My theory on why Chinese Democracy took so long to complete is that Axl Rose wanted to time its release with the fall of the Communist Party of China.* If the global economy doesn't recover in the medium term, it's a real possibilty, as durable as they've been. Some of the lyrics to the title track:

If they were missionaries
Real time visionaries
Sittin' in a Chinese stew
To view my disinfatuation

I knew that I'm a classic case
Watch my disenchanted face
Blame it on the Falun Gong
They see the end
And you can't hold on now

Cause it would take a lot more hate than you
To end the fascination
Even with an iron fist
More than you got to rule a nation
When all I've got is precious time

----------------------
* The world's largest political party with 70 million members, comprising 5.5 percent of the Chinese population.

Oh look, mistletoe. Now isn't that awkward?

"Indie darling" Feist made a great angel on Stephen Colbert's Christmas special.

"A MAVERICK Thai general who has threatened to bomb anti-government protesters and drop snakes on them from helicopters has been reassigned as an aerobics teacher, the Bangkok Post said on Friday.

Major-general Khattiya Sawasdipol, a Rambo-esque anti-communist fighter more commonly known as Seh Daeng, reacted with disappointment to his new role as a military instructor promoting public fitness at marketplaces.

'It is ridiculous to send me, a warrior, to dance at markets,' he said, before launching an attack on his boss, army chief Anupong Paochinda.

'The army chief wants me to be a presenter leading aerobics dancers. I have prepared one dance. It's called the 'throwing-a-hand-grenade' dance', he said."

Imagine, there you are protesting, getting your fair share of abuse from the riot police and you get knocked on the head and knocked down, so another protester pulls you off to the side out of further harms way. Then a bunch of snakes drop on you.

(via Obsidian Wings)

I bought Guns N' Roses' album Chinese Democracy and it is both terrifying and beautiful like witnessing a 50 megaton thermonuclear detonation and mushroom cloud. You fear not just for yourself, but for your loved ones and even the human race, everyone you have ever known. It puts an end to Irony, like 9/11 or the election of Obama. No wonder it took so long to create.

Chuck Klosterman pens a review for the Onion.

Jody Rosen's review with some more context.

Video of the paranoid, spitting mad Axl Rose with the original lineup.

Pour Some for the Homies

I'd like to pour a little of my 40 on the ground as a libation to Paul Newman, Studs Terkel and John Leonard.

Leonard was able to vote for Obama, whereas Newman and Terkel passed away before the election.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote of Leonard:

When I read anything by my longtime friend John Leonard, his voice is that of a total stranger. He is too polite in ordinary conversations, with me at least, to set off the fireworks of all he knows and feels after reading and comparing and responding to, in the course of his long career as a literary critic, a thousand times more books than I have even heard of. Only in print does he light the night sky of my ignorance and intellectual lassitude with sizzles and bangs, and gorgeous blooms of fire. He is a TEACHER! When I start to read John Leonard, it is as though I, while simply looking for the men’s room, blundered into a lecture by the smartest man who ever lived."

Newman I loved in Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Slapshot, Nobody's Fool etc. Victor Navasky wrote about how Newman and his wife Joanne Woodward helped save The Nation. Terkel himself had a bit part in the pictures in Eight Men Out.

WORK BUY CONSUME DIE

Bumper sticker which made me chuckle for some reason.

"The Fundamentals of the Economy are Sound"

A little late on the post, but McCain's statement reflecting the Republican view was definitely a Baghdad Bob moment.

Loads of international press are here in Chicago for the election.

Luis Redondo reports for Channel 9 in Valencia, Spain.

REDONDO: Which has an audience of 5 million inhabitants and then through satellite can also be seen throughout the whole country, the whole Spain, so 40-million viewers.

He's been in the States for two weeks covering the election, from New York to Virginia. And today, Redondo was one of about 50 foreign reporters coming from Taiwan to Azerbaijan. They were sitting through a presentation by Chicago election officials, who were trying to explain how the city's voting machines work.

REDONDO: For our audience, it's very interesting because elections in the United States is like a kind of election in the world.

Redondo says he wanted to be in Chicago for election day because Illinois' Jr. Senator is seen as a sort of celebrity in Spain.

For some reason I imagine a guy sounding like Elwood Blues (Dan Aykroyd in the trailer) "trying" to explain how the voting machines work.

