Turning Japanese

GISM was a Japanese mid-paced hardcore punk band (with heavy metal influence) formed in Tokyo, Japan in 1980. Even though the guitar style resembled heavy metal style riffs and solos, GISM were one of the first Japanese hardcore bands, while at the same time drawing influence from the early industrial/avant-garde music scene; something extremely uncommon in punk bands at that time.

The acronym GISM had many different variations; they include: God In the Schizoid Mind, Guerrilla Incendiary Sabotage Mutineer, General Imperialism Social Murder, Genocide Infanticide Suicide Menticide* & Gnostic Idiosyncrasy Sonic Militant.

GISM has attained a cult status in the international punk scene, duly for their unique blend of heavy metal and hardcore punk. Several Japanese punk bands have emulated the low-pitched vocal style of Sakevi Yokoyama.

...

In Lady Gaga's video for the song "Telephone," released in March of 2010, the performer wears a spiked leather jacket featuring a GISM back patch. Whether Lady Gaga is actually a fan of the band is unclear. However, the director of the music video, Jonas Akerlund, is former member of the Swedish metal band Bathory and could very well be the reason for the jacket's appearance in the video. The jacket also features patches for the UK crust bands Icons of Filth and Doom.

Krugman blogging about stagflation versus hyperinflation and the 1970s:

The kind of inflation we had in the 1970s, the famous era of stagflation -- high inflation combined with high unemployment -- was quite different. Deficits weren’t the issue -- actually, US deficits were much smaller in the inflationary 70s than in the disinflationary 80s. Instead, what you had was a combination of excessively expansionary monetary policies, based on an unrealistic view of how low the unemployment rate could be pushed without causing accelerating inflation (the NAIRU), plus oil shocks that pushed up inflation across the board thanks to widespread cost-of-living clauses in contracts. There was never any risk of hyperinflation; the only question was whether and when we’d be willing to pay the price in high unemployment of bringing inflation back down.

Kinsley seems to be confusing the logic of the natural rate argument, which says that expected inflation gets built into price-setting, so you need an accelerating inflation rate to keep unemployment below the NAIRU, with the very different logic of hyperinflation, which is about people fleeing money.

Meanwhile, for those predicting hyperinflation, my question would be: what is it about the United States now that looks different to you from Japan in say, 2000? Big budget deficits and high debt? Check. Huge expansion in the monetary base? Check. And yet Japan’s GDP deflator has fallen 9 percent since 2000.

 (Lady Gaga: "Prepare to be assimilated.  We will add your 
biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.  You 
will adapt to service us.  Resistance is futile.")

--------------------------
* "the systematic effort to undermine and destroy a person's values and beliefs, as by the use of prolonged interrogation, drugs, torture, etc., and to induce radically different ideas."

Kurdish people total population: 23-36 million


Palestinian people: c. 12 million


Armenians: 7.3-7.4 million


Circassians: c. 4 million

Circassian beauties is a term used to refer to an idealized image of the women of the Circassian people of the Northern Caucasus. A fairly extensive literary history suggests that Circassian women were thought to be unusually beautiful, spirited and elegant, and as such were desirable as concubines. This reputation dates back to the Ottoman Empire when Circassian women living in the Sultan's Imperial Harem started to build their reputation as extremely beautiful and genteel, and then became a common trope in Western Orientalism.

As a result of this reputation, in Europe and America Circassians were regularly characterised as the ideal of feminine beauty in poetry, novels and art. Cosmetic products were advertised, from the 18th century on, using the word "Circassian" in the title, or claiming that the product was based on substances used by the women of Circassia.

In the 1860s the showman P. T. Barnum exhibited women who he claimed were Circassian beauties. They wore a distinctive Afro-like hair style, which had no precedent in earlier portrayals of Circassians, but which was soon copied by other female performers, who became known as "moss haired girls". These were typically presented as victims of sexual enslavement among the Turks, who had escaped from the harem to achieve freedom in America. 

... 

The legend of Circassian women was also repeated by legal theorist Gustav Hugo, who wrote that "Even beauty is more likely to be found in a Circassian slave girl than in a beggar girl", referring to the fact that even a slave has some security and safety, but a "free" beggar has none. Hugo's comment was later condemned by Karl Marx in The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law (1842) on the grounds that it excused slavery.

