perfidy

Instapundit has a quite interesting post from InstaPundit's Afghanistan correspondent, Boston University Professor John Robert Kelly. It's a good read, but he had me at Beer and Loafing.

Over the last several days, I have conducted a rigorous scientific study of the effects of what I call humor on people I come in contact with. My methodology is brutally effective and simple. Whenever I say something, I closely observe the effects. A smile, and I incise a small cut on the inside of my left forearm. Laughter, a small cut on my left palm. A frown or other show of unhappiness or displeasure, a scratch on my right forearm. No reaction, a nick goes on my right palm.

After three days, my arms were a bloody mess, but I emerged from my trauma clutching close to my breast the dearly won knowledge that I am really, really funny.

In measuring the response of others to various statements of mine, I used the following criteria:

• Like with the famous purity test, technicalities count. So, a contemptuous smirk counts as a smile. Similarly, an embarrassed giggle counts as laughter.
• I have discounted all responses from my son, because he is not qualified to judge me and would be biased in any event.
• Finally, if someone says something like, "Shut the Hell up" while laughing counts as laughter, not displeasure.

The results:

In three days, I interacted personally with 39 people and one retard. In the course of conversation with these 39.5 people, I made 1204 distinct utterances. The breakdown of reactions is as follows:

• Laughter: 9.8%
• Smile: 47.7%
• Displeasure: 4.2%
• Stunned silence: 38.4%

(percentages may not add up to 100% due to rounding)

As you can clearly see, significantly more than half of the things that I say cause smiles or laughter. I am doing more than my share in bringing joy to the world. However, one must be careful not to read to much into the results of this study, as it was not designed to measure the mechanisms that cause the humor reaction in others, merely that they reacted.

Some interesting results from deeper analysis of the data:

My interactions with the retard skewed the results somewhat, as he laughed at every thing I said. However, only seven of the 1204 utterances were directed at him.

Male coworkers are significantly more likely to laugh at intentional attempts at humor than others.

Wives are significantly (drastically) less likely to laugh at intentional attempts at humor, but much more likely to laugh at utterances that were not meant to be humorous. Further study will be needed on this topic, because women often report in Cosmo surveys that sense of humor is an important factor in mate selection. This apparent discrepancy cries out for resolution.

Streetbums, though an admittedly small part of the sample, show displeasure at the least provocation, and were responsible for almost a third of the "displeasure" reactions. This may have something to do with monetary factors involved in our interaction, but this supposition is not fully supported by the data at hand.

Conclusions:

1. I am funny
2. Retards are easily amused
3. Bums need to lighten up when I don't give them a quarter
4. I need more neosporin

Steven den Beste has a long post on biological and cultural evolution today. Most of this I have no problem with, as it's a quite well written summary of the general state of the art. Toward the end though, he gets into talking about evangelistic and xenophilic cultures, and says that they are generally exclusive:

But in general, what you find is that some cultures tend to be dominated by evangelism and they don't tend to be as open to outside ideas. Others tend to be quite xenophilic and don't tend to be quite so evangelistic. You can also get some which don't tend to either, which are smug and self-absorbed and are so contemptuous of outsiders that they feel little need to spread their ideas to anyone else

I would argue that Western culture to a certain extent, and American culture to a much larger extent is both evangelistic and xenophilic. And the reason that we can be both is that we willing embrace new methods, techniques, knowledge (and people) from anywhere, and roll it into the constantly evolving culture that we then evangelize. It is a point of pride in American culture that we absorb any good thing without worrying where it came from - and the rest of the world certainly complains often enough that we are ramming the result down their throats.

[Update:] Got an email from Clueless, who said that the part two of the series already written, "went into exactly that."

I'm smart. (3300 words, and its only part one. Sheesh.) 

The headline: "A Good Idea With Bad Press".

That pretty much describes the DARPA futures market proposal. I've been thinking about it more and I still think the dead-pool aspects, though a minor part of the overall proposal, make this something the government shouldn't be doing. In short, I think it's a fantastic idea except for the part where you can win money when people die. Even though that is not the focus of the program, critics were able to seize on it and their objections were never fully answered.

This is because the pointy-heads at DARPA have a huge PR problem. It's their job, I realize, to come up with the craziest ideas they can, in the hope they will make the US and world a safer place. The problem is they don't have anybody on staff who knows how to take out the crazy-talk when speaking to the press. Just check out the nutty charts on the DARPA site. It's all cutting-edge research and conceptualization, but without a smiling avuncular face to explain it, the improbable aspects dominate. 

The good part is, now that DARPA has made the idea current and public, a thousand private nonprofit futures markets like the one Ross is currently programming will come into being. Rather than one government-run system, we could end up with many distributed markets-- quite possibly a better scenario than the one recently retracted by DARPA.

[moreover]: A TechCentralStation column by James Pethokoukis puts to bed my main objections to this program: "Indeed, who cares about a "yuck factor" or terrorists pocketing a few grand if thousands of lives could be saved?"

Fair enough. When I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I personally wouldn't feel comfortable buying futures in terrorist acts, but I think the benefits clearly outweigh the yuckiness.
 

No, we need not fear the invasion of North Korean troops disguised as insurance salesmen that the Weekly World News predicted a couple months ago. A recent article has noted that the US Congress is preparing to dramatically increase the number of North Korean refugees allowed to enter the country.

Some US officials are concerned that North Korean advocate groups are pushing the change as a way of "imploding" Kim Jong-il's regime. The advocate groups draw parallels with the fall of communist Europeafter huge refugee movements out of eastern bloc countries destablised the regimes there.

As far as I'm concerned, that's not a bug, it's a feature. Other concerns included the responses of China and especially South Korea; legally, North Koreans are considered citizens of South Korea and not entitled to refugee status in the US, though the article did not say whose laws made that illegal.

If we can get the Martians in charge of North Korea out of power, the world will be a far better place. And we can welcome the North Koreans as well - their southern cousins have been very successful here in the states. And Korean women are very, very cute in my experience. (Did I say that on the outside?)
 

This article, from the LA Times, shares some thoughts on America's role of Global Cop. In it, Mr. Spencer makes a useful distinction between the big peace, and little peace in individual countries around the world. America's position in the world dictates that it will be a, if not the, major player in assuring the peace of the world.

This big peace means keeping the seal lanes open for trade, deterring large scale aggression or territorial aggrandizement, and ending major threats. Assuring the peace inside any given country is at best optional unless the meltdown of that country has major repercussions outside its borders.

This to me sounds like a reasonable criterion for judging foriegn intervention. If we assume that the war in Iraq was part of a larger war on terror, it clearly fits into the big peace category. Our actions there were part of deterring or ending the threat fundamentalist or islamic terror represents to the peace of the world.

Liberia, on the other hand, is small peacekeeping. For all the horrific character of Liberia's civil war, the utter collapse of Liberia will have little effect on the rest of the world. National interest must come into play in order to set a lower bound to what makes us commit troops. Otherwise, we will become fatally overstretched.

Currently, the United States has exactly three uncommitted combat brigades. (for reference, a brigade is a third of a division, of which the United States Army has ten.) Approximately ten thousand troops are available for new missions, the rest are either in tasked to S. Korea, Europe, or are in refit/retraining on their way to being available once more. This means that if some great threat were to emerge that isn't the paranoid raving lunatics of North Korea, we're screwed. And we're even more screwed if a third of our available unallocated military strength is sent to Liberia.

At the end of the first Gulf War, the Army had 18 active duty divisions along with a number of independent brigades, and any number of support and logistics units. During the Clinton administration, with the acquiescence of the Republican congress, that was nearly cut in half. The Navy and Air Force suffered similar, though not quite so deep, cuts in their forces. Only the Marines, smallest of the four branches, survived nearly untouched.

The recent unpleasantness in Iraq has stretched our downsized military almost to the breaking point. During the conflict, we heard of the Carrier task forces that were on station for more than a year. The Army's third division just had its deployment in Iraq extended indefinitely. The reason that these forces were so overused is for one simple reason - there was nothing to replace them with.

While many have commented on the facts I just mentioned, few realize that overdeploying units have far reaching effects beyond the immediate morale of the troops in those units. The extension of the Third division's deployment basically was a decision to sacrifice one tenth of our army for immediate needs. Sure, we can use the 3rd now, but when the division eventually comes home, huge percentages of its soldiers will not reenlist. When these soldiers leave, they are not available to train the new soldiers who are assigned to the unit. It will be most of a decade if at all, before the 3rd is as effective as it was when it entered Iraq.

