Schism

Hitchens on Thomas Cromwell and the English Reformation.

He writes, "In Cromwell’s mind, as he contemplates his antagonist [Thomas] More, Mantel allows us to discern the germinal idea of what we now call the Protestant ethic:

He never sees More--a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod--without wanting to ask him, what’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, "Purgatory." Show me where it says "relics, monks, nuns." Show me where it says "Pope.""

Ahmed Rashid on the present-day Taliban.

It's almost as if when the 21st Century "West" (and globalized Japan, China, etc.) looks at the Taliban, we are looking at our past.

From Rashid:

What [Taliban author] Zaeef omits or fudges is significant. He makes no mention of the ISI's financial and material support to the Taliban, and says hardly anything about al-Qaeda or how his hero Mullah Omar became so close to Osama bin Laden. He has nothing to say about the Taliban's repressive attitudes toward women, including the ban on their education, and he makes no mention of the Taliban's harsh punishments, including public stonings. 

By 2001, after UN sanctions restricted the Taliban's international contacts, Zaeef became the only Taliban leader who could meet with US and Western envoys. His relationship with the US embassy in Islamabad was dominated by American demands to hand over Osama bin Laden. In the days after September 11, he frantically tried to stave off the impending US attack on his country by appealing to Western embassies, writing letters to the UN, and trying to enlist support from Islamic countries. He met with Mullah Omar, who was convinced that the Americans would not dare attack. In Omar's mind, Zaeef writes, "there was less than a 10 percent chance that America would resort to anything beyond threats and so an attack was unlikely."

Review of Stewart Copeland's new book.

“Strange Things Happen” is just slightly more generous on the Police years than was Sting’s “Broken Music,” which dismissed the band in a single page. Copeland devotes 10 skimpy, highly impressionistic pages to the years between 1976 and 1984, at which time the trio became the biggest band in the world. (The guitarist Andy Summers was more expansive about the glory days in his endearing “One Train Later.”) Almost as much attention is devoted, for no clear reason, to a single show in which he sat in with middling alt- rockers Incubus, or an incomprehensible MTV event for which he accompanied the Foo Fighters. 

Above and beyond the Police, Stewart Copeland has had a pretty wild life. He was raised in the Middle East, the son of a C.I.A. operative. [Miles Copeland] He was something of a pioneer in the pop exploration of “world music,” recording with African musicians well before Paul Simon made his “Graceland” trek. He has worked on various documentary films and is an accomplished polo player. 

In “Strange Things Happen,” though, he glosses through these events at such high speed that at best, we get a wisecrack or a flip observation (“my daddy used to conduct his nefarious manipulation of local potentates with cocktail parties at our modest Ottoman palace”), but no real sense of what any of it means to him. 

 

Tony Blair on Iraq: "No Regrets."

As he says, the views in the Middle East are that the Sunni Saddam Hussein was a check on Shia Iran. But he's right that we shouldn't use one dictatorship to check another. He gave a big speech to that effect in Chicago in 1999.

Blair is the one politician I've changed my mind about. During the 90s, I believed he was a triangulator of the Clinton mold, and he was in a way. After 9/11 he took a lot heat for standing with America, but we are better off for it.

J.D. Salinger passed away.

Dana Stevens on why Catcher in the Rye was never adapted into a movie.

Howard Zinn is dead, too. He was a next-door neighbor to Matt Damon and his family, near Boston.

Damon's Will Hunting was a working class Holden Caulfield-type with a pronounced Southie accent.

Eccentric Cool
Hitchens on Gore Vidal:

More than a decade ago, I sat on a panel in New York to review the life and work of Oscar Wilde. My fellow panelist was that heroic old queen Quentin Crisp, perhaps the only man ever to have made a success of the part of Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. Inevitably there arose the question: Is there an Oscar Wilde for our own day? The moderator proposed Gore Vidal, and, really, once that name had been mentioned, there didn’t seem to be any obvious rival.

Like Wilde, Gore Vidal combined tough-mindedness with subversive wit (The Importance of Being Earnest is actually a very mordant satire on Victorian England) and had the rare gift of being amusing about serious things as well as serious about amusing ones. Like Wilde, he was able to combine radical political opinions with a lifestyle that was anything but solemn. And also like Wilde, he was almost never "off": his private talk was as entertaining and shocking as his more prepared public appearances. Admirers of both men, and of their polymorphous perversity, could happily debate whether either of them was better at fiction or in the essay form.

I recently read a description of actor Johnny Depp which called his style an eccentric cool. Like Vidal and Wilde, there's a confident independence. Even though Vidal is in Italy and Depp is in France, they are still "involved" and not hermits. Not too long ago I saw Vidal on Henry Rollins's show, which was funny. And Depp has a new Disney blockbuster Alice in Wonderland movie coming out.*

Louis Auchincloss just passed away and I remember Vidal always spoke highly of him. From the Times obituary:

Admirers compared him to other novelists of society and manners like William Dean Howells, but Mr. Auchincloss’s greatest influence was probably Edith Wharton, whose biography he wrote and with whom he felt a direct connection. His grandmother had summered with Wharton in Newport, R.I.; his parents were friends of Wharton’s lawyers. He almost felt he knew Wharton personally, Mr. Auchincloss once said.

Like Wharton, Mr. Auchincloss was interested in class and morality and in the corrosive effects of money on both. "Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs," Gore Vidal once wrote. "Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives."

And yet five judges of the United States Supreme Court remain oblivious.  Obama's pointed disrespect ("With all due respect to the separation of powers...") last night was amazing. The Times obit also describes the class traitor Auchincloss's partrician/cultural elite personal style (which also could be said of Vidal.):

Mr. Auchincloss had a beaky, patrician nose and spoke with a high-pitched Brahmin accent. He had elegant manners and suits to match, and he wrote in longhand in the living room of an antiques-filled apartment on Park Avenue.

What was most memorable about Vidal's memoirs, to me at least, was the anecdotes about his mother. They are unbelievably funny and she comes off as highly intelligent and unsentimental (i.e. a major bitch) with no trace of self-doubt (like the mother/matriarch on the hilarious sitcom Arrested Development**). For all I know she was a nice, if distant, woman, but Vidal's portrait is unforgettable.
 -----------------------------
* It's good to see Depp working again with friends Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter. It's also exciting to see they invited Anne Hathaway down the rabbit hole to play the White Queen. Hathaway was unbearably heartbreaking in Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, a film that struck too close to home for me.
**That show is incredibly funny and absurd. I just started watching it.

