perfidy

We never should have stopped at Yorktown. We never should have given those poxy damned smelly and toothless gits their own nation, their own empire, their own sovereignty. We had the men, we had the ships, we had the momentum. Washington should have pressed on until London, York, Newcastle were all firmly in American hands. That way, we would never know the shame of the country that made us great doing something as shameful as this. Decay is an ugly thing, whether it's a tooth or the collective tastes of a sovereign people.

Wonderwall? If Wonderwall why not something truly vile like Robson & Jerome or 2-4-6-8 Motorway? The only thing worse than a bad job is a bad job done half-assed.

ht: Michele

Something's been on my mind lately and, lacking any other material to post, might as well throw it out to both our readers:

What is the most over-used music in film?

I'm thinking specifics here, not the every-time-something-happens-in-Australia-cue-the-didgeridoo type of observation, or the swelling-string-section-in-each-cloying-love-scene type.

For my money, it would have to be everything from The Nutcracker, with second place split between James Brown's Papa's Got a Brand New Bag and I Got You.

The man who they call Deep Throat has reportedly come forward.

W. Mark Felt, 91, who was second-in-command at the FBI in the early 1970s, kept the secret even from his family until 2002, when he confided to a friend that he had been Post reporter Bob Woodward's source, the magazine said.

"I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat," he told lawyer John D. O'Connor, the author of the Vanity Fair article, the magazine said in a news release.

Wow. Even so, I still prefer to think of Deep Throat as two cute blondes with weed cookies.

What a frustrating weekend! I lost [an insignificant but irritating amount of money] to an 11 year old playing Texas Hold 'Em. Really! (Poker discussion to follow... nonfans may skip ahead to the part where I watch Star Wars]. I play a very tight game and seem to have a good head for odds and a good sense for strength at the table. I was able to outlast all the adults in this way, only to come into heads-up mode against the 11 year old son of a friend of mine. Aided by his dad only in that he kept reminding the kid not to show his cards, the kid's strategy amounted to "play every hand, raise every turn." Literally. The kid went in on every hand, no matter how weak, and bet up on every... single... opportunity. This is a terrible strategy to live by because it depends 100% on luck, but it does have the advantage of being potentially disruptive to everyone else's game. The kid's automatic raises amounted to a constant gut-check, driving players either to fold or overbid marginal hands, and his lack of strategy meant that everyone's attempts to control momentum went for naught. And because the kid got lucky on every... single... river card, he just kept on winning. it came down to me and him.

Me: pocket 5s. Him: 2-8 offsuit, the second worst starting hand in the game. I go in small before the flop. The flop gives me another 5 and some garbage; a 3 and a 6. At this point I go all in, knowing that trying to play mindgames against the ATM sitting across from me would be silly. He calls, leaving himself with only 10 chips or so. I win this, I'm thisclose to winning it all. The spawn is trash talking about all the toys he's going to buy. The turn is an 8. I let out a breath. Junk.

And the kid drew a 4 on the river to give him the damn gutshot straight starting from one of the weakest hands in Texas Hold 'Em. I lost to the Dorchester Kid.

Then, on Monday, the power went out four times during Revenge of the Sith. They finally gave me my money back, but I figure they should have kicked in a few extra bucks for skipping over the fight scenes and making sure to restart the show in time to show me all the "I love youuuu!!!!" parts uninterrupted.

So... how's it end?

Mrs. Buckethead and I are leaving for the wilds of central Delaware this weekend. In fact, I'm heading home as soon as I finish this post. The reason? We are going to a mini-burn. You may have heard of the big burn out at Blackrock, NV every August. Well, this is a similar but much smaller twice a year event with a tiny, tiny fraction of the attendees.

About 600 or so people will gather at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Motorcycle Club ranch, and have themselves a very nice time, in beautiful weather, with lots of booze and other intoxicants. Mrs. B and I will be able to partake for the first time in two years, as my mom is on the road from Ohio as we speak. She, my aunt and cousin will be taking care of Sir John-the-not-quite-ready-for-that-sort-of-entertainment for the long weekend.

For the first time since the little nipper was born, the wifey and I will be free to have a good time without worrying about the boy choking, falling, buring or otherwise injuring himself. For the weekend at least, "Free at last, free at last!" Unless you have kids, you have no idea how good it feels to be rid of them, if only for a little while. Much as I love my son, and love spending time with my son; Daddy needs a couple days to go away, be irresponsible, and get well and truly pickled.

