perfidy

BILIOUSNESS - Jaundice or other symptoms associated with liver disease; may also have been any upset leading to vomiting bile or just vomiting
BLACK JAUNDICE - Wiel's Disease; Black Water fever (deadly form of malaria)
BLACK POX - Black Smallpox
BLOODY FLUX Bloody stools
BREAKBONE Dengue fever, Infectious fever endemic to East Africa
CORRUPTION Infection
EEL THING Erysipelas
FRENCH POX Syphilis
KRUCHHUSTEN Whooping cough
LOCKJAW Tetanus or infectious disease affecting the muscles of the neck and jaw. Untreated, it is fatal in 8 days
MORMAL Gangrene
RICKETS Disease of skeletal system
SCRUMPOX Skin disease, impetigo

I have noticed a disturbing trend lately. Names of diseases no longer sound like disease names. Long gone are the days of scurvy, gout, consumption, scarlet fever, yellow fever and plague. Now we have antiseptic acronymic disease names like AIDS, SARS, HIV, CFS. We have even ruined good disease names like herpes by adding -simplex I and the like.

The only decent new disease name is hemorrhagic fever. We need to come up with better names for our diseases. Names with bite, names that sound like you are slowly dying in agony.

espite the derivative nature of your post, there is a reason why many people do it. Its fun. (Except for ripping off Kaus, which is annoying. -ed) I have had little time to read lately, which is painful as I have read three books a week for most of the last twenty years. The addiction is strong for me.

Nevertheless, I have managed to read a couple books this summer.

• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Johno has been bugging me to read this since the dawn of time. I should not have waited so long. (btw, this book got the record for most comments from other people who see me reading a book, at five. The previous record was for Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. I do live in DC.)
• The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler. I read this book about once a year. I still don't know what the plot is, but what is plot when the writing is this beautiful?
• A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs. I love, love, love this book. Thoats, Zitidars, and Calots, oh my.
• Heaven on Earth, by Joshua Muravchik. Still reading this one. A history of socialism by a red diaper baby who lost his faith. He still has sympathy for the figures involved, and it seems a balanced account. It is amazing how everything in modern communism was prefigured in Babeuf back in the French Revolution. Good book.

Johno is right, I do like the hard sf. One reason I stopped reading fantasy was the depressing sameness of it all. The engineering/scientific outlook on life does lend a certain flavor to hard sf. But it certainly doesn't suppress the imagination. Working under the constraints of hard sf forces some writers to greater flights of imagination than more open formats might.

[btw]My favorite part of killing star was the central park analogy. Read the book, it is one of the more chilling things you'll read. Because it could be true.

I don't know much about North Korea as a place (after all, how much can one really know about a nation that has sealed itself off from the rest of the world?), but the lead article in this week's Boston Phoenix comes to the opposite conclusion as Buckethead's citation below. According to this piece, North Korea is an Orwellian nightmare in which all ills-- poverty, fear, etc.-- are all attributed to the USA. Result: a nation of fanatical America-hating militarists, as if we needed another one of those. . . . Read on!

Air-raid drills are a fact of life in Pyongyang, along with scheduled blackouts that plunge this city of two million into an eerie darkness through which even the trams ghost along without lights. This may be the most militarized nation on earth, but people here believe the nuclear threat comes from the outside. "The Americans were the first to threaten a pre-emptive nuclear strike," says my guide, O Jin Myong, as he leads me through the cavernous subway passages decorated with enormous glass chandeliers, Romanesque arches, and huge murals extolling the country's founder, Kim Il Sung. The platforms, carved more than 100 yards underground, will serve as shelters in an attack, Mr. O tells me. "Here the American bombs can't get us."

At first, the talk of nuclear bombs and first strikes sounds premature, even paranoid. But during my weeklong visit to the world's most isolated nation last February, I hear this mantra so many times that it takes on a logic of its own. "Tell the world we are not afraid of nuclear weapons," says an elderly female guide, Ri Ok Hi, after finishing up a tour of a monument to the Workers Party. "We will fight to the death for our leader."

As one of the first Western journalists allowed in since North Korea's latest nuclear crisis with the United States began last fall, I experience firsthand the paranoia that marks everyday life for North Koreans. For seven days, I am watched, followed, and fed propaganda. From doctors to parsons, everyone I am introduced to - and I have no choice about whom I meet - parrots the same line: hatred of the Americans, matched only by their love of the "Great Leader," Kim Jong Il. . . .