The civilian leadership of the DoD have spoken of reorganization as a possible solution, saying that by contracting out more logistical and administrative functions we can assign more uniformed personnel to combat units. This is probably true. But it cannot actually solve the problem.

There are only two solutions. Reduce the number and scale of military deployments by a) cutting back on peacekeeping and commitments to other nations and b) fighting far fewer wars; or increasing the size of the military to something close to what it was in 1991. (Alright, there's a third solution that is an average of the first two.)

For a variety of reasons, the first option can't solve all our problems. We can cut back on deployments by nibbling around the edges - the Sinai, cutting back in the Balkans and Central Europe, etc.; but there are certain core needs that must continue to be met. In most cases, American troops already in place are there for a good reason. Further, for all that you've heard me say that unilateralism is not necessarily a bad thing, I also feel that multilateralism is not necessarily a bad thing either. Cuttign back drastically on our military commitmentst to other nations will have deleterious diplomatic consequences, and possibly encourage aggression that is now deterred by the presence of American forces.

So, we need to not merely increase defense spending, we need to increase the number of combat troops that can be sent to the sharp end - so that we can meet the threats that the next couple decades may offer. If we burn up all of our combat strength now by overdeployment, we might have very little left by the end of the decade. Right now, we spend a little over 3% of GNP on defense. This is somewhat more than many other nations spend. Of course, the sheer size of the American economy makes that number seem very large when compared to others.

At the height of the cold war, we were spending double the percentage that we are now. Given our role of first team peacekeeper, spending say, 5% of GNP does not sound that unreasonable. Especially when that would give us six more army divisions, a couple carrier battle groups and several Air Force bomber and fighter wings. Which might even give us the real leeway to lower the bar for humanitarian interventions.

"I'm talkin' about friendship. I'm talkin' about character. I'm talkin' about--hell, Leo, I ain't embarrassed to use the word--I'm talkin' about... ethics."

Trivia: name that film!!

One further hint: "Take your flunky and dangle."

I bring up ethics because it occurs to me that my main objection, such as it is, to the Great Leader Board of Terrorism is an ethical one.

That is, I don't participate in dead pools, and find them distasteful. To be on, much less profit from, the date of someone's death, dances on the line between macabre and cruel. So with the DARPA Terrorism Futures Market. The good part about the aforementioned list of nutty predictions cited by Ross at Spiral Dive is that, if they come true, a thousand flowers of democracy bloom, puppies roll in daisy patches, and nobody gets blowed up.

But in the DARPA process, anonymous speculators would bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups. Winners would win based upon the deaths of people. Period. Say more air attacks happen, and such an event has been on the Big Board. Some people would collect winnings from a government-sponsored program because they were "lucky" enough to bet on the date of the next 09/11/01. Policy considerations aside, that is positively grotesque, no matter how predictive such a futures market may be.

For that reason, I'm very glad that DARPA has cancelled the program. Their brand of heady, amoral weirdness is better left out of the light of day.

Please note that I do find the general idea appealing, and the potential is fascinating. I'm rather excited to see what Ross can put together in the way of a sample system using less macabre predictions. But the government should not be in the business of sponsoring dead pools.

Following up an earlier post, the Defense Department has cancelled plans to set up the Policy Analysis Market. In a SkyNews article, US defence chiefs said they had hoped the market would have been a valuable tool in second guessing when terror strikes would occur.

But critics dismissed the move as "unbelievably stupid", "ridiculous" and "grotesque".

The good news is that things that are unbelievably stupid, ridiculous and grotesque are our stock in trade. Stay tuned as the Ministry will attempt to create its very own Terror Stock Market. Hopefully, we will have a broader coverage than the aborted PAM. Stay tuned for further updates.

If you have ideas for items that might be possible futures contracts (ie, with clearly defined, yes/no outcomes) send email to perfidy at perfidy dot biz. Likewise with suggestions on how this might be accomplished, and links to relevant articles, material and so on.

Several Haitian refugee children are now fingerless after a marathon session of hand carving new html as they moved the July archives from our old website to here, letter by letter. While the former website did not have the advanced capabilities as our enslickened perfidy webpage (for which several Uzbeki emigre webmasters were summarily executed), we have done our very best to integrate the old with the new. Old posts have been randomly assigned categories, so that your searches will be overwhelmed with meaningless and irrelevant commentary.

Since the Haitian "employees" have proved (tragically! sob...) so unsatisfactory, they will be liquidated and replaced as we prepare to move the June archives.

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I hereby notify all and sundry that I am gloating over the fact that reality forced Johno to admit that conservatism is the new hip, cool, rebellious thing for those wacky kids to be doing. As a side note, I find it ironic that whenever a limousine liberal hollywood gashead tries to parody the right, it ends up being adopted by (at least some) as a badge of honor - because they didn't really understand the right to begin with. Examples include the Tim Robbins entire movie Bob Roberts, and the "Greed is good" speech from Stone's Wall Street.

Bloomberg is reporting that DARPA is creating a online futures market for ideas.

Traders could bet on the likelihood of events ranging from the overthrow of a government to the collapse of an economy or the assassination of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

This is the Delphi boards from John Brunner's clasic book Shockwave Rider come to life. (On my top five sf novels list.) I have been trying for years to get someone who knows more about programming than I do to help me create this idea. One of my goals for finally getting webspace was to finally do it. Now the goddamn defense department has gone ahead and created it. (You can see the Policy Analysis Market here.)

[Update:] The NYT now has a story, and is claiming that "the White House also altered the Web site so that the potential events ... that were visible earlier in the day ... could no longer be seen." However, you can still see the images here, here, and here. A general article on Ideas Futures Markets can be seen here.

The purpose of the site is to leverage knowledge that many individuals each have about one area into knowledge of a whole area or sequence of events. DARPA says, "Prices and spreads signal probabilities and confidence. Since markets provide incentives for good judgment and self-selection, the market will effectively aggregate information among knowledgeable participants.'' It continued, "This approach has proven successful in predictions concerning elections, monetary policy decisions and movie box office receipts -- DARPA is investigating its success in defense- related areas."

The mechanism is to set up mutually opposing outcomes - each of which represents a futures contract that pays $1. For example, the question, "Will terrorists attack Israel with bio-weapons in the next year?" has only two possible outcomes. You can bet (purchase a contract on one side or the other.

The interesting thing is that it doesn't stop there. There are derivatives and hedge contracts as well, that serve to combine information. The example given on the PAM website is historical - two contracts, one on the likelihood of the collapse of the Jordanian monarchy, and the other on the likelihood of Saddam's regime lasting a month once the US began hostilities. In a matrix, there are four possible combinations of outcomes, and each of these represents a derivative. The price on each is in effect an aggregate prediction. Further there are hedge bets - for example, you could bet that if Saddam lasts longer than one month, then the Jordanian monarchy will collapse. If the first part of the prediction doesn't come true, you don't lose money, but you would gain significantly if the whole thing did.

In all, this is very similar in concept to the idea of the Delphi boards in Brunner's novel. The boards were organized more on the model of racetrack betting, but they did involve speculation of future events. And the underlying assumption was identical: if you ask enough people, even if they are unaware of the complete body of information regarding the question, the average of their answers will approximate the actual result. If anything, the DARPA concept is potentially more powerful than the Delphi boards, because it seems to allow combinations of predictions in infinite variety. In this manner, new questions conveniently packaged with answers can be discovered, rather than merely answers to questions explicitly asked. Further, the price mechanism could allow more responsive and informative predictions than artificially moving the odds in response to betting on the part of participants.

Needlessly to say, I think this is very cool. I am very upset that they got their first. However, currently the site is only aimed at the middle east. This could be expanded. I am now on a crusade to convince those with the knowledge I need that they must help me. Ross, you're first on my list.

As a side note, some Democrats were upset in completely predictable ways. Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota called it, "the most Byzantine thing I have ever seen proposed by a federal agency.'' But more to the point, he was worried about people's feelings:

How would you feel if you were the king of Jordan and learned that the U.S. Department of Defense was creating a futures market in whether you're going to be overthrown?

Well, seeing as I am always going on about the power of markets, I kind of have to be behind this idea. I am going to try to sign on when the site begins registration on Aug 1. Should be interesting.

My father suggests that I change my nom de net to "Buickhead." I guess it wasn't enough for me to wear a buick tshirt to his party last weekend.

Small Times is reporting that advances in rapid prototyping are bringing the idea of desktop manufacturing to reality.