State of the Union: Fabulous*

Gays in the military! Great speech by Obama as I expected. Very impressive outing by Obama and his speechwriting staff. Health care reform, jobs, climate change and immigration reform coming this year. Honest differences with the Supreme Court. Great optimism about the coming decade.
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* I stole this line from Chicago Disc Jockey Frank E. Lee, in reference to the Leettes(sp?). Obviously things aren't fabulous with 10% unemployment and the Democrats likely to lose elections in November, I just liked the way it sounded. Below, fabulous commercial nixed by the Superbowl people. (via Andrew Sullivan).

Taibbi's writings on the financial industry always seem a bit sloppy to me, if pleasantly hyperbolic. My estimation of him went up after reading his Baffler review of Blagojevich's book where Taibbi displays his knowledge of The Wire:

Fans of the HBO series The Wire who read this book will undoubtedly recognize in Blago’s public appeals for sympathy on the corruption charges--whatever he did, he did because he just loves the people of Illinois so goddamn much-- an almost flawless impersonation of Isiah Whitlock, Jr.s’ immortal character Clay Davis, a corrupt-as-fuck Maryland state senator. Indeed, the chief differences between the two are incidental: Davis quoted Aeschylus; Blago quotes Shakespeare.

...

The story that federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald tells in his indictment of Blagojevich--copiously borne out by the wiretap transcripts-- is in the grand Chicago tradition of open graft. Blagojevich is trying frantically to sell the Senate seat to Obama’s people, who apparently wanted African-American lawyer Valerie Jarrett, a longtime confidant of the Democratic presidential nominee, to get the spot. "I’ve got this thing, and it’s fucking golden, and uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fucking nothing," he says, in one such voluble wiretapped call. Later on, Blago deputy John Harris is heard negotiating with then-aide and now-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, saying that if Jarrett were to be Blago’s pick, "all we get is appreciation, right?" To which Emanuel says, "Right."

(Video via The Wire fan Yglesias)

One more reminiscence about 2009: some favorite bits of writing.

From the Onion's Gateways to Geekery: Krautrock:

The gist of krautrock is simple: It was Germany’s answer to the musical upheaval at play all across the planet in the late 1960s and ’70s, when rock did double-duty as revolutionary art-music and strived to be newly psychedelic and free.

Henwood at his new blog where in he wrote in literary fashion:

The IMF, which was off the scene for many years, is, like a vampire salivating at sunset, returning to action. It's already developed a program for Iceland, which is being put through the austerity wringer; apparently being white and Nordic doesn’t earn you an exemption. It's likely to lend some money to some countries that it deems virtuous on easy terms - among them Brazil but not Argentina. More on all this in the coming weeks.

In a piece for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi employed the vampire metaphor as well:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Hitchens on the deceased J.G. Ballard:

Fascinated by the possibility of death in traffic, and rather riveted by the murder of John Kennedy, Ballard produced a themed series titled The Atrocity Exhibition, here partially collected, where collisions and ejaculations and celebrities are brought together in a vigorously stirred mix of Eros and Thanatos. His antic use of this never-failing formula got him briefly disowned by his American publisher and was claimed by Ballard as "pornographic science fiction," but if you can read "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As a Downhill Motor Race" or "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" in search of sexual gratification, you must be jaded by disorders undreamed-of by this reviewer. Both stories, however, succeed in being deadpan funny.

And Rick Perlstein on the Tea Party phenomenon:

In Pennsylvania last week, a citizen, burly, crew-cut and trembling with rage, went nose to nose with his baffled senator: "One day God's going to stand before you, and he's going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies up on the Hill. And then you will get your just deserts." He was accusing Arlen Specter of being too kind to President Obama's proposals to make it easier for people to get health insurance.

In Michigan, meanwhile, the indelible image was of the father who wheeled his handicapped adult son up to Rep. John Dingell and bellowed that "under the Obama health-care plan, which you support, this man would be given no care whatsoever." He pressed his case further on Fox News.

In New Hampshire, outside a building where Obama spoke, cameras trained on the pistol strapped to the leg of libertarian William Kostric. He then explained on CNN why the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots."

 Last November Obama attended a Town Hall in Shanghai. From Time:

Instead of being greeted by voters mulling their options, Obama on Monday met with several hundred well-dressed, attentive and relentlessly on-message students, handpicked by Chinese authorities for the occasion. They listened attentively, nodding in agreement at some of his answers and laughing at his jokes. Most of their questions were something less than challenging. "What measures will you take to deepen this close relationship between cities of the United States and China?" asked the first questioner, a young woman whom Obama picked randomly from the crowd. "What's the main reason that you were honored with the Nobel Prize for Peace?" asked another. A third followed up on the Nobel Prize line of inquiry. "What's your university/college education that brings you to get such kind of prizes?"

...

But the Obama Administration's initial hopes for widespread Chinese broadcast of the event were not, in the end, realized. Though the event was covered on Shanghai television, elsewhere in the country the broadcast networks did not carry the feed.

A bright spot for the new year was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's forceful speech criticizing China over the "Great Firewall." The Chinese Communist Party immediately pushed back:

In an editorial, the English-language edition of a Chinese newspaper, Global Times, said that the demand for an unfettered Internet was a form of "information imperialism," because less developed nations could not compete with Western countries in the arena of information flow.

As Perlstein's examples above show, in the arena of information flow in the US, corporations dominate. The recent US Supreme court decision that campaign cash is free speech will ensure further domination of the corporate world-view.

Hang in there, kitty!

Earlier I linked to Charlie Jane Anders' 5 theories why Avatar was such a hit. My favorite was:

Conservative rage? Avatar is a perfect snowball of Conservative-baiting, from the jabs at the Iraq war and the War on Terror to its heavy-handed environmentalist messages. But that hasn't hurt the film at all, notes the L.A. Times' Hero Complex blog. The Weekly Standard called it "anti-American" and "anti-human." But actually, I'm left wondering if all of the controversy over the film's politics didn't spur more people to go see it so they could find out what the fuss was about.

Certainly conservatives are riled, which they demonstrated by winning the Massachusetts Senate Race and creating panic in the Democrats' ranks.

Here's another theory: Luminous 3-D Jungle, a Biologist's Dream, from the Times's science section.

Everybody Chill the Fuck Out. I’ve Got This. by Jonathan Cohn

Hopefully Obama will give a good State of the Union speech.

Hitchens on Haiti

A year ago I linked to this video where a woman is wearing a nametag with "Free Haiti" on it.



