You Need Us More Than We Need You
(from the New York Times)

Shortly after he became chief executive [of Fannie Mae], Mr. Mudd* traveled to the California offices of Angelo R. Mozilo, the head of Countrywide Financial, then the nation’s largest mortgage lender [before it was bought out by Bank of America]. Fannie had a longstanding and lucrative relationship with Countrywide, which sold more loans to Fannie than anyone else.

But at that meeting, Mr. Mozilo, a butcher’s son who had almost single-handedly built Countrywide into a financial powerhouse, threatened to upend their partnership unless Fannie started buying Countrywide’s riskier loans.

Mr. Mozilo, who did not return telephone calls seeking comment, told Mr. Mudd that Countrywide had other options. For example, Wall Street had recently jumped into the market for risky mortgages. Firms like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs had started bundling home loans and selling them to investors - bypassing Fannie and dealing with Countrywide directly.

"You’re becoming irrelevant," Mr. Mozilo told Mr. Mudd, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting who requested anonymity because the talks were confidential. In the previous year, Fannie had already lost 56 percent of its loan-reselling business to Wall Street and other competitors.

"You need us more than we need you," Mr. Mozilo said, "and if you don’t take these loans, you’ll find you can lose much more."

Then Mr. Mozilo offered everyone a breath mint.

Investors were also pressuring Mr. Mudd to take greater risks.

On one occasion, a hedge fund manager telephoned a senior Fannie executive to complain that the company was not taking enough gambles in chasing profits.

"Are you stupid or blind?" the investor roared, according to someone who heard the call, but requested anonymity. "Your job is to make me money!"

Capitol Hill bore down on Mr. Mudd as well. The same year he took the top position, regulators sharply increased Fannie’s affordable-housing goals. Democratic lawmakers demanded that the company buy more loans that had been made to low-income and minority homebuyers.

"When homes are doubling in price in every six years and incomes are increasing by a mere one percent per year, Fannie’s mission is of paramount importance," Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, lectured Mr. Mudd at a Congressional hearing in 2006. "In fact, Fannie and Freddie can do more, a lot more."

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*Please don't shed a tear for "My Name is Mudd", his salary was in the millions.

David Foster Wallace* RIP

Writer David Foster Wallace died at the age of 46 last Friday. His wife came home to find him hanging by a noose, an apparent suicide.

In March 2005 I linked to this Atlantic story he did about conservative radio talk show hosts. (It has a cool footnote/sidebar feature which I must figure out how to do.) He could be really, really funny as seen in the talk show piece.

When Mr. Z.'s impassioned, his voice rises and his arms wave around (which obviously only those in the Airmix room can see). He also fidgets, bobs slightly up and down in his executive desk chair, and weaves. Although he must stay seated and can't pace around the room, the host does not have to keep his mouth any set distance from the microphone, since the board op, 'Mondo Hernandez, can adjust his levels on the mixing board's channel 7 so that Mr. Z.'s volume always stays in range and never peaks or fades. 'Mondo, whose price for letting outside parties hang around Airmix is one large bag of cool-ranch Doritos per evening, is an immense twenty-one-year-old man with a ponytail, stony Mesoamerican features, and the placid, grandmotherly eyes common to giant mammals everywhere.

He was really smart too, as show by the great argument he puts forward in this piece. To summarize: we endure thousands of automobile deaths in order that we have the freedom to drive. We should be able to endure inevitable terrorist attacks, without sacrificing our civil liberties or giving government absolute power over its citizenry.

What are the effects on the American idea of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, PATRIOT Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and property safer - are they worth it?

We should think of the victims of terrorist attacks as "democratic martyrs" for "the American idea."**

Infinite Jest was of course his big hit. I dated a girl five years or so younger than me, who had gone to Northwestern (and hence a braniac with a work ethic) and her and her friends would quote lines from it. I enjoyed it, especially the conceit about the government commodifying time and selling corporations the right to name certain years,*** so for example year 2017 was known as 2017: Year of the Depends Adult Diaper. His many footnotes were very informative and very funny.

Mark Twain said, he's all there in his work. His piece Consider the Lobster.

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way - hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

Slate has some people write up their memories and thoughts. Jordan Ellenberg writes:

But there's a deeper likeness, too. "We live today," he told the Believer in 2003, "in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to public policy and psychology and classical music are so extremely abstract and technically complex and context-dependent that it's next to impossible for the ordinary citizen to feel that they (the developments) have much relevance to her actual life." Technical complexity, a turnoff to most, was Wallace's bread and meat. He was never interested in the kind of truths that you could sum up in 10 words - which is why it's so hard to quote Wallace 10 words at a time.

Michiko Kakutani puts him inside the context of other fiction writers:

Like Mr. DeLillo and Salman Rushdie, and like Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith and other younger authors, Mr. Wallace transcended Philip Rahv’s famous division of writers into "palefaces" (like Henry James and T. S. Eliot, who specialized in heady, cultivated works rich in symbolism and allegory) and "redskins" (like Whitman and Dreiser, who embraced an earthier, more emotional naturalism). He also transcended Cyril Connolly’s division of writers into "mandarins" (like Proust, who favored ornate, even byzantine prose) and "vernacular" stylists (like Hemingway, who leaned toward more conversational tropes). An ardent magpie, Mr. Wallace tossed together the literary and the colloquial with hyperventilated glee, using an encyclopedia of styles and techniques to try to capture the cacophony of contemporary America.

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* the footnote meister
** in a footnote to "the American idea" Wallace writes "let's just please all agree that we generally know what this term connotes - an open society, consent of the governed, enumerated powers, Federalist 10, pluralism, due process, transparency ... the whole democratic roil."
*** I remember a time when sports stadiums didn't have corporate brands in their names.

Department of Frozen Conflicts

Last week:

King Abdullah II of Jordan flew to Baghdad on Monday, becoming the first Arab leader to visit Iraq since Saddam Hussein fell five years ago.

Jordan relies on Iraq for most of its fuels.

Ibrahim al-Sumadayi, an Iraqi political analyst, said on Baghdad television that the visit would encourage other Arab nations to take similar steps. He also said that Jordan, with its Sunni majority, wished to prevent Iran, a nation of Shiites, from exerting undue influence in Baghdad.

Abdullah had been the one warning of a rising "Shia crescent" extending from the Shia in Lebanon, who are gaining in power, to the newly empowered Shia in Iraq, to the Shia nation of Iran.

The UN should create a department of Frozen Conflicts which alerts the media as one of them thaws or heats up. Kashmir is seeing increasing conflict today, for instance. Cyprus seems to be getting better, as does Shia-Sunni flashpoint of Iraq. (However from what I understand the Shia of Iraq are unlikely to reconcile with their fellow Iraqi Sunnis, which is why Abdullah's diplomacy with Iraq is key.)

Musharraf set to quit and receive immunity

Obama's lead economics advisors Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee employ Delong in their Wall Street Journal Op-Ed today:

Sen. McCain has put forward the most fiscally reckless presidential platform in modern memory. The likely results of his Bush-plus policies are clear. As Berkeley economist Brad Delong has estimated, the McCain plan, as compared to the Obama plan, would lower annual incomes by $300 billion or more in real terms by 2017, costing the typical worker $1,800 or more due to the effect of large deficits on national savings and thus capital formation. Sen. McCain's neglect of critical public investments would further impede economic growth for decades to come.

Ronald D. Asmus writes about the Russian-Georgian conflict.

