course, though ill people with no money should have no trouble doing so; hey, one can always hike to California.)

Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5 on the WashPo story. Scruggs, by the way, is both the lawyer whose successful lawsuit against Big Tobacco was portrayed in the movie The Insider, and the brother-in-law of Trent Lott. One wonders, slightly, what holiday family gatherings are like for them.

1/29/2005 03:47:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 2 comments

A NON-LEFTY OBSERVATION ON LITTLE GREEN FOOTBALLS is made by Von, with appropriate links, which were, of course, immediately duly blocked by the proprietor, and then duly re-linked.

As a rule, I try not to kick other bloggers, but as an untoward number of reasonable people still read, and apparently respect, LGF (which I, myself, did respect and link to initially in late '01 and early '02), I provide this link for your own consideration and appraisal.

Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5 if you read LGF at all. (I imagine it's conceivable this post may lead Charles Johnson to again accuse me of making personal attacks upon him; oh, dear, oh, me, and: no.)

1/29/2005 03:04:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

IAOTL:) E-MAIL SHORTHAND THAT CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS WOULD LIKELY HAVE USED IN LETTERS HOME HAD THE TECHNOLOGY BEEN AVAILABLE TO THEM:

w/o:roht
Without reward or hope thereof

ryahud;)
Remaining your affectionate husband until death

[...]

iawap:)
I am well at present

[...]

y:(
The Yanks

i-r
I reckon

frot:)
(In) fond remembrance of thee

s!
Shelling

[...]

=|:(#
Old Abe

[...]

~
Body lice

Who needs Matthew Brady when you have a Lincoln smiley?

Read The Rest Scale: 2.5 out of 5.

1/29/2005 02:37:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

JACK-BOOTED THUGS STEAL OUR MONEY! Brad deLong notes Elizabeth Anderson pointing out that some "Hayek" guy observes that "your" income is neither morally "deserved" nor a moral entitlement:

Hayek's deepest economic insight was that the basic function of free market prices is informational.... They reflect the sum total of the inherently dispersed information about the supply and demand of millions of distinct individuals for each product. Free market prices give us our only access to this information.... This is why centralized economic planning is doomed to failure.... It's a short step from this core insight about prices to their failure to track any coherent notion of moral desert. Claims of desert are essentially backward-looking.... Free market prices are essentially forward-looking. Current prices send signals to producers as to where the demand is now.... [C]apitalism is constantly pulling the rug out from underneath even the most thoughtful, foresightful, and prudent production plans of individual agents... individuals cannot count on their virtue being rewarded in the free market. For the function of the market isn't to reward people for past good behavior. It's to direct them toward producing for current demand, regardless of what they did in the past....

[...]

Hayek focused on... any attempt to regulate people's rewards according to judgments of how much they morally deserve would destroy liberty. It would involve the state in making detailed, intrusive judgments of how well people used their liberty, and penalize them for not exercising their liberty in the way the state thinks best. This is no way to run a free society....

Several implications follow.... (a) The claim "I deserve my pretax income" is not generally true.... (b) The claim that people rocked by the vicissitudes of the market... are getting what they deserve is also not generally true.... It is in principle impossible for even the most prudent to forsee all the market turns that could undo them. (If it were possible, then efficient socialist planning would be possible, too. But it isn't.)... (d) The volatility of capitalist markets creates a profound and urgent need for insurance, over and above the insurance needs people would have under more stable (but stagnant) economic systems. This need is increased also by the fact that capitalism inspires a love of personal independence.... This fact does not yet clinch the case for social insurance... maybe private insurance would do a better job meeting people's needs for insurance in the event of unemployment, disability, loss of a household earner, sickness, and old age.... [But] no argument that people have a moral claim to their pretax incomes, sufficient to preclude taxing it for insurance purposes, has survived critical scrutiny. Certainly, "I deserve it" doesn't.

Words by Ms. Anderson; isn't it marvelous what happens when I elide on top of Brad's elisions?

I think what clinches the case for "social" insurance is the obvious fact that not everyone can afford private insurance, and someone has to pay to at least cart away the bodies of those who wind up dead as a result, lest the effect on public health be unpleasant for all. My radical theory is that it's cheaper for all, on average, to chip in for some preventative treatment, and food and shelter, before cheap starvation and highly expensive epidemic; since, of course, not everyone will agree to do so, it becomes necessary pour encourager les autres to hold the jackbooted thugs in a ready room, just as said thugs are necessary for enforcement of other "laws," as we so amusingly call them. Those who do not care for this are as completely free to opt out and go elsewhere as they are free to earn an income, or fail to do so.

(I've been struck since adolescence, which is when I first encountered libertarians such as Samuel Edward Konklin III at sf conventions circa 1973, when I was 14, at the standard libertarian worship of Robert Heinlein -- and I happen to agree with a number of libertarian ideas, and hold a selective admiration for Heinlein, whom I met twice -- and yet the seemingly common libertarian disregard for the point of his short story "Coventry".)

Read The Rest as interested. Or drop down a post to get back to the sex stuff. Which to write about? Politico-economic theory, or teledildonics? It's a hard call.

1/29/2005 12:58:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 1 comments

OH, NO! Cybersex has been ruined! Who knew?

Many blame the deterioration of sex chat on the influx of AOL members exploring IRC for the first time, thanks to the newfangled web-based user interfaces. It was "pretty much the universal death knell of some of the big hangouts, as if a half-thousand Paris Hiltons suddenly showed up to the best party ever," wrote Garrett, a Sex Drive reader.

Still, he says, "nerds being nerds, there's always a solid group that knows enough about the technology to stay just outside the mainstream." That's where the good cyber is thriving, beyond the reach of the newbies, the opportunists, the clueless and the bots.

I should have known that the best cyber occurs in games: MUDs, MUCKs and MMORPGs, oh my.

Role-playing games attract people with strong imaginations and the ability to evolve a fantasy over a long period of time. And even online, there's nothing solitary about an RPG. To make the fantasy complete, you must interact with others in a shared adventure of the mind.