Imagine your kitchen blender conks out the day you’re hosting a large cocktail party. You search an online catalog, decide on a model, and click the “buy” button. But instead of waiting three days for the appliance to be shipped to your door, a new kind of printer on your desk springs into action. Layer by layer, the miraculous machine squirts out various materials to form the chassis, the electronics, the motors – literally building the blender for you from the bottom up in a matter of hours.

This will revolutionize the most profitable sector of the internet economy: online pornography

For the Ministry's inaugural assault, I choose as our target this bunch of blinkered racist nozzleheads:

Parents: White Teacher Should Not Teach Black History Group Of Parents Protest District's Decision OBERLIN, Ohio -- A group of parents said they will fight a possible decision to allow a white teacher to lead classes in black history at Oberlin High School.

In this brief article from News Channel 5 in my hometown of Cleveland, we learn that civilization is dead.

"the parents said using a white teacher would send the wrong message to black students"

What good is civilization if we cannot all learn from the knowledge that our civilization has accumulated? Am I not permitted to study and ponder the life of Martin Luther King, because he was black and I am white? Will I be consigned to the outer darkness if I ever mention anything I learned to someone who is black?

This is complete and unremediated bullshit. One of my strongest memories from a black period of my life - the year that I dated Margaret, the psycho hosebeast - is the two day long argument I had with her over how much people of different backgrounds can actually communicate and understand each other. Margaret took the position that it is in fact impossible for a white male of privilege (subtext: me) could understand the inner life of a oppressed minority. (subtext: her.) This of course ignored the fact that she grew up in a house five times the size of mine, and her father was one of the five richest accountants in California. It also ignored the fact that she did not look in the least bit hispanic, and in fact got upset that summer because someone whose ancestors came from Finland could get a better tan than she could. But why bother writing books, explaining your life in print, studying the past if the end result is that no one except those who share your upbringing can understand what you say? This is parochialism of the most severe kind.

Of course, my mind was an open book. She could understand and benefit from my culture. She could criticize my history, beliefs and culture with impunity. And the great thing was, she was immune from any kind fo response I might make. If I offered some comment on her culture, well I just wasn't qualified to say anything. I could not judge her, or anyone like her, or anyone in fact who shared her political beliefs.

I hate being reminded of Margaret. Which is one more reason to hate these idiots in Oberlin. These parents have abandoned civilization. They are saying that black history is meaningful only when taught by black teachers. Is it meaningless otherwise? Does it hurt the self esteem of fragile black minds to hear the stories of Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington and all the rest from white lips? It would send the wrong message, they say.

What message do they want sent? Clearly, not a message that Martin Luther King would have endorsed. If the message is racial amity and togetherness, this action certainly isn't sending it. If we wanted to send a message of racial harmony and set a positive example, a white (or asian or hispanic or jewish or martian) teacher teaching black history would be ideal. And throw in a black teacher teaching Shakespeare for good measure.

The message that these parents want sent is a message of racial apartheid, only we're not allowed to call it that. It's only bad when white people do it. It is supreme irony that race conscious blacks and liberals are doing everything in their power to recreate the segregation and hatred that the civil rights movement labored and sacrificed to end.

Reagan Conservatism: The New Youth Protest Flavor Of The Year.

I've been an idiot. For years I have been insisting that apathy is the new form of youth protest. With the Boomer Generation firmly in charge of the media, entertainment, and politics, not to mention the families that produced the Youth Of Today, it's a logical conclusion. The Boomers still claim that all youth activism is inspired by their efforts in the 60s, rather cruelly robbing the younger generation of any credit for initiative, drive, or effort. And indeed, so much college protest seems to be warmed-over Aquarian sentimentalism. Consequently, I naturally concluded that, since the neo-hippies aren't so much protesting as rehashing a mis-remembered past, the Apathetic Majority must be the ones taking a stand, in their apathy, against their parents' generation and their monopoly on activism.

But I've been an idiot. No matter what the era, teenagers have responded to politics with apathy - a silent majority of people with better things to do with their time. We (I) tend to forget that fact, given that the Big Boomer Lie has rewritten the 60s so extensively that it seems that every single person who came of age back then was a hippie, nobody voted for Nixon, and the fields of Woodstock NY held countless millions.

But that's bullcrap. Most kids back then were living their lives quite content to ignore the heated political debates of the age. Hell, my own Boomer father spent the late 60s working construction, building hot rods, and drinking Gennesee Cream Ale. My kid sister had to turn him on to Bob Dylan, in 1998! His collection of Johnny Cash records, on the other hand, is quite extensive.

What I have mistaken for a new wave of intelligent apathy among The Youth Of Today is just new wine in old bottles - the same old not giving a damn, dressed up with an inborn ability to see through the sales pitches, spinning, and artifice that politics shares with entertainment and ads.

I've been an idiot not to have seen it sooner: the Big Protest Movement Of Today is Reagan Conservatism. It makes perfect sense. Alex P. Keaton is the perfect icon for a generation of activist youths whose elders harp incessantly on the virtues of the 1960s and the evils of Ronald Reagan. What is more natural than for politically inclined kids to take a look at what pushes their parents’ buttons and gravitate toward that? The hippies are their parents, for god's sake! How embarrassing! Mommm stop waving that sign! People'll see!!

And then they get to college, where far-left liberals outnumber moderate conservatives fifty to one on faculties (I'm making that number up), and the case is sealed. These kids, brought up being told "Liberal=DoublePlusGood" and "Reagan=Eats Babies" are now fed the worst kinds of Liberal Social Theory (whiteness studies, political correctness). Since kids these days have very fine bullshit sensors what with the constant advertising barrage they've grown up with, some see right through the Theory and rhetoric and reject it in favor of a vaguely populist, ostensibly pragmatic, conservatism. If they can find something genuinely appealing in the legacy of Reagan, good for them! I only worry that kids being kids they will idolize Ronnie, warts and all, and elevate him to the political godhead without actually considering the nuances of his legacy. (Well, of course they will... kids....)

I'm such an idiot. For further reading, the Economist has a good article this week on the topic (subscription only), and New York Magazine ran something about three weeks ago which I apparently cannot link to. The NY Times ran a story some months ago on the same topic. Frankly, punditry about the new turn in campus conservatism has been everywhere for the last year or so, and I've been an idiot for not putting two and two together. 

Previously, I had accepted the rise of conservatism on campuses as a sideshow in the larger funhouse of youth activism. Now I begin to see it's becoming the main attraction.

God help us all.

In a hours long graphic nightmare, the powers that be were whipping the third world children that toil in the perfidious dungeons for a dollar a month in wages, encouraging them to provide new category images for the glory of the ministry.

The previous images for Entertainment and Perfidy were replaced with newer, stronger, better images in a brutal Darwinian contest. Fighting their way to the top of the pile of nascent categories are: Perfidy Attacks, Perfidy Responds, Filthy Lucre and Holy Shit!

Some old posts may be recategorized, so pay attention.

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In this interview with John Gibson of Fox News, Hitchens discusses his recent trip to Iraq. In general, he belives that things are going well:

The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition.

And so if no one is willing to take the gamble, as they see it, of saying actually that it's going a lot better than it is, but it is. It's quite extraordinary to see the way that American soldiers are welcomed. To see the work that they're doing and not just rolling up these filthy networks of Baathists and Jihaddists, but building schools, opening soccer stadiums, helping people connect to the Internet, there is a really intelligent political program as well as a very tough military one...

I felt a sense of annoyance that I had to go there myself to find any of that out.

More balanced mainstream reporting on Iraq and on the democracy movement in Iran would be welcome.

Michael Novak has a thought provoking three part ((#1), (#2), and (#3)) piece on the root of the recent arguments between American and Europe. Me, ahm jus a simple rednek consuhvativ, I uhsly jus say them all You-Ro-Pe-Uns purely suck, and we all kicks ass.

Mr. Novak has a much more thoughtful commentary. His conclusion is worth pondering, "Despite their particular origin, furthermore, our common values have important meaning for all cultures universally, as many in other cultures have long been testifying. Others may not accept these common values wholesale, or in the same way that we do, but nothing in these common values belongs solely to us. Like all things human, they both have a particular historical origin, and also they are part of the common heritage of humankind." 
 

Pythagosaurus has pointed out that correctly, "thingie" is only used as a euphamistic term for the human male wang. Therefore, when referring to events in the wide world, the only correct usage is "thingy."

Don't let people tell you I never admit when I'm wrong.

"thingie" is dead, long live "thingy!"