I do not plan to be asleep or sober for the next 72 hours.

See you Tuesday.

It has long been an article of faith with me that no matter where you go in the United States, you can find trailer trash there. Before I moved to New England, I perhaps thought that it was a mix of dour upright fishermen who say "ayuh," big time lawyers, and witty, urbane literate types who sit in Edwardian chairs discussing Updike over snifters.

Boy was I wrong. My downstairs neighbors in the first apartment I lived in when I moved to Massachusetts (for the second time) nearly burned the house down the week before we moved in; one of them "fell asleep" on the couch with a lit bowl of reefer. Our next door neighbors never conversed wittily about Updike, or even King. Their nightly 3 AM conversation went something like this:

Him: F*****CK YEEEW!
Her: AAAAH F*CK YISELF!
Him: I HATE YEEEEEEEEEEEW YOU MOTHER****AH!
Her: I'll F*KING KILL YOU YOU **** ******* *** ********* *** ****BAG!!
Spawn: EEEYAAAAAAH! EYYYAAAAH!!!! *STOMP* *STOMP* *STOMP* *STOMP*
Him: F*ck this, I'm leaving.
Spawn: EEEYAAAAAAH! EYYYAAAAH!!!! *STOMP* *STOMP* *STOMP* *STOMP*
Her: Fine! You can't get by without me, you lazy **** ******* *** ********* *** ****STAIN!!!
Him: Oh yeah? F********CK YEEEW!
Her: F********CK Y*******U! I HATE YOU! I F***ING HATE YOU YOU **** ******* *** ********* *** ****!
Spawn: EEEYAAAAAAH! EYYYAAAAH!!!! *STOMP* *STOMP* *STOMP* *STOMP*

The summers were even better, because they'd do this in the parking lot so everyone could hear, and since school was out they had no problem keeping the kid up past her customary 4AM bedtime.

The most dismaying part is that I left Ohio precisely because I wanted to get the hell away from people like this. Still more dismaying is that proof accrues daily that people are the same everywhere. Whether it's small potatoes like kids making lightsabers from flourescent bulbs and burning gasoline or world-historical statements of human fallibility like the various genocides that still continue, there's no getting away from the idiots.

More surprising yet is how people everywhere really are the same deep down. Some might see this as proof that some day all humankind will clasp hands and sing together in perfect harmony in a spirit of love. We at the Ministry tend to see this as proof that we're all screwed. Example: read the following and see if you can tell where the incident described took place. Answer below the fold.

A fatally injured man pulled a crossbow arrow out of his torso and taunted the man who shot him, saying: "Is that all you've f... got?"

Soon afterwards, Anton Nauer collapsed and within hours he was dead from being shot by Dean Pender in a late-night confrontation at Pender's ----------------- home.

Hayden Keith McDougall, 19, unemployed, and Jared James Little, 20, a -------, of ----------, deny the charge.

. . . . . . .

During the previous evening there had been a series of incidents, including a window being smashed at the home of Pender's former girlfriend, leading to the trio allegedly arming themselves with num-chukkas and a knife.

"The allegation is that Nauer proceeded onto the property, bearing a set of num-chukkas, and there was an altercation with Pender, who obtained a crossbow and fired a fatal shot at Nauer," Beaton said.

"Nauer died in hospital some hours later and the allegation is that McDougall and Little went with Nauer and were armed when they went on to the property."

Pender's sister, Sarah Pender, told the court she arrived home shortly before the fatal shot. They were outside moving cars so they could close the gates on the property when "a ------- guy", who she now knows was Nauer, arrived with McDougall and Little.

"They said, `Do you know where Dean Pender is? Get him here'. They said he'd smashed Natasha's window," she said.

"By then (Dean Pender's friend) Shaun Lawrence had come down the driveway and was carrying a pole of some kind. He said, `What's wrong, what have you got against my boys?'

"Shaun's younger brother hopped out of the car and started walking over. The ------- guy said 'Get on your knees or I'll slit your throat.' Shaun started getting angry because of what the guy said to his younger brother.

"The guy pulled out num-chukkas and started swinging them around and started getting really aggressive. By this time Dean was down the driveway and they all saw him and started yelling, 'You're going to f... pay.'