If you can do all that, you can probably cyber with the best.

But even if you join a game for the sole purpose of cybersex -- which I don't recommend -- you will not be able to sustain yourself in the game world long enough to find the good stuff. Because good cyber, like good sex, arises out of a relationship.

[...]

You need to get a sense for each other's timing, the style of banter that gets the most response, and in a game world, the kinds of fantasy that turn each of you on.

Oh, darn. Back to hookers, I guess. So thanks to those who recently donated to me!

But wait!

[...] For non-gamers, blogs may be the modern gathering place for like-minded individuals to find one another. Devlon, a Sex Drive reader, wrote to tell me that he has found cyber through his blog. "You can browse through a person's blog, get a taste (for who they are). There can be flirting through comments to entries, and then private messages that can get very hot," he says.

I've clearly yet to get the hang of this "blogging" thing after more than three years. I bet it works for Giblets, though!

Read The Rest Scale: if your nipples go spung, 3.75 out of 5 for both stories.

1/29/2005 12:50:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

DID YOU KNOW THAT YOU CAN BE BLIND FROM BIRTH and draw like this?

I sure didn't.

Read The Rest Scale: if interested, 4 out of 5 for fascinating details. An aspect I'm particularly intrigued by is that a bored blind child would take up drawing as a primary hobby.

1/29/2005 12:36:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

DEY ARE NO MATCH FOR DROY-DEKKARS! Continuing our mindless worship of George Lucas as we lead up to the premiere of Revenge of The Sith in May, we note this:

A spherical roving robot designed to detect and report intruders has been developed by a Swedish start-up company.

The design was first developed with planetary exploration in mind, at the Ångström Space Technology Center, part of Uppsala University, Sweden. But Rotundus, formed in December 2004 plan to market the ball-shaped bot as an automated security guard.

"We knew it would have applications on Earth," says company CEO Nils Hulth. "It is very robust when compared to robots that use wheels or tracks and can travel through mud or even snow."

A short video (14.5MB mpeg) on the company's website demonstrates the robot's ability to navigate through snow.

[...]

Ultimately, the company hopes to make the robot virtually autonomous. It is currently developing a radar sensor to allow it to navigate around obstacles and motion-sensing software to automatically detect an intruder.

[...]

Other robots being developed could be much better suited to indoor tasks, however. For example, researchers at Case Western University in Cleveland, US, are working on insect-inspired bots that can overcome irregular surfaces and steps.

These robots use a combination of wheels and legs to scramble over terrain and are therefore dubbed "whegs". A video (35MB mpeg) of various whegs in action reveals a form of locomotion akin to that of a large insect.

[...]

The latest Mini Whegs have also been given a mechanism that allows them to leap up a small step, as another video (0.7MB mov) made by the team shows.

If you prefer to chat with a bot, by the way, try here.

And does it surprise anyone that it may be that the Web and Google may be the key breakthroughs that will lead to AI?

Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5.

1/29/2005 12:15:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

MINE'S BIGGER THAN YOURS. Wait, a magnetar isn't a Giant Japanese transforming robot?

The most powerful magnetic objects in the universe - rare stars called magnetars - are created by the titanic explosions of very heavy stars, new research has revealed.

Observations of a gas bubble surrounding one magnetar showed astronomers that the star is 30 to 40 times the mass of the Sun. That puts it at the top end of the range of star sizes, and explains why magnetars are so rare. Since the first discovery in 1998, astronomers have confirmed only 11 magnetars, most of them in our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

Researchers had suspected that magnetars are created by supernova explosions. However, when a star explodes, a collapsed neutron star is the usual product - not a magnetar. Some neutron stars spin at rates up to 600 revolutions per second and emit short bursts of radio waves on each turn - these are called pulsars.

But magnetars spin much faster, up to 1000 times a second, and emit gamma-ray flashes. This spinning generates their powerful magnetic fields - a million billion times stronger than Earth's. The new work indicates this rapid spin is the result of the massive size of the parent star.

Is it just me, or does saying "a million billion" sound a lot like a child trying to come up with a Rilly Big Number? The fact that this is reality is, however, fabulous, if not morally so.

"The surprising thing is how big this bubble is," Gaensler says. "It's huge. The Sun's bubble is a tiny fraction of a light year across. This thing is dozens of light years across."

[...]

He says the magnetar he studied could have initially been part of a binary system, but when one of the stars exploded, it may have kicked the other off into space.

Whee!

Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5.

1/29/2005 12:10:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

MORAL FABULOUSNESS. I don't recall ever touting a Peggy Noonan column before, but this one and this even stronger follow-up are extradordinary in the slaps they take at the President.

A week later, do I stand by my views?

Yes. If I wrote it today I wouldn't be softer, but harder.

[...]

Why don't I see the speech as so many others do, as a thematic and romantic statement of what we all hope for, world freedom? Don't we all want that?

Yes. But words have meaning. To declare that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, that we are embarking on the greatest crusade in the history of freedom, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation--seemed to me, and seems to me, rhetorical and emotional overreach of the most embarrassing sort.

[...]

Refrain from breast beating, and don't clobber the world over the head with your moral fabulousness.

[...]

The temperature of our world is very high. We face trouble that is already here. We don't have to summon more.

[...]

And we must do nothing that provides our foes with ammunition with which they can accuse us of conceit, immaturity or impetuousness

[...]

Two years ago, after watching a series of rather too jocular and arguably too boastful news conferences from administration leaders on the coming war, I said that they seemed to be suffering from mission inebriation. I meant it. And meant it as a caution. The White House can be a hothouse. Emotions run high, tired minds run on adrenal fumes. When I said last week that they seemed again to be suffering from mission inebriation, I meant that too.

As for criticizing Mr. Bush on something so big, that's why I did it: It's big. And so important. When you really disagree, you have to say so. In the end I found the president's thinking perplexing and disturbing. At any rate, in the end, as Jack Kennedy once said, "Sometimes party loyalty asks too much."