At the Grand People's Study House, North Korea's national library, two huge reading rooms are dedicated to the works of Kim Jong Il, including treatises on filmmaking, journalism, architecture, agriculture, and, of course, military strategy. Some are so well thumbed that the tattered pages look ready to crumble. The young librarian, Hwang Sun Ryol, insists that her country's leader wrote 1500 books during his university days. When I doubt that anyone could write a book a day for five years, she does not hesitate: "He is the most outstanding theoretician. No one can match his creativity and enthusiasm." (I thank her and, in the spirit of cultural exchange, donate an anthology of George Orwell's essays and a video of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.)

Certainly, some of this overwhelming Kim-love can be chalked up to lip service, but how much? In a nation where radios must be left on at all times, where air-raid drills are a daily occurrence, and managed starvation-- blamed on America-- is a way of life, one wonders just how Orwellian a place can possibly be.

Also, Buckethead, I would like to point out that the North Korean emigre you cite recommended that we preemptively nuke another nation. Your arguments a few months ago about nuclear fears being overblown notwithstanding, is that man on effing crack?

I don't like to pick on my home state, but they make it so damn easy!

Yes, Jerry Springer is running for the US Senate in 2004. Oh, good. Finally someone to bring some dignity and restraint to Washington! I wish that wasn't so true! I need another Martini!

Jerry: word of advice, son. This time, when you get a hooker, please be sure not to pay her with a personal check. Senators carry cash for that.

The CNN article linked notes that Springer, who was born in Engaland, is therefore not eligible to run for President. Pity.

Randy Barnett of the Volokh Conspiracy has an excellent, penetrating, and informative piece up at the National Review about the SCOTUS decision in Lawrence v. Texas. Here's the opening paragraph and two of the conclusion.

The more one ponders the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas, the more revolutionary it seems. Not because it recognizes the rights of gays and lesbians to sexual activity free of the stigmatization of the criminal law — though this is of utmost importance. No, the case is revolutionary because Justice Kennedy (and at least four justices who signed on to his opinion without separate concurrences) have finally broken free of the post-New Deal constitutional tension between a "presumption of constitutionality" on the one hand and "fundamental rights" on the other. Contrary to what has been reported repeatedly in the press, the Court in Lawrence did not protect a "right of privacy." Rather, it protected "liberty" — and without showing that the particular liberty in question is somehow "fundamental." Appreciation of the significance of this major development in constitutional law requires some historical background. . . .

In the end, Lawrence is a very simple ruling. Justice Kennedy examined the conduct at issue to see if it was properly an aspect of liberty (as opposed to license), and then asked the government to justify its restriction, which it failed adequately to do. The decision would have been far more transparent if Justice Kennedy had acknowledged what was really happening (though perhaps this would have lost some votes by other justices). Without this acknowledgement, the revolutionary aspect of his opinion is concealed, and it is rendered vulnerable to the ridicule of the dissent. Far better would have been to more closely track the superb amicus brief of the Cato Institute which he twice cites approvingly.

If the Court is serious, the effect on other cases of this shift from "privacy" to "liberty," and away from the New Deal-induced tension between "the presumption of constitutionality" and "fundamental rights," could be profound. For example, the medical-marijuana cases now wending their way through the Ninth Circuit would be greatly affected if those seeking to use or distribute medical marijuana pursuant to California law did not have to show that their liberty to do so was somehow "fundamental" — and if the government was forced to justify its restriction on that liberty. While wrongful behavior (license) could be prohibited, rightful behavior (liberty) could be regulated provided that the regulation was shown to be necessary and proper.

The debate over privacy has long been misguided. The question germane to our Constitutional rights is not "does [state action x] violate our right to privacy?" Although the ninth amendment could be construed to contain such a provision, it's not clear that it does and I'm sure real actual legal scholars, of which I am not one, would be able to tell you why.

The germane question in any case-- be it bedroom behavior of any kind, medical marijuana, or the right not to be videotaped in your home-- is rather, "does [state action x] violate our right to liberty?" Barnett does an excellent job splitting the difference between liberty and license, for which reason alone you should read the article. But the more important point he makes, from where I sit, is that the Constitution includes clear instructions on how to cope with questions of thou shalt/not when it comes to consensual, individual action, and those who would fight for liberties they find important would do well to stand on that firm ground.

It's well known that we do things our own way around here.

(Actually sir, that's not so well known. Nobody reads this blog. And you're about to do something that everybody's doing. Not to mention you're ripping off Kaus. -ed.)

Well, whatever. Since I've been reading at the steady clip of about three books a weeks for the last few months, I thought I'd share some recommendations.

• Jarhead, Anthony Swofford. Is to the Gulf War what The Things They Carried was to Vietnam, in every way possible, including being much easier to read.
• Founding Brothers, Joseph Ellis. Joe Ellis might be a liar and a cheat, but his history is good. For all of my degree-having and claimed expertise, it was this book that really made me begin to understand the men who shaped the United States' destiny.
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakame. The only points of comparison I have are Thomas Pynchon, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and perhaps Milan Kundera. Wierd, masterful, and breathtaking.
• The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler. I read this book about once a year. I still don't know what the plot is, but what is plot when the writing is this beautiful?
• Everything on Buckethead's Science Fiction List. I'm almost through it, and have not been disappointed yet.