Ross, over at spiral dive, is the only one who showed any interest in my police state post. (Scroll down to the second entry. Unreconstructed luddite Ross doesn't have permalinks for individual entries.) (Wah. Not that he bothered to tell me. I actually had to go read his blog, the bastard.) While I posted a version of this in his comments, I found it sufficiently interesting to post over here. (And remember, I do this for my amusement, not yours.)

Ross says:

The question is, can the system come apart? In the environment and in our political system I believe we are truly faced with the systemic question. Will the system survive the stresses we place upon it?

He then mentions the environment and the brittleness of our political system, as examples that we are skating on the edge of disaster. He continues:

Do you really believe that we can just muddle along on these issues? Do you really believe that there just can't be a downside, that nothing can and ever will befall this country? After all, nothing ever has.

(Read the whole post to get a sense of where he was coming from.)

Not normally one to kick at long term consequences, I have to say that sticking a knife in our economy now on the chance that we may prevent a 1 degree increase in the average world temperature over a century seems a little too forward looking.

In my post, I was talking about the ultimate collapse of government. But to answer your question, yes, I think we will muddle along. Every issue has its downside, every decision has its consequence. This is the core of conservative thinking - the law of unintended consequences. We need to defend the country, that costs money. The boomers want their entire existence subsidized. That will cost a lot of money. The government decrees that cars must be fuel efficient, so people by minivans and SUVs which are classified as light trucks. You can't have a solution just by wishing it so, or because it would be fair, or just, or whatever.

While political systems are not in general fast reacting - dedicated as they are to the status quo - the US has a government whose reaction times have been reduced to a world record generation or less. If something starts going wrong, we can take advantage of our adaptable system to put in a correction. The openness of the system allows people to organize to achieve this.

Over the last two centuries, history shows us that people have always felt that we were on the brink. Somehow we never went over, or maybe we weren't really on the brink after all.

There are problems. Likely, someone has a solution or at least a start on one. None of these problems are catastophic, at least that I can see. So unless we get hit by an asteroid, I think we'll be alright for the time being.

Unless we go to war with China

In the Pulpit, Cringely comes up with a new model for music sharing. But first, the money quote:

Technology has already changed the economics of music creation and distribution, but the record companies are resisting with every weapon they have. I would too if I was in their position, which is fat, rich, and having everything to lose.

His idea is insidious. Create a company which will buy many cds. Then, sell shares. Each shareholder is a co-owner of the large pool of cds. Under fair use laws, they may copy them. There is even a business model - each shareholder would pay a small fee to the company for each download.

Aside from the business benefits, what this would do to the mental equilibrium of the recording industry is just delicious.

In a move certain to generate sympathy for the embattled recording industry, the RIAA has decided to persecute not only those who download music, but their grandmothers, parents and roommates. As the AP reports:

The president of the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group for the largest music labels, said lawyers will pursue downloaders regardless of personal circumstances because it would deter other Internet users.

"The idea really is not to be selective, to let people know that if they're offering a substantial number of files for others to copy, they are at risk," Cary Sherman said. "It doesn't matter who they are."

This kind of judiciousness has always won the RIAA praise. "pour l'encouragement des autres." What a great idea.

In this article, Charles Krauthammer offers a good prespective on what we've accomplished so far in the war on terror. The part I found most interesting was this, on the recent hooforah over the uranium thingie. (Thingie!):

The fact that the Democrats and the media can't seem to let go of it, however, is testimony to their need (and ability) to change the subject. From what? From the moral and strategic realities of Iraq. The moral reality finally burst through the yellowcake fog with the death of the Hussein brothers, psychopathic torturers who would be running Iraq if not for the policy enunciated by President Bush in that very same State of the Union address.

That moral reality is a little hard for the left to explain, considering the fact that it parades as the guardian of human rights and all-around general decency, and rallied millions to prevent the policy that liberated Iraq from Uday and Qusay's reign of terror.

This has amazed me for some time. The left is the champion of the downtrodden masses, the oppressed and suffering. Why did they try so hard to keep these particularly downtrodden, oppressed and suffering masses from being helped? Even if they believe that Bush is satan incarnate, an alliance of convenience to help the oppressed might have been a good idea, then go back to trying to overthrow the evil republicans.

Many people have been whining lately about how the US is a Police State. This cry has come from several quarters - libertarians worried about privacy and surveillance, leftists worried about whatever they worry about, and fundamentalists trying to immanentize the eschaton. 

Somehow, I have failed to notice that I live in a Police State(tm). Certainly, liberty must be defended. I oppose parts of the Patriot acts, and worry about things like face recognition software and Poindexter's evil laboratory. (A well argued counterpoint to those worries can be found here.)

But what chance, really, is there that the freest nation in the world would come to resemble the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Cuba or even Great Britain?

I was pondering today, "Under what circumstances could there be a coup or totalitarian takeover in the US?" This may seem an odd thing to ponder, but this is how I spend my days.

I came up with several groups that would have at least the desire, if not necessarily the ability to rule the American people with an iron fist.

• Fundamentalists
• the Far left
• Environmentalists
• Charismatic Personality Cult

Another group has the ability, but in all likelihood will never have the desire: The US Military.

The problem with fundamentalists on one side, and with the leftists/greens on the other is that their positions are completely unacceptable to huge numbers of people on the opposite end of the political spectrum. It is unlikely that they could ever get close to the levers of power and pull a Hitler. If they have to get in legitimately, they never will, because the American people are naturally centrist, and because our political structures encourage that.

The only other way that we could have a takeover would for there to be some sort of monumental catastrophe that created a collapse in the existing government, creating a power vacuum that some small group could exploit.

The German Weimar government, weak as it was, was able to resist many attempts on its life - communist, the beer hall and other putsches, and so on. It was only when Hitler gained a significant popular following that we was able to take power - after being legally elected.

The Communists under Lenin were able to take power largely because of the total collapse of almost every cultural and political institution in Russia. And even then, they almost collapsed on several occasions.

The chance, short of massive asteroid strike, of the US government collapsing is very close to nil. Which rules out the shortcut to power.

I have ignored two options. One I mentioned above, and the other is creeping fascism. Libertarians talk about the ratchet effect, where once an invasion of our liberty is in place, it never goes away. In this manner, we slowly stagger towards totalitarian oblivion. I don't think this is really true. In many cases, repressive laws have been removed - especially after both world wars. The experience of the civil rights movement flies in the face of this. For every patriot act, there is a EFF and a hundred other organizations fighting against it. In the society we have, it is so easy to organize to oppose the actions of our government. These two forces will oppose each other, and I think in the end will cancel each other out.

The only chance of creeping fascism actually happening is if the government gets its hands on technology that allows it to suppress the people. David Brin talks about this in his book, The Transparent Society. But the flip side of that argument is that the government is notoriously slow to adopt technology. I work in the government, I should know.

In this era of amazing technological change, it is people in general who will be getting the cool stuff first. For all that the government might spend, there are hundreds of thousands of engineers designing for the consumer market. The military is slowly realizing this, and has begun in the last decade to gear its procurement toward the civilian market. Technology can be abused by governments (see A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge) but if it is also in the hands of the far more numerous public, that cancels out as well.

The last option, now that is the only one that at all worries me. Imagine a combination of a Huey Long's political skills, a Lincoln or Martin Luther King's oratory, the charisma of Washington, set in a Kennedy like charm and vigor (viga), and guided by a ruthless and amoral mind with power as its only goal. Imagine that he is a democrat, but a professed Christian - he is a hard core environmentalist, but calls it "stewardship." He calls for every kind of social program, but uses biblical imagery and Christian charity instead of neo Marxist and class warfare rhetoric. He satisfies the fundamentalists by calling for bans on pornography, but does not offend the left by castigating gays and lesbians. He is a foriegn policy hawk.

Someone like this could convince enough people, and get a big enough following to win an election. If enough of his followers got into congress, he could conceivably pull a Hitler, or at least a Hitler lite, and push through some sort of totalitarian agenda. Every policy could be justified in some part of American society's desire to control other people.

Other than that, I don't think it's possible.

Fox News* has a singularly moronic piece up about "Spike TV," the First! Network! For! Men! Beware my awesome fisking power!

"There wasn't that one place where [men] could go," explained Kevin Kay, TNN's vice president of programming and production. "I'm hopeful that TNN is the first place guys will check out, and they'll make it a favorite on their remote."

Right. Except for ESPN/ESPN2/FoxSports/FX/TBS, every network on weekend afternoons, and Shark Week.