[...]

Bill Buckley and David Gelertner suggest the speech was badly written. Isn't that really the essential problem?

No. It was badly thought.

Myself, I'm fairly sure we've never before had an Inaugural Address followed immediately by all the President's spokespeople swearing up and down that, no, really, he didn't mean anything by it, and policy was remaining exactly as it has always been, no matter what he, you know, said. Just kidding!

Somehow I'm ineluctably reminded of the Scarecrow pointing out to Dorothy how to get to Oz.

Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5.

1/29/2005 10:38:00 AM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

TORTURE IS SO GENTLE AND BENIGN, it almost seems, when carefully described in the passive voice.

One technique that C.I.A. officers could use under certain circumstances without fear of prosecution was strapping a subject down and making him experience a feeling of drowning.

That's the "dehydrated" form of "water-boarding" apparently being described, in which it would appear that no actual water need be involved, let alone, you know, forced and suffused into your lungs so that you can't -- how do we say? -- can't breath.

What does Michael Chertoff, the nominee for Secretary of Homeland Security think?

In responding, Mr. Chertoff's division said that whether the techniques were not allowed depended on the standards outlined in an August 2002 memorandum from the Office of Legal Counsel that has since been disclosed and which defined torture narrowly. That memorandum, signed by Jay S. Bybee, then the head of the legal counsel's office, said inflicted pain, for example, qualified as torture only if it was of a level equivalent to organ failure or imminent death.

The officials said that when the agency asked about specific practices, Mr. Bybee responded with a second memorandum, which is still classified. They said it said many coercive practices were permissible if they met the narrow definition in the first memorandum.

The officials said Mr. Chertoff was consulted on the second memorandum, but Ms. Healy of the White House said he had no role in it.

One might muse upon the small question of who's lying, but I would not be so uncharitable, as I am infused with the warm glow reached by contemplating the famous joys of pain equivalent to organ failure or imminent death being administered by the U.S. government and our still extant policy of keeping secret what "coercive practices" are "permissible."

The defense of this secrecy is, of course, that if described, future prisoners will have a better idea of what to expect and what the limits are and thus can hold out longer; such an argument can be discussed genteelly by well-bred people since, of course, such "coercive practices" would never be used against you.

Or your mother, or your son, or your niece, or grandfather, or beloved spouse.

Only guilty people need worry -- that's the principle America was founded on, and we can all be proud of that. Trust your government with proper administration of torture -- it's the American way!

Here, for instance, is one nutbar's view of how to treat prisoners:

I am informed that Genl. Putnam sent down Major Stockton, taken upon Rariton, to Philadelphia in Irons, and that he continues in strict confinement. I think we ought to avoid putting in practice, what we have so loudly complained of, the cruel treatment of Prisoners. I therefore desire, that if there is a necessity for confinement, that it may be made as easy and comfortable as possible, to Major Stockton and his Officers. This Man, I believe, has been very active and mischeivous, but we took him in Arms, as an Officer of the Enemy, and by the Rules of War we are obliged to treat him as such, not as a Felon.

Wimp. Wuss. Big 'ol softy. What a kidder, that George Washington, on March 10, 1777. Fortunately, the United States of America was in no existential danger then.

Today is different. We must strike fear into the hearts (and lungs) of our enemies! (That we strike fear into everyone else is no matter! The right to strike fear into the good and innocent around the world is the right to be free! Fear brings freedom!)

Read The Rest Scale: 2.75 out of 5 for more anodyne passive voice descriptions of -- oh, that word "torture" is so old-fashioned, it's positively unhip -- and what Michael Chertoff may or may not think.

1/29/2005 09:03:00 AM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

Friday, January 28, 2005

IF ONLY IT TURNS OUT TO BE TRUE! I may find a reason to go on living after all! (No, don't that as other than figurative.)

Rumble is former Republican U.S. Senate candidate/nightmare Alan Keyes is eyeing a bid for governor.

Let us pray for deliverance.

Keyes, whose religious and political views give moderate GOPers the shakes, is not only back . . . he's conducting the first meeting of his "Cook County United" gathering of 40 to 50 of Cook County's best conservative activists in his Loop office tonight!

Run, Alan, run! Illinois needs you! The Republican Party needs you! We all need you. You put the "loon" in "lunatic," and bring joy to politics! You have the Keyes to our hearts! Run!

Read The Rest Scale: 0 out of 5.

1/28/2005 03:02:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

Thursday, January 27, 2005

THERE'S NO MYSTICAL FORCE THAT CONTROLS MY DESTINY. Keep your distance though, Chewie... but don't look like you're tryin' to keep your distance.

Jeff Tweiten lives on a periwinkle blue, fold-out futon on the sidewalk in front of the Cinerama Theatre.

He is not homeless, but camping out for 139 days. Waiting.

For Godot, you wonder? An organ transplant? The end of the world?

Tweiten is waiting for "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith," which opens May 19.

[...]

Just who is this sidewalk Skywalker wearing sunglasses and a wool pea coat?

Tweiten is a 27-year-old graphic artist who grew up on Bainbridge Island and attended the Art Institute of Seattle. Before moving to the street, he dwelled in a Belltown apartment. To make ends meet, he also makes ceramic raku masks, plays poker and picks up occasional odd jobs.

His life is not one big homage to "Star Wars," he says, and he has plenty of other interests, including classical music, modern dance, fine dining, dive bars, working out and reading about contemporary art.

But, what made him a bicoastal media darling was when he camped out at the Cinerama for "Star Wars: Episode I" and "Episode II" -- director George Lucas' prequels to the original series.

He's been called a loser, a geek, a Peter Pan who refuses to grow up and get a life. A few days ago, someone called him a "bum" for the first time.

"I don't really care how people label me," Tweiten says. "If they are so narrow-minded and can only see that one aspect of me, I kind of pity them."

[...]