(clockwise from topleft: Randy the Cowboy, Victor the Police Officer, Alex the Sailor, Glenn the Biker, Felipe the American Indian, David the Construction Worker)

When I was a kid in the late 70s, the Village People seemed cool or at least a lot of fun, with their energetic performances of songs like "Macho Man," "In the Navy," and "Y.M.C.A." Little did I know, as Wikipedia reports, "The band's name references New York City's Greenwich Village neighborhood, at the time known for having a substantial gay population. [Composer Jaques] Morali and [business partner Henri] Belolo got the inspiration for creating an assembly of American man archetypes based on the gay men of The Village who frequently dressed in various fantasy attire."

Stephen Colbert appreciates the McCain's campaign tactic of adopting Joe the Plumber in their attacks on Obama.

I for one appreciate the McCain campaign treating us like children. McCain will bring us back to a simpler time. A time when you could identify your neighbors' jobs by the hats they wore. Like Sam the Fireman, Bill the Cowboy and Jose the stereotype. These are the people in your neighborhood. The people that you meet when you're walking down the street. They're the people that you meet each day. And what the people in your neighborhood, the Joe the Plumber, the Wendy the Waitress need are tax cuts for the wealthy and off shore drilling. They don't need universal health care or last names.

(via Crooks and Liars, via Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman)

Procrustes

Procrustes was a host who adjusted his guests to their bed. Procrustes, whose name means "he who stretches", was arguably the most interesting of Theseus's challenges on the way to becoming a hero. He kept a house by the side of the road where he offered hospitality to passing strangers, who were invited in for a pleasant meal and a night's rest in his very special bed. Procrustes described it as having the unique property that its length exactly matched whomsoever lay down upon it. What Procrustes didn't volunteer was the method by which this "one-size-fits-all" was achieved, namely as soon as the guest lay down Procrustes went to work upon him, stretching him on the rack if he was too short for the bed and chopping off his legs if he was too long. Theseus turned the tables on Procrustes, fatally adjusting him to fit his own bed.

Doug Henwood linked to this in his criticism of Naomi Klein's Disaster Capitalism.

A Procrustean bed is an arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is forced.

Stumbled across this at stand-up comedian Marc Maron's MySpace page:

I may be a little late on this but someone recently sent me a link to zietgeistmovie.com. They said, "you're going to like this, man. It's going to explain everything." It's one of those movies that debunk large chunks of history through valid research and some conspiratorial revisionism. You know the territory: the Jesus fallacy, the illuminati, Hitler was funded by the Bush family, the Federal Reserve Bank's control of inflation, 911. I tend to avoid this type of thing in my life right now. Not because I have any problem with people who want to do that kind of work. I'm just not in a position right now to dedicate my life to it. Which seems to be what it requires. I don't want to be the brooding guy that enters every conversation saying, "What about World Trade Center 7? Explain that."

Granted the Kennedy Assassination conspiracy buffs really solved that thing. Look what those guys who relentlessly pursued the multi gunman theory have done with the 40 some odd years of work they put in. Thank god we now know the truth.

So, I got sucked into this zeitgeist thing. It might be true it might not be true. Do I care? What's difference between believing in that and believing in Jesus? You act the same as a religious fanatic if you are a conspiracy theorist. You pick a series of unprovable "facts" that become dogmatic tenets and you commit your life to it. If anyone argues with it you say, "Well, I guess you just don't want to open your eyes to the truth. You want to live in darkness. You don't want to see the light." So, how are they any different? You just pick a different dogmatic system that explains the relatively recent killing of a very attractive president and not the killing of a very attractive Jew thousands of years ago.

So, I'm watching the film. I tried to fight it. I'm fighting it now. I used the phrase conspiracy theorist and I don't like that phrase because I know it's a right wing semantic fuck off and it denies them their place but I don't want to be one of them and I know I'm vulnerable to it. I'd rather use 'independent speculative investigator'. They are doing something. It is unclear how important it is now or if it will ever be but they are committing their life to it and certainly there are questions.

The movie starts out by proving, effectively, that Jesus didn't exist. I'm thinking, "Okay, I know that." The eloquently and cinematicaly show It was a myth constructed from Egyptian astrology and several different creation and sun god myths that were popular in the region. It was compelling, well executed, and logical. Then, BAM, planes are flying into the towers. I'm in Jerusalem and now, in a cut, I'm in smoldering downtown Manhattan. As if to say, "Now we've showed you that Jesus is a lie and your mind is open. What about this?"