----

WASHINGTON — The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted narrowly on Thursday to condemn as genocide the mass killings of Armenians early in the last century, defying a last-minute plea from the Obama administration to forgo a vote that seemed sure to offend Turkey and jeopardize delicate efforts at Turkish-Armenian reconciliation. 

The vote on the nonbinding resolution, a perennial point of friction addressing a dark, century-old chapter of Turkish history, was 23 to 22. A similar resolution passed by a slightly wider margin in 2007, but the Bush administration, fearful of losing Turkish cooperation over Iraq, lobbied forcefully to keep it from reaching the House floor. Whether this resolution will reach a floor vote remains unclear.  

In Ankara, the capital, the office of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan immediately issued a sharp rebuke. “We condemn this bill that denounces the Turkish nation of a crime that it has not committed,” the statement said. Ambassador Namik Tan, who had only weeks ago taken up his post in Washington, has been recalled to Ankara for consultations, according to the statement.  

Historians say that as many as 1.5 million Armenians died amid the chaos and unrest surrounding World War I and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey denies, however, that this was a planned genocide, and had mounted a vigorous lobbying campaign against the resolution.

----

ISTANBUL — Turkey’s foreign minister said Friday that the vote by a Congressional committee in Washington condemning the mass killing of Armenians early in the last century as genocide would damage ties with the Obama administration and set back reconciliation efforts between Turkey and Armenia. 

... 

In recent years, Turkey has sought to play a bigger regional role, re-establishing ties with nearby Arab countries and reaching out to Armenia, whose border with Turkey has been closed since the 1990s, when Armenia was at war with its neighbor Azerbaijan, a Turkish ally. In 2008, Turkey’s president paid the first visit by a Turkish leader to Armenia in the two nations’ history. 

----
Interesting fact from a New York Times piece about China's trade policies:

I.M.F. policies call for it to disclose documents and information on a timely basis, with the deletion only of market-moving information. But under the rules a member country may decide to withhold a report, an organization official said.

China allowed the release of its reports until the monetary fund’s executive board decided in June 2007 that reports should pay more attention to currency policies. China has quietly blocked release of reports on its policies ever since, without providing its specific reasons to the I.M.F.

A person who has seen copies of the most recent report last summer said that the monetary fund staff concluded the renminbi was “substantially undervalued.”

The monetary fund regards a currency as substantially undervalued if it is more than 20 percent below its fair market value.

More than four-fifths of the I.M.F.’s members allow publication of the agency’s annual staff reports on their economies. Countries blocking release are mostly tightly controlled places like Myanmar, Sudan, Turkmenistan and Saudi Arabia, although Brazil has also not released its reports.

IMF/World Bank support of military dictatorships chart

---- Jonathan Chait quotes a Ha'aretz editorial:

There is one reason for the crisis: Netanyahu's persistence in continuing construction in East Jerusalem, in placing Jews in Arab neighborhoods and evicting Palestinians from their homes in the city. This is not a matter of timing but substance. Despite repeated warnings and bitter experiences, he stokes the flames over the conflict's most sensitive issue and is bound to get himself in trouble. Netanyahu has made it clear by his actions that American support for Israel, especially essential now in light of the Iranian threat, is less important to him than the chance to put another few Jews in the Sheikh Jarrah or Ramat Shlomo neighborhoods.

Isn't this just ethnic cleansing? Why don't people call it by its rightful name?

Metamorphosis / "why is a raven like a writing desk?"

I saw Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, and thought it was good. Anne Hathaway is very beautiful as the White Queen and the actress playing Alice is very good, as is Depp's Mad Hatter, Stephen Fry's Cheshire Cat, Helena Bonham Carter's Red Queen and the others.

What was interesting to me was how Alan Rickman's Caterpillar said good-bye to Alice as he finished making his cocoon in preparation of turning into a butterfly. It had a finality as if the Caterpillar would lose his memory after his radical transformation.

This article in the New York Times reports a person's genome can be decoded for $50,000.

Besides identifying disease genes, one team, in Seattle, was able to make the first direct estimate of the number of mutations, or changes in DNA, that are passed on from parent to child. They calculate that of the three billion units in the human genome, 60 per generation are changed by random mutation -- considerably less than previously thought.

So presumably, a child receives 120 mutated genes along with 2,999,999,880 duplicate genes from her parents. Alice certainly received the genes for imagination from her father. I like how she had all of those random thoughts while dancing with her suitor.

Solace in Excess

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . ."And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?" 

Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. "What the hell are you yelling about," he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to drive." I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.