The other aspect of Avatar most conservatives probably won't like is that the villain is another one of James Cameron's immoral corporations. In the Avatar universe, humanity and its corporations have destroyed Earth's environment and left their home world a dying planet. In the real world, an activist US Supreme Court just set us on the same path by overturning a hundred years of precedent and ruling that campaign contributions by corporations are free speech.

Remember, be like Fonzie and stay cool.

Poker Face

In the realm of music, Lady Gaga took the nation by storm in 2009. By coincidence her hit song describes Obama's successful strategy for moving health care reform through Congress this past year, especially during this past summer.

Sweetheart Taylor Swift reportedly was the biggest seller of 2009 when you combine sales via downloads and bricks & mortar. I'd like to think Kanye West went onstage with Swift when she was receiving an award in order to get her more publicity, which the brouhaha did, in an act which reminded me of when Derek Zoolander went onstage to accept a fashion award which in fact Hansel had won. Not exactly the same thing and the latter took place in a movie, but that's what came to mind. Obviously Kanye doesn't care what people think. No doubt he lost a few fans when he opined on live TV that Bush hates black people (In reference to Hurricane Katrina). (Yes I'm taking all of January to reminisce about 2009).

Also in 2009 we had the French band Phoenix's album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. The band's vocalist Thomas Mars is married to Sophia Coppola and the two had a baby in 2009. (Sophia's brother Roman made a great movie CQ starring Jeremy Davies which is set in France and contains lots of wonderful French '60s pop music. The Coppola family tree.)

Some of my favorite tunes that came out in 2009 include "Percussion Gun" by White Rabbits (Missouri by way of Brooklyn), "Mykonos" by Fleet Foxes (from Seattle), and "Cheerleader" by Grizzly Bear (Brooklyn). It was strange spending my time in 2009 as a cheerleader for the President of the United States and arguing against unrealistic critics. I didn't really like Bill Clinton as President, although his work getting the government to budget surpluses certainly helped out his Democratic successor. So credit where it's due.

 (Diane Krueger in Inglourious Basterds.)

Punching Hippies

2009 was a good year for thought-provoking and invigorating movies. Who can forget the Comedian punching hippies in Watchmen, and Rorschach decrying stay-within-the-lines liberal sensibilities from a darker perspective. There was Inglourious Basterds, Avatar, A Serious Man, Public Enemies, Whip It, Extract, The Hangover and (500) Days of Summer. Star Trek captured the hopeful, confident, smart, scientific* and youthful zeitgest of the first of the Obama years, with young pundits like Jonathan Cohn, Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias coming to the fore, and liberals like Obama, Emanuel, Geithner and Orszag taking over the levers of government. Remember when Bones asked Chekov "How old are you?!?"

I didn't see Invictus, Bright Star, Where the Wild Things Are, the Hurt Locker, the Messenger, Antichrist, Precious, An Education, Men Who Stare At Goats, or Up in the Air so obviously I can't judge those but undeniably 2009 was a banner year for Billy Crudup (Watchmen, Public Enemies), Giovanni Ribisi (Avatar, Public Enemies), Stephen Lang (Avatar, Public Enemies) and Kristen Wiig (Extract, Whip It).

---------------------

*Some may argue technocratic would be a better word than scientific, but I view technocratic as being more of a pejorative. (Dr. Manhattan in the Watchmen was technocratic, that is, doing Nixon's bidding in Vietnam without considering whether or not it was a just war.) Science tries to put political - more specifically, partisan - concerns aside. The glibertarians at Hit & Run wonder "why are so many sci-fi films left-wing?" The answer is that objective science is more of a priority on the left. On the rightwing science's findings and priorities are often overridden in the interests of profits and religious ideology or twisted to further rightwing goals. On the undemocratic left, like Stalinist Russia, science can be subsumed under ideology also obviously. As Wikipedia says:

Although the sciences were less rigorously censored than other fields such as art, there were several examples of suppression of ideas. In the most notorious, the Ukrainian agronomist Trofim Lysenko refused to accept the chromosome theory of heredity usually accepted by modern genetics. Claiming his theories corresponded to Marxism, he managed to talk Joseph Stalin in 1948 into banning population genetics and several other related fields of biological research; this decision was not reverted up to the 1960s.

(Sam Worthington feels like hugging a tree

OR Stephen Lang looks on as Sully goes native.)

5 Theories That Explain Why Avatar Was Such A Huge Hit by Charlie Jane Anders

If Only and Missed Opportunities

In 2009, I had a number of titles I wanted to use for blog entries but couldn't find content to support them for some reason. Here they are anyway:

Big Fish in a Little Pond
Bubblicious
Prison Sex
Punching Hippies
A friend asked, "What is it? You look like you've seen a ghost."
Hold Me Closer Tony Danza*

Marc Cooper on the last decade.

My person of the year for 2009 is ACORN, who managed to bring down the global economy and elect an Islamic Marxist to the Presidency, all the while fighting a rearguard action against an increasingly confident Teabagger movement. Can't wait to see what they do for an encore.
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*Correction. I found content for two of the titles since posting this. Also "Hold Me Closer Tony Danza" is sung to Elton John's Tiny Dancer.

Easy Tiger

David Leonhardt unloads on the Federal Reserve Bank and Ben Bernanke in an above-the-fold front page article.

Whether we like it or not, the Fed really does seem to be the best agency to regulate financial firms. (It now has authority over only some firms.) As the lender of last resort, it already has a vested interest in the health of those firms. The Fed’s prestige also tends to give it its pick of people who want to work on economic policy.

"The Federal Reserve has unparalleled expertise," Mr. Bernanke told Congress last month. "We have a great group of economists, financial market experts and others who are unique in Washington in their ability to address these issues."

Fair enough. At some point, though, it sure would be nice to hear those experts explain how they missed the biggest bubble of our time.

Eugoogly

Paul Krugman writes about Paul Samuelson.

Claude Lévi-Strauss died this past year at 100.

Hitchens on J.G. Ballard.

"Don't touch it, it's evil."

NPR interview with Terry Gilliam.

When I was 10 or 11 I saw Time Bandits and loved it. When I was 15 or 16 I saw Brazil and was blown away. According to Wikipedia:

Robert Hewison, in his book Monty Python: The Case Against, describes the dwarfs [in Time Bandits] as a comment on the Monty Python troupe, with Fidget (the nice one) as Palin, Randall (the self-appointed leader) as John Cleese, Strutter (the acerbic one) as Eric Idle, Og (the quiet one) as Graham Chapman, Wally (the noisy rebel) as Terry Jones and Vermin (the nasty, filth-loving one) as Gilliam himself.