He sees worth in the waiting, especially in a culture that demands instant gratification.

"Coming out here and sitting and waiting -- embodying the anticipation -- I think people need to see that," Tweiten says. "Maybe they'll slow down. So many people are in such a hurry that they miss the savoring of time."

A whole community has developed around Tweiten's mission. His friends bring him changes of clothes, snacks and their company. Nearby businesses offer a bathroom, a shower or a warm cup of coffee. Passersby might laugh in amusement, shake their heads in wonder or strike up a conversation.

[...]

Tweiten's living room is right next to a bus stop, and every afternoon, the buses spew loud decibels and clouds of fumes at him.

Still, he says, "It feels more like home than any apartment I've ever lived in."

To pass the time, he writes in a journal, posts to his blog, chats on the phone and touches up old stories from past "Star Wars" campouts, in hopes that, perhaps, a book deal will be extended one day.

"I think I'm working the hardest I've ever worked."

He knows, from past experience, that in a few months, he will begin receiving 600 to 700 e-mails, and do seven to 10 radio interviews a day. Already, the interview calls start at 3:30 a.m., and he has appeared on the "Jimmy Kimmel Live" show on ABC.

Who's scruffy-looking?

In other words, though, this is indeed viewable as a gig. It's simply a rather original and unconventional sort of gig. And, with any luck, it will somehow payoff with something more positive than a stay in the mental ward.

Of course, he has a blog.

While I'm waiting in line, I've got a lot of time to kill (yeah, I bet you didn't know that), and I spend some of my time creating cool new designs and the occasional slogan. As I create these designs, I'll put them up on my CafePress store in case any of you want to pick up a t-shirt, mug, stein, etc. with one of my designs.

Call it Free Enterprise. Then a friend of his extolls him:

...Jeff is Seattle's latest fixture: an odd mix of devotion, philosophy, and human spectacle. Most people, of course, think of this stunt as ridiculous, and the knee-jerk reaction is always to write him off as some type of lunatic fanatic.

I am writing to you because this is not the case, and someone with prominence in the science-fiction/fantasy community needs to take notice of him. Briefly: Jeff is not an attention-seeker or a local media hound, he will continue his wait with or without any recognition from the wider world....

Although this seems somewhat contradicted by the fact that Jeff knows precisely what sort of "recognition" is on the way -- as well as perhaps a few ducats from tee-shirts -- perhaps it is precisely true that Jeff would do this even with no recognition. Perhaps. Perhaps were that so, Jeff would refuse all interviews and publicity and sales opportunities. Perhaps not. Who could say? And not that there's anything wrong with either choice.

...rather, Jeff is someone who, as odd as it may seem to conventional society, feels deeply motivated by the idea of "waiting" for things of value, and in a consumer driven, materialistic culture he sees as spiritually drained, this is where he's putting his time and energy down as a worthy investment. All Star Wars fans are moved by how these films capture mythic themes of heroism, discipline, and inner strength, but I would wager that very few of them have been as thoroughly transformed by these ideals as Jeff Tweiten.

Perhaps so. Perhaps not. Perhaps it is time for a parallel movie to Trekkies 1 & 2. Here, though, are the two parts of the story that most impress me:

1):

Number of times he's seen "Star Wars": about 1,200 (same for "Empire" and a few more for "Jedi")

Reaction to "Episode I": "I've pretty much blocked it out of my mind." Too much "blah, blah, blah, yacky-schmacky"

Reaction to "Episode II": Better. He liked the lightsaber duels and angst.

Combined with:

2):

Jeff's genius comes not only from his talent, but from that unique ability to truly transcend the opinions of contemporary society in his path to let imagination re-create him. I recognize that this still sounds like a raving fanboy at best, and a complete lunatic at worst, but here's the proof that Jeff's the real thing. Are you ready? JEFF WAITED OUTSIDE IN LINE FOR A MOVIE FOR OVER FOUR MONTHS! And now he's at it again!! I don't think any of us can really have an accurate idea of what this entails. The elements, the mental and physical demands alone would surely weed out anyone who was simply crazy or posturing.

Impeccable logic. Anyway, in the face of Jeff's reaction to The Phantom Menace, Episode I, clearly hope springs eternal.

Waiting for months on the street to see a film, though, isn't precisely "waiting" in the same sense one usually waits on a line ("queue," for those of you who have the honour of going to theatres rather than theaters). The sense that, you know, someone might get in line befor you, making such a "wait" necessary. But clearly there are deeper issues at stake in this case. As his web page says:

Someone fantastic and funny is happening in our midst, and when we look back to tell the story ten years from now, do we want to be one of those ants who lacked vision and mocked him, or one of his fellow crickets who played the violin all winter with him, just out of the sheer joy of myth and fantasy?

A different choice, I make.

Read The Rest Scale: if you're interested, both links have other elements I found amusing, but you might not.

Footnotes: I lived for a year at 420 Vine St., only two blocks from the very wonderful Cinerama Theatre in Seattle's downtown Denny Regrade (a couple of blocks in the other direction from the remains of the 1962 World's Fair, which includes the Space Needle, all contemporaneous with the original Martin's Cinerama), and saw many films there; taking Amy Thomson to the press screening of Blade Runner with passes Vonda McIntyre had given me sticks in memory. I once sat through a ten film marathon there of 70 mm Cinerama Greats at the beginning of the Eighties, including Ben-Hur; 2001; How The West Was Won; It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; Krakatoa, East of Java, and others. The whole thing lasted something like 35 hours or so; naturally, I packed a huge pack of food, and managed to stay awake for it all, although my companion slept through all of Ben-Hur, including that quiet little chariot race.

