Havrilesky writes about the State of the Union speech.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Gameness" (or man's best friend)

Malcolm Gladwell, about whom I know nothing, writes:

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

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

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

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

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

CyberMonday (or virtual shoppers, reality-based debtors)

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

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

Paradox or not?

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

I noticed the same thing Neal Pollack did:

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

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

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

(via Doug Ireland.)

Iran vs. Israel

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

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

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

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

Democratizing the Middle East

The NYTimes reports:

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

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

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

(via Matthew Yglesias)

Sheep go to Heaven, goats go to Hell

Came across this succinct description of Hume and his thought:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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