Other men in the target audience haven't caught onto the new TNN yet, but are intrigued. Jim Smith, 41, of Indianapolis, said he'd check out the channel's car shows -- which will start airing in August -- and sports, like the full-contact basketball game, Slamball.

Slamball!! Alllll RIGHT!! Personally, I've been dying for a sport that combines the nonstop action of American Gladiators with the spectacle of the XFL, and is as compulsively watchable as BasEketball. Sometimes ferret-legging just isn't enough.

After "Lifetime: Television for Women" was introduced in 1984, other female-oriented channels like Oxygen and WE followed suit. But until TNN reinvented itself, there was no cable channel for guys.

Right. Except for HBO (pre Sex/City), Showtime, Spice!, the Playboy Channel, and the History Network. Dark days, yea verily.

Early Spike skeptics say some of its animated shows like Stripperella and Ren & Stimpy are clichés of what entertains men: sex and toilet jokes. But Lifetime, one of the most successful -- and criticized -- channels has weathered accusations that it stereotypes women.

"We listen to our viewers, not our critics," said Tim Brooks, Lifetime's executive vice president of research. "And what they're telling us loud and clear is that they find the kinds of programming we put on empowering."

<snark> Yeah, empowered to fix me a damn sandwich! </snark> Seriously... are we supposed to believe that women find Judith Light empowering?

"When we talked to guys in focus groups, one thing they said is, 'Don't stereotype us. We don't just want T & A. We're better than that,'" Kay said. "We have to be smarter, deeper and appeal to guys with interests across the board."

Which is why we get Stripperella, Ren & Stimpy, and Crazy Japanese People Hurting Themselves In Costume. Sounds about right. Except I don't see any show dedicated to the care and feeding of Apache servers, or anything about footwear. I love shoe shopping. There should be a show about shoes. I'm also really into the history of public transportation, and architecture. I'm a guy. Where's my show?

So far, Spike's lineup is all over the map, ranging from shows for frat-boy types to those for 30-something yuppies with families. In addition to programs like Stripperella (a cartoon about a stripper/crimefighter with Pamela Anderson's voice) and Slamball, the network airs a slew of James Bond and "guy" movies and male-oriented shows like Baywatch.

Translation: "We've got tits AND ass! Plus full-contact fake sports!"

Uhhhh... what happens if I fantasize about doing drivebys on frat houses, and loathe yuppies and children? Uh-oh... looks like the E! network for me.

If it goes the way of Lifetime, which despite its sometimes-schmaltzy reputation routinely scores top ratings, Spike TV will be a hit.

Wilson, for one, is already a convert.

"Women had like three different channels they could pick," he said. "Men had none. I got tired of watching Golden Girls reruns on Lifetime."

Dude, I didn't even know Golden Girls was still on! What the hell have you been watching? Take off the skirt, Sheila, and come watch the Brickyard 300 on my bigscreen. There's a whole world out there for you to discover, slugger.

* There was a "John Birch" reference here I have since removed. I put it in for fun, but upon reflection, decided it was too stupid to live. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that every well-written piece needs to be balanced by a jarringly incorrect statement. It's entertainment!!

As a follow-up to yesterday's post on Harold Bloom, here is a memo.

Dear Mr. Bloom:

You may be the only man in the English-speaking world qualified to write a book called "How To Read." That is a remarkable accomplishment. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily mean you should do so. Most of us learned how to read in elementary school, and Oprah is helping the rest along nicely. Nice of you to try though.

Thank you for your time.

Yours sincerely,
Pythagosaurus.

In response to this statement from Gephardt:

"George Bush has left us less safe and less secure than we were four years ago."

William Kristol had some things to say.

Are we not even a little safer now that the Taliban and Hussein are gone, many al Qaeda operatives have been captured or killed, governments such as Pakistan's and Saudi Arabia's are at least partly hampering al Qaeda's efforts instead of blithely colluding with them, the opposition in Iran is stronger, our defense and intelligence budgets are up and, for that matter, Milosevic is gone and the Balkans are at peace (to mention something for which the Clinton administration deserves credit but that had not happened by July 1999)?

Is it reasonable to criticize aspects of the Bush administration's foreign policy? Sure. The initial failures in planning for postwar Iraq, the incoherence of its North Korea policy, the failure adequately to increase defense spending or reform our intelligence agencies . . . on all of these, and other issues as well, the administration could use constructive, even sharp, criticism. But that we were safer and more secure four years ago?
Gephardt has made a claim that will come back to haunt him and his fellow Democrats...

There are plenty of legitimate grounds to criticize the Bush administration's foreign policy. But the American people, whatever their doubts about aspects of Bush's foreign policy, know that Bush is serious about fighting terrorists and terrorist states that mean America harm. About Bush's Democratic critics, they know no such thing.

This is some amazingly ridiculous thinking, from someone I've come to consider almost synonymous with ridiculous thinking. I think Kristol hits it here. If by some freak of nature Gephardt got the nomination, this would come back to haunt them.

But how many democratic candidates either believe or will say this in the future? If this is any measure of the Democratic leadership's mindset, they are in for a rude shock when they realize how far to the margins they've been pushed. And Gephardt is a centrist democrat!

It is not good for the Republic for one of its two major parties to go traipsing off into lala land. When you add in the conspiracy theories, virulant Bush hatred, and all the rest - you worry. Why can't we have a sane Democratic party, like we had back before '68?

Ralph Peters, an insightful military commentator (and former Army officer) said that the truism on military plans was reversed in the Iraq war - no Iraqi army was surviving contact with our battle plan.

The remarkable success of the war phase may have led to confidence that other plans were equally good. Of the things that Wolfowitz mentions, many could not have been easily foreseen, given the closed nature of Iraqi soceity before we arrived, and the precedent of the first gulf war.

Adaptability is key in winning wars, likewise in peacetime. As long as we don't delude ourselved, we will be able to adjust our plans and our thinking to meet problems as they are.

Once Iraqi oil starts flowing, that may reduce the financial burden somewhat. And 29.5 billion compared to the total US budget is not a deal killer.

Keep in mind though, Wolfowitz and others have often said that it would cost money, and problems would have to be detected and solved. This statement isn't the first. (Still welcome, though.)

Hopefully, the mudville nine will not fall over themselves criticizing the administration for problems that would have had to be solved regardless of whether they had been accurately foretold or not. Openness and accountability are all good, especially in this phase.

(As a side note, Clueless has a new post on why we never should have and still shouldn't reveal long term plans. This reasoning wouldn't apply to the civilian administration of Iraq, though.)

(Just kidding about that headline).

From CNN:

Pentagon admits Iraq mistakes

Back from a four-day whirlwind tour of Iraq, the Pentagon's number two civilian, Paul Wolfowitz, has admitted that many of the Bush administration's pre-war assumptions were wrong.

Among the things Wolfowitz says the U.S. guessed incorrectly was the assumption that some Iraqi Army units would switch sides; that the Iraqi Police would help maintain security; and that regime remnants would not resort to guerrilla tactics....

Speaking to reporters this week, Acting Army Chief Of Staff Gen. John Keane said it was entirely possible for the military to stretch its forces beyond the limits.

But, he says, "we don't want to do that -- so we're working very hard to avoid that."

The U.S. says it also had no idea how badly Iraq's infrastructure had been neglected over the past three decades.

The cost of putting the country back on its feet will be billions. According to the U.S. administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, it will take up to $13 billion "to rebuild and meet foreseeable power demands."

On top of that, he says, United Nations estimates indicate "we will have to spend $16 billion over the next 4 years just on water and getting decent water to the population."

My headline aside, I'm overjoyed that someone from the Bush Administration has the stones to address reality and the fact that it's Wolfowitz suggests that the NeoCon Leadership Coalition are finally willing to accept that they don't have all the answers. In any case, Wolfowitz's statement is miles better than the usual dissembling and selective amnesia. The best part is that the top brass admitting that mistakes were made means that the problems their mistakes created are being addressed.

The only bitter pill is the $13 billion dollar figure just for power, and the $16.5 billion dollar water bill. I guess by breaking the numbers down like that, they hope to keep us from adding them up.

But I'll put that aside for now. Despite my major problems with Bush's domestic agenda, I'm not so crazy that I wish for a continued cluster**** in Iraq just to spite the President. The faster Iraq gets back power, water, security, and stability, the happier I will be. Let's hope this only the first of many so-called 'honest' statements from Administration flacks that actually might deserve the name.

Mmmmmm... glasnost!