Isn't it Ironic? Don't you think?*

In Pennsylvania last week, a citizen, burly, crew-cut and trembling with rage, went nose to nose with his baffled senator: "One day God's going to stand before you, and he's going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies up on the Hill. And then you will get your just deserts." He was accusing Arlen Specter of being too kind to President Obama's proposals to make it easier for people to get health insurance.

In Michigan, meanwhile, the indelible image was of the father who wheeled his handicapped adult son up to Rep. John Dingell and bellowed that "under the Obama health-care plan, which you support, this man would be given no care whatsoever." He pressed his case further on Fox News.

In New Hampshire, outside a building where Obama spoke, cameras trained on the pistol strapped to the leg of libertarian William Kostric. He then explained on CNN why the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots."

The above is from Rick Perlstein's piece "In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition: Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage."

As it turns out the Teabaggers unsuccessfully primary Arlen Specter and drive him into the Democrats arms, thereby enabling the creation of government-run health care and rationing and death panels, i.e. the most progressive legislation since Medicare (which as we know all teabaggers hate with a passion.)

Ned Lamont and his single-issue supporters unsuccessfully primary Holydiver Joe Lieberman, and thereby thoroughly embitter him, so that he makes sure health care reform doesn't include a public option. Just because they wish Saddam Hussein was still in power. Well done.

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*As they said on The Wire, if you come at the king, you best not miss.

Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger*

We end "beautiful woman month" with Tabrett Bethell who portrays the Mord’Sith Cara on the television series Legend of the Seeker. The show is produced by Sam Raimi who previously had done the Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules shows, as well as the Evil Dead and Spiderman movies. The show is based upon Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth book series.

The Mord’Sith are a cult of elite warrior women who dress in skin-tight leather outfits and have an S&M motif going on. According to Wikipedia:

They were created to defend the master of [the land of] D'Hara, Lord Rahl, from creatures or people with magic. A Mord’Sith has the unique ability to capture others' magic and use it against them.** A Mord’Sith is selected from the gentlest and kindest girls in D'Hara and is trained from a young age on three levels. Each time, she must be "broken." The first breaking is a time during which she is tortured to the point of obedience so strong that she would do absolutely anything her master/mistress tells her, without question or hesitation. This part of the training breaks her of her sense of self and personal desires. During the second breaking, she is forced to watch as her teacher slowly and brutally tortures her mother to death. This is to break her of compassion. The third, and arguably the most difficult, breaking is when she is given the instrument of torture*** and must inflict pain and suffering upon her own father until she finally kills him. When she has completed this task, the Lord Rahl instills in her the magical ability to take the magic of anyone who uses magic against her. Once a magical being uses magic against a Mord-Sith, she can inflict intense pain upon him/her with a thought. He/she has no defense.

The show recently had an episode which explored how Cara was "made." Indeed as a child, Cara was so gentle and kind that when her father took her and her sister fishing, she became incredibly sad and shed a heartbreaking tear when she saw the recently caught fish stuck in her father’s water bucket. Her father saw his daughter's distress and returned the fish to the river. And then the Mord’Sith came, took Cara and made her one of them. From Wikipedia:

When Mistress Denna failed to kill Richard Cypher [aka the Seeker], Cara was personally recruited by the evil ruler Darken Rahl to eliminate the Seeker once for all. But instead of fulfilling her mission, Cara was forced to work with Richard to save herself, which ultimately led to the Seeker fulfilling the prophecy, killing Rahl and ending his reign of tyranny. From the Underworld, Darken Rahl commands the Mord'Sith to dispose of Cara for her role in his demise. They beat her and leave her for dead, after which Richard helps Cara. Deserted by her people and sworn to protect Richard, the heir to the title Lord Rahl, Cara joins the Seeker and a wary Kahlan and Zedd on their new quest. Richard trusts Cara, and believes her unique abilities could prove invaluable in finding the Stone of Tears and defeating the Keeper of the Underworld.

The show's hero Richard is good-natured and believes people can change if given a chance, even Cara. His companions Kahlan and Zedd are more skeptical.

You have to wonder why they need to take the "gentlest and kindest" girls. Maybe they need to have those qualities for Darken Rahl to be able to instill his magic in them. Creepy.
_________________

*unless it breaks you.
**magical jujutsu
***The Agiel. The only weapon Mord'Sith carry is an Agiel, which has the power to inflict unbearable pain, break bones, or kill with only a touch. An Agiel appears simple. It is a plain red leather rod, about a foot long, and about as thick as a finger. It also inflicts pain on the Mord-Sith in charge of the torture. Mord-Sith use the same Agiel that was used on them in their training. Simply holding her Agiel causes the Mord-Sith terrible pain. The power of the Agiel stems from the bond of all D'Harans to the Lord Rahl.

You know Tiger Woods is spoiled when he cheats on the Swedish Model. 

My favorite character in the BBC Robin Hood series was Isabella, played by Lara Pulver. Pulver will be playing an intern in the film "The Special Relationship," which stars Hope Davis as Hillary Clinton, Dennis Quaid as Bill Clinton, Michael Sheen as Tony Blair and Helen McCrory as Cheri Blair.

Back in the Saddle Again.

The Baffler is back.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Overlords
(or We'll Make Great Pets)


Especially when they are dressed as sexy minxes. The ABC television series V has ended for the moment but resumes in March. It's a remake of an Eighties miniseries in which alien visitors come bearing gifts and talking of peace. But ultimately they are only interested in planetary imperialism, regime change and taking our natural resources.

In the current series, Party of Five's Scott Wolf plays a George Stephanopoulos-like TV news anchor named Chad. He gives the aliens good PR in exchange for access. And yet he's skeptical. Chad inquires on-air, "Is there such a thing as an ugly Visitor?" Morena Baccarin (above) plays the aliens' maximum leader Anna. Says Baccarin: I am not Obama.

I don't think we're saying Anna is President Obama. But she is the leader of her people, and she is coming down to Earth and offering healthcare, and offering cures for diseases, and things that sort of clean out and give people hope, and there are definite parallels to be drawn and our intentions are to create a show that people relate to. And I think this is something that's been on people's minds, even before Obama... finding hope again, and healthcare, and finding a leader, and someone who can save us from the hole we've gotten ourselves into.

Their plans for invasion include using the regular or Swine Flu vaccine, I forget which. Jonathan Chait argues the show plays into the Teabagger's ideology.