"They started running towards Dean and the guy was swinging the num-chukkas. I got pushed to the ground by the ------- guy with (McDougall) right behind me.

"They were yelling 'You're going to f... pay, Pender. We're going to get you.' (Nauer) said `We're going to f... kill you.' McDougall had a knife in his hand. It was like a hunting knife.

"I was freaking out. It all happened so fast – they were running towards Dean and I got pushed to the ground. I was getting off the ground when it happened. Dean said 'Get back or I'll f... shoot. Get back. Get back.' That's the only time I heard him yelling.

"Then the ------- guy was pulling out the crossbow (arrow from his torso). As he was pulling it out, he said 'Is that all you've f... got?' He handed it to Shaun then he and the two [other] guys (McDougall and Little) started taking off up the driveway."

Crossbows? Frigging numchucks? Public knife fights at a girlfriend's house? Where, indeed?

Florida? Nope.
New Jersey? Nope.
Detroit? Gettin' colder.

The incident in question happened in the nicest country on earth, New Zealand.

Tom Wolfe once said that Fascism is forever descending on the United States, but that somehow it always lands on Europe. It seems that President Chirac will proceed with Euro-integration and the EU constitution regardless of how the French people vote. The EU Constitution looks like a very bad thing to me, and it seems that a majority of voters in France and the Netherlands will be agreeing with me. Since the rejection of the constitution by any of the member states will sink it, this is bad news for the Brusselcrats. However, they are urging the administrations in France and the Netherlands to run the referendums again and again until the masses get the right answer. Too bad they don't have the option of recalling the people and electing a new people.

Perhaps the Euro project is heading for the ash heap of history. But if the Euro constitution is put in place over the will of the actual people of Europe, the end result will not be good for them, or for us.

Via Kausfiles, we find this really, really interesting bit of political analysis that I don't have time to discuss right now.

The report of the civil engineers examining the World Trade Center attack came to the conclusion that thousands of lives were spared that might have been lost because people ignored the recommendations of emergency services and fled the building in a self-organizing and effective non-panic..

We know that US borders are porous, that major targets are largely undefended, and that the multicolor threat alert scheme known affectionately as "the rainbow of doom" is a national joke. Anybody who has been paying attention probably suspects that if we rely on orders from above to protect us, we'll be in terrible shape. But in a networked era, we have increasing opportunities to help ourselves. This is the real source of homeland security: not authoritarian schemes of surveillance and punishment, but multichannel networks of advice, information, and mutual aid.

This gets into what I (and of course many others) have been saying for some time - that an informed public (and an armed public, but that's not the point here) is the first and best line of defense against terrorist attacks. Note well that every major success in the WoT on our soil was won by ordinary citizens, not government agencies or law enforcement. (The shoe bomber, the wackjob at LAX, flight 93, the DC snipers.) In the case of the DC snipers, those assholes were nabbed despite the best efforts of Sheriff Moosehead and his assholes to conceal the very information that, once leaked, led to their arrest within hours.

An interesting exercise in simultaneous fiction and public health awareness.

British doctors writing in the British Medical Journal are calling for a complete ban on all long kitchen knives, saying that half of all stab wounds are caused by those deadly kitchen implements.

They consulted 10 top chefs from around the UK, and found such knives have little practical value in the kitchen.

Good to know that they got everyone involved in the process.

They argued many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.

And if there aren't any knives handy, they'll grab something else.

The study found links between easy access to domestic knives and violent assault are long established.

What? There's a link between the existence of swimming pools and drowning deaths. Violent assaults usually happen at home.

The researchers say legislation to ban the sale of long pointed knives would be a key step in the fight against violent crime. "The Home Office is looking for ways to reduce knife crime. We suggest that banning the sale of long pointed knives is a sensible and practical measure that would have this effect."

Practical? Are they going to register the hundreds of millions of already extant knives?

Nutjobs. First they came for the guns...

Shamia Rezayee, a veejay on a newly resurgent Afghani TV network, is dead. Why? They think it's because of her job.

two months ago her bosses were forced to dismiss Ms Rezayee, 24, under pressure from conservative mullahs who were disgusted by the “unIslamic values” of her music show.

This week she paid for her unconventional choices with her life: she was shot dead in her home by an unknown assailant.

Police said that they believed the killing was linked to her former job as a “veejay” — video journalist — on Hop, which was broadcast by Tolo TV, one of a number of private stations set up since the fall of the Taleban.