No Credit: Timothy Geithner’s financial plan is working--and making him very unpopular. 
by John Cassidy

The hardest part of his job, Geithner often says, is getting people to comprehend the inner logic of a financial-rescue operation, and the unpopular actions it entails. In fact, his problem may be not economic illiteracy but its opposite: Americans understand all too well what has happened. Financial crises have a way of revealing aspects of our economic system that otherwise remain obscured, such as the symbiotic relationship between Wall Street and Washington, the hidden subsidies that financial firms sometimes receive from the Fed and other government agencies, and the fact that the vast profits that firms like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman generate depend in part on an implicit guarantee from the taxpayer. When ordinary Americans are confronted with these realities, they get angry. "People just don’t get how these institutions got bailed out and their people are still making big bonuses," Mark Zandi noted. "It just does not compute. No matter what you say, you can’t persuade them it’s right."

Godzilla Haikus

(via Ezra Klein)

 

The Repo Man

Via John Cassidy, "Memo to Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, Ric Mishkin and all other economists who still argue it is impossible to discern a speculative bubble while it is inflating. (This chart is from p. 27 of this year’s Economic Report of the President, which the White House Council of Economic Advisers released yesterday.)

"How Paul Krugman Found Politics" by Larissa MacFarquhar

Via Greg Mankiw, via Mark Thoma, Gary Gorton on the Financial Crisis. It was a bank run.

• As traditional banking became unprofitable in the 1980s, due to competition from, most importantly, money market mutual funds and junk bonds, securitization developed. Regulation Q that limited the interest rate on bank deposits was lifted, as well. Bank funding became much more expensive. Banks could no longer afford to hold passive cash flows on their balance sheets. Securitization is an efficient, cheaper, way to fund the traditional banking system. Securitization became sizable.
• The amount of money under management by institutional investors has grown enormously. These investors and non‐financial firms have a need for a short‐term, safe, interest‐earning, transaction account like demand deposits: repo. Repo also grew enormously, and came to use securitization as an important source of collateral.
• Repo is money. It was counted in M3 by the Federal Reserve System, until M3 was discontinued in 2006. But, like other privately‐created bank money, it is vulnerable to a shock, which may cause depositors to rationally withdraw en masse, an event which the banking system -- in this case the shadow banking system -- cannot withstand alone. Forced by the withdrawals to sell assets, bond prices plummeted and firms failed or were bailed out with government money.
• In a bank panic, banks are forced to sell assets, which causes prices to go down, reflecting the large amounts being dumped on the market. Fire sales cause losses. The fundamentals of subprime were not bad enough by themselves to have created trillions in losses globally. The mechanism of the panic triggers the fire sales. As a matter of policy, such firm failures should not be caused by fire sales.
• The crisis was not a one‐time, unique, event. The problem is structural. The explanation for the crisis lies in the structure of private transaction securities that are created by banks. This structure, while very important for the economy, is subject to periodic panics if there are shocks that cause concerns about counterparty default. There have been banking panics throughout U.S. history, with private bank notes, with demand deposits, and now with repo. The economy needs banks and banking. But bank liabilities have a vulnerability.

Joseph Stiglitz in San Francisco

Kaus and McCardle don't believe health care reform will happen.

As Senate Majority Shifts, So Does View of a Procedural Power Play by Jackie Calmes

WASHINGTON -- It is tempting to think that the authors of the 1974 federal budget law were feeling mischievously ironic when they chose "reconciliation" as the name for a particularly arcane process the bill established. ...

But even as they fulminate about the unfairness, Republicans carry a long record of having employed reconciliation themselves on big and controversial legislative packages.

Sixteen of the 22 "reconciliation bills" that have made it through Congress were passed in the Senate when Republicans had majorities. Among them were the signature tax cuts of President George W. Bush, the 1996 overhaul of the welfare system, the Children's Health Insurance Program, Medicare Advantage insurance policies and the Cobra program allowing people who leave a job to pay to keep the health coverage their employer provided (the "R" and "A" in Cobra stand for "reconciliation act").  

... In 1980 a Democratic majority used it for the first time to reduce that year’s deficit. Months later, however, it was the new administration and a new Republican Senate majority that pioneered using reconciliation to enact major legislation: a package of spending cuts to offset President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts.

Republicans turned to reconciliation again the next year, 1982, but to pass a controversial measure rolling back some of the tax cuts and cutting spending to pare a growing deficit.