They target the young by enticing them to join an idealistic (but, in reality, sinister) youth group. A few perceptive humans warn of the dangers of hopping on the bandwagon before we know what the bandwagon is really about. The alien leader, Ana, promises to use futuristic technology to heal humans. "You mean universal health care!" gapes a reporter, who, naturally, has been co-opted by the aliens. Anna soothes skeptics by declaring that accepting change can be difficult. A small band of human resistors forms. The lead character is skeptical--what proof do you have she asks, besides some scary thing "you read on the internet." But the seemingly hysterical message from the internet is true! The charismatic new leader is masking her true identity! The death panels are real! Etc., etc.

If this scenerio really happened, I'd probably be gung-ho about the visitors as I'm enthusiastic about Obama. But then again I have always been the one to accept candy from strangers.

An interesting subplot of the show is about a group of alien traitors trying to undermine Anna's plan of domination from within. Will they succeed? Tune in and find out!

Bubblicious

Dean Baker blogs about the housing bubble very well so I'm going to reproduce this post in its entirety.

The WSJ is effectively covering up for the Fed and the economics profession by implying that there was something difficult about recognizing the 70 percent jump in real house prices as a bubble or realizing that its collapse would lead to serious economic damage. The bubble was not difficult to spot for any serious analyst of the economy. The run-up was a sharp divergence from a 100-year long-trend that could not be explained by any change in the fundamentals of the housing market. It also was not accompanied by any notable increase in rents.

It also should have been evident that the bursting of the bubble would devastate the economy. This article wrongly focuses on the financial aspects of the collapse. While this is important for Wall Street, the real aspects are far more important for the economy. The bubble added more than 3 percentage points to GDP in the form of excess housing construction and another 4 percentage points of GDP in the form of excess consumption driven by bubble generated housing wealth.

This demand was absolutely certain to disappear when the bubble burst. The Fed has no mechanism that can readily replace a drop in annual demand equal to 7 percent of GDP or more than $1 trillion. (The downturn was exacerbated by the collapse of a bubble in non-residential real estate which is still in process.)

This is all very simple. None of this requires complex economic analysis, just competent economists.

It is also worth noting that the WSJ refuses to discuss what could be one of the Fed's most important tools against an asset bubble: talk. If the Fed had devoted its enormous research capacities to documenting the existence of a bubble and the likely implications of its bursting, and the Fed chairman used his enormous megaphone to widely disseminate this information at congressional testimonies and other public appearances, it would have almost certainly been sufficient to burst the housing bubble.

While economists question this possibility, since the cost is trivial (talk is cheap), there is no excuse for the Fed not following this route in addition to whatever other measures it may take.

 As George Harrison says, "with every mistake, we must surely be learning." And Ben Bernanke did thoroughly study the Great Depression and based his policy responses on what he had learned. And it worked this time around. Unlike Baker, I think Bernake did pretty well given the circumstances and given the natural inclinations of conventional wisdom. He thought outside the box in other words.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, author of Too Big To Fail, argues that Treasury Secretary Paulson was more the main driver, but I havn't read the book yet.

Baker writes of the popping of the bubble: "The Fed has no mechanism that can readily replace a drop in annual demand equal to 7 percent of GDP or more than $1 trillion." The popping of the bubble also caused the Great Panic as credit markets froze and overleveraged, ginormous financial institutions collapsed. (Seems the so-called Free Market/Insvisible Hand of Capitalism isn't very nimble or resilient, which is Krugman's point about the "efficient-market hypothesis" and freshwater economists.)

Via Ezra Klein, how Washington Mutual failed:

Within two hours of the call, regulators took control of a company with $307 billion in assets and sold it to rival JPMorgan Chase & Co. for $1.9 billion, a fraction of what the New York powerhouse led by Jamie Dimon had offered just months earlier.

With these swift actions, tens of thousands of shareholders and bondholders lost billions of dollars, and Washington Mutual became known as the largest bank failure in U.S. history -- nearly eight times larger than the Federal Deposit Inurance Corp.’s previous record failure, set during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s.

Yet despite the size and significance of this event, much of what happened to WaMu has never been reported.

 There was a lot going on at the time. The housing bubble caused the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, WaMu, AIG, Iceland, etc. Bank of America who was in bad shape just paid back its TARP money even though that leaves it in a weaker position. Via James Kwak at Baseline Scenerio, "From a liquidity perspective, it now has about $20-25 billion ($45 billion minus $19 billion raised from new equity minus a few billion from other asset sales) less cash than it did before paying the money back." Why did they do it? To avoid executive compensation caps. Kwak writes "Update: Ted K. pointed out to me that Wells Fargo, which is generally considered less of a basket case than Bank of America, is not paying back its TARP money yet."

 Obama has been very lucky in some ways (mostly during the campaign like when the financial system imploded) and unlucky in others (once in office he had to deal with all of the messes Bush and the Republicans had left). On the radio I heard Christine Romer describe how she told him that that job market lost only 11,000 jobs this past month and he responded "you mean 110,000?" So, finally there's been a pleasant surprise of good news.

Ahmed Rashid blogs about Afghanistan and Pakistan at the New York Review of Books.

(via Majikthise)

Zero-Sum Thinking
(or thinking like an insurance company actuary)


The human species is still relatively unevolved. Our adrenal glands are too big and our frontal lobes are too small. So, when pundits try to stoke tribal thinking and fear and paranoia, as Yglesias and Steve Walt do here, it usually works.

But it’s not as though the United States hasn’t started some big public works projects over the past decade or so; it just hasn’t been doing them here at home. We’ve spent billions constructing military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, and another billion or more on a giant embassy in Baghdad and another one in Pakistan. Needless to say, those "public works" projects are a drain on the U.S. economy rather than a source of additional productivity.

Likewise I guess foreign humanitarian aid is a total waste down the rat hole. Dark skin foreigners will never change. (or maybe they will)

Analysts say the deals on three of the country’s top fields show that Iraq, after an embarrassing start, may be on a path to joining the world’s major oil-producing nations, which could in turn upset the equilibrium in OPEC and increase tensions with the neighboring oil giants Iran and Saudi Arabia. Adding to those strains, development rights to 10 other Iraqi oil fields will be offered to foreign companies at a public auction in Baghdad on Dec. 11.

And then Yglesias writes

It seems I should write my official What I Think About Obama’s Escalation in Afghanistan post. Mostly the whole situation makes me want to sigh. I don’t think the kind of effort that as best I understand it we’re undertaking in Afghanistan meets any kind of plausible cost benefit test.

And yet he offers no cost-benefit analysis, not even a heavily spun - i.e. full of lies and ommissions - one.  The main point is that Walt and Yglesias aren't worried about costs, they're not that conservative. No they're just focused on opposing Republican foreign policy whatever that may entail.