I just finished Asne Seirstad's The Bookseller of Kabul, in which the European journalist author lived with the family of a bookseller in Afghanistan for a few months. Although the book is eye-opening for other reasons in that it is a doorway into a culture and civilization that the Americans never see intimate details of, it is positively eye-popping for its descriptions of how women are treated. In the words of Jeffrey Lebowski, "he treats objects like women, maaan!" The bookseller's first wife, tossed over for his second wife, is reduced even further to cipher status within his household, newly subordinate to the illiterate and bubbleheaded hottie from the sticks. The bookseller's youngest daughter, an intelligent girl who learned English while in exile in Pakistan tries to find some way to teach English in a nearby school while still seeing to the every bodily need of all nineteen people in her household. She is the last one to bed at night and the first one up in the morning, and she had better make sure breakfast is waiting when everyone else stirs. Her hopes fade when she is married off- to a nice enough man, to be sure, but no married woman is going to go teach English. It's makin' babies time. Throughout the book, women are treated as chattel, as ciphers, as halfway to slaves - and this in the house of a literate, urbane and worldly patriarch with modern inclinations. Though the book is ostensibly about the bookseller and his travails, and about half the book is in fact spent discussing his troubles with the Taliban, his business, and his aspirations, Seirstad clearly finds more compelling material in the lives of the women around her. And this is probably as it should be as the book ends up pitting the struggles of one man to rescue his country from the dark ages against his struggles to maintain the dark ages in his own home.

As Hamid Karzai said on September 10, 2001 when hearing of the death of Northern Alliance leader (and last hope against the Taliban) Ahmed Shah Massoud, "what an unlucky country." (If there is a prize for bitter historical irony of the century, we have probably found our winner.) I recently finished Steve Coll's Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 as well, and the political picture of the country that emerges is one of an ancient and noble set of tribes crippled by internecine rivalries, Islamism, greed, and the distorting effects of international meddling. The CIA and Pakistani secret service took turns acting as unwitting catspaws for each other with the effect that by the time the Taliban came roaring across the plains they were driving nice new white Toyota extended-cab pickups courtesy of Langley, VA and invading areas denuded of worth and reduced to chaos courtesy of equal parts Moscow, Langley, and Islamabad. Although Coll's history is necessarily myopic, focusing as it does on the arc of the CIA's involvement in the country, I learned a lot in the process about the texture of Afghanistan's geography and ethnography and that part of Asia in general. Did you know that the name "Hindu Kush mountains" means "Hindu Killer?" Together with Sierstad's book, the picture that emerges is of a set of borders without a country; a people with a history but no common future; and a region with boundless initiative and an eye for the main chance but no constructive ideas.

A nation that has come to rely heavily on violence as a means of resolving disputes and still can't agree whether women showing their faces in public is a hanging crime or simply unseemly has a long way to go before it can get anywhere. What is especially puzzling is why this must be the case for a civilization so old, so rich, and so centrally located on ancient trade routes.

[wik] On another note, I am working on a piece on the intersection of political violence and popular music that I hope to have up sometime soon.

[alsø wik] This serious and utterly unsnarky post has also been books #11 and #12 in The Fifty Book Challenge.

Max Boot, author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (a fantastic book I can't recommend highly enough), has an op-ed in the LA Times about the dispute surrounding the role of women and gays in ground combat. If you'd asked me to guess how Boot came down on this issue, I'd have probably guessed he was against, but here he makes a strong argument for the integration of women and gays into frontline Army and Marine units.

But today, 212,000 women (15% of the active-duty force) play an integral role in the military. Keeping them out of combat is impossible, whatever the law says, because in a place like Iraq everyone is on the front lines. Thirty-five female soldiers have died in Iraq and almost 300 have been wounded.

Even as women have taken on roles once reserved for men, the disastrous consequences predicted by naysayers have not come to pass. In 2000, the late Col. David Hackworth wrote: "What the British longbow did to the French army at Crecy in 1346, the failed military policy on gender integration has done to the U.S. armed forces at the end of the 20th century: near total destruction." Yet in the last five years, "near total destruction" has been the fate not of the U.S. armed forces but the Taliban and Baathists they have battled.