To be sure, the Georgian government and President Saakashvili himself is responsible for launching its military move on August 7--albeit in response to provocations and heavy shelling by South Ossetian separatists. That move gave Moscow the pretext to invade. Today, Western observers understandably ask why Tbilisi allowed itself to be goaded into what was clearly a Russian trap. President Saakashvili will have to answer that question himself. But I suspect I have a pretty good idea of what he will say. In our recent conversations, it was clear to me that he was concluding that the West was not serious about resolving these conflicts, that he did not believe he would ever have the diplomatic support required, and that the status quo could not go on forever. He watched Russia's creeping annexation of Abkhazia start last spring with almost no Western response. That does not justify what clearly was a terrible strategic mistake by Georgia to act militarily. But it points to the mistakes--both of omission and commission--the West made that contributed to this crisis.

Cathy Young writes about it in Reason.

Russia has pointedly compared South Ossetia's claims to independence to those of Kosovo, whose recognition it strongly opposed. (Russia's own war against secessionist Chechnya, which killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of civilians, goes unmentioned.)

The Russians going on about human rights and genocide is a little bizarre. Young again:

Some liberal Russian commentators, such as EJ.ru's Dmitry Sidorov, argue that Saakashvili walked into Moscow's trap, giving Russia an excuse for an invasion that will fatally destabilize Georgia's political system. Meanwhile, opposition leader Mikhail Kasyanov believes it was the Kremlin that let itself be provoked into a military confrontation that will badly hurt Russia's international standing.

Obviously it remains to be seen how this shakes out. It was interesting to see the Presidents of Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia in Tbilisi in solidarity. To me a lot depends on the future state of the global financial system and hence the global economy. Will it continue to slide?

Krugman says:

A nasty inflation number today. But remember what the guide says: DON’T PANIC.

Basically, what we’re seeing is pure commodity price inflation, with not a hint of a wage-price spiral. And the commodity boom seems to be over. So inflation will be headed down soon.

I’m sure that Gentle Uncle Ben is under immense pressure to raise rates. But he shouldn’t.

Richard Just's exhaustive, comprehensive piece on Darfur. I guess since it's in the New Republic, Just feels he has to be nasty and so he takes multiple gratuitous shots at Don Cheadle for whatever reason.

Just titles it "The Truth Will Not Set You Free: Everything we know about Darfur, and everything we're not doing about it." He gets almost Zizekian in his paradoxical inversions. Not near enough has happened to stop the genocide because we know too much?

Russia and China won't allow Sudan's sovereignty to be violated and there's no stomach to go outside the UN again like with Kosovo and Iraq. Those are the obstacles, not any shortcomings of those who've tried to do something however small.

Pakistan Coalition Moves to Impeach Musharraf

interview with Ahmed Rashid

Darkness Visible

No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all, but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed
With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed.

The Dark Side and the Dark Knight


The Battle for a Country's Soul by Jane Mayer

Alan Brinkley's review of Mayer's The Dark Side.

At the urging of Cheney - or his surrogate Addington - President Bush nullified the Geneva Conventions and, without publicly stating it, suspended habeas corpus for terror suspects, thus removing two important impediments to torture. Others worked to undermine the 1984 international Convention Against Torture, which, under American leadership, had provided the first explicit definition of what torture was.

Obama better win in November. The unsung heroes:

Among the most courageous opponents of the use of torture was a small group of lawyers working within the Bush administration - conservative men, loyal Republicans, who in the face of enormous pressure to go along attempted to use the law to stop what they considered a series of policies that were both illegal and immoral: Alberto Mora, the Navy general counsel, who tried to work within the system to stop what he believed were renegade actions; Jack Goldsmith, who became the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 and sought to revoke the Yoo memo of 2002, convinced that it had violated the law in authorizing what he believed was clearly torture; and Matthew Waxman, a Defense Department lawyer overseeing detainee issues, who sought ways to stop what he believed to be illegal and dangerous policies. Waxman summoned a meeting of high-ranking military officers and Defense Department officials (including the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force), all of whom supported the restoration of Geneva Convention protections. Waxman was quickly hauled up before Addington and told that his efforts constituted "an abomination." All of these lawyers, and others, soon left the government after being deceived, bullied, thwarted and marginalized by the Cheney loyalists.

Via Crooks and Liars, conservative pundit Glenn Beck says Bush is Batman:

"This seems to be a movie that extols some of the conservative viewpoints that we are dealing with terrorists, that you can trust people to make the right decision, that sometimes you have to do things that you don’t want to do, and you have to cross lines that you don’t want to cross, if you’re going to save - if you’re going to save your city, in this case it’s Gotham.

"But Batman goes into another country and with a C130, snatches a guy out, then throws him back here into Gotham. So there’s rendition! At one point, the Morgan Freeman character says to Batman, ‘Wait a minute, hang on... you’re eavesdropping on everyone in Gotham?’ And Batman says, ‘Yes, to stop this terrorist.’ Morgan Freeman says, ‘I can’t be a part of it.’ And yet Morgan Freeman does become a part of it, and they find the Joker. One of the ways they find the Joker is through eavesdropping. I mean the parallels here of what’s going on is to me stunning."

It's a movie, which I enjoyed by the way. Batman wants to retire for various reasons and feels he can because of Harvey Dent. In the real world, he could because there'd be a FBI after the Joker and in the real world Batman's eavesdropping and torture of Eric Robert's mob boss (by dropping him off a building balconey) are illegal. So Bush is doing illegal stuff? Extraordinary rendition is not when you snatch someone and bring them to the US to stand trial. It's when terrorist suspect are handed off to intellegence services of countries like Syria, Egypt, and Jordan where they are tortured.

These conservatives are trying to defend torture on principle. It's the Vic Mackey theory of justice or the ideas embodied by Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men. Damon Root discusses another salient example at Hit and Run:

There's a lot worth thinking about in Justice Antonin Scalia's harsh Boumediene v. Bush dissent, but one passage jumped out right away. After noting that the Bush administration used the naval base at Guantanamo Bay precisely because it believed that enemy combatants would not enjoy habeas corpus and other constitutional rights while being held there, Justice Scalia suggests the following: "Had the law been otherwise, the military surely would not have transported prisoners there, but would have kept them in Afghanistan, transferred them to another of our foreign military bases, or turned them over to allies for detention." Here's the kicker: "Those facilities might well have been worse for the detainees themselves."

Given that "allies" such as Egypt and Syria regularly torture their prisoners, I'd certainly agree that things "might well have been worse" elsewhere. But isn't Justice Scalia contradicting President Bush, who famously declared that "torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture." And maybe I'm reading too much into it, but Scalia's words sure sound like an implied threat. You liberals think Guantanamo is bad? Next time you won't even know where the prisoners are held.

Glenn Beck and Scalia are like the police officer the Joker baited in jail. They are like Harvey Dent when - driven mad by fear of losing the one he loves - he's threatening Joker's tied-up flunky with death, until Batman talks him out of it. To paraphrase the Joker, all some conservatives need to become fascist is a little push. These scenes argue against seeing The Dark Knight as propaganda. Plus why would they have a cameo with Patrick Leahy if Glenn Beck was right?

(spoiler) Also, the film has a nice climatic scene of solidarity, when each boatload of passengers refuses to kill the other boatload of strangers in order to save themselves. The mad Joker believes they will succumb to fear, whereas Batman believes they won't.

(top) AnnaSophia Robb with some of the cast of Reno 911 and (bottom) hitting the books.

New Slang

14-year-old actress blogging? At least it's better than catblogging. I got those photos from Robb's website, where she has lists of her favorite things, like movies: "Best in Show, Mighty Wind, Lord of the Rings, Titanic, Napolean Dynamite, Nacho Libre."