I just don't believe Obama is so cynical that he would surge in Afghanistan without believing it was the right thing to do from a security perspective. Granted he is enough of a realist to formally recognize  fraudulent elections in Iran and Honduras as somehow legit, so as not to upset their newly "elected" governments.

Yesterday Yglesias linked to the even worse Alex Massie. Who links to the even worse right-wing Daniel Larison. Who I won't link to because he doesn't deserve the traffic. Massie opines:

To take but one obvious example: if US foreign policy is "largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims" or freeing them from tyranny, then why, the Muslim Street might reasonably ask, does the US support repressive dictatorships in Egypt and Libya and Saudi Arabia and elsewhere?

Is Massie really that stupid? Libya was for a long time a pariah, but now the US "supports" Libya by lifting sanctions b/c they gave up their nuclear program. Egypt is supported along with Israel, because essentially we are buying them off from killing each other and blowing up the Middle East. Same with Saudi Arabia, one of the worlds largest oil-exporter. Also the Saudis don't talk about wiping Israel from the map on daily basis as Iran does. Seems like Massie prefers Iran to these Arab countries who receive favorable treatment? Or maybe he doesn't like Israel. Or the US. He certainly attempts to ventriloquize the "Muslim Street" in an anti-American fashion.

But basically Yglesias and Massie misquote Tom Friedman and omit some of the column which proves their theses wrong. The main subject of his column was Major Hasan who shot up Fort Hood. Yglesias and Massie don't even mention that.

Hitchens in Slate:

When the throat-slitters and school-burners and woman-stoners come to the villagers of Pakistan and Afghanistan at dead of night, they have one great psychological advantage. "One day, the Americans and the Europeans will go," they say. "But we will always be here." There's some truth in this: Most of the talk in this country is now of an "exit strategy," and for all the good they are doing, most of the other NATO contingents might as well have shipped out already.

Massie, Yglesias, Walt, and Larison want to divide the world up between the Evil US Empire and the rest of the world. But I see the Afghans and Americans as inhabiting the same planet. We are all residents of Earth and the more privileged among us shouldn't leave the less fortunate in the hands of the  thoat-slitters and school-burners and woman-stoners.

Victoria was my Queen

Slate is publishing some good writers:

Katha Pollitt on Gail Collins and the Secret History of Feminism.

Women needed their husbands' permission to start a business, get a credit card, or even rent an apartment as a separated spouse. In some states, women were barred from serving on juries. (After all, as Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren was advised in a memo from his clerk, letting women serve "may encourage lax performance of their domestic duties.") Marital rape? Legal. Sports for girls? Forget it. That women were the weaker, dumber, more boring sex was a given.This elaborate structure of law and custom had been in place seemingly forever. And yet within a few decades it was shattered so completely that young women today can be forgiven for thinking it sounds like some science-fiction dystopia.

Dana Stevens writing about popular culture:

Sometimes a critic's aesthetic judgment is impossible to extricate from what you might call her cinematic libido. There are movies that bring us a pleasure that's neither definable nor defensible. These used to be called "guilty pleasures," but that phrase seems too judgmental, too pre-Vatican II, for our postmodern era of omnivorous cultural consumption. The distinction between high and low culture, between what we're allowed to enjoy publicly and what we must sneak off to savor in private, has effaced itself to the degree that "guilty pleasures" needs to be replaced by a more morally neutral term. For our purposes here, I'll go with a term that a friend and I coined in college and that I still deploy on occasion: movies we couldn't intellectually defend but still unapologetically loved we called "juicebombs."

Michael Bérubé reminds us of what National Review editor Rich Lowry once wrote about that juicebomb Sarah Palin now that she is back in the news with the publication of her new book and kinky behavior of her family unit.

A very wise TV executive once told me that the key to TV is projecting through the screen. It's one of the keys to the success of, say, a Bill O'Reilly, who comes through the screen and grabs you by the throat. Palin too projects through the screen like crazy. I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.

I've always given Lowry some grudging respect because he'll argue the conservative side of issues with a lawyerly professionalism and is smart enough to see when his side is losing. So it's funny to see him write something like this, especially after dissing the celebrity aspect of Obama.

And though I don't agree with Lowry about Palin, the room did darken and my heart started beating like a hammer when I witnessed Tina Fey do her famous Palin impersonation live on TV. I've always had Fey up on a pedestal, but to see her hit a home run caused - in Lowry's words - starburst neurtinos to shoot out of the boob tube and melt my inner core and cause my tectonic plates to shift. I believe Ray Davies and the Kinks said it best:

Long ago, life was clean
Sex was bad and obscene
And the rich were so mean
Stately homes for the lords
Croquet lawns, village greens
Victoria was my queen
Victoria, Victoria, Victoria, toria

I was born, lucky me
In a land that I love
Though I am poor, I am free
When I grow, I shall fight
For this land, I shall die
Let her sun never set
Victoria, Victoria, Victoria, toria
Victoria, Victoria, Victoria, toria 

The Dreaded MSM

My favorite music video of the year.



Lindsay Beyerstein writes about the Stupak amendment for Newsweek. Newsweek also publishes Matthew Yglesias's thoughts on the Republicans' chronic cock-blocking.

I would give anything for Gwen Stefani to be my Muse/green goddess.

(KSM is very hungover.)

The big news is that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed will be tried in a Federal Court in New York City.

Interesting front page portait of KSM in the New York Times.

As Pakistanis in Kuwait, his relatives would have been considered second-class citizens, but they had the means to send him to the United States for his education. After attending secondary school in Kuwait, Mr. Mohammed was accepted at Chowan College, a Baptist college in rural North Carolina where many foreign students came to improve their English. He later transferred to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he earned a mechanical engineering degree in 1986.

Not long after graduation, he traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to join the mujahedeen fighters, who at the time were the beneficiaries of millions of dollars from the C.I.A. in the fight against Soviet troops.

The purpose of the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Mohammed told his captors years later, was to "wake the American people up." By hitting civilian targets, he said, he would shock Americans into recognizing the impact of their government’s actions abroad, including supporting Israel in its fight against Palestinian militants.
...
Yet for all his professed wisdom about the United States, Mr. Mohammed later admitted that he had completely misjudged what the American response to the Sept. 11 attacks would be. He did not expect the American military campaign in Afghanistan, and he did not anticipate the relentless hunt for Al Qaeda leaders throughout South Asia and the Middle East.

In other words, he probably wouldn't have done it had he known the consquenses ahead of time. The "antiwar" left pathetically likes to argue Al Qaeda planned to draw the US into a Middle Eastern quagmire, that military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan would just "create new terrorists." On the contrary, it looks like "adventurous" US foreign policy has dissuaded them.