... I also don't see why we are still barring all gays and lesbians from serving openly. Between 1994 and 2003, according to the Government Accountability Office, the military discharged 9,488 homosexuals, including 322 with badly needed knowledge of such languages as Arabic, Farsi and Korean. In other words, the fight against gay rights is hurting the fight against our real enemies. That's a compelling reason to change the law, even for those of us who used to be supporters of the gay ban.

I have in the past, like Boot, supported the ban on gays in the military. Like him, I was persuaded by the arguments of those opposing the ban that the mere presence of gay soldiers or marines would undermine morale and unit cohesion.

There certainly isn't any historical basis for banning gays from serving, and serving well. All the way back to the Sacred Band of Thebes, gays have often had a prominent role in combat. Our culture has had a long history of discrimination, if not revulsion, aimed at homosexuals; and it would not have made sense to sacrifice the fighting efficiency of the vast majority of straight soldiers to allow a relative few gays to serve. However, attitudes have continued to change, and I think that that argument no longer holds water, especially given the increasingly difficult task of maintaining recruiting levels, and attracting needed skills into the armed forces. We should eliminate all restrictions on gays serving in the military, and if necessary (though I think it won't be) implement the kinds fo policies that were used to integrate blacks back in the fifties.

Women are now in combat pretty much across the board. They are fighter pilots in the Navy and Air Force, and serve on warships in combat duty. They serve in support and combat service support roles in both the Marines and the Army, and the nature of the conflict in Iraq - largely absent of any traditional battle lines - means that they are on the front line no matter what DoD classification they have. That's all well and good. Boot's argument however, is that since they're already in combat, there's no point in making any sort of distinction at all. That's doesn't necessarily follow, though I admit that pulling women out of support units would be an enormous headache.

I don't think that women who volunteer for the armed services are necessarily lacking in the "fighting spirit" or "killer instinct" that male soldiers supposedly possess. A lot of evidence points to the fact that the majority of men in the armed forces are not natural born killers, and attempts to make them such are not very successful. Some sort of 80-20 rule seems to be operating - a large percentage of enemy deaths are likely caused by a relatively small number of American fighters. There is no inherent reason that women can't be in either group, and it is clear that both are needed for a successful military. (We might imagine that relatively fewer women will be in the natural killer category, but self selection would allow lots of them to end up in the military.)

My only real remaining problem with women in combat is the physical requirements, which are currently (to my understanding) significantly lower than for men. Raise those standards, at least for women wanting to serve in the Airborne or other elite units, and I'm cool with the whole project. I don't think the young straight men in the Army and Marines will have a problem with that, as long as they know their new comrades are going to be able to pull their own weight.

Really, we should do this not just because it fits in with our whole free-wheeling, I'm okay - you're okay American idiom. Just think about the salt and lemon juice rubbed into a paper cut feeling it would induce in an already pissed off jihadi to be captured by a squad composed largely of women and gays. That'll stick a spoke in their wheel.

The FDA is investigating whether Viagra can make you blind. Mothers everywhere say: "I told you so!"

Lego corp, that evil capitalist monstrosity, has released for sale a lego version of the second Death Star:

Those bastards couldn't make all these wonderful toys back when Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back were around, could they? Noooo, not when I was a kid. My two favorite toys when I was a lad were legos and star wars action figures. But the two sets of toys were mostly incompatible. How I yearned for Star Wars Legos. I wrote them a letter. Bastards! Now I'm too old and my son's too young. Crap!

@#!?%!

From Michelle, I discover that Lawrence Simon's brief career as a illegal Mexican narcoterrorist gunrunner is over, thanks to the dilligent and effective police work of the ATF and the Houston PD.

But I thought you might benefit from knowing that this guy apparently harbors some level of disdain for Cameron Diaz.

Ah, the stuff I read so you don't have to. Even though you just did.

The Ministry is happy to announce the promotion of Pittsburgh Steeler fan (nobody's perfect) and irascible conservative John Cole of Balloon Juice to the Ministry Legion of Merit. His trenchant commentaries and clear-eyed indictments of buffoonery from all quarters will make him a useful adjunct to our political wing. This move is also long overdue and by way of recompense the Ministry is pleased to offer to Mr. Cole the head of any enemy of his choosing, on a stick, for his enjoyment.

That is all. Thank you for your cooperation.

Once again, Instapundit can suck it:

Thus speaks a true Minnesotan [Lileks]. It's unseasonably cool here, too. But that means 70 degrees.