For years, reconciliation mainly was used to shrink deficits. But in 1999 and 2000, with budgets running rare surpluses, Congressional Republicans sent tax cut bills to President Clinton. He vetoed them, citing his vow to "save Social Security first."

Once Mr. Bush took office in 2001, however, Republicans successfully used the tactic to enact the much bigger tax cuts he had campaigned on. With the Senate bill lacking 60 votes, reconciliation was "the way it will have to be done in order to get it done at all," Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said at the time.

Obama is going to take health care reform through reconciliation if need be, which is what he said he'd do last June.

Via Yglesias, Newsweek summarizes Hank Paulson's new book:

Meetings with Senate Republicans were "a complete waste of time for us, when time was more precious than anything" (page 275). Ideas that Republicans do add are "unformed," like Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor’s plan to replace TARP with an insurance program. In a rare moment of sarcasm, Paulson goes off on the minority Whip: "I got a better idea. I’m going to go with Eric Cantor’s insurance program. That’s the idea to save the day" (page 285).

Eric Cantor is the Republican's number two man in the House, which is scary.

Daniel Gross writes about Paulson's book also:

Paulson love-bombs Barney Frank as "scary-smart, ready with a quip, and usually a pleasure to work with," praises Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and notes that then-Sen. Barack Obama was "always well informed, well briefed, and self-confident."

But while Bush ("admirably stalwart") comes in for similar praise, Paulson has little positive to say about other Republicans. Sarah Palin annoyed him from the get-go. When he spoke to House Republicans about efforts to help Fannie and Freddie, he was chagrined that many responded with speeches about ACORN, the low-income housing activist group. House Minority Leader John Boehner was ineffectual. John McCain comes off worst of all: impulsive, ill-informed, and counterproductive. "This was crazy," Paulson writes of McCain's decision to suspend his campaign in late September 2008 and demand a White House meeting on the bailout. At the climactic meeting in the Cabinet room, Obama spoke for the Democrats, delivering a "thoughtful, well-prepared presentation." But McCain? "When it came right down to it, he had little to say in the forum he himself had called."

Abu Dhabi tightens grip on debt-stricken Dubai

Senior Hamas official assassinated in Dubai, probably by Israel.


Israeli officials declined to comment.

Assassinations are rare in Dubai, a polyglot business hub on the Persian Gulf where deposed foreign leaders sometimes sought shelter. But that began to change last year after a former Chechen rebel was shot dead in an underground Dubai parking lot. “The myth that Dubai is the eye of the storm, and no one will touch it because everyone has an interest, is being blown apart,” said Christopher Davidson, the author of two books on the United Arab Emirates, to which Dubai belongs.

A Profligacy of Greed
I've taken Mel Gibson off my Axis of Evil list on the right since his latest movie was good for a bad movie, even though the plot line seemed devised by a conspiracy-minded 9/11 Truther. Plus famous people like Gibson tend to go insane and it's not generous to malign the mentally ill.

In addition to my Axis of Evil list, I have my personal Rogues Gallery, particularly awful human beings I will touch on and discuss from time to time. People such that your heart sinks at the mere mention of their name. So far, I believe I've mentioned George Will, Robert Samuelson, and Mickey Kaus. Let me add that scourge of government debt Peter G. Peterson to the list. As Matt Yglesias has pointed out, the stimulus last year was too small, even though it was the largest in history. It was too small because people like Peterson have been spreading propaganda about the deficit for years. And so many more people than need be will be unemployed in the coming years, the economy will be worse off, and hence the Democrats and Obama will suffer at the voting booth.

Let me add this anecdote from Yves Smith:

The one and only time I met Steve Schwarzman was in 1986, when he and Pete Peterson had just started the Blackstone Group. I was a manager (meaning a mid level working oar) at McKinsey. We had teed up a deal and were assisting our foreign client in hiring an investment banker. This transaction was sufficiently sexy that Felix Rohatyn wound up working on it personally.

But what did we get when we presented the idea to Peterson and Schwarzman? We explained why we came to see them. We got 40 minutes (I kid you not, I checked my watch) of name-dropping by Peterson, of all the senior folks he knew in our client’s country. But that wasn’t why our client came to see him; had he bothered to listen, the matter at hand was in the US.

Then he and Schwarzman spent the next 20 minutes talking about Blackstone, and they make it abundantly clear how jealous they were of leveraged buyout king Henry Kravis (at the time, Peterson and Schwarzman were mere advisor types, their looting wealth creating opportunities were far more limited than if they had oddles of investor and bank money to play with).