I will admit to being wrong about one thing. In the past I assumed the main grievance of Al Qaeda was US troops in the holy land of Saudi Arabia - stationed there after the first Persian Gulf war, something bin Laden always made a point to discuss. But for the "man with the plan" KSM, it was Israel's conflict with the Palestinians and America's support of Israel.

Question: The fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan was a radicalizing moment for many Muslims world-wide. Same with Bosnia, where many free-lance holy warriors travelled to fight. Why not the Palestinian occuped territories? Was it that rich Saudis and/or the Pakistani intelligence services were much more effective in recruiting for the first two causes? I mean for the so-called "antiwar" left, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is much more significant than Afghanistan or Bosnia.

And it should be pointed out that 9/11 was a complete disaster for the already put-upon Palestinians. In the aftermath Israeli hawks were given free reign by the Bush administration and they took full advantage of it.

Heckuva job KSM.

The End of the Cold War

The Lessons of 1989 by Hitchens

20 Years of Collapse by Slavoj Zizek

Post-Wall by Slavoj Zizek

Velvet Revolution: The Prospects by Timothy Garton Ash

Hitchens mentions something I found surprising the first time I heard about it.

Even more appalling was the 12-fold increase in the GDR's [German Democratic Republic] national debt--a situation so grotesque that it had been classified as a state secret lest loans from Western creditors dry up. "Just to avoid further indebtedness," wrote Schürer, "would mean a lowering next year of living standards by 25 to 30 per cent, and make the GDR ungovernable."

 Why would people loan to and borrow from their mortal enemies?

Timothy Garton Ash:

Twenty years later, in the summer of 2009, the Islamic Republic of Iran staged a show trial of political leaders and thinkers it accused of fomenting enghelab -e makhmali--that is, precisely, velvet revolution. Across the intervening years, dramatic events in places including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, South Africa, Chile, Slovakia, Croatia, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, and Burma were tagged with variants of adjective + revolution. Thus we have read about singing (Baltic states), peaceful, negotiated (South Africa, Chile), rose (Georgia), orange (Ukraine), color (widely used, post-orange), cedar (Lebanon), tulip (Kyrgyzstan), electoral (generic), saffron (Burma), and most recently, in Iran, green revolution. Often, as in the original Czechoslovak case, the catchy labeling has been popularized through the interplay of foreign journalists and political activists in the countries concerned.

 And yet the "antiwar" left finds this all uninteresting.

Masterpiece Theater's Endgame.

Life After the End of History by Ross Douthat

It takes a certain amount of moral nihilism to write something like this:

On the left, there’s an enduring fascination with the pseudo-Marxist vision of global capitalism as an enormous Ponzi scheme, destined to be undone by peak oil, climate change, or the next financial bubble.

Nothing's destined but he seems weirdly oblivious of what happened last year.

Ezra Klein had a nice catch here:

Ross Douthat, for instance, says it will be "offensive when Obama takes the stage in Oslo this November instead of Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s heroic opposition leader." By that same logic, it seems a bit offensive for Douthat to spend his column arguing that Obama should give back the Nobel rather than devoting his column to the struggles of Tsvangirai, who has never before been mentioned in one of Douthat's op-eds.

Douthat would rather take up precious column space bashing liberals rather than write about Tsvangirai or, say, Aung San Suu Kyi.

Postmodernism

Believer article on Steve Erickson, which places him between DeLillo and Pynchon on the hand and Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace on the other.

I've always had a soft spot for postmodern theorist Fredric Jameson, because he's a gay Marxist who wears a leather jacket and rides a Harley.

On the Glib Callousness of the "Antiwar" Left*

The Muslim Charles Whitman shouted the takbir "God is Great" as he went about his shooting spree at Fort Hood, but he wasn't a "terrorist" in the conventional sense. He had a long history of mental instability, like his precursor Whitman.

Jamie Tarabay on American Muslim's reactions.

Reflecting on the shootings, the emotion I felt was sadness, for the victims and for the recent history of world Muslims. Russia leveled Muslim Chechnya in the 90s. Bosnian Serbs ethnically cleansed the Muslim residents of Bosnia, resulting in the worst massacre in Europe since World War II. In Darfur, Arab Muslims committed genocide against black Muslims. Growing powerhouse China continues to dominate and oppresses the Muslim Uygurs in the western Xinjiang region. Israel invades Lebanon again, blockades and commits war crimes in Gaza and refuses to allow a Palestinian state to form in the West Bank. Mahmoud Abbas is about to resign and the Palestinian Authority is on the brink of collapse.

The "antiwar" left is coldly callous about all of this, except America's client Israel and Iraq and Afghanistan. (Ostensibly because we pay taxes and participate in elections here and not in those other countries, not to mention the fact the US is still the most powerful country economically and militarily.) And yet because of America and the West, Saddam Hussein and the hard core religious Taliban can no longer massacre fellow Muslims on a regular basis.
___________
* The "antiwar" right - antigovernment, nativist and isolationist - like those at antiwar.com are basically racist and weirdly obsessed with Jews and neocons.

The Difference Engine

Master number-cruncher Brad DeLong recommends Sydney Padua's comics.

Peace and Reconciliation

Democracy has a difficult time functioning when a developing country has two or more ethnicities locked in conflict. So, some good news from Turkey:

ISTANBUL -- After months of dialogue, the Turkish government announced a plan on Friday to help end the quarter-century-long conflict with a Kurdish separatist movement that has cost more than 40,000 lives.

The plan will be debated by Parliament, but the fact that it is being discussed at all is considered to be a landmark. For decades, Kurdish political parties were routinely banned, and the ethnic identity of the Kurds was not openly acknowledged, though they make up almost 15 percent of Turkey’s population.

The government’s plan would allow the Kurdish language to be used in all broadcast media and political campaigns, and restore Kurdish names to cities and towns that have been given Turkish ones. It would also establish a committee to fight discrimination.

"Today is the beginning of a new timeline and a fresh start," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a live televised speech. "We took a courageous step to resolve chronic issues that constitute an obstacle along Turkey’s development, progression and empowerment, and we are very sincere."

Last year, Parliament approved private Kurdish language courses and a public television channel in Kurdish, as part of what it called a democracy package. And this week, a regulation took effect allowing Kurdish prisoners to communicate with visitors in their native language.