Heh. Indeed. Read the whole thing.

Last night I slept (failed to sleep) in a breeze for the third straight night as a nor'easter pounded our house (situated on the north face of the second highest hill in town) with 60-mph winds and horizontal rain. The wind came straight through the window and into the room, the backyard fence blew down, and I can't get the storm windows back down since all the windows on one side of the house are swollen shut thanks to rain. And yet they let the air right in. Go figure. Since Monday, every night has been like trying to sleep in the baggage hold of a passenger jet, it has rained every day for eight days and four successive weekends, and it is expected to rain for another week straight. Massachusetts has been setting record lows this week. It's Memorial Day and this week the temperatures have been 45, 48, 50, and 52. If we could some how get rid of every last person in Florida I'll move there in a second, at least until it stops threating to snow in June.

You know, sometimes the snow comes down in June. Sometimes the sun goes 'round the moon. And sometimes you want to gouge your eyes out with a spoon.

When Jack White teamed up with Loretta Lynn last year for Lynn's (don't call it a) comeback record Van Lear Rose many critics - including me - rushed to hail the return of rock to country and country to rock. While I still maintain that Van Lear Rose is a very fine record that picks up where Gram Parsons and Sticky Fingers left off, I have to admit to engaging in a certain amount of revisionism in my review. Rock and country never really broke up in the first place.

Country-tinged rock has always been there on the margins, if you knew where to look. Even in the skinny-tie 1980s, Green on Red were tie-dying their Nudie suits, and through the 1990s Neil Young was releasing now-classic albums like Freedom, Ragged Glory (which led off with a track called "Country Home''), Harvest Moon, and the double-live Weld. The Jayhawks have been making harmony-drenched roots rock since the days of Def Leppard. And most notably (from a rock snob perspective), the No Depression scene of the early 1990s fostered the careers of bands like country punks Uncle Tupelo and that band’s descendents Wilco and Son Volt. While Uncle Tupelo veteran Jeff Tweedy drove Wilco away from rootsy rock into arty and critically acclaimed experiments, his bandmate Jay Farrar chose to tow the country-crunch line in Son Volt.

Best known for their 1995 college-radio hit "Drown," Son Volt released three albums of guitar-driven roots rock (what would now be dubbed "Americana") between 1995-1998 and then went on semi-permanent hiatus. (There is a new Son Volt album out this year, but Farrar is the only original band member remaining.) Anchored by Farrar's reedy voice and his concisely stated guitar lines, 1995's Trace (Warner Bros.) didn't so much depart from Uncle Tupelo's sound as much as bear down on the rough parts. Subsequent albums, 1997's Straightaways and 1998's Wide Swing Tremolo (both also on Warner Bros.) introduced jangly midtempo alt-rock into the mix to (what some say were) diminishing results.

For a band with only three full-length albums under its belt, Son Volt have cast a long shadow. Although now perceived as Megadeth to Wilco's Metallica, the slightly ragged, plaintive sound they pioneered is now classic, and echoes can today be heard in every third track on Adult Alternative radio. Thus, the time is right for Son Volt - A Retrospective:1995-2000, just released on Rhino.

It is a little puzzling as to who Retrospective was intended to please. Although the compilation starts out strongly with four excellent selections from Trace and a worthy bonus song and proceeds chronologically from there, this otherwise logical scheme inadvertently points out Son Volt's weaknesses as much as plays to the band's strengths. Thus, the running order risks turning off newcomers. On the other hand, Rhino chose to make fully half the selections an odds-and-sods mix of EP, soundtrack, and unreleased offerings, suggesting that this collection is aimed at diehard fans. The trouble is that diehard Son Volt fans (I know a few) are the type most likely to have already hunted down promo EPs and bought the soundtrack to the 1996 grungesploitation flick "Feeling Minnesota" just for the one Son Volt song.

So, what are those strengths and weaknesses that emerge? And are the unreleased bits worth it? Well, first things first. Jay Farrar is a heck of a songwriter, with a strong sense of structure and melody. The guitar work in particular walks the line between Marshall crunch and country twang. The band display an admirable sense of epic restraint that keeps them from spiraling off into eight minute Jay Mascis jams, as if Neil Young (circa Zuma and Bruce Springsteen (circa The River) were writing songs for Nashville. On the quieter numbers, Farrar’s country side generally turns his introspective and melancholy lyrics into universal laments, which is the hallmark for all good country ballads.