I had practice; at the end of 1974, just after I turned 16, I waited on line for something like 17 hours to get into the ten-film marathon of Columbia Picture's Ten Best for their 50th Anniversary celebration in NYC at one of the prestige Upper East Side theaters, partially to get in and get a good seat, but more because they were giving away prizes to the first on line, the first ten on line, and some others after that; I wound up third or fifth or so, and was interviewed for the first time in my life by The New York Times. Among the films were It Happened One Night, Dr. Strangelove, and His Girl Friday. Buddy Rich was playing that night (as he often did) at the nightclub next door, and you could hear the sound of his drums at deafening volume in the theater's men's room.

The Seattle Cinerama remains one of two places left in the world to see true Cinerama (the other being Pictureville Cinema at Bradford, England’s National Museum of Photography, Film and Television).

And this turned into a post of a size all out of proportion to my actual interest in what was merely a story I found amusing, but there ya go.

1/27/2005 09:26:00 AM |permanent link | Main Page | | 2 comments

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

STARTING SOMEWHERE. Um, yes, I'm not parsing carefully, and at length here. I'm just recommending Phil Carter at length. Hey. it's not as if you'll go far too wrong.

Shesh! Be werry werry careful! He's blogging again!

1/25/2005 12:21:00 AM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

Monday, January 24, 2005

OTHERS SPOKE of Anna Vargo yesterday.

I still can't.

I still can't.

1/24/2005 09:17:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

Saturday, January 22, 2005

ICK, PTUI. I decided I had reason to look for the lyrics to another October Project song, regarding someone, but when I did, I found a lot of foul, gross, and disgusting replacements. How weird and ugly. Here are the correct lyrics to Paths of Desire: Here.

I have traveled the paths of desire
gathering flowers and carrying fire
Raising a grave to the reasons behind me
Looking for strength as you live to remind me
I'm drawn to you
I'm caught in you
I am the fly who dreams of the spider
The path to the web becomes deeper and wider
I dream of the silk that is tangled inside you
And know that I want to be somewhere beside you
I'm drawn to you
I'm caught in you
In your eyes
All of the promises
All the lies
Will you keep all the promises
In your eyes
I am crossing the bridges of sorrow
Empty with yearning and full of tomorrow
The river is high and the bridges are burning
I know I've been hurt but I keep on returning
I'm drawn to you
I'm caught in you
In your eyes
All of the promises
All the lies
Will you keep all of the promises
In your eyes
I have traveled the paths of desire
following smoke and remembering fire
The night is falling, the path is receding
I don't need to see it to know where it's leading
In your eyes
All of the promises
All the lies
Will you keep all of the promises
In your eyes

Read The Rest Scale: 0 out of 5. One of the saddest things I've noticed about life is the way it so often happens that so many people don't keep so many of the promises they give in words.

1/22/2005 07:08:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

SONGS I'VE OVER-LISTENED TO, LATELY. I live with rather an under-access to music technology, though this is both extremely long-standing and in proportion with the rest of my life. For the last about-two-years, for the first time in a few years, I've had a CD-player, which would have meant more if I was able to afford more than six CDs (CDs have more or less never been in the budget in my life; the last time I had much of a music collection, they were LPs), a broken cassette-player (too bad, I have about twelve albums on tape), a radio which would work if I acquired an antenna, and the P1 computer with 40 megs of RAM, and a smallish hard drive, meaning I can risk downloading a few songs from file-sharing systems, if I want to risk it, or listen via old RealPlayer/WM software, if I'm willing to devote the computer to just that. All of which is background I shouldn't mention, but sometimes I do shake my head a little at the assumptions that, of course, everyone has an Ipod, modern computer, and now I'm shutting up.

Point I was going for was that I've been playing, of my extremely small selection of choice, a lot of October Project, having done the LimeWire thing a while ago for most of the first album, and wondered if anyone else knew them.

Bury My Lovely:

Cover the mirror
Hide in your dreams
Forget what they told you
Forget what it means
A picture worth a thousand lies
The mem'ry and the mirror
Nothing but what came before
Nothing but a closing door

*pre-chorus*
A picture worth a thousand lies
A thousand words
A thousand eyes

*chorus*
Bury my lovely
Hide in your room
Bury my lovely
Forget me soon
Forget me
Forget me now
Forget me not

Cover the madness
Cover the fear
No one will ever
Know you were here
A figure in the hallway light
Returning like a ghost
Something that was left behind
Something in a child's mind

*pre-chorus*

*chorus*

Bury my lovely
Bury the lies
Bury me under
A thousand good-byes

A shadow from another time
Is waiting in the night
Something happened long ago
Something that will not let go

*chorus*

Return To Me:

you rise like a wave in the ocean
and you fall gently back to the sea
now i want to know how to hold you
return to me
return to me

you shine like the moon over water
and you darken the sky when you leave
now i want to know how to keep you
return to me
return to me
turn to me
return to me

everything i tell you has been spoken
and everything i say was said before
but everything i feel is for the first time
and everything i feel i feel for you

i am here calling the wind
i am here calling your name
i am here calling you back
return to me
return to me

i know what it means to be lonely
and i know what it means to be free
now i want to know how to love you
return to me
return to me

i am here calling the wind
i am here calling your name
i am here calling you back
return to me
return to me

Anyway, recommended.

1/19/2005 05:45:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 2 comments

SEARCH.MSN.COM. In the past week or so, something seems to have been tweaked there, as I've been getting dozens and dozens of hits per hour from there, ever since, on an endless number of search terms, up from hardly any. Just to look at the latest via SiteMeter:
"peter pan play pictures"
"noodling (Illinois)"
"present leader of Cambodia"
"what does the oath of office mean"
"tidal wave video"
"20th century figuratively started in 1914. why?"
"colorado springs, employment, christian"
"china weeping yogi"
"what are good stumbling companies to invest in"
"Pictures of worms in New Mexico"
"childrens story times"
"russian babes"
"INFORMATION ABOUT JOHN F. KENNEDY"
"osama bin laden flash games"
"smut girls"
"lives asian babes"
"sushi beanbag chair"
"I live near a abuse person in Judith"
"BENICIO D."
"pictures of rivers in Morocco"
"gay active duty"
"web page about timeline Ralph Bunche"
"spider man pictures"
"bin laden thoughts about september 11th"
"gop items for sell"
"seven areas of the soul"
"why should there be curfews"
"sex machine built diagram"
"what are the sucessess and failures of economic statistics"
"shirt printing calif"
"owl monkey behaviors"
"jerry orbach memorial ad"

And while I've been typing this:
"cambodia tyrants"
"how to write a thank you note to a doctor"
"suicidal websites"

As you can see, rather disparate, and the usual handful of rather vaguely alarming inquiries; I'm long used to a noticable smattering of Google and other search engine hits, of course; but this recent stream from MSN search has been coming fast and furious for a number of days now, and it's getting a bit tiresome, as well as not likely to be well-serving those making most of the inquiries; not as well, at least, as whomever just googled "gary farber, anna vargo."