What the People Think

I've added the very smart Nate Silver to my blogroll. In my opinion, the best policy when encountering a poll, graph or chart is to be highly skeptical about its methodology, especially when like 99 percent of the time a blogger will post a poll, graph or chart which supports their views.

Change We Can Believe In

New York Times Editorial:

On Friday, Attorney General Holder announced that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and four others accused in the plot will be tried in a fashion that will not further erode American justice or shame Americans. It promises to finally provide justice for the victims of 9/11.Mr. Holder said those prisoners would be prosecuted in federal court in Manhattan.

...  

Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. took a bold and principled step on Friday toward repairing the damage wrought by former President George W. Bush with his decision to discard the nation’s well-established systems of civilian and military justice in the treatment of detainees captured in antiterrorist operations.

From that entirely unnecessary policy (the United States had the tools to detain, charge and bring terrorists to justice) flowed a terrible legacy of torture and open-ended incarceration. It left President Obama with yet another mess to clean up on an urgent basis.

Matt Yglesias uses the occasion to take a jab at loco Senator Joseph Lieberman. The first thing that came to mind for me is that ultra-leftists who have been saying that there is no difference between Bush and Obama are full of it, something I've been saying all year.

Congressman Boehner's Terror Alert Skin Set Back To Orange

That would be a nice premise for a sci-fi story: in a future society people's skin has been genetically modified so that when the Terror Alert Level changes, everyone's skin would change color to reflect the new threat level.

Also in the news: U.S. deports Lou Dobbs.

WANTAGE, NJ--Acting on anonymous tips from within the Hispanic-American community, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials on Wednesday deported Luis Miguel Salvador Aguila Dominguez, who for the last 48 years had been living illegally in the United States under the name Lou Dobbs.

"Shia Crescent" Expanding?

Not surprisingly, Matt Yglesias is blasé about the fighting in Yemen spilling over the border into Saudi Arabia (see map above). Probably because he sees it through the optics of the debate over the Iraq war and American foreign policy.

I agree that we shouldn't worry about things until they actually happen, but this does raise the specter of the rivalry of Iran and Saudi Arabia intensifying.

A battle between the Arab world’s leading Sunni power and Shiite Iran, even at one remove, could significantly elevate sectarian tensions across the region. Iran gained tremendous leverage over the Israeli-Palestinian problem by supporting the militant groups Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and Hamas, in Gaza. Helping the Houthis, another guerrilla group with great staying power, could give them a way to put pressure on Saudi Arabia.

Iran has long denied aiding the Houthis, who have been battling the Yemeni government intermittently for more than five years. On Tuesday, the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, affirmed that position, saying no country should "interfere in internal issues" in Yemen.

But in recent months, Iran’s state-owned news media have been covering the Houthis’ struggle against the Yemeni military more intensively and more sympathetically than ever, setting off alarms across the region. Yemeni officials have accused the Houthis of receiving money from Shiite charities in Iran and elsewhere.

Last month, the Yemeni government said it had intercepted an Iranian vessel carrying weapons in the Red Sea near where the Houthis are based. But Yemen has not supplied any evidence to back up that claim.

Also:

The World Bank predicts that Yemen's oil and gas revenues will plummet over the next two years and fall to zero by 2017 as supplies run out.

Given that they provide around 90% of the country's exports, this could be catastrophic.

An unnamed energy expert is quoted in the report as saying that this points to economic collapse within four of five years time.

It could also be that the Iranian regime is trying to direct attention elsewhere via its state-run media. (But then they do meddle with other sovereign nations' "internal issues" via Hamas and Hezbollah. Maliki was surprised to discover the extent of Iranian meddling in southern Iraq.) However, if - when - we pull out of Iraq, and if Iran insists on stirring up trouble via Saudi Arabia's minority Shia who live near the oil fields, and the two countries go at it, oil prices will go through the roof and the already weak global economy will go into a tailspin. And many, many nasty Republicans will be elected to political office, something Yglesias does care about. And I'll say I told you so. Until then, no need to worry though.

Aww How Cute

Ezra Klein is jealous of Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Matt Yglesias pens a contrarian* blog post about how Veterans Day is bad because it glorifies war. I'm sure veterans everywhere agree. He writes:

To lose a war, like in Vietnam, is a bad thing. But there seems to be a growing conventional wisdom that the surge has somehow redeemed Iraq and that the only thing we’re allowed to talk about with regard to Afghanistan is whether we can or will "win."

I'm not a conservative but I do think it's good that American soldiers removed Saddam Hussein from power. They can be proud of that no matter what the antiwar folks say and no matter what red herring arguments they bring up to change the subject.

A war with Iran would be a disaster no matter what warmongering conservatives say, but Afghanistan deserves better than the Taliban, who - antiwar folks conveniently forget - refused to turn over bin Laden. "He is our guest" Mullah Omar said. Why do antiwar folks always forget that?

And there's Glenn Greenwald, the master of the double standards, who today writes

In April of this year, the British daily, The Guardian, published an article by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi citizen, documenting the increasingly autocratic practices of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.  The article quoted an Iraqi intelligence official claiming that "Maliki is running a dictatorship."  As if to prove their point, the reaction of the Maliki government was to sue The Guardian under a law that does "not allow foreigners to publish articles critical of the prime minister or president," and yesterday, an Iraqi court ordered the newspaper to pay Maliki the equivalent of £52,000.  Iraq's leading journalism organization says the court order "is part of a wider crackdown against media outlets designed to discourage scrutiny of public officials" and that "the Iraqi media have been inundated by writs from officials in recent months and have lost official access and status to state-backed organisations."  Both The New York Times and AP in Iraq have received such writs.

Greenwald doesn't seem to realize that under Saddam Hussein, Iraq didn't have independent journalism organizations, let alone a "leading" one. Even the Guardian article he links to says this explicitly!

Media freedoms have improved substantially in Iraq since the tyrannical decades of Saddam Hussein, when all information was controlled by cronies of the former dictator, such as Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, who was the information minister during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He was popularly known as Comical Ali** for his increasingly outlandish claims about the strength of the Iraqi army.

Does Greenwald want us to stay in Iraq? No, he wishes uber-Cheneyite Saddam Hussein or his psychopathic sons were in power.
---------------------
* Yglesias on foreign policy is like Superfreakonomics: annoying too-clever-by-half contrarianism. For good contrarianism see this article in Slate by Jonah Weiner, Creed is Good.
** Comical Ali was known in the US as Baghdad Bob. On April 7, 2003, he claimed that there were no American troops in Baghdad, and that the Americans were committing suicide by the hundreds at the city's gates. At that time, American tanks were patrolling the streets only a few hundred meters from the location where the press conference was held.