And finally, beautiful irony. I think Buckethead likes more than I do science fiction written by scientists and science-advocates, e.g. Gregory Benford, Jerry Pournelle, Charles Pellegrino. Their writing tends to share a certain cant, much as police procedurals, outbreak novels, and spy novels do. It doesn't appeal to me too greatly, but I read it for passages like this one, from a point in the Pellegrino/Zebrowski novel "Killing Star" after the aliens have found Earth and tried to wipe it out but before anyone knows why:

"Got it!" he announced triumphantly. "The Intruders seem to be rebroadcasting what remains to this day the loudest, most highly synchronized electromagnetic shout ever sent out from Earth. On April 5, 1985, as part of a publicity effort to bring aid to the starving children of Africa, every radio and television station on every continent began brodcasting the same message at the same moment-- a composition called "We Are The World," by one Michael Jackson. I'm not trying to sound ironic, but I think the Intruders are trying to tell us what first drew their attention to our species."

"So this Michael Jackson became the first definitive sign of intelligent life on Earth," Sargenti said acidly. "And the Intruders are throwing it back at us. Whatever for?"

"To mock us?" General Stoff asked. "But of course that can't be true."

"So what did they do all these years?" Sargenti said. "Just wait around replaying this tune to themselves until they could build starships and come finish us off? They must be insane!"

"Or very determined music critics," Isak said.

I appreciate cruel symmetry wherever it exists.

Via the New Republic's weblog, witness the unstoppable majesty of Ari Fleischer, speaking at a news conference yesterday:

I think the American people continue to express their support for ridding the world of Saddam Hussein based on just cause, knowing that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons that were unaccounted for that we're still confident we'll find. I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are. [emphasis added]

We are but grasshoppers.

The fact that no person or news agency other than PBS' Frontline has been honest about the very simple reasons for going to war with Iraq, and that removing a dictator with things that go boom wasn't one of them. There are reasons, and then there are excuses.

Being told that it's a-okay to have me teaching part-time, but that I might be overqualified to work as a full-time instructor during the course of the interview for said full-time position. The fact that I won't get the full-time position because they'll probably give it to a jug-head who has no business being in a class-room as a student, much less a prof.

Realizing that other, similar colleges might consider me overqualified while knowing that the next step up will most likely consider me underqualified.

Referring to Hispanics (a term that the U.S. government invented) as though they were a single ethnic group. If that's the case, then the whole of the European continent, Britain, Ireland, the near east, and north Africa are all peopled by members of the same ethnic group.

Speaking of Africa as though it were a country and not a continent.

The scratch in my eye that keeps reopening to leave me in blinding pain every morning, including the one I had the aforementioned interview.

Not to sound like a populist demagogue, but banks have my goat at the moment.

The sad lack of free alcoholic beverages distributed by the government to people who work part-time and have difficulty acquiring full-time employment, or unemployed people with no employment, in a poor economy with a national unemployment rate over 6%.

Just the unemployment rate by itself, and that people are having difficulty paying rent and buying food, much less a luxury like booze.

Dealing directly and extensively with people I dislike, especially pain in the ass co-workers.

Women who turn their noses up at men who make less than $100,000 a year. That's roughly 98% of them in this town. The other 2% are already married to guys who make less than $100,000 a year, leaving me pretty much out in the cold.

That the odds of being shot, stabbed, or bounced repeatedly off the front windshield of a speeding taxi attempting to swerve through traffic with its passenger side wheels on the sidewalk are better than experiencing even moderately good fortune.

That by next year, the only good show on HBO will be Six Feet Under. An excellent series, but my life has so little. How 'bout just one more season of The Sopranos after this next one, Gandolfini? What do you say?

Finally, the very last thing that's annoyed me lately, television commercials where one character pretends to accept the meaning of a word or phrase spoken by another character except the second character deals in reality and the first character has his own language and lives in his own little world. Like the one where that rich asshole who made his money the old-fashioned way he inherited it and never worked a goddam day in his privileged life in the pickup with his gold-digging wife and whiny children with a sense of entitlement, hauling a fucking boat, the total monetary value of both vehicles being more than most people will see in their entire lives represents himself as a trucker to an actual trucker and the rich jag-off thinks he's a trucker because he has a fucking pick-up!

I almost feel better. Except something else will piss me off tomorrow, and I'll be back where I started.

Welcome to the Ministry of Minor Perfidy, your home for quality evil.