No funny conclusion, I'm afraid; I'm just noting for the record, and wondering if anyone else has noted an upsurge in MSN search hits.

1/19/2005 01:45:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 1 comments

BACK FROM DR.'S APT. Blood pressure hovering at 210/110 from a high of 225/125 -- last 220/122 here and 190/122 here after a bunch of months of increasing medication. However, the doctor -- who is, of course, leaving the clinic, only after a few months of my seeing him, just as happened with the last two doctors I've seen there; par for the course for a clinic for the poor, though -- suggested that I might have been under unusual stress the last three months, and I'm to come back in another month. Hey, I'd miss the wide-eyed looks of major alarm, and gasps, I get from the aides each time, if my bp ever goes seriously down.

Made the round-trip to the pharmacy; having emptied out the PayPal account, and my pockets and drawers, and making a half-payment to the phone company, and taking into account the bus fare, after catching up on my prescriptions for the next couple of weeks, I find I am left with... eight cents (until the end of the month).

Last month I shorted myself on various medication so I could have food; today I went the other way; one can flip the coin either way. I do have several servings of ramen left, and a few cans of things, and I can hit one of the food banks next week; the toilet paper crisis is rather nigh, though.

I'm grateful to the three or so of you who recently made a donation, and I'm sorry I'm not better at writing individual thank you's; if anyone feels like hitting the Paypal link, under the optimistic thought that I'll be blogging more in the future, or something, this would be a good thing. (A bump in the road has been that I was, as I often am, entirely out of money last month, when a blogger I trust assured me that they were immediately sending at least a $100 check in the mail; on that basis, and my lacking food and choice, another friend advanced me the $100 temporarily; unfortunately, after a month, that check seems to be lost in the mail, but I still need to repay that $100 ASAP.)

Man, I hate talking about this sort of thing. (A reader recently suggested I check out pharma indigent patient programs; although my past inquiries haven't borne fruit, I'm looking into it again.)

1/19/2005 01:01:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 5 comments

I SEEM TO HAVE moved, in the last two days, from crying more or less all the time, to weeping only intermittently, a few times per day.

So that's a step.

I miss her so, though.

I miss her so.

1/19/2005 08:01:00 AM |permanent link | Main Page | | 1 comments

Sunday, January 16, 2005

IN WHICH I AGAIN TAUNT THE PRESIDENT. Partisan hacks must not miss this small marvel:

... or some saying I should have negotiated with [Yasser] Arafat for the four years I was president -- obviously, prior to his death -- and I chose not to because I didn't feel like he was a person who could deliver peace.

Emphasis mine and: ya think?

Read The Rest Scale: hey, it's a good substitute for a hallucinogen, if you're lacking.

1/16/2005 03:41:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 1 comments

IT'S HOW I GET ALL MY PIZZA. Those wacky Canadian scandals!

Canada's immigration minister Judy Sgro has resigned over allegations that she agreed to help a pizza shop owner avoid deportation in return for free food.

Harjit Singh says he delivered free pizza and garlic bread to Ms Sgro and up to 16 election campaign volunteers.

He says Ms Sgro reneged on the deal and ordered his arrest to "save her job" as another immigration scandal broke.

Ms Sgro says she had no alternative but to resign in order to fight "these outrageous fabrications".

This is what happens when you include no cheesy bread, Harjit! Now you will pay for your treachery!

Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5 as interested. What America needs is more political Pizza Scandals! The right to extort free pizza is the right to be free!

1/16/2005 12:21:00 AM |permanent link | Main Page | | 1 comments

Saturday, January 15, 2005

THE HEAD, IT DOTH EXPLODE. Sometimes all you need to do is just listen.

President Bush said the public's decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath.

This is because, boys and girls, elections are like magic beans. Once you have one, everything is magical and glowy and wonderful! All errors are magically wiped away, and everyone who committed any is either instantly killed and replaced by clone or made a member of the Cabinet. See, Bush secretly fired Rumsfeld and replaced him with an identical clone! Same for the other folks "staying on." Explains a lot, doesn't it? And it's a brilliant solution.

[...] With his inauguration days away, Bush defended the administration's decision to force the District of Columbia to spend $12 million of its homeland security budget to provide tighter security for this week's festivities. He also warned that the ceremony could make the city "an attractive target for terrorists."

"By providing security, hopefully that will provide comfort to people who are coming from all around the country to come and stay in the hotels in Washington and to be able to watch the different festivities in Washington, and eat the food in Washington," Bush said. "I think it provides them great comfort to know that all levels of government are working closely to make this event as secure as possible."

Because, everyone, what makes people feel safe and secure against terrorist attack is which line the accounting goes on. I certainly know that when I'm worried whether an attack might be made against an important event, perhaps killing and maiming hundreds or thousands of people, the first thing I demand to know is how is the budget for security managed?

Because, as we all know, being secure isn't a matter of how thoroughly the event is planned for and the site checked out, or the number of professional security forces are deployed. Nonsense! That notion is a popular misconception!

It's all about the budget divisions! It's the accounting that will make us safe! The power to tax is the power to be free! Aliens from Titan are coming to attack us! The way to wipe out the federal deficit is to get Washington, D.C. residents to pay for it! There are messages in my teeth! Help me! AAGGHHH!