Robb played the gum-chewing Violet Beauregarde* in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But she caught my attention with last year's movie Bridge to Terabithia, where her performance as Leslie Burke is outstanding.

Time movie critic Richard Schekel said of her performance in the film "Sleepwalking", "There is a wonderful range to Robb's work; she's testy and vulnerable, patient and impatient, hopeful and despairing always fiercely committed to exploring the ambiguities of her still-forming character. This is extraordinarily mature acting from someone this young and she wins our sympathy without once begging for it."

According to Wikipedia, Robb is a Christian from Denver, who had a bit of homeschooling but now attends a private school. Her first gig was for a McDonalds commercial, which makes her the stereotypical American, from the perspective of "Old Europe."

The subtitle of this blog is "Anything To Help Advance the Cause" and once a commenter asked "what is the 'cause' you speak of"? I responded it can be anything you want, from having a good time, to doing the chores, to making the world a better place.

Interstingly, Robb has a section of her website called "Changing the World." Once you click through the link, the heading is "Making the World a Better Place" and the section contains three more links. The top link is on Darfur, and it connects to a good summary of what is happening there: "At the moment, many mission agencies such as; Oxfam International, CARE, International Rescue Committee, Church World Service, Inter Action, Doctors Without Boarders[sic], Save the Children, UNICEF, CRWRC, and lots of others are all involved with humanitarian aid for the displaced Sudanese. Yet only 13,000 aid works[sic]** are in Darfur to help 4 ½ million."

Her analysis is pretty sophisticated, "The UN has many resolutions in debate to put UN troops on the ground in Darfur to protect the people but, a few countries that are profiting from the Khartoum government, China and Russia, openly refuse to admit to what is going on in Sudan. They say that the UN inspectors are misinformed. These governments vote against the resolutions. China and Russia are buying all the oil in Sudan and 80% of the oil money is being used to buy ammunition for the Janjaweed." At the end, Robb gives a numbered list of what people can do now, supplied by and credited to the Genocide Intervention Network.

The second area of interest is the Dalits, or "untouchables" of India. Again, she provides some good information and contact numbers for those wanting to get involved.

The third and final section of "Making the World a Better Place" is the "Environment." There's a note saying it's "(under construction)" which is sort of how I feel about environmental issues. Yeah, of course they're a concern but I don't have much to say about it. Actually I never blog about it. In my mind the needs of those in Darfur, in Zimbabwe, or in Burma, etc. seem more immediate. Not to denigrate those active on environmental issues; I guess those issues could be more consequential in the long run. Perhaps her interest in these various causes are partly a result of her religion? Maybe, but if she is religious she apparently isn't very hardcore because she doesn't bring it up on her website.

The first time I saw Bridge to Terabithia, I took a car ride afterwards and the Shins' song "New Slang" came on the radio. The sweetly melancholic tune seemed a perfect fit for the movie and now whenever I hear it, I think of that magical-realistic, Hallmarky film. (Robb is teaming up again with the director of that film (who according to IMDB also directed an episode of the Simpsons(!)) The song "New Slang" first came to mainstream prominence when Natalie Portman's character in Garden State said "it will change your life." Portman has made a successful transition from child actress to adult actress, and we here at Negative Outlook? will be "praying" that the same happens for Robb if that's what she wants to do. (A little six degrees of Kevin Bacon: Robb has a bit part in Hayden Christensen's new movie Jumper.)

Robb's character in Bridge to Terabithia, Leslie Burke, had a weirdly compelling sincerity. It reminded me of Amy Adams in Enchanted or Junebug or Barack Obama or the positive spin on Ned Flanders in the Simpsons movie (of course it's a generalization and there are differences). Call it the "New Sincerity" for an ironic age (e.g. Mighty Wind, Best in Show, Napolean Dynamite, Nacho Libre) where the national newspaper is the Onion.

----------------------------
* In the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory, Violet Beauregarde had probably my all-time favorite movie line "WHAT IS THIS, A FREAKOUT?" when they were taking the psychedelic boat-trip down a candy river.
** Yeah there are a couple mistakes the spellchecker couldn't catch, so what? Don't know about most people that age, but I was too busy crashing keg parties and attending Van Halen concerts and such back then to care about politics and tragedies in far off lands. It's pretty impressive.

A Day in the Life

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died.

One story, a short novel, was "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," an account of a single day in an icy prison camp written in the voice of an inmate named Ivan Denisovich Shukov, a bricklayer.
...

Mr. Solzhenitsyn typed the story single spaced, using both sides to save paper. He sent one copy to Lev Kopelev, an intellectual with whom he had shared a cell 16 years earlier. Mr. Kopelev, who later became a well known dissident, realized that under Khrushchev’s policies of liberalization, it might be possible to have the story published by Novy Mir, or The New World, the most prestigious of the Soviet Union’s so-called thick literary and cultural journals. Mr. Kopelev and his colleagues steered the manuscript around lower editors who might have blocked its publication and took it to Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the editor and a Politburo member who backed Khrushchev.

On reading the manuscript, Mr. Tvardovsky summoned Mr. Solzhenitsyn from Ryazan. "You have written a marvelous thing," he told him. "You have described only one day, and yet everything there is to say about prison has been said." He likened the story to Tolstoy’s moral tales. Other editors compared it to Dostoyevski’s "House of the Dead," which the author had based on his own experience of incarceration in czarist times. Mr. Tvardovsky offered Mr. Solzhenitsyn a contract worth more than twice his teacher’s annual salary, but he cautioned that he was not certain he could publish the story.

Mr. Tvardovsky was eventually able to get Khrushchev himself to read "A Day in the Life." Khrushchev was impressed, and by mid-October 1962, the presidium of the Politburo took up the question of whether to allow it to be published. The presidium ultimately agreed, and in his biography "Solzhenitsyn" (Norton, 1985), Michael Scammell wrote that Khrushchev defended the decision and was reported to have declared: "There’s a Stalinist in each of you; there’s even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil."

How did Solzhenitsyn first end up in the Gulag Archipelago?

In February 1945, as the war in Europe drew to a close, he was arrested on the East Prussian front by agents of Smersh, the Soviet spy agency. The evidence against him was found in a letter to a school friend in which he referred to Stalin - disrespectfully, the authorities said - as "the man with the mustache." Though he was a loyal Communist, he was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp.

more of an 'and' guy than an 'or' guy

Harold Meyerson had a good column on Obama's choice of economic advisors and a meeting he had with them.

Given the range of perspectives and interests represented, such concord was remarkable. The advisers ran the gamut from Clinton administration centrists, such as former Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers; to former George W. Bush administration Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and SEC chairman William Donaldson, both presumably still Republicans; to such avowed liberals as former labor secretary (and my American Prospect colleague) Robert Reich, economist Jared Bernstein, and labor leaders John Sweeney (president of the AFL-CIO) and Anna Burger (chair of Change to Win). Also there, for good measure, were former Fed chief Paul Volcker and everyone's favorite mega-rich guy, Warren Buffett.

"There was no dissent over whether there should be a stimulus," says Bernstein, "just over whether it should be $50 billion or a lot bigger. There's real consensus that the economy has structural problems, ranging from people like Reich and me to CEOs who look at the markets and say we really need better rules."

That doesn't mean that differing views weren't voiced in the meeting or that the party has reached a consensus on trade. But, adds Bernstein, Obama is "more of an 'and' guy than an 'or' guy. He's for growth and fairness."