I'm a huge fan of Hunter S. Thompson. In my halcyon college days, I read all his classic books in one short stretch of the summer of 1995. I would sit in the shade after six hours of washing dishes for rich summer-band-camp brats, drink gallon jugs of Gin & Tonic, smoke big Mexican cigars until my teeth were brown, and read Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, F&L on the Campaign Trail, and his collected shorter pieces until I could no longer put together a coherent sentence, much less stand on my own. It's not the gin. It's the cigars that will get you every time.

For a long time, HST was one of the best topical writers in America. Even as late as 1995 he would occasionally emerge from his vague rehashing of old, er, hash, to issue a diamond-clear, cutting demolition of the latest Clinton foolishness.

So naturally I was very happy when HST started writing a periodic column for espn.com. Some of them were great-- HST is a huge football fan, and he usually has enough money riding on college basketball for him to write something weird impassioned.

But what the hell is this?!

In his latest piece, Welcome to the Big Darkness, Thompson rambles on about spine and hip replacement surgery, Kobe Bryant, and The Downward Spiral of Dumbness in America, and then makes it clear that someone's been slipping him massive doses of Ibogaine:

When I went into the clinic last April 30, George Bush was about 50 points ahead of his closest Democratic opponent in next year's Presidential Election. When I finally escaped from the horrible place, less than three weeks late, Bush's job-approval ratings had been cut in half -- and even down into single digits, in some states -- and the Republican Party was panicked and on the run. It was a staggering reversal in a very short time, even shorter than it took for his equally crooked father to drop from 93 percent approval, down to as low as 43 percent and even 41 percent in the last doomed days of the first doomed Bush Administration. After that, he was Bill Clinton's punching bag.

Richard Nixon could tell us a lot about peaking too early. He was a master of it, because it beat him every time. He never learned and neither did Bush the Elder.

But wow! This goofy child president we have on our hands now. He is demonstrably a fool and a failure, and this is only the summer of '03. By the summer of 2004, he might not even be living in the White House. Gone, gone, like the snows of yesteryear.

The Rumsfield-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.

Beyond that, we have lost the respect of the world and lost two disastrous wars in three years. Afghanistan is lost, Iraq is a permanent war Zone, our national Economy is crashing all around us, the Pentagon's "war strategy" has failed miserably, nobody has any money to spend, and our once-mighty U.S. America is paralyzed by Mutinies in Iraq and even Fort Bragg.

The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world.

The Stock Market will never come back, our Armies will never again be No. 1, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of our lives.

The Bush family must be very proud of themselves today, but I am not. Big Darkness, soon come. Take my word for it.

Guh? Wuzzah? Is this screeching hate-fit a clever satire of the far left's alternate reality, or has the Doc finally severed mind from reality and plunged into the Void?

That's the damned thing about modern aesthetics. Sometimes you can't tell the difference between art and bullshit.

According to this article, "One-third of Germans under age 30 believe the U.S. government may have sponsored the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington."

"Asked whether they believed the U.S. government could have ordered the Sept. 11 attacks, 31 percent of those surveyed under the age of 30 answered "yes," while 19 percent overall gave the same answer.

Die Zeit said widespread disbelief about the reasons given by the United States for going to war in Iraq and suspicion about media coverage of the conflict had fostered a climate in which conspiracy theories flourished.

"The news is controlled," 17-year-old Kenny Donaubaur was quoted as saying. "You could see that in the Iraq war. It doesn't seem to me that you get the full truth."

My instinct is that if you ask a 17-year old a question, you get a 17-year old's answer. I know at least one of our regular correspondents is in Europe right now... any ideas what gives?

[moreover] Matthew Yglesias nails it: "I believe that that's smaller than the proportion of Americans who believed that the Iraqi government was behind the 9/11 attacks, so you've got ill-informed people everywhere.... The point... is that people everywhere are shockingly ill-informed about almost everything."

Buckethead, John Cole posted recently about how stupid the Democrats are (actually, he posts on that like twice every ten minutes, but when you strike gold, you mine it, right?), and came up with a loooong list of things he is angry with the President over. I think he and you (and well, I) have some things in common.

There are so many damned things I am pissed off at this administration for that if it were not for the never-ending sniping on the left, I probably wouldn't even think about voting for Bush if there was a credible alternative. In no short order, these issues piss me off royally-

• the stand on stem cell research
• faith based initiatives
• continuing the war on drugs
• the fact that the WMD are probably in terrorist hands or in the hands of other unsavory regimes
• not placing enough pressure on Iran
• failing to increase domestic oil production
• the deficit
• caving on the education bill
• failing to push social security privatization
• caving to Democrats and trying to get the House to pass tax cuts for people who only pay payroll taxes
• putting too much pressure on Israel
• the deficit
• even toying with the notion of a prescription drug plan
• Ashcroft's intervention into state affairs regarding the death penalty and medical marijuana
• the ridiculous Homeland Security Department
• Norm Mineta
• not publicly addressing the failures of Clinton foreign policy, thus providing Democrats with an opportunity to blame Bush for everything
• the deficit and the bloated budgets

I can't say as I agree with all these-- I never do with John Cole-- but man! If a President can do all these things in direct contradiction of the principles he was elected to uphold and the opposition is still more odious to him...

In an interview in The Atlantic Unbound:

I left the English department twenty-six years ago. I just divorced them and became, as I like to put it, Professor of Absolutely Nothing. To a rather considerable extent, literary studies have been replaced by that incredible absurdity called cultural studies which, as far as I can tell, are neither cultural nor are they studies. But there has always been an arrogance, I think, of the semi-learned.

Ow!

Love him or hate him, Harold Bloom knows what he is talking about.

I almost wrote this: "His scholarship is motivated by the purest thing of all: love of the material. " Yet that's not right. Harold Bloom does love what he does, and what he studies, but so do many rat bastid deconstructionists. Good intentions are no indicator of results, in academia or anywhere else. No, Harold Bloom is just a fiercely articulate, extremely intelligent, discerning and iconoclastic scholar who just happens to have a sense of perspective that ecofeminism tends to lack completely.

The key to why this is comes in what Blooms says next:

You know, the term "philology" originally meant indeed a love of learning—a love of the word, a love of literature. I think the more profoundly people love and understand literature, the less likely they are to be supercilious, to feel that somehow they know more than the poems, stories, novels, and epics actually know. And, of course, we have this nonsense called Theory with a capital T, mostly imported from the French and now having evilly taken root in the English-speaking world. And that, I suppose, also has encouraged absurd attitudes toward what we used to call imaginative literature.

Bloom here makes a point that I have made far less gracefully in the past: capital-T Theory is a crutch. It allows students (and professors!) to move forward arrogantly in a state of semi-comprehension, reading a work only deeply enough to discern how they may fit it into the framework of their choice. Of course, Theory only exists because some French smartasses hoped to find a way to observe the universe "objectively," that is, divorced from the innate prejudices of their own perceptions. Bloom, rather ingeniously (but, sadly, not obviously), cuts through the problem of objectivity by reveling in the experience of reading and understanding-- he places the self, the way that literature works on you the reader, front and center. Maybe this is as it should be, because if all interpretation is ultimately bullshit, why shouldn't you stick to your own rather than use someone else's?

Anyway, read the whole thing. It's great. I leave you with one last bit:

Throughout the English-speaking world, the wave of French theory was replaced by the terrible mélange that I increasingly have come to call the School of Resentment—the so-called multiculturalists and feminists who tell us we are to value a literary work because of the ethnic background or the gender of the author. 

Feminism as a stance calling for equal rights, equal education, equal pay—no rational, halfway decent human being could possibly disagree with this. But what is called feminism in the academies seems to be a very different phenomenon indeed. I have sometimes characterized these people as a Rabblement of Lemmings, dashing off the cliff and carrying their supposed subject down to destruction with them.

This isn't scholarship! This isn't learning! This is lazy!

And this is why I will not go back for my Doctorate.

if this limited study is correct. Results suggest that a vegetarian diet can cut cholesterol as much as perscription drugs can.

Also, if this study is correct, my wife will live to be 250.

This probably shouldn't surprise anyone. The one constant in the last twenty years of diet wisdom, right behind "eat less and exercise" has been "eat your vegetables and whole grains, and don't eat that steak every single day." I eat oatmeal and soy every day, and I bet that if eggplant cuts cholesterol, the other nightshades can too (tomatoes, all peppers...). I am so set!! Vegetarian, yeah!!
Not that I don't love meat, mind you. Pulled pork. The New England delicacy they call "steak tips." Pork of any kind. Steak of any kind. Buffalo. Buffalo wings. Rabbit. Smoked pork. Lobster. Mmmmmmmm.... I love these things, but I'm just to poor to afford them regularly, and years ago adjusted to eating a vegetarian diet at home. It has worked really well so far, and for a few years my total grocery expenditures per week were between $12-$15(!).

