You know when the apolitical jocks start showing solidarity it's serious business.

(via Andrew Sullivan who is overdue for a mental health break.)

Satrapi-Makhmalbaf Joint Conference EU Parliament Brussels

Invited by European Green Party Deputy Daniel Cohn Bendit (Iconic Former Student Leader of France's May 68 Revolution) , Iranian Filmmakers Marjane Satrapi and Mohsen Makhmalbaf demand foreign governments Not to recognize the government of so-called President Elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Back last September, The Onion AV Club reported:

The A.V. Club is delighted to point you to a free download of a new live collaboration between Wilco and Fleet Foxes, a cover of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released" which was recorded in Bend, OR on the recent Wilco tour. Wilco's working with Headcount.org, "a nonpartisan, non-profit organization dedicated to voter registration and inspiring participation in democracy through the power of music." So when you download this track, you'll be asked to click a simple button, pledging to vote in the upcoming national election on November 4. And if you're feeling particularly generous, Wilco's also suggesting you make a donation to Second Harvest/Feed America.

I've added some new blog links. All of these bloggers are extremely informative. First, I've added Glenn Greenwald even though I felt he was unfair to Obama during the primary.

Same thing with Ezra Klein, who is now at the Washington Post. Yesterday the New York Times reported that Obama shared a New Yorker article with aides and Senators that had effected his thinking on health care reform. Klein had raved about it when it came too.

Finally, Hilzoy is a longtime blogger who is eminently fair and informed and with whom I usually agree. Turns out her father was President of Harvard from '71-'91 and took over from Larry Summers after his infamous comments about women. Her maternal grandparents were Gunnar Myrdal and Alva Myrdal. Whoa.

Ahmed Rashid writes about Pakistan.

Podcast with Rashid.

Adolph Joffe was a Bolshevik who supported Trotsky. Remembering Joffe's presence with the Bolshevik delegation at Brest-Litovsk, Count Ottokar Czernin, the Austro-Hungarians' representative would later write:

The leader of the Russian delegation is a Jew, named Joffe, who has recently been released from Siberia [...] after the meal I had a first conversation with Mr. Joffe. His whole theory is simply based on the universal application of the right of self-governance of nations in the broadest form. The thus liberated nations then have to be brought to love each other [...] I advised him that we would not attempt to imitate the Russian example and that we likewise would not tolerate a meddling in our internal affairs. If he continued to hold on his utopic viewpoints the peace would not be possible and then he would be well advised just to take the journey back with the next train. Mr. Joffe looked astonishedly at me with his gentle eyes and was silent for a while. Then he continued in an for me ever unforgettable friendly - I would even nearly say suppliant - tone: 'I very much hope that we will be able to raise the revolution also in your country...'

Poehler at the White House Correspondents Dinner after party.


















Poehler on Charlie Rose.

Amy Poehler on NPR.

Losing your religion

Michelle Cottle writes about a conference for religion writers where a scientist attempts to square faith and science:

His maiden BioLogos blog post (which appears on beliefnet) opens with an anecdote about a devout home-schooled Christian girl who, once she got to college and embarked on a biology major, promptly suffered a four-alarm crisis of faith. If the creation had not gone exactly as she had been taught, were all of her beliefs a lie? While Hitchens would surely like her to conclude "yes," presumably her family and faith community would prefer a different outcome. 

In my younger years, I underwent a vastly lower-key recalibration along these lines that pretty much ruined religion for me. More seriously, I had a devoutly Christian friend whose little brother became damn near suicidal trying to reconcile his fundamentalism with the basic realities of the world beyond his church. If the stats and stories are to be believed, scads of kids have similar experiences.

I shared a fiction writing class with Cottle at Vanderbilt, which come to think of it did have a lot of religious students. Cottle is distractingly pretty, so of course she'd catch me stealing glances during the time fellow classmates were reading their boring short stories aloud. This must have been before her recalibration because she was consistently impervious to my attempts at after-class chit-chat like "I really liked your story, great stuff" and "That story was even better than the last, especially that part when ..." Or maybe not.

With all of its straight-laced God-fearing southern students, I found it ironic that the university was founded by that OG corporate titan, robber baron Cornelious Vanderbilt, also know as the Commodore which is the school's mascot. There's a new biography out on him:

Cornelius Vanderbilt, the great steamship and then railroad magnate, the man who built the original Grand Central Terminal, was not much of a conversationalist. If a man boasted in his presence, he would say, "That amounts to nothing." If interrupted while speaking, he would stop talking and not resume the subject. Vanderbilt (1794-1877) didn’t need words. His actions spoke with a brute eloquence.

Coincidently, Slate recently had a piece where John Swansburg discusses what your favorite Grateful Dead song says about you

"Tennessee Jed": ...While you were paddling Vanderbilt freshmen over at the Sigma Chi house, she was hot-boxing in a VW bus with her vegan friend Judy. You hated all that drug stuff, but you were fond of Brianna's liberated approach in the boudoir (actually the back of the VW). Brianna dragged you to a few Dead shows, but you never thought Jerry had anything on Gregg Allman.