So, he could listen to the theorists and social engineers like David Brooks and Thomas Friedman who call for more education and increasing human capital. Also, Obama hopefully will focus on fairness and not actively make the economic environment so anti-labor. In a an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he did say:

We have drastically increased productivity since 1995, and there was the theory that if you increase productivity enough some of these problems of living standards would solve themselves. But what we've seen is rising productivity, rising corporate profits but flat-lining or even declining wages and incomes for the average family.

What that says is that it's going to be important for us to pay attention to not only growing the pie, which is always critical, but also some attention to how it is sliced. I do not believe that those two things -- fair distribution and robust economic growth -- are mutually exclusive.

The Iceman Cometh

Peter Maass writes about Generation Kill.

The series reminded of a Marine with whom I had corresponded. He had been in Iraq.

Aleksandar Hemon writes about the capture of Radovan Karadzic.

Nymphadora Tonks

New York Times Magazine: How did you feel when you heard that Buckley died this year?

Gore Vidal: I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred.

Well put. Coincidently I recently saw Jeff Garlin's documentary John Waters: This Filthy World which was hilarious. Waters is a unique guy.

and the singer ... rams Buddha down the throat of a giant silver dragon

There's a high you get from the classic 1970s "art-rock" of Yes, Genesis, or King Crimson-- and when it hits, there's nothing like it. I'm not talking about the way other music peaks, like a dance track where the beat kicks in and the crowd goes berzerk, or metal music that gets louder and louder until your skull caves, or gutbucket singers who can make your heart jump out of your chest. With art-rock, there's a lot of mumbo-jumbo and funny time signatures, and sometimes there's like 10 or 15 minutes of really boring shit (see: Yes, "Awaken"). But when the "good part" hits? Holy shit-- the band crescendos and the singer, smooth as silk but loud as God, rams Buddha down the throat of a giant silver dragon. If I sound like I'm growing a mullet, I've done my job.

Speaking of which, Stereolab has a new album dropping on August 18th, then a tour of the States this fall.

Oops

Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired the top civilian commander and the top general in the Air Force over "Atomic errors."

The inquiry involving the Air Force was an effort to determine how four high-tech electrical nose cone fuses for Minuteman nuclear warheads were sent to Taiwan in place of helicopter batteries. The mistake was discovered in March - a year and a half after the mistaken shipment.

Mr. Gates made clear that most troubling was that the inquiry showed how little the Air Force had done to improve the security of the nuclear weapons infrastructure even after it was disclosed last year that a B-52 bomber had flown across the United States without anyone’s realizing that it was carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles.

Some had said that the bomber flight was consciously done as a warning to Iran. I didn't find that persuasive at the time and especially don't find it persuasive now that NATO-ally Turkey and Iran are coordinating attacks on Kurds in northern Iraq.

Dirt off your shoulder and shit off your shoes



(via Yglesias via Spencer Ackerman.)

"'If he had signed just one platinum act, all would have been forgiven. Instead he gave them Luna, Stereolab and the Afghan Whigs.' Things go from bad to worse, until 'Terry had lost his wife, which he pretended not to care about. Now he had lost his job. ... Six months later he was working at a gas station in New Jersey, changing oil and brake liners by day, snorting heroin by night.'"

Liz Phair quoting from Dean Wareham about "One particularly unforgettable story [involving] the rags-to-riches-to-rags-again tale of a high-flying A & R executive at Elektra named Terry Tolkin".

Herger the Joyous

Stick A Fork In It

I just heard the honey-voiced Wade Goodwyn say Obama won Texas.

To quote Heath Ledger's Joker: "Why so serious?"

said one commenter to a pro-Clinton commenter at Yglesias's blog.

Who's more radical?
(or poetry versus prose)

On paper Hillary Clinton or John Edwards may look better for progressive hopes - although no doubt Obama supporters would dispute this. I'll admit my enthusiasm for Obama wavered when I read that two of my favorite writers obliquely favored Edwards (Barabara Ehrenreich and Christopher Hitchens).

But then I read this brief for Obama by Lorrie Moore and my mind was blown like an audience member at a Tenacious D gig*.

Moore articulates my inchoate thoughts about the Democratic primary. Hillary Clinton made a category mistake when she said people shouldn't succumb to "false hopes." Cornel West has made a useful distinction about the term "hope." He said people are optimistic when they erroneously believe conditions are more favorable than they actually are. Pessimism is when one is erroneously negative. Hope is when one has a realistically negative outlook but also recognizes the possibilities for and works towards - against the odds - positive change. In West's formulation you can't have "false hope."

Obama and his supporters had hope which ended up transforming the political economy after the Iowa primary and altered the landscape, at least for the time being. (Was there an actual paradigm shift? We'll see.)

David Brooks wrote on that occasion "This is a huge moment. It’s one of those times when a movement that seemed ethereal and idealistic became a reality and took on political substance."

Maureen Dowd, who once called Obama "Obambi" opined: "The Obama revolution arrived not on little cat feet in the Iowa snow but like a balmy promise, an effortlessly leaping lion hungry for something different, propelled by a visceral desire among Americans to feel American again."

One can overstate the changes and significance - that would be being optimistic. Nevertheless the Obama campaign gave people more reason to hope.

-----------------
*Is that Amy Adams in the audience?

Do you come from the land down under?


Kendra Shaw had to make some tough choices in the new Battlestar Galactica movie. As circumstances forced her - for the most part - to become more and more like the cold "toasters" she was fighting, she began to hate herself more. This meant putting herself in risky situations without a second thought and using drugs to numb the pain and cope with the stress.

Lots of good things coming out of Australia lately. Like NPR's Jamie Tarabay or the John Butler Trio. Then there's Bret and Jermaine, who are from New Zealand of course.

The photo is of Iorek Byrnison, who appears in the Philip Pullman trilogy His Dark Materials. The first installment, The Golden Compass, is coming to the movie theaters soon. The website has an interesting feature which tells who your daemon is. Mine's a fox named Delilah.

BEHOLD THE POWER OF THE NERDFURY AND DESPAIR!

(via theGarance)

The question at hand was how to find good restaurants, and his answer was to take the city you want to go to and just google up some restaurant names that serve the dish you're after. Then go to chowhound or another foodie site, and rather than asking about restaurants, you put up an enthusiastic post talking about how you just had the best whatever you're looking for at one of these restaurants.

At that point, what drivingblind likes to call the nerdfury will begin. Posters will show up from nowhere to shower you with disdain, tell you how that place used to be good but has now totally sold out and - most important to your quest - will tell you where you would have gone if you were not some sort of mouth breathing water buffalo.

(via Kevin Drum, via Jim Henley, via Robert Donoghue)

A Devil's Haircut In My Mind



Great film. Have to say my favorite scene in No Country For Old Men is when Josh Brolin is trying to swim away from the furiously paddling pit bull. But there are many, many other great scenes. It is a violent, gory movie (which I'm not into - can't understand why so many people pay money to see all of those horror films Hollywood churns out) but it's a Coen brothers film. A wonderful, sad, scary, suspenseful, funny one with great actors. It's one of those movies where you don't know which way it's going to go.

Makes me feel lucky to live in Chicago which got screenings before the nationwide release.

Alfredo Stroessner, Colorful Dictator of Paraguay for 35 Years, Dies in Exile at 95

Thus was the obit heading in the New York Times I picked up this morning.

Lorrie Moore writes about Shakespeare.

That Bitch-Goddess Success

Random subject heading for some random thoughts. I love the Internet exclusive trailer and theatrical trailer for Jack Black's new movie Nacho Libre.