[...] A new report released last week by U.S. intelligence agencies warned that the war in Iraq has created a training ground for terrorists. Bush called the report "somewhat speculative" but acknowledged "this could happen. And I agree. If we are not diligent and firm, there will be parts of the world that become pockets for terrorists to find safe haven and to train. And we have a duty to disrupt that."

Fortunately, no terrorists have been spotted in Iraq up to now. Pshew! We're lucky we've ducked the bullet on that one!

[...] As for perhaps the most notorious terrorist, Osama bin Laden, the administration has so far been unsuccessful in its attempt to locate the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Asked why, Bush said, "Because he's hiding."

He cleared that one like a true master!

[...] Bush acknowledged that the United States' standing has diminished in some parts of the world and said he has asked Condoleezza Rice, his nominee to replace Powell at the State Department, to embark on a public diplomacy campaign that "explains our motives and explains our intentions."

Bush acknowledged that "some of the decisions I've made up to now have affected our standing in parts of the world," but predicted that most Muslims will eventually see America as a beacon of freedom and democracy.

"There's no question we've got to continue to do a better job of explaining what America is all about," he said.

Because we've done everything perfectly! No mistakes! All we need to do is explain things better! Than all Muslims will love us, and bring us tasty halal sausages to eat, yum, yum! With felafel!

Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5; read enough, and your head, too, can explode; also, more clues about what other schemes are on their way. Do you like my new outerwear as a partisan hack, by the way? It's stylin', isn't it?

1/15/2005 10:42:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 1 comments

LAURA BUSH CONDEMNS FDR. There are innumerable more important issues than how large or expensive the inauguration is, although the way Administrations use them to collect bribes, er, donations, in completely unrestricted fashion from corporate interests must never be overlooked.

Still, the White House employs people who are supposed to advise and prevent this sort of gaffish statement.

With less than a week to go until her husband's second inauguration, Laura Bush on Friday defended the decision to hold the $40 million celebration as planned despite a war abroad and the tsunami disaster in the Indian Ocean.

Inaugurations, Mrs. Bush said, are "an important part of our history."

"They're a ceremony of our history; they're a ritual of our government," she said in a round-table interview with reporters in the White House map room. "And I think it's really important to have the inauguration every time. I think it's also good for Washington's economy, for people to come in from around the country, for the hotels to be full, and the restaurants to be full, and the caterers to be busy. I think that's important."

She added: "I think there's a symbolic aspect of the inauguration that - and because of that, the symbol of the inauguration, you never want to - for any reason - cancel it or not have it."

Well, then:

The fourth inauguration was conducted without fanfare. Because of the expense and impropriety of festivity during the height of war, the oath of office was taken on the South Portico of the White House. It was administered by Chief Justice Harlan Stone. No formal celebrations followed the address.

FDR must have been one lousy President to not understand how "important" it was for him to party on, dude, in January of 1945. Why did he hate America?

(There wasn't much partying for either of Lincoln's inaugurations, either; he must have not understood the importance to Washington's economy.)

Even Warren G. Fricking Harding had a different view:

This is apparently an express letter from President-elect Harding to Edward B. McLean, chairman of the Inaugural Committee. It was probably sent about the same time as a similar message in a telegram of January 1921. Harding asks the Inaugural Committee to abandon all plans for an inaugural celebration because of his concern about extravagance, but sends his appreciation to McLean and the other members of the committee for their efforts. He describes his wishes, thus: "It will be most pleasing to me to be simply sworn in, speak briefly my plight of faith to the country and turn at once to the work which will be calling."

Not to mention President Andrew Johnson.

Andrew Johnson taking the oath of office in the small parlor of the Kirkwood House [Hotel], Washington, [April 15, 1865].

And Truman.

[Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone administering the oath of office to Harry S. Truman in the Cabinet Room of the White House, April 12, 1945].

Coolidge.

In 1923 President Coolidge first took the oath of office, administered by his father, a justice of the peace and a notary, in his family's sitting room in Plymouth, Vermont.

Do I care a lot how much money is spent or how much fuss is made over this Inaugural? Not much. I'd just like the First Lady, famous for being a librarian, to not say ahistoric things.

ALSO:

To some extent, the criticism of inaugural extravagance reflects the longstanding concern about turning the president into royalty. Complaints that George Washington had "monarchical" pretensions prompted him to consider beginning his second term of office with a private swearing-in ceremony at home. He ultimately took the oath in the Senate chamber, but limited his second inaugural address to four sentences.

Some of his successors also tried scaling back the ceremonies. There were no inaugural balls for Woodrow Wilson in 1913 and 1917, and none for succeeding presidents until 1933, when one was held at the depths of the Depression for Roosevelt. But there were no balls to start his later terms, and in 1945 he dispensed with the swearing-in ceremony at the Capitol as well as the parade.

"Roosevelt was the only one who ever took the oath at the White House," Professor Boller said. "His health had something to do with it, but so did his concern that you shouldn't be having gaiety in Washington when there was wartime austerity in the rest of the country."

Roosevelt proposed a buffet luncheon with chicken à la king, and then the White House's famously frugal housekeeper, Henrietta Nesbitt, decided even that was too lavish. She served cold chicken salad, rolls without butter, poundcake and coffee. Roosevelt, who was not feeling well, got through the occasion by sending his son James to his room to smuggle him a tumbler of bourbon.

Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5.

1/15/2005 12:45:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 4 comments

LINES FROM EBERT I LIKED. A recurring category of post. Here regarding Pedor Almodovar's latest:

So there's 153 words right there, and my guess is, you're thinking the hell with it, just tell us what it's about and if it's any good. Your instincts are sound. Pedro Almodovar's new movie is like an ingenious toy that is a joy to behold, until you take it apart to see what makes it work, and then it never works again. While you're watching it, you don't realize how confused you are, because it either makes sense from moment to moment or, when it doesn't, you're distracted by the sex. Life is like that.