I was actually a member of Sigma Chi until national pulled our charter for excessive partying. The chapter wasn't very hardcore fraternity-wise with only officers living at the house, but there were lots of parties where the music usually consisted of countrified Grateful Dead or Allman Brothers or the Rollings Stones' countrified rock of Exile on Main St. and Sticky Fingers.




Many believe the guy in the jeans in Andy Warhol's album cover is Mick Jagger, but it's actually Joe Dallesandro, who acted in Warhol's films. He also later appeared in John Waters's Cry-Baby as a religious zealot. Waters praised him as "A wonderful actor who forever changed male sexuality on the screen."

Hey Nineteen

According to the stress tests, Bernanke and Geithner say the banks need $75 billion in fresh capital to weather an economic storm worse than expected:

Under the worst-case scenario - an unemployment rate of 10.3 percent, an economic contraction of 3.3 percent this year and a 22 percent further decline in housing prices - the losses by the 19 banks could total $600 billion this year and next, or 9.1 percent of the banks' total loans, regulators concluded. Losses to the banks' loan portfolios alone could total $455 billion this year and next.

And the winners are....
(or Lovers in Japan (Osaka version))

Tomorrow is Stress Test Thursday, when the Obama administration provides the public with some more transparency regarding the financial sector, the specifically the top 19 banks.

Bernanke says things are stabilizing but there will be no quick recovery:

In his most upbeat assessment in a long time, Mr. Bernanke said a wide array of indicators, from consumer spending and home sales to a revival in the credit markets, now suggested that the economy was stabilizing.

Mark Thoma fears we may be falling into a Japanese rut.

Brad DeLong is happy as credit fears ease.

Obama has critics Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz over for dinner.

Joe Nocera has been searching conferences and symposiums for the answer and reports Stiglitz gives the Obama administration an A++, however that's grading on a curve.

Obama interview with David Leonhardt.

Love in the Time of Swine Flu

The WHO upgrades the risk level to 5* and now there are reports of swine flu in my hometown of Chicago, which gives one a little frisson.

A Quiet Day in Iowa as Same-Sex Couples Line Up to Marry

Now New Hampshire and Maine are looking to legalize also.

And there are signs the GOP is rethinking its stance on gay marriage.

Gay and lesbian groups that want this should ally themselves with divorce lawyer associations, see Intolerable Cruelty,** who would no doubt be willing to pony up for the cause.

---------------------------
* out of 6

**

The Australian duo Empire of the Sun.

Martin Amis remembers J.G. Ballard.

Tom Bissell writes about David Foster Wallace.

I heard Bissell on the radio once talking about a trip he took to post-Soviet states, like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. He laughed as he told how the former communist boss/ current dictator of one of them granted a holiday amnesty and emptied the prisons while he was in the country. Bissell was mugged 4 or 5 times the following days.

Like Wallace, the 41 year-old financial chief of Fannie Mae David Kellermann recently committed suicide. With suicide you can't really explain why, even though Wallace was clinically depressed and Kellermann was under enormous pressure. Others suffering in a similar manner don't do it. In medieval Europe, suicides were denied a Christian burial and superstitiously buried at crossroads with a stake through their heart. As if their heart wasn't already broken.

Centrists Gone Radical!


Tim Fenrholz writes about Simon Johnson.

Paul Krugman writes about Bush's drive to war in Iraq:

"The Bush administration was obviously - yes, obviously - telling tall tales in order to promote the war it wanted: the constant insinuations of an Iraq-9/11 link, the hyping of discredited claims about a nuclear program, etc.. And the question was, should you stand up against that? Not many did - and those who did were treated as if they were crazy.

For me and many others that was a radicalizing experience; I’ll never trust "sensible" opinion again."

Here, Krugman points us to the new IMF report titled World Economic Outlook.

The New York Times reports on it here and here.

The I.M.F. projected a 1.3 percent decline in global economic activity for 2009,[first decline since WWII] down sharply even from the modest 0.5 percent growth it had projected in January. In the United States, still the "epicenter" of the crisis, according to the fund, economic contraction would be even greater, at 2.8 percent this year, with zero growth for 2010.
...
Mr. Blanchard said that the fiscal responses of several major countries had made "a gigantic difference."

"If there had been no fiscal stimulus across the world, world growth in 2009 would be 1.5 to 2 percent less," he said. "We would be in the middle of something very close to a depression."

One has to give props to China who enacted a $500 billion (converted) stimulus package. Japan also enacted one. The IMF puts bank losses from global economic crisis at $4.1 Trillion:

Of that amount, $2.7 trillion is from loans and assets originating in the United States, the fund said. That estimate is up from $2.2 trillion in the fund’s interim report in January, and $1.4 trillion last October.
...
Among European countries, the fund has already agreed to more than $55 billion in loans to Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Iceland, Ukraine, Belarus and Latvia. More may yet need to be bailed out.