However, these same tendencies get the band in trouble. The same restraint that keeps the hooks hooky and the songs short leads the band to try the same tricks repeatedly with the result that their style doesn’t seem to evolve as much as flatten from one era to the next. Though excellent songs appear from all three albums, Farrar over time seems to succumb to the dreaded Mid-Tempo Syndrome where every song stays timidly in a neat little box. That's not to say that Jay Farrar doesn't have a singular and beautiful way with those pretty country gems: on the contrary, he does. But a collection of such songs back to back to back would be as interesting as tan wallpaper no matter how good any single song might be.

The running order ultimately saves Retrospective from petering out too quickly. For example, although track nine, a previously unreleased acoustic cover of Woody Guthrie's "I've Got To Know," is okay, if it were sitting between the mild midtempo of "Back Into Your World" and the downcast "Creosote" (both from Straightaways), even the most dedicated fan would be fast asleep. Since this is the point at which the disc seems to enter its second act, it’s important that this not happen. Luckily, the compilers keep the energy up by puttin the excellent (and loud) "Picking Up The Signal" from Straightaways between "World" and the Guthrie song. Similarly, wonderful gems like "Windfall," "Rex' Blues" (a compilation track with Kelly Willis) and "Tulsa County" gain by being paired with the more uptempo "Drown," "Route," and "Straightface." This dynamic holds through the first two-thirds of Retrospective.

Still, for listeners unconvinced of the genius of Gram Parsons, the band's quieter moments finally threaten to bog things down in a somber haze that intelligent programming can’t fix. This tendency is especially pronounced in the disc’s third act. The last ten tracks alternate between selections from Wide Swing Tremolo and various unreleased and rare tracks. Unfortunately, the selections from Tremolo smear together into a slightly bland mess of REM-ish pleasantness, and the sketchy and diffuse bonus cuts don't help matters. A desultory Lead Belly cover ("Ain't No More Cane") slouches by between two moody album cuts, and by the time we reach the mournful cover of "Holocaust" from Big Star’s glorious wreck of an album, Third/Sister Lovers, Retrospective feels more like a funeral than a party.

The compilation closes out with a few demos, a live track, and a cover of Springsteen's "Open All Night," from Badlands: A Tribute To Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. The band's performance on the Springsteen song underlines what bothers about the whole second half of the disc. Although Farrar does his best Springsteen impression and the band keep pace with pleasant and tasteful noises, the song ends up feeling a bit listless and empty, like an unfinished throwaway.

Although Son Volt - A Retrospective:1995-2000 is a worthwhile introduction to the band’s career, it remains trapped between its twin obligations to the newcomers and the dedicated. The first half is uncommonly strong (and on its own worth the price of admission) but by the end Son Volt come across not as ahead-of-their-time Americana visionaries but as a band hemmed in by their influences who didn't risk a grand display if a modest gesture would get them by.

(This post also appears on blogcritics.org, which you should be reading daily.)

While I'm on the subject of writers, writing, and reading, the Guardian has interviewed Umberto Eco about his new book as well as the difference between Foucault's Pendulum and The Da Vinci Code (other than the obvious gulfs of quality, erudition, and depth) and whether he is the Italian Salman Rushdie. Thanks to the squishy lefties at bookslut.

The NY Times has an article about the new vogue for audiobooks, at least among denizens of greater New York City. I shouldn't be so glib: it is true that as the number of Americans who read books regularly declines, the number who listen to them has been rising.

The Times takes note of the discussion simmering between authors and "readers" (for what else can we call people who regularly listen to the printed word in leiu of reading it but "readers," any note of condescention detected being not entirely accidental?) as to what types of books are most appropriate for listening, and what kind of prose works best (they note that D.H. Lawrence makes for particularly dull listening). People listen to books while commuting, while exercising, and while walking the dog, though one user testifies that short stories work best for dog-walking since there's less to miss - a spectacularly stupid thing to say. A good short story packs an entire universe into five hundred words, meaning that if you look up to pull your dog off the mailman's leg, you've arguably missed more than if Dean Koontz were squirting his gore-soaked hackery straight into your ear. But I digress.

Although I have enjoyed a book on tape (namely Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester, read by the author), I just don't know if reading aloud is always the best way to absorb a book. In high school my advanced English class read aloud each day, and it quickly became apparent which authors were bearable aloud and which were not. Hemingway: yes. Tolstoy: not so much.