I love the new song by The Raconteurs

Find yourself a girl and settle down
Live a simple life in a quiet town

Steady as she goes (steady as she goes)
Steady as she goes (steady as she goes)

So steady as she goes

Your friends have shown a kink in the single life
You've had too much to think, now you need a wife

Akbar Ganji released from prison after serving a 6-year sentence.

Trial Began for Members of Aryan Prison Gang

The trial in the federal courthouse here is the first in a series growing out of a 2002 indictment of 40 members of the gang, which was formed in the mid-1960's by white inmates in the racially divided California prison system.
...
Prosecutors said the brotherhood had since adopted the tactics of organized crime families as it expanded to several other states and to a half-dozen federal penitentiaries, particularly the most secure "supermax" prisons at Florence, Colo., and Marion, Ill.

On trial now are four senior members of the brotherhood, including two of its early leaders, Mr. Mills, 57, known as "The Baron," and Tyler D. Bingham, 58, who goes by "T.D." or "The Hulk." Also on trial are Edgar W. Hevle, 54, known as "The Snail," and Christopher O. Gibson, 46.

The four are accused of ordering or participating in 15 murders or attempted murders over the past 25 years. They are being charged under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization laws, which have been used to prosecute Mafia families and other criminal groups. Federal prosecutors call the Aryan Brotherhood case, the result of four years of investigation by numerous agencies, the biggest federal death penalty case ever brought.

It takes a village

Events in Iraq called to mind these words which were written about another land with a much different history

We have been told that "it takes a village" and--never mind the implication for now--it probably does. A village or small town like Gorazde can mature for years in history's cask, ripening away for all its provincialism. The large majority of its citizens may be content or at any rate reconciled. But the awful and frightening fact about fascism is that it "takes" only a few gestures (a pig's head in a mosque; a rumor of the kidnap of a child; an armed provocation at a wedding) to unsettle or even undo the communal and humane work of generations.

Normally the fascists don't have the guts to try it, they need the reassurance of support from superiors or aid from an outside power and they need to know that "law," defined nationally or internationally, will be a joke at the expense of their victims. In Bosnia they were granted all three indulgences. But even at the edge of those medieval paintings of breakdown and panic and mania, when people still thought the heavens might aid them, there was often the oblique figure at the edge of the scene, who might hope to record and outlive the carnage and perhaps help rebuild the community. Call him the moral draftsman, at least for now, and be grateful for small mercies.

I'll admit it: I rely on the New York Times too much for my news. But it's so convenient and my "time management skills" are so lacking. And then there's my laziness. Michael Weiss over at Snarkwatch writes a pitch-perfect post about why the New York Times keeps ya coming back (besides the fact it gives you the lowdown on what everyone else is thinking however much you may disagree):

Once In A While In The New York Times... A passage like this comes along:

The subjects of his books included the Kronstadt naval base rebellion of 1921, an uprising of sailors against the Bolshevik regime that left more than 10,000 dead or wounded; the Haymarket Riot of 1886, in which seven Chicago police officers were killed by a bomb thrown at a workers' gathering; and the Sacco and Vanzetti case. He interviewed hundreds of adherents of the movement for one book, "Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America."

Paul Avrich, CCNY historian of anarchism and the Russian revolution, is dead at 74. The Old Left is steadily moving to the final stage beyond old.

Well, the Old New Left, as Avrich was slightly ahead of his time in a way. In other words, he was an inspiration to the New Left, like Herbert Marcuse.

Strange to learn Richard Kelly wrote the screen play for the Tony Scott film Domino. (Kelly also wrote and directed Donnie Darko.) Domino gets off to a good start with one of the three bounty hunter central characters employing their shotgun to blow away an attacking pit bull. Keira Knightly plays one of the bounty hunters, as does Mickey Rourke who was notably brilliant as Marv in Sin City and is good in this. Tom Waits also has a walk on part.

Rourke's character - who had spent hard time in Angola (the Louisiana State Penitentury and largest prison in the U.S.) - gives a nice speech to his bounty hunter buddie after said buddie freaks out because he has fallen for Knightly's character.

Let me tell you something. You see this? There was no prison riot. I blew off my own God Damn toe. Just to numb the pain. We all get weak over women. We all get weak over women. Fucking broads, they're all nuts. They know how to kill us. This kid in there? She's killing you.

Not anti-union

Interesting piece on how Cingular Wireless is neutral when it comes to unions organizing its workforce.

The Cold War fades into the distance

Theodore Draper, Freelance Historian, Is Dead at 93

The following in Thomas L. Friedman's (TimesSelect!) column caused me to do a mental doubletake:

To understand the Danish affair, you can't just read Samuel Huntington's classic, "The Clash of Civilizations." You also need to read Karl Marx, because this explosion of Muslim rage is not just about some Western insult. It's also about an Eastern failure. It is about the failure of many Muslim countries to build economies that prepare young people for modernity - and all the insult, humiliation and frustration that has produced. (emphasis added)

Shit

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 22 - Insurgents dressed as police commandos detonated powerful explosives on Wednesday morning inside one of Shiite Islam’s most sacred shrines, destroying most of the building, located in the volatile town of Samarra, and prompting thousands of Shiites to flood into streets across the country in protest.

A Few Good Men

Jane Mayer writes about Alberto J. Mora - once the general counsel of the United States Navy - Guantánamo Bay, and Torture.

One of the writers who has been good on the torture travesties is Andrew Sullivan. He writes about Mayer's piece at his blog.

from Chinatown

Jake Gittes: I just want to know what you're worth. Over ten million?
Noah Cross: Oh my, yes.
Jake Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?
Noah Cross: The future, Mr. Gitts, the future.

Julian Sanchez writes about the NSA warrantless spying program.

He links to an interesting Washington Post piece and a New Republic piece by Richard Posner.

I caught the Attorney General on Charlie Rose's show tonight and he brought up a new justification beyond the Force Resolution (AUMF) of 2001. He wasn't clear, but he said something about the President's power to act in national security matters. He also argued again that there's a clause in FISA that says Congress may give the President greater powers - or take away oversight - in future cases, but critics continue to argue FISA has the word "exclusive" in it.

Equilibrium, i.e. non-dictatorial
(or the Domestic Spying/Terrorist Surveillance Program)

I recorded the entire Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Attorney General Gonzalez about the administration's NSA domestic spying program and watched the entire thing.

The hearing focused on a program Bush authorized for the NSA that allows it to use warrantless electronic surveillance on international communications from Al Qaeda or affiliated groups with American citizens within the "homeland." Warrantless means the other two branches of government have no oversight or "check" on what the administration is doing in regards to the domestic half of the international communication being spied upon.

Justice Jackson's concurring opinion in the "Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer" Supreme Court decision was referred to by some because of its discussion of the limits of the Executive branch's powers.

The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was Congress's response to the abuses of wiretapping by previous administrations. Apparently, according to this law the government needs a warrant from a special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court in order to perform certain electronic surveillance. Shortly after 9-11 and the 2001 resolution, the Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF, against al Qaeda) given to the President by Congress, the administration decided that it didn't need to go to this court to get warrants for NSA spying on international communications from al Qaeda or related groups to American citizens in the US.

The issue is that half of the communication is within the US and hence domestic. Attorney General Gonzalez told the hearing the President didn't authorize a warrantless domestic to domestic communications surveillance program, because of the politics, essentially. However, he didn't say whether or not the AUMF, or the Constitution, gave the Executive that power.