On Tuesday, Colombia became the second Latin American country to seek aid, requesting $10.4 billion. Last Friday, the fund approved a $47 billion line of credit for Mexico, making it the first country to qualify for a loan from a program that extends credit to emerging economies that are considered well managed. Poland also said this week that it would seek a $20.5 billion credit line under that program.
...
In a twist that leaves some experts shaking their heads, the fund needs money from cash-rich developing countries, like China and India, to help more developed but strapped countries, like those in Eastern Europe.

Mark Weisbrot argues the IMF needs reform.

The Stockholm Syndrome

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
The Stockholm Syndrome
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Via Matthew Yglesias. Yglesias also reports good news: his friend Ezra Klein was hired by the Washington Post.





But to my sorrow Matt also linked to Daniel Larison at the American Conservative. Larison is a conservative isolationist of the Patrick Buchanan/Justin Raimondo/Charles Lindbergh school and is currently being touted by the anti-interventionist faction. From Wikipedia:

After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Lindbergh resigned his commission as a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps on September 14, 1939 to campaign as a private citizen for the antiwar America First Committee. He soon became its most prominent public spokesman, speaking to overflowing crowds in Madison Square Garden in New York City and Soldier Field in Chicago. His speeches were heard by millions. During this time, Lindbergh lived in Lloyd Neck, on Long Island, New York.

Lindbergh argued that America did not have any business attacking Germany and believed in upholding the Monroe Doctrine, which his interventionist rivals felt was outdated. Before World War II, according to Lindbergh historian A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh characterized that:

"the potentially gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without realizing that Hitler’s destruction would lay Europe open to the rape, loot and barbarism of Soviet Russia’s forces, causing possibly the fatal wounding of western civilization."

Charles Lindbergh speaking at an AFC rally.

During his January 23, 1941, testimony before The House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Lindbergh recommended the United States negotiate a neutrality pact with Germany.

In a speech at an America First rally in Des Moines on September 11, 1941, "Who Are the War Agitators?" Lindbergh claimed the three groups, "pressing this country toward war [are] the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration" and said of Jewish groups,

"Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation."

In the speech, he warned of the Jewish People's "large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government," and went on to say of Germany's antisemitism, "No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany." Lindbergh declared,

"I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction."

J.G. Ballard passed away this past Sunday.

Johann Hari asks: Was J.G. Ballard a prophet of doom - or the future?

Ballard's vision hangs like black smoke over my instinctive liberalism and rationality, as a constant, nagging doubt. His novels present a world where people will not - cannot - be persuaded by facts and evidence and reason for long. Our frontal lobes are too weak; our adrenal glands are too big. We would rather hug our consumer goods and our guts today than preserve ourselves and our species for tomorrow. He said of his novels: "I see myself more as a kind of investigator, a scout who is sent on ahead to see if the water is drinkable or not."
...
The roots of Ballard's vision obviously lay in his childhood. He grew up in the ornate mansions of the International Settlement in Shanghai in the 1930s, waited on by battalions of servants paid for by his father, who was a rich textile chemist. When the Japanese invaded, that world was stripped away overnight. His family was interred in a detention camp, and he scavenged and starved in suddenly abandoned mansions - a story told in the Spielberg film Empire of the Sun.

From the New York Times:

A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

Then he was waterboarded another 82 times.

Khalid Sheik Mohammad was waterboarded 183 times.

I think Obama has the right idea that a bipartisan 9-11 type committee should be formed instead of Leahy's truth commision because that might become too partisan.

I love Anna Faris, so I was interested to read Majikthise's criticism of a scene in the new movie Observe and Report, which I haven't seen.

I tend to agree with Dana Stevens more, who says that Ronnie stopped once he realized Brandi was passed out. Although I haven't seen the movie.

Hopefully Faris's next movie will be better - like House Bunny or Smiley Face - since neither Beyerstein nor Stevens liked this one.

In an interview with Newsweek, Faris says she and Seth Rogan believed the scene would be cut.

Kiefer Sutherland was on a local radio station last night promoting his record label by hanging out and playing songs by bands on the label. I've watched his show 24 this season and it's really good with loads of great actors (like Mary Lynn Rajskub* and Janeane Garofalo pictured above). Sutherland said they start shooting the next season in three weeks.

Coincidently yesterday the Obama administration released the Office of Legal Council memos about torture yesterday. Hell froze over as Glenn Greenwald had some kind words to say about Obama's decision.

--------------------
*Rajskub and Kristen Wiig were good in this past season's The Flight of the Conchords also.

Happy Tax Day!

(And a belated Happy Zombie Jesus Day!)

Patriots Glenn Beck and Nick Cavuto and Dick Armey among others have been organizing "Tea Parties" to protest Obama's alleged drift towards socialism, Think Progress reports. The turnouts were rather low.