[...]

...and does it so well that if he had played Hephaistion, Alexander would have stayed at home in Macedonia, and they could have opened an antique shop, antiquities being dirt cheap at the time.

[...]

I think it's really more about erotic role-playing: About the roles we play, the roles other people play, and the roles we imagine them playing and they imagine us playing. If Almodovar is right, some of our most exciting sexual experiences take place entirely within the minds of other people.

Regarding Meet The Fockers, Roger notes:

When the MPAA objected to the title, by the way, the filmmakers produced several real people who said they were Fockers, and proud of it.

And in case you were wondering how his "star" system works:

Stars are relative, not absolute, and analyzing them represents a waste of valuable time that could be profitably spent watching aquarium fish or memorizing the sayings of Dr. Johnson. I am compelled to award them because of market pressures. I, too, would rather see "The Life Aquatic" again than "The Stepford Wives," but within the context of the two films, I think "The Life Aquatic" falls further short of what it was trying to do -- even though what it does is better than anything in "The Stepford Wives." I realize my logic is impenetrable. I recommend just reading the reviews and ignoring the stars.

Read The Rest as interested.

1/15/2005 12:32:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

Friday, January 14, 2005

DON'T YOU HATE IT when you put something away, and just forget you have it? Something like, say, hundreds of cannisters of chemical weapons that an old friend gave you? And, darn, now no one can find the paperwork!

Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5.

1/14/2005 04:07:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

HOORAH! This is, of course, arguably the most historic day in the history of humanity: the first time we have landed on the moon of another world, one which is a rich and mysterious world unto itself.

Most people probably won't even notice, of course.

I, of course, wish Anna could have seen it; she would have loved it.

Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5.

1/14/2005 02:36:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 2 comments

CONSISTENT WITH MILITARY NECESSITY. Likely I'm just not reading the right blogs, but it seems to me that Andrew Sullivan's exegesis on torture deserves more attention. (I suspect it hasn't gotten it because so many on the left will never forgive him for supporting the war and initially defending Bush for a long time, and most on the right now see him revealed as the crypto-leftist, Bush-hating, single-issue thinker he has now been truly revealed to be!)

What's notable about the incidents of torture and abuse is first, their common features, and second, their geographical reach. No one has any reason to believe any longer that these incidents were restricted to one prison near Baghdad. They were everywhere: from Guantánamo Bay to Afghanistan, Baghdad, Basra, Ramadi and Tikrit and, for all we know, in any number of hidden jails affecting ''ghost detainees'' kept from the purview of the Red Cross. They were committed by the Marines, the Army, the Military Police, Navy Seals, reservists, Special Forces and on and on. The use of hooding was ubiquitous; the same goes for forced nudity, sexual humiliation and brutal beatings; there are examples of rape and electric shocks.

[...]

These are not allegations made by antiwar journalists. They are incidents reported within the confines of the United States government. The Schlesinger panel has officially conceded, although the president has never publicly acknowledged, that American soldiers have tortured five inmates to death. Twenty-three other deaths that occurred during American custody had not been fully investigated by the time the panel issued its report in August. Some of the techniques were simply brutal, like persistent vicious beatings to unconsciousness. Others were more inventive. In April 2004, according to internal Defense Department documents recently procured by the A.C.L.U., three marines in Mahmudiya used an electric transformer, forcing a detainee to ''dance'' as the electricity coursed through him. We also now know that in Guantánamo, burning cigarettes were placed in the ears of detainees.

Here's another case [....]

Was the torture effective? The only evidence in the documents Danner has compiled that it was even the slightest bit helpful comes from the Schlesinger report. It says ''much of the information in the recently released 9/11 Commission's report, on the planning and execution of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, came from interrogation of detainees at Guantánamo and elsewhere.'' But the context makes plain that this was intelligence procured without torture. It also claims that good intelligence was received from the two sanctioned cases of expanded interrogation techniques at Guantánamo. But everything else points to the futility of the kind of brutal techniques used in Iraq and elsewhere.

[...]

And the damage done was intensified by President Bush's refusal to discipline those who helped make this happen. A president who truly recognized the moral and strategic calamity of this failure would have fired everyone responsible. But the vice president's response to criticism of the defense secretary in the wake of Abu Ghraib was to say, ''Get off his back.'' In fact, those with real responsibility for the disaster were rewarded.

[...]

Alberto R. Gonzales, who wrote memos that validated the decision to grant Geneva status to inmates solely at the president's discretion, is now nominated to the highest law enforcement job in the country: attorney general. The man who paved the way for the torture of prisoners is to be entrusted with safeguarding the civil rights of Americans. It is astonishing he has been nominated, and even more astonishing that he will almost certainly be confirmed.

But in a democracy, the responsibility is also wider. Did those of us who fought so passionately for a ruthless war against terrorists give an unwitting green light to these abuses? Were we naïve in believing that characterizing complex conflicts from Afghanistan to Iraq as a single simple war against ''evil'' might not filter down and lead to decisions that could dehumanize the enemy and lead to abuse? Did our conviction of our own rightness in this struggle make it hard for us to acknowledge when that good cause had become endangered? I fear the answer to each of these questions is yes.

[...]

Advocates of the war, especially those allied with the administration, kept relatively quiet, or attempted to belittle what had gone on, or made facile arguments that such things always occur in wartime. But it seems to me that those of us who are most committed to the Iraq intervention should be the most vociferous in highlighting these excrescences. Getting rid of this cancer within the system is essential to winning this war.

It's interesting to note which pro-war voices (in which category I might fairly be put) have been loudly speaking out on the torture issue, and which have matter-of-factly muttered about it as a necessary way station on the way to denouncing what's really important, which is the awfulness of those people who are so partisanly attacking President Bush.

Read The Rest Scale: 4.75 out of 5.

ADDENDUM: The Medium Lobster comments.

1/14/2005 01:55:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 6 comments