It looks like politics, the media and the public will decide this issue. It came to light because of a leak and, outside the Executive branch, only the top 8 members of Congress regarding intelligence issues had been informed of the program. (Gonzalez said because of the AUMF and the Executive's constitutional powers, it wasn't required to inform anyone else.)

However, after 9-11 Congress changed FISA to make it easier to use. Someone elsewhere on the Internet wrote

While Feinstein touched on it, what is the explanation of the Administration for the clause in FISA allowing the President warrantless wiretapping for 15 days after Congress declares war? According to Gonzalez, FISA is Constitutional, he just doesn't think it applies in time of war. So what was the point of that clause? According to him, wouldn't that clause be unconstitutional because it appears to limit Presidential powers in wartime?

Gonzalez told the hearing that the AUMF superceded FISA - or did he? - plus FISA is too burdensome. Well if FISA doesn't apply because of the AUMF, how is it burdensome? And how come this program wasn't mentioned when FISA was altered after 9-11?

Interestingly, Gonzalez noted that the AUMF is *not* a declaration of war by Congress, but simply what it states: a Congressional authorization of the use of military force.

Republican Senators Specter, Graham, DeWine and Brownback all questioned the administration's use of the AUMF to back up the legality of the NSA/al Qaeda-domestic spying program. As the New York Times reports

Mr. Gonzales also clarified again a statement he made on Dec. 19, a few days after the spying program was disclosed by The New York Times. At the time, he said the administration had not sought an amendment to the 1978 law because "certain members of Congress" had "advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible." Since then Mr. Gonzales has said the real problem is that such legislation could not be enacted without compromising the program.

So it sounds like they knew the other branches of government would see it as a power grab.

Those who subscribe to the Vic Mackey* theory of law enforcement wonder what the big deal is. They should study the domestic spying abuses which led to the encactment of the 1978 FISA law and consider the experience of other countries which don't value a system of checks and balances. Senator Specter spoke of the equlibrium amongst the various branches of govenment and warned that the administration may be disturbing it. All he recommended, though, was that the administration bring the program before the FISA court and see what it had to say. Perhaps there's a chance Congress will do something if Gonzalez doesn't follow his advice, but it looks like this will be decided by the public and politics rather than the law and Constitution.

Emily Bazelon writing in Slate on the hearings.

blogger Glenn Greenwald

Noah Feldman writing in the New York Times Magazine

*character on the television show The Shield

Havrilesky writes about the State of the Union speech.

The Market System and Shifting Alliances
President Bush, who was well-known for not travelling outside the country much at all, spoke a great deal in his state of the union on America's need to globalize and mix it up with the rest of the world. In fact, in his opinion it's America's duty to lead all other nations.

I haven't seen the film Syriana but from what I hear it portrays the US government's foreign policy as highly cynical and mercantilist, the very opposite of what a global leader should be. Or does it?

The plot involves an oil-rich Middle Eastern nation whose leader has made contracts with China to sell its oil at much higher prices than the US is currently paying. This leader is a genuine reformer who wants to use the increase in government revenue to benefit his citizens. The market system at work, in a sense. The CIA assassinates this leader so that his pro-American brother can assume power and continue the preferential treatment of America.

So, yes the Americans behave badly on the international stage. But what about the Chinese? In the real world, they back the genocidal regime of Sudan because of oil. They back the klepto-theocratic rogue regime of Iran because of oil. And they keep the American government and economy afloat via massive loans. But they need the American consumer to keep their economy growing.

I'm in the middle of reading Steve Coll's Ghost Wars which is partly about the CIA's support of the Afghan rebels in their war with the Soviet Union's invading force. Most of the weapons the CIA initially supplied to the rebels came from Communist China, a mortal enemy of the Soviet Union.

So, first the US formed an alliance with the Soviet Union against fascist Germany. Then it allied with radical Islam, a defeated Germany and Communist China against the Soviet Union. Now it's allied with Germany, Russia and China against radical Islam.

"Gameness" (or man's best friend)

Malcolm Gladwell, about whom I know nothing, writes:

Pit bulls, descendants of the bulldogs used in the nineteenth century for bull baiting and dogfighting, have been bred for “gameness,” and thus a lowered inhibition to aggression. Most dogs fight as a last resort, when staring and growling fail. A pit bull is willing to fight with little or no provocation. Pit bulls seem to have a high tolerance for pain, making it possible for them to fight to the point of exhaustion. Whereas guard dogs like German shepherds usually attempt to restrain those they perceive to be threats by biting and holding, pit bulls try to inflict the maximum amount of damage on an opponent. They bite, hold, shake, and tear. They don’t growl or assume an aggressive facial expression as warning. They just attack. “They are often insensitive to behaviors that usually stop aggression,” one scientific review of the breed states. “For example, dogs not bred for fighting usually display defeat in combat by rolling over and exposing a light underside. On several occasions, pit bulls have been reported to disembowel dogs offering this signal of submission.” In epidemiological studies of dog bites, the pit bull is overrepresented among dogs known to have seriously injured or killed human beings, and, as a result, pit bulls have been banned or restricted in several Western European countries, China, and numerous cities and municipalities across North America. Pit bulls are dangerous.

Hitchens continues his war on cliche in a review of a Flaubert book:

This made me laugh:
"Still, it is a trope to rival that of Proust's Mme. Verdurin, who loved nothing better than 'to frolic in her billow of stock expressions.'"

Julian Sanchez interview with Russell Tice, one of the NSA leakers. Reminds of that cheesy movie Sneakers, which starred Ben Kingsley, Mary McDonnell, Dan Aykroyd, Sidney Pointier, David Strathairn, Robert Redford, and River Phoenix, deceased brother of Joaquin.

Article on Cat Power, 33, and Beth Orton, 35, and their new albums.

CyberMonday (or virtual shoppers, reality-based debtors)

Just when you thought the Holiday season couldn't get any worse, a new word is given birth. Just kidding. No, but if it's used again next year, it means the word has staying power.

Animal Planet Reality Show To Put Bear, Antelope, Hawk, Cheetah In Same House

Paradox or not?

Thought-provoking piece on the development, to use a dry word, of science via the human imagination/instinct/creativity by Ian McEwan.

I noticed the same thing Neal Pollack did:

As the Sox cruised toward their destiny tonight, with one out in the 9th, Mr. Buck started naming off South Side neighborhoods. He got them right: Bridgeport, Hyde Park, Back Of The Yards, and a couple of others. He then mentioned how the South Side is home to many different ethnic groups: Irish-American, Polish, Lithuanian....and then he stopped.

How in the world can a grown man in the sports business talk about the South Side of Chicago and possibly not mention that black people live there? Or hundreds of thousands of Mexicans? Or, you know, people from non-Caucasian ethnic groups.

Lakshmi Chaudhry takes issue with some of the themes of Ariel Levy's new book which I brought up here.

(via Doug Ireland.)

Iran vs. Israel

I don't know the significance of this, but Iran's hardline President said today that Israel must be "wiped off the map." The New York Times reports

Senior officials had avoided provocative language over the past decade, but Mr. Ahmadinejad appears to be taking a more confrontational tone.
...
France's foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, learning of Mr. Admadinejad's comments, said "I condemn them very forcefully," adding that he will summon Iran's ambassador to Paris to ask for an explanation, Agence France-Presse reported.

Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon both have the same goal. Even so, it's good policy to draw them into the democratic, political process in their respective governments, just as it was good to draw the IRA, another terrorist organization, into the political process via Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland. The IRA recently made a historic step by disarming. Hopefully one day, Hamas and Hezbollah will do the same, and change into organizations (or merge with others) that recognize Israel.