So in effect, they spent an hour telling us that they really wanted to be doing LBOs, that was SO much better paid than M&A, they wanted to grow up to be Henry Kravis, but since they hadn’t raised the money to do that yet, then yeah, our client’s deal might be worth their while in the interim.

I have never seen a pitch meeting (and this had been arranged at the senior levels of the firm) devolve into such a naked display of personal greed. The two partners who were there with me, neither one of them naifs, were as appalled as I was. As much as I have seen a lot of unprofessional conduct in my life, this still ranks as one of real doozies.

The Rule of Law is Sacrosanct*
(or don't fear the reaper, i.e avoid a bunker mentality**)

Glenn Greenwald is positively overflowing in his praise for Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder has been trying to do what's right and best for America in the face of the usual suspects' demagoguery and bedwetting over terrorism. As Obama has said more than once, "Let's not allow the terrorists to scare us into a bunker mentality." The only thing to fear is fear itself, as FDR put it. Greenwald:

Independently, Rahm Emanuel is the absolute last person who ought to be exerting influence over the Attorney General's decisions regarding where and how to try Terrorist suspects; remember when all Good Democrats agreed that Karl Rove's attempts to influence the DOJ was really bad because prosecutorial decisions are not supposed to be politicized?

Easy Glenn, don't want to praise Obama's AG Holder too much, it might make your never-ending hyperbolic criticism of Obama, that he's no better than Bush, etc., seem incongruent.

Last week there were news stories about a possible ouster of Emanuel after the Massachusetts Senate race loss. I disagreed with those who thought he should go, but after reading this I now wouldn't argue so strongly for keeping him. Emanuel might be right in is his argument that it would be better to get health care reform than try terrorism suspect as civilians and thereby respect international norms and put the Bush administration's lawlessness in the past.

I would say it's better to get health care reform than perform a witch hunt on a previous administration, which is what Greenwald wants. (People who complained about the witch hunts against Bill Clinton seem especially inclined to return the favor. Seems .... hypocritical and double-standardsish.) My hope would be that Obama follows his AG's advice and manages to gets health care reform done. That seems possible - even likely - while I believe they would have to chose between health care reform or partisan witch-hunt. (Besides Obama's whole Presidential campaign theme was bipartisanship, something his critics always seem to forget or ignore.)

According to the New York Times article Greenwald points to, Holder is currently reading "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a Swedish mystery-thriller, and Slavery by Another Name, about its unofficial persistence into 20th-century America."

My question to Senator Lindsey Graham - who I've always admired and who Emanuel is trying to placate - is that if we can treat anyone who is not an American in any manner we choose, why can't foreign nations do the same to American citizens? And if they do how can we protest?
--------------------
*sometimes
**As Rorschach says in prison to his fellow inmates - many of whom he put there, "You don't understand, I'm not in here with you, you're in here with me!"

Ezra Klein: 

In related news, Evan Bayh has decided to retire. He said he wants to spend more time scolding his family for moving too far to the left.

Left-liberal analysis failure

Maybe I'm just getting older and more compromised, but I was underwhelmed by left-liberals efforts to put Obama's feet to the fire and hold him to his campaign promised this past year. I know, I know, Obama explicitly asked for supporters to keep the pressure on and stay involved - the only recipe for success - but still reading this news reminds me of critics' evidence that the Obama administration would be a failure:

Mr. Tauzin is leaving his $2 million-a-year job as the top lobbyist for the drug industry amid complaints from drug makers that he bargained away their profits too cheaply, spent too much in his $150 million advertising campaign to sell the overhaul and miscalculated in his assessment that the passage of the legislation was all but inevitable.

Other drug industry lobbyists, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said his departure raised questions about whether the drug makers would continue to support the proposed overhaul, which has stalled in Congress.

Several of the lobbyists said Mr. Tauzin was undermined by a rival lobbying powerhouse -- Thomas J. Donohue, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, who had fought the health care proposals from the start and complained to the drug makers that Mr. Tauzin had gone along too easily. A spokesman for Mr. Donohue declined to comment on Mr. Donohue’s behalf and later released a statement from Mr. Donohue praising Mr. Tauzin as "a great friend."

On the other hand many of the left-liberals who pointed to the drug industry deal never supported Obama.

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.
----------
* 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).

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*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!