The following is a public service announcement:
Any meat eaters, who through guesting or accident, are faced with eating soy products, note the following.

Tofu is fine. Sometimes it's even delicious. Just like sweetmeats, brains, or insects, you need to develop a taste for it. Quit your whining and eat it! Tempeh, on the other hand, tastes like rat droppings pressed into a cake.

Fake meats are generally excellent and can be eaten without compunction. Boca-burgers taste just like the real thing, and Morningstar Farms Soy Breakfast Patties are very good, if a little dry. Avoid fake bacon (as if you had to be told!).

However, certain products suck mightily unless you already like the taste of soy extract. These include: soy margarine (as if you had to be told!), soy ice cream (ditto, and ugh!), and homemade soy milk. The cartoned stuff is actually pretty good, and is great in cereals.

Another, unconnected thought. The one thing I miss most about not having meat in the home is being able to cook it. I'm a fairly admirable home cook, and sometimes I even aspire to greater things. But my skills are limited when it comes to meats. I can braise, I can grill like a beast, and I can roast, saute, and panfry. But it's all a little shaky. As a sad side effect, my saucing skills aren't so hot. By rights I should be able to whip up a hollandaise or bearnaise sauce without thinking, but I can't. I mean, give me a cookbook and I'm fine, but I'm a proud sort and like to work without a net. Not that this is such a big deal, but I'm a geek about every single thing I do in life and therefore this is an irritant.

Ah well. I still make a damn fabulous pork and beef chili.

Mark Kleiman has been all over a disturbing and little-known story.

It's official: the Bush Administration deliberately blew the cover of a secret agent who had been gathering information on weapons of mass destruction, endangering the lives of her sources and damaging our ability to collect crucial intelligence. (And, not incidentally, committing a very serious crime.) The apparent motive: revenge on Joseph Wilson, her husband, for going public with the story of his mission to Niger, which blew a hole in the Yellowcake Road story.

The facts of the case seem legit. I sincerely hope this wasn't a Nixon-moment.
 

The Washington Post is reporting that US Forces in Iraq have dental record matches and several eyewitness IDs on the two sons of Saddam. 

Meanwhile, in In Baghdad, people break curfue to celebrate the news that Uday and Qusay were pushing up daisies. It seems that the most common regret was that because they were dead, no further harm could be done to them.

Good riddance.
 

From Nordlinger on NRO:

Three Americans and an Israeli soldier are caught by cannibals and are about to be cooked. The chief says, "I am familiar with your Western custom of granting a last wish. Before we kill and eat you, do you have any last requests?"

Dan Rather says, "Well, I'm a Texan, so I'd like one last bowlful of hot, spicy chili." The chief nods to an underling, who leaves and returns with the chili. Rather eats it all and says, "Now I can die content."

Al Sharpton says, "I'd like to have my picture taken, as nothing has given me greater joy in life." Done.

Judith Woodruff says, "I'm a journalist to the end. I want to take out my tape recorder and describe the scene here, and what's about to happen. Maybe someday someone will hear it and know that I was on the job to the last." The chief directs an aide to hand over the tape recorder, and Woodruff dictates some comments. "There," she says. "I can now die fulfilled."

The chief says, "And you, Mr. Israeli Soldier? What is your final wish?"

The solider says, "Kick me in the behind."

"What?" says the chief. "Will you mock us in your last hour?"

"No, I'm not kidding. I want you to kick me in the behind."

So the chief unties the soldier, shoves him into the open, and kicks him in the behind. The Israeli goes sprawling, but rolls to his knees, pulls a 9mm pistol from his waistband, and shoots the chief dead. In the resulting confusion, he leaps to his knapsack, pulls out his Uzi, and sprays the cannibals with gunfire. In a flash, the cannibals are all dead or fleeing for their lives.

As the Israeli unties the others, they ask him, "Why didn't you just shoot them? Why did you ask the chief to kick you in the behind?"

"What?" answers the soldier. "And have you SOBs call me the aggressor?"

Heh.

You ask, you recieve. Bush is in general a conservative. And he is certainly vastly more conservative than android-American Gore, or any of his likely opponents in the next election. I was upset by his trade policies, when he went protectionist. I am upset with the prescription drug thingie. (Thingie!) I am bothered that he has not increased the size of the military. The tax cuts are insufficient. The airline safety agency is a nauseating joke, and the Homeland Security agency... sheesh. Arguably, this is because I am more conservative than he is.

While I have been occasionally frustrated, especially on matters economic; overall, I am happy with his performance in the war on terror. This is the overriding issue in this time, and I support him and the administration. The mudville nine have so far offered nothing that looks like a real foriegn policy.

I also support the administration because Rumsfeld is fucking awesome.

I also support the administration because it irritates people like Hesiod.

Buckethead, yesterday you wrote:

"Though I have consistently defended the the decision to invade Iraq, and in general support the administration (I am a conservative, after all). . . ."

Are you seriously suggesting that Bush is in general a conservative?! He sure isn't, fiscally, and culturally he sends decidedly mixed messages! Well, he IS pro-business in a big way.

Is that what you mean? (he asked innocently, knowing the dangled bait would be taken)

The 101st Airborne and Special Operations troops killed Uday and Qusay in Mosul. Two other Iraqis were also killed, according to this Centcom News release.

Drudge has posted the transcript of his appearance on Crossfire, and its some interesting stuff. Arianna Huffington possibly jumping in the California governor's race, politics and what not. But what was really interesting is the discussion of Mel Gibson's new movie. Drudge, and apparently most of those attending the small screening at Jack Valenti's place, were in tears at the end of it. Drudge said it was:

This is the ultimate film. It's magical. Best picture I have seen in quite some time, and even people like Jack Valenti were in the audience in tears at this screening. There was about 30 of us. It depicts a clash between Jesus and those who crucified him, and speaking as a Jew, I thought it was a magical film that showed the perils of life on earth.... those of us, every single person in there, and I'm not talking about tears, I'm talking total tears. It is something Mel Gibson stood back at the end and took questions for about an hour, and he is -- he told me he's tired of Hollywood. That this is it. He's going to do it. He's going to do it his way, and this film, I tell you, is magic. It's a miracle. It's a miracle...

Effusive praise. Drudge also didn't think it was anti semitic. But another interesting quote at the end was this, after the mention of Huffington in CA:

Well, it's going to be progressive with her and Schwarzenegger. I vote for Mel Gibson, however, to run for the governor of California, and he will correct that state in a heartbeat.

In support of Pythagosaurus' views on the RIAA. Well, some of them. Check it out. The King of Pop, el supremo freako, has something in common with our beloved Johno. Whooda thunkit?

Instapundit's alterego, Glenn Reynolds, had this to say about the utility of the Homeland Security agency. I agree completely:

Now Tom Ridge is proving me right, with a new plan to pervert Homeland Security from its antiterror mission to an unrelated one: "The initiative, dubbed Operation Predator, will target pornographers, child prostitution rings, Internet predators, immigrant smugglers and other criminals."

What can we learn from this? Two things. One is that the Department of Homeland Security apparently thinks the War on Terror isn't important enough to occupy its full energies anymore, and that -- in the interest of bureaucratic survival -- it's branching out into the kind of operations that have generally been associated with, well, ordinary law enforcement, even if the targets, in this case, are foreigners...

Since Ridge has, with this initiative, essentially admitted that Homeland Security is no longer urgent enough to occupy the Department of Homeland Security, let's abolish the Department, and pass the savings on to the taxpayers. Not only will this save money, but it will serve as a salutary warning to future Tom Ridges that overstepping the bounds of a mandate is politically dangerous.

Of course, that isn't going to happen.

In a recent comment, NDR (loyal reader #0010) says:

However I think that people examining the current scandal need to reflect how scandals are, in general, seldom about specific actions and events but the things they represent. The hubbub over Iraq-Niger focuses the disappointment felt as few of the war?s goals have been met: the Iraqis are not thankful to the US, their plight has worsened, US troops will not be coming home soon, the US commitment to nation-building will be extensive, Hussein did not pose the threat that the government claimed, and that the intelligence community cannot be relied on to safeguard Americans and concentrate activities related to the war on terror itself.