I've got to say, maybe they're right. I'll give them that. Here's to the 911 Truth Movement, maybe you're right, good for you, good luck with it. God forbid you do something practical like help change legislation so we can all have health care or not have our hard drives infiltrated by the government. No, what you're doing is much more important because the truth needs to come out. Don't worry about re-legislating bankruptcy laws so were not all just two payments, a divorce or an illness away from abject poverty. No, its important to know what happened to WTC 7 because ultimately if we know that then we are winning and all problems will be solved.
...

The observant Belle Waring caught this:

OK, I expect a certain level of crazy from Dr. Helen, [wife of Instapundit-peter] but I have to say this left my head spinning:

Is your head spinning from all the doom and gloom being blasted from the media and Congress day and night about impending financial disaster? Mine is, and frankly, I sometimes wonder how much of the financial picture is accurate and how much is manufactured in order to get a Democrat elected. One has to ponder about the timing of all of this bad news.

Why the crescendo of economic collapse right before the election? Why didn't the media and congress act just as concerned some time ago or wait until sometime after the election to go into crisis mode? [perhaps an actual crisis occurred at this time?--ed] The timing of the current financial crisis seems too planned and calculating to be just a coincidence. Polls show that people's number one concern right now is the economy and that for the most part, voters believe Democrats are somewhat more likely to help with the economy. Could it be that the liberal media and those in Congress, knowing that, is blaring the bad economic news from the rooftops in order to manipulate voters into voting for a Democrat? If so, it won't be the first time.

The Instapundit often likes to take a similar line: the economy is actually fine but people are being tricked into thinking it's not. I really don't understand what model of the human psyche we're meant to be working on here. If you're underwater on your ARM mortgage, you're going to feel stressed out; likewise, if you are worried about losing your job and have huge credit card bills. There's just no amount of evil MSM scheming that could plausibly negate your actual experience of local economic conditions, unless the TVs at the Instapundit home are tricked out with an array of virtual reality simulators and backed up with generous servings of psychoactive drugs. Which, if true, makes me want to go to Tennesee, because that sounds rad. But this, view, while silly, is as naught compared with the belief that George Bush, Ben Bernanke, and Henry Paulson are part of a scheme to elect Barack Obama. I mean, really.

Yglesias noted Waring's find on Oct. 6, Henry at Crooked Timber on Oct. 21 - with an added link to Barbara Ehrenreich - noting that the conspiracy really isn't about electing Obama, it's about heightening the contradictions, which means electing McCain.

Matthew Yglesias reviews Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule.

Let us now praise celebrities who are politically active


The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.





Of course I remember Scarlett Johansson and Larry David were active for Obama early in the primary. David will start work on the seventh season of Curb Your Enthusiasm in Decemeber. Sort of hope he does something about political campaigns.

Perry Anderson with a sweeping recent history of Turkey.

Paul Krugman on NPR

The Chorus and Cassandra
(or Caring is Creepy)

Megan McArdle writes

So the idea that Krugman has somehow won one for the team by predicting something that libertarian/conservative/free-market commentators didn't see coming is either misinformed, or lunatic.

Paul Krugman of course recently won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

McArdle was responding to Brian Beutler who wrote:

Time passed, and eventually conservative and libertarian writers--who either didn't understand what was happening, or didn't think all that highly of Krugman's liberalism, or both--began to mock him for getting his economic forecast wrong. Now, lo and behold, he wasn't wrong at all.

I've disagreed with Krugman over some things over the years, like Obama versus Hillary Clinton, but Beutler is absolutely correct here.

I've learned a ton from reading Krugman - among others of course - who wrote well in real time about Japan's "lost decade" of the Nineties, the failure of Long Term Capital Management, the Asian Financial Crisis of the Nineties, Enron and accounting fraud, etc., etc., etc.

Those of us, like Beutler, who studied Krugman are much better prepared to understand what's happening now with the global economy, and were much less surprised by the crisis. Also it was conservative and libertarian policy prescriptions which lead to the crisis in the first place, but that's a different argument.

In commenting on this Beutler makes an excellent point:

For literally years, Paul Krugman warned that we'd be in for some serious economic hard times when the housing bubble burst. This wasn't something he did as a game, but rather in the hope that rightly positioned people would address the problem. They didn't.

People of a social democratic persuasion who criticize free market ideology don't do so because they're somehow overly negative or fundamentally cynical, it's because they care.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then Mr. Mozilo offered everyone a breath mint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Foster Wallace* RIP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Department of Frozen Conflicts

Last week:

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

Jordan relies on Iraq for most of its fuels.

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

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

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

Musharraf set to quit and receive immunity