The Iranian mullahs' bluster may reflect their growing weakness in Iran itself. (See Timothy Garton Ash's piece in the New York Review of Books.) But this also may be a result of Iran's growing influence in Iraq. Unfortunately, Iran's likely to get nuclear weapons in the near-to-mid term, despite the West's efforts.

Democratizing the Middle East

The NYTimes reports:

Israel began on Sunday to back away from its opposition to participation of the armed Islamic group Hamas in Palestinian elections, having failed to persuade President Bush to offer public support for its stance.
..
Mr. Sharon contends that Mr. Abbas must disarm Hamas immediately. Last month, on a visit to New York, Mr. Sharon said that "we will make every effort not to help" the Palestinians hold elections if Hamas took part.

His comments were interpreted as part of a campaign to get Mr. Bush to side with Israel. But Mr. Abbas told Agence France-Presse that he had persuaded Mr. Bush last week in Washington "that we have a democracy, and the movements of all political colors must be allowed to participate in the elections."

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
-John Kenneth Galbraith

(via Matthew Yglesias)

Sheep go to Heaven, goats go to Hell

Came across this succinct description of Hume and his thought:

As he lay dying at home in his native city of Edinburgh, David Hume entertained a visitor by conjuring up, with characteristic cheerfulness, a scenario in the afterlife. He imagined himself begging the fatal ferryman Charon for a little more time: "Have a little patience, good Charon, I have been endeavoring to open the eyes of the public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition." The "prevailing system" which Hume had become most notorious for attacking was the Christian religion, whose favorite tenets-providence, miracles, the argument from design, the afterlife itself-he had called into question, with increasing audacity, over the course of his work. But he had also done much damage to newer systems of thought, notably Locke's. Locke had regarded personal identity as coherent and continuous, the consequence of lifelong experiences and ideas accumulated in the memory. Hume, in his early, massive Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), waived all this away as an arrant fiction-though perhaps a necessary one, since empiricism properly pursued reveals so radical an incoherence in mortal minds that empiricists themselves must intermittently abandon philosophy in order to go about their daily lives. Like many of his empiric predecessors, Hume argued that knowledge of the real world "must be founded entirely on experience"; more than any predecessor he was willing to entertain (and to entertain with) the doubts and demolitions arising from that premise. In his own lifetime, his skepticism did not prove as contagious as he had hoped. The Treatise, he recalled wryly, "fell deadborn from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots." Though his attempt to recast his chief arguments more succinctly in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) prompted a somewhat livelier response, he eventually made his fortune not as a philosopher but as author of the highly successful History of England (1754-1763). He faced the general indifference or hostility to his arguments as blithely as he later greeted death, continually refining his views and revising his prose. He knew himself out of sync with his times. When, in his fantasy, he forecasts to Charon the imminent downfall of superstition, the ferryman responds, "You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term? Get into the boat this instant, you lazy loitering rogue." More than two hundred years later, the artful mischief of Hume's work has secured him some such lease. His writings, lucid and elusive, forthright and sly, demand (and receive) continual reassessment; his skepticism has proven more powerful than his contemporaries suspected, and he figures as perhaps the wittiest and most self-possessed philosophical troublemaker since Socrates.

Mira Sorvino's two-part series Human Trafficking begins tonight. Her breakout role was as a prostitute in Mighty Aphrodite, but before that she was in Barcelona.

Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff at the State Department said at a recent speech:

Well, Saddam Hussein really cared about deterring the Persians – the Iranians – and his own people. He didn’t give a hang about us except on occasion. And so he had to convince those audiences that he still was a powerful man. So who better to do that through than the INC, Ahmad Chalabi and his boys, and by spoofing our eyes in the sky and our little HUMINT, and the Brits and the French and the Germans, too. That’s all I can figure.

The consensus of the intelligence community was overwhelming. I can still hear George Tenet telling me, and telling my boss in the bowels of the CIA, that the information we were delivering – which we had called considerably – we had called it very much – we had thrown whole reams of paper out that the White House had created. But George was convinced, John McLaughlin was convinced that what we were presented was accurate. And contrary to what you were hearing in the papers and other places, one of the best relationships we had in fighting terrorists and in intelligence in general was with guess who? The French. In fact, it was probably the best. And they were right there with us.

In fact, I’ll just cite one more thing. The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by god, we did it to this RPM, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments? We were wrong. We were wrong.

Those demanding a pullout of American troops should read up on the Algerian civil war.

Porn-tastic!
Review of a book on the "pornification" of American youth culture. It's coming not from the right, but from the feminist Left and notes the dialectical aspect of said pornification. Reminds me of some Red Hot Chili Pepper lyrics:

Destruction leads to a very rough road
But it also breeds creation
And earthquakes are to a girl's guitar
They're just another good vibration
And tidal waves couldn't save the world
From Californication

And some lyrics heard today on the radio which gave me a pang:

We went to a shopping mall
And laughed at all the shoppers
And security guards trailed us
To a record shop
We asked for Mojo Nixon
They said "He don't work here"
We said "If you don't got Mojo Nixon
Then your store could use some fixin'"

We got into a car
Away we started rollin'
I said "How much you pay for this?"
She said "Nothing man, it's stolen"

Two of my favorite actors. I recommend Victor Navasky's new book about his life. One can't overestimate how Joseph McCarthy influenced that generation of the Left.

A belated note on the death of Simon Wiesenthal. Some nice quotes to have on your grave, as Royal Tennenbaum might say.

"But clearly Simon Wiesenthal haunted his quarry. One of Mengele's fanatical Nazi protectors in Brazil, Wolfgang Gerhard, said he had dreamed of hitching Mr. Wiesenthal to an automobile and dragging him to his death."

"It was a matter of pride and satisfaction, he said in 1995, as he approached his 87th birthday, that old Nazis who get into quarrels threaten one another with a vow to go to Simon Wiesenthal."

The New York Times reports:

U.S. Says It Has Killed No. 2 Qaeda Operative in Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 27 - ...

As insurgent attacks continued across Iraq today, American and Iraqi officials offered further details about the killing on Sunday of Abu Azzam, whom they described as the top lieutenant of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

I'd bet $1,000 "anti-war" "expert"Juan Cole doesn't report the good news on his blog tomorrow. He grudgingly refers to Zarqawi's group as "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" apparently slow to give ground to Bush's imagined propaganda efforts.

Also, the Times gives more details on how Sistani is keeping a lid on things:

Also today, the renegade Shiite cleric Moktada al Sadr issued an unusual public request for guidance on how to deal with Mr. Zarqawi, who declared a "full-scale war" on all of Iraq's Shiites two weeks ago.

Days after his declaration of war, Mr. Zarqawi issued a qualifier, exempting certain groups including followers of Mr. Sadr, who has sometimes allied with Sunni fighters in his resistance to the American presence here.

Seemingly embarrassed by that exemption, Mr. Sadr publicly sought guidance on how to fight Mr. Zarqawi's attacks from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric.

The ayatollah responded in an unusually lengthy statement, in which he repeated his previous counsel to Iraqis to "continue in their self restraint, along with more caution and alertness." Mr. Sistani also said that the insurgents' purpose was to "start the fire of civil war in this beloved country," and that Iraqis must not allow them to succeed. He called on the government to protect Iraqis, and on the courts to speed up their work in trying and sentencing those accused of murder.