He is certainly right that the people who are exercised over this scandal probably don't really care about the specifics, and likely don't know where Niger is either. Further, I think that Pythagosaurus' complaints about transparency get to the rest of the issue. The administration, while not lying, has not laid out the case very well, and seems reluctant to talk about why it's doing what it's doing.

If this hubbub is indeed the result of this discontent over the factors that NDR mentions, how justified is it, and why are they complaining?
Much has been made of the discontent of the Iraqi people. Most Iraqis probably want us to go home. But the question is really when - right now, or after we have contributed to the formation of a responsible government, fixed the infrastructure, and generally settled things down. I think most Iraqis would prefer the second option. From reports by reporters actually in Iraq, the word is that they are very happy that Saddam is gone, and they recognize that we got rid of him. They are thankful for that. But, like anyone, they don't want to be ruled by someone else. Happily for them, we don't want to be there forever. Much of what is reported as ungratefulness could more properly be termed impatience.

As for claiming that their plight has worsened, I don't think you can make that argument. One, no more brutal fascist dictator. If their electricity went out for a while, that is a hardship - but its back on now. And certainly lacking electricity does not compare to mass graves.

As for Saddam not posing the threat that was claimed, this is closest to being true. But keep in mind how certain elements would have reacted if Bush had said, in effect, "Saddam is a weakling, his army is pathetic, and we are going to go through him like shit through a goose." He would have been called arrogant (well, more arrogant) and contemptuous of Islam and whatever. He was right to err on the side of caution - he said be prepared for a long war, but we're gonna win. Nothing really wrong there.

As for the WMD part of that equation, see my other posts.

The administration has always said that this would be a long war, and that Iraq was but a single aspect of it. Nation building was not a surprise, nor was the lengthy tours of duty for our soldiers. Since the end of "official" hostilities, the media have reported over and over the attacks on US servicemen, and military morale problems, and so on. But considering that 25 million people who until a couple months ago were under the heel of a brutal dictator are now free - they are behaving well, all things considered. Even though there are several attacks a week, this represents an absolutely miniscule portion of the Iraqi population. And, what the media doesn't mention, most of the attacks are in Saddam's home territory. (I plan on addressing the manpower issue sometime soon.)

Finally, we have known that we couldn't rely on our intelligence services since the early morning of September 11, 2001. That nothing serious has been done is abominable.

The administration has failed to tell people the things that they should know. But overall, things are going well in Iraq. The media is going to report on every soldier or marine killed, but the administration needs to make the case better that progress is being made in other areas. Whenever a problem that the media is bleating about is solved, they don't report that, "Hey, there's electricity now!" Instead, they move onto the next disaster.

So, back here in the states, people are upset about the sixteen words in the SOTU because Bush screwed the pooch in Iraq and is generally falling down on the war on terror. Since that isn't really the case, they are either misinformed, for which we can blame both the administration and the media, or they are pursuing purely partisan advantage by picking at nits.

I think that there are serious issues that can be raised, issues that for the Democrats might have a lot more traction with the general public than, ?Bush lied.? For one, the Saudi thingie. Others include the Homeland Security department, the Patriot acts, and so on. The war happened. If Democrats want to be taken seriously on National Security, they should talk about how we are going to rebuild Iraq, where to go next in the war on terror, and how to apply our principles in a coherent foreign policy. And the current administration needs to be a lot more open about what it is doing.

Reason and Philadelphia-area papers are reporting that on the recommendation of the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security, the Philadelphia Eagles have banned outside food from Lincoln Financial Field, home of the Eagles. Food, it appears, is a hazard to us all.

Philadelphians are furious over this development, as bringing hoagies to the stadium is almost as much a Philly tradition as is soul music, patriotism, and knuckledragging stupidity (Pittsburgh rules! (I love my wife!))

Well, I guess I can let this one go as long as they don't ban D-cells, stupid headgear, and glass bottles from Cleveland Browns Stadium. Right?

I'm a pretty big fan of Howard Dean, and it frosts my cookies to see the Democratic Leadership Congress dismiss him as "unelectable," by which they mean "not on our payroll."

The New Republic recently ran this "agin' him" piece by Jonathan Chait. I thought it was a mildly foolish article that raises a few good points about the dangers posed by the Dean campaign and the potential for his nomination to candidate to go horribly awry (by "horribly awry" in this context I mean Bush winning in a stroll).

Then I forwarded the article to my friend Bootsy, and received in response this gentle fisking:

Prefaced by: I am a raging Deanite:
1. Dean's followers are NOT largely liberal. This is a fallacy perpetrated throughout the media. (resisting urge for conspiracy theory...)
2. Dean does not diametrically oppose Bush. He was opposed to the war, not opposed to all war. He makes a strong case for where we do need to use our military strength and where we do not. In fact, I really can see why Republicans can support Dean. A lot of the issues that the Republican party says they stand for but have lately ignored, especially fiscal responsibility and state's rights, are solid with Dean.
3. I think they underestimate the public's dislike for the Patriot Act.
4. Dean's positions are not unpopular. Fiscal responsibility, pro-choice, health care reform, education reform? Pretty mainstream to me.
5. As a vermonter, I take offense at their generalization of Vermont politics. This is a state with only two gun laws, civil unions, practically socialized school funding, and a very large libertarian element. It is diverse, not extremely liberal. Just ask the guys my dad has breakfast with about Hillary Clinton.

...all this "too liberal" bullshit is code word for "gay lover" and the DNC is just really disgusting me lately. Not only are they distancing themselves from their base but their strategy has proven that it does NOT win elections, I think they are too stubborn and power hungry to give it up.

All true. And all why I think Dean has a better shot than many people give him credit for at winning the primaries and the general elections. He's irascible, he's smart, he doesn't take or give any BS, and he consistently does his homework, thinks about what he wants to say, and admits when he doesn't have a firm answer to a question.

It's like he's from the moon or something.

(And I would like to say, Bootsy is dead on about the "too liberal" epithet.)

Brad Templeton has compliled a history of the word spam. Joe-Bob says, "Check it out."

Every news source in the world is reporting this, so I will randomly choose... ooooh, MSNBC:

"The likely death of Saddam Hussein’s two powerful and notorious sons, if confirmed, would represent a withering blow to Iraqi Baath Party loyalists who hope to wait out the American occupation and restore the regime to power.

That's great! It's taken Bush months to beat this level, and it's worse for him that he sometimes forgets to save his game. 

All that remains is the Big Boss Level. I hope Bush remembered to defeat the Tikriti Dragon and get the Spirit Key-- he's gonna need it! 
 

While I'm on an Instapundit kick, he excerpts a report from the Telegraph saying that Newsweek says that a joint congressional inquiry found that Saudi Arabia was deeply involved in the 9/11 attacks. (How's that for a chain of references?) The administration has apparently not released an entire section of the congressional report that has all the juicy details of how individuals working in Saudi consulates were intimately involved in the plot.

This, not to put to fine a point on it, is wrong. The administration should not be coddling the Saudis for at least ten reasons right off the top of my head, but certainly not if they were involved in the worst assault on America since the Second World War.

Though I have consistently defended the the decision to invade Iraq, and in general support the administration (I am a conservative, after all) I most certainly do not approve of this. This information needs to be disseminated, the American people (and everyone else, for that matter) need to know. There are good reasons for what we are doing in the war on terror. But it should not be me (God forbid) or the USS Clueless or other warbloggers pointing this out. The Bush administration should be out in public, letting us know and making the case for taking the fight to these terrorist sickos.

And while I'm on a roll, I hear that Adm. Buster Poindexter's TIA got its funding zeroed by the Senate. Good. The Patriot Act: I, II and N is a bad idea. Not increasing military funding or the size of the military when you're in a war is a bad idea. Not taking a really close look at how our intelligence system is working (and in terms of human intelligence, not working at all) is a very bad idea. There are questions, and I think the administration should be a lot more vocal about either answering them (if only to shut certain people up) or saying flat out that we don't know the answers yet. And with the Saudis, its time to call a spade a spade.

Instapundit is reporting that Reuters is reporting that American forces may have put the finger on Uday and Qusay Hussein. If true, this is very good news.

"There was a shootout in Mosul, and there is a number of dead people and a couple of them could be Uday and Qusay," the official said, but added it had not been definitively confirmed.

I think those two would qualify for just about anyone's pre-decease list. 

[Update] MSNBC has a bigger story, and mentions that sources believe there is a 90-95% chance that the two brothers have gone to their eternal reward.