I recently corresponded with a Lieutenant in the Marine Corps who mentioned in a neutral, or possibly ironic way, that he had seen General Mattis give a talk at Quantico. Here's what the often inaccurate Wikipedia has to say:

On February 1, 2005, Lieutenant General Mattis, speaking to a forum in San Diego, apparently said "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." "Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling." Mattis' remarks sparked controversy, and General Michael W. Hagee, Commandant of the Marine Corps, issued a statement suggesting that Mattis should have chosen his words more carefully, but would not be disciplined.

General Mattis popularized the slogan "no better friend, no worse enemy" among his command. This phrase became central in the investigation into the conduct of Lieutenant Ilario Pantano, a platoon commander serving under General Mattis. Lieutenant Pantano shot a pair of prisoners on April 15, 2004. He said that he thought they represented a threat. Lieutenant Pantano emptied two entire magazines into their bodies, because he wanted "to leave a message". He then scrawled General Mattis's slogan over the bodies.

EDIT: He is portrayed by Robert John Burke in the HBO miniseries Generation Kill.

Warning: Personal Confessional Bullshit
Dear Reader (all 0-2 of you),

Sorry for the sporadic postings. My ego took a beating recently at
the hands of - who else? - the fairer sex. After A. and I dated for a year,
she decided I wasn't The One and promptly dumped me. After I had completely fallen for her.

What happened - I think - can best be illustrated by a Harlon Ellison
science fiction story. The 1975 film A Boy and His Dog, starring a young
Don Jonson, was based on an Ellison short story of the same name. In
the film, a young man and his loyal dog wander a post-Apocalyptic planet
scavenging for food and sex. They finally meet a woman who they share some adventures with and hit it off with. In the end, though, they end up going their separate ways.

The short story is actually much harsher. After hitting it off and making
narrow escapes from danger, the three end up running out of food while
wandering a wasteland. What do you think happens next, dear reader? Wrong, actually the young man and his dog eat the woman to survive.

How does this relate to this blogger's travailles? Well, I'm highly
allergic to dogs and cats, and A. has a dog which she's very attached to.
I guess it's surprising we lasted as long as we did.

Anyhoo, enough about me. I like how Hak Mao, posts random pictures at her
blog without comment, so I plan on doing a bit of that.

A Menace to Society by Peter Bagge

"Who Moved My Ability to Reason?" by Barbara Ehrenreich

From a New York Times review of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:

The secret of Dahl's charm, and Wonka's, is that neither one seems to be an entirely nice person. Or, rather, neither has much use for the condescending sweetness that some adults adopt in the belief that children will mistake it for niceness. Dahl's sensibility was gleefully punitive; he was a scourge of bullies, brats and scolds, and a champion of unfussy decency against all manner of beastliness.
...
Mr. Depp, in a recent interview, has dropped the name of the Vogue editor Anna Wintour. To me, the lilting, curiously accented voice sounded like an unholy mash-up of Mr. Rogers and Truman Capote, but really, who knows?

An interesting history of Suck.com.

Brad DeLong on the "Celtic Tiger" economy of Ireland.

Tim Cavanaugh on the underwhelming "Downing Street Memo," which Cavanaugh notes some feel is iron-clad proof, as iron-clad as the Massey Prenup, of the "warmongers'" dishonesty.

Bad News Bears

Richard Linklater's remake is due out next month. He did a great job with School of Rock among other films, so there's reason for hope.

Charles Taylor, not the writer from Salon I bet, has a piece on the original
in Slate.

I was born in 1970 and there was something about this 1976 film that resonated. It captures how kids interact, especially in sports. And who can forget Lupus (looking glum yet thoughtful front and center in the photo) and how Tanner (shrimp on the far right) stuck up for him even though the bullies outnumberd Tanner?

Heather Havrilesky writes some more at her blog.

Micchael Young writes about the murdered Lebanese columnist Samir Kassir

Mark Felt, a.k.a. Deep Throat, in
his old-timey FBI action pose.

Ruling Class Revolutionaries
(and nihilistic sectarians)

Maybe you've heard of the band Decemberists whose leader says the name refers to people who feel December is their month. "They're sort of stuck in this month. And I think that sort of speaks to the songs and the characters in the songs: sort of marginalized, sort of on the outskirts, all living in the coldest month." Never realized some people get stuck in a certain month. Seems a little on the self-pitying side.

Anyway, there's also the blog "the Decembrist."

In the June issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Hitchens discusses Mikhail Lermontov, the inheritor of the failed, but noble Decembrist tradition.

Early Russian literature was intimately connected to the Europeanizing and liberal tendency of the "Decembrist" revolution of 1825, which was enthusiastically supported by Pushkin and his inheritor Lermontov. And the debt of those rebels to Byron's inspiration was almost cultish in its depth and degree.

Speaking of cultish worship, Che Guevara is quoted as an authority in a New York Times piece on the peculiar nature of the Iraqi "insurgency":

If the insurgency is trying to overthrow this regime, it is contending with a formidable obstacle that successful rebels of the 20th century generally did not face: A democratically elected government. One of the last century's most celebrated theorists and practitioners of revolution, Che Guevara, called that obstacle insurmountable.

"Where a government has come to power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality," he wrote, "the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted."

The Decembrists of course weren't facing an elected government and the revolution they fought for wouldn't happen for almost another century. Of Lermontov's death by duel, Hitchens writes,

When Lermontov was brought to the field of honor he apparently declined to fire on the fool who had provoked the duel. Slain on the spot, he never heard the czar's reported comment: "A dog's death for a dog." His unflinching indifferece on the occasion, however, drew on two well-rehearsed nineteenth-century scenarios: The contemptious aristocrat on the scaffold, and the stoic revolutionary in front of the firing squad. The Decembrists, in their way, admired and emulated both models.

The anti-American revolt in Iraq, which mainly targets Iraqis, is a nihilistic, sectarian variation on the unflinching indifference of the classic revolutionary.

Max Sawicky's informative take on the economy.

Canary in the Coalmine
(or I've seen the best minds...)

Neal Pollack's piece on the news that Dave Chappelle has checked himself into a mental-health clinic in South Africa and backed out on the new season of his show sort of annoyed me.

I love Dave Chappelle and even though I don't know him, I'm a little sad about the news. Pollack writes,

Chappelle may be America's most incisive and original comic mind on issues of class and race, but that's not what frat boys are thinking about when they buy his DVDs. It's "I'm Rick James, bitch," all the time. Chappelle made his own choices, and, like the rest of us, he has to live with the consequences, even if he is better funded. It's not our fault.

Pollack does recognize Chappelle's unique talent, but he's hinting that Chappelle is sort of a sell-out and that his current troubles may be a result of that "choice." I don't see Chappelle as a sell-out at all. Anyone who can include "incisive and original" bits on race, class and politics in their comedy in today's America isn't.

Pollack highlights Chappelle's drug humor and assumes drugs are the source of his problems when it's more likely a matter of his fame clashing with his integrity. (The New York Times reports, "Representatives of Mr. Chappelle have vehemently denied that drug use played any role in the suspension of his show.") In other words I give Chappelle more credit than Pollack does. Pollack's main intent is to blame and critique the wider "hipster culture" but by noting that frat boys love Chappelle too - even though he could be merciless about that type of individual - and slamming Chappelle on the fact, he exemplifies the worst tendencies of that culture. (Last season, "Chappelle's Show" averaged more than three million viewers a week, twice as many as Comedy Central's other big draw, "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart." I've read the DVDs are the best-selling for TV DVDs. No doubt Pollack believes the Bush-bashing Daily Show has more "hipster cred.")