I think the main concern is that many writers don't write with auditory concerns in mind. That is, some authors write to be heard, and some authors write to be read. The latter write so that readers can roll the succession of words around their mind, savoring the singular texture and shape of each phrase with little regard for how difficult it might be to say. Take the foregoing sentence: if I were writing that to read out loud, I would never have used "savoring the singular texture," which sounds a little fey and precious but feels in the mind-- to me at least-- pleasingly crinkly. I tend to craft sentences so they have rhythm, a flow of tension and release on which I can hang the exact words I need to use. Unfortunately, that means out loud I read like a moron. It's that way for many authors. I could listen to Donald Hall's poetry all day long but I think I'd rather sit down with Pynchon, thank you very much. Unlike me, both Hall and Pynchon are major contemporary writers, but only one of them works aloud.

Many readers mentally sound out what their eye scans as they read it. Personally, I'm one of those readers and I write for them. It's much easier to think how "coruscating" sounds than to actually stumble over it with your tongue, and if I want that ocean to be "coruscating" rather than "glinting" "glimmering" "shimmering" or "shining," then that is what I will write. And when the book on tape comes out, that coruscating ocean will sound positively idiotic. Writing for reading aloud requires exactly the same attention to precise shading that writing for reading quietly does, but the rules are different and largely incompatible. A speechwriter isn't necessarily a novelist. I'm not going to denigrate people for absorbing books by whatever means they can, but I am going to stand athwart history with a dictionary and a reading lamp, shouting "shut up!!"

John Cole has been in a fine lather recently over the whole Koran-flushing thing. Start here and scroll down. It seems the military now affirms the toilet incident (which means nothing aside from making Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, and Bush's spokespeople out to be liars- or at least knee-jerk apologists- in their own right) and ups the ante with stories of far darker abuses. I agree with his posts on this matter 100%, which is pretty good for a yunzer and Steeler fan; it's not that I want accusations of Koran-flushing and detainee murder to be true. No. No, no no. What I want is for the truth to come out as to whether (and how often) prisoners in American custody die mysteriously, so that it can stop, and the only way for that to happen is to get the truth about what's happening. Mutilated bodies on ice and artillery corporals making dogpiles of naked prisoners for shits and giggles is not what the US of A is about, period. No matter whether each separate incident is indeed an isolated occurrence or (as it increasingly appears) part of a concerted move toward grisly "interrogation" techniques, that stuff has to end.

And why haven't I already put Cole on the blogroll?

[wik] I should be clear. Newsweek don't get a free pass for rushing to press with a poorly sourced story. Neither do they get a free pass for focusing on an incident so minor when dead bodies on ice turn up in detainee camps. What they do get is a modicum of understanding; was it ever so unbelievable that someone at Gitmo flushed a Koran (or pages from one) down the hopper considering the darker stories that seep out from ongoing investigations into military detention and interrogation techniques? That is all.

I was just downstairs on a smoke break, and noted that the powerball lottery is up to 180 meeelion dollars. Of course, you’re more likely to be struck by lightning something on the order of 175 consecutive times than to win that money, but its fun to think about what you would do with a windfall of that magnitude. A quick check of the website reveals that the cash payout value is just over a hundred million. Take off a third for taxes, and that would leave you with somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy million dollars. That’s not chump change.

What would I do?

• I’d buy a Hummer, because I’m going camping this weekend. (Personalized plate: NLB4ZOD)
• I’d stop at the sporting goods store, and get one of those nifty tents that set itself up if you just ask it nicely. And while I’m there, I’d get one of those Rambo survival knives, just because the cost would only be .000071% of my net worth.
• Once I’m back from camping, I’d get myself a nice Macintosh computer, because compatibility with the computers at work is not exactly an issue anymore. While I’m at the Apple store, I’d get me a powerbook, an iPod, and whatever other iGadgets catch my eye.
• Since iPods hold 10,000 songs, and the average CD has what, 13 songs? I’d need to buy 769 and a quarter CDs.
• I would go to Japan and buy a samurai sword. The kind that takes a wizened Japanese craftsman ten years to fold umpty-thousand times to create the perfect blade. Then, I’d go to the local mall and buy a cheap stamped aluminum rip-off from the Chesapeake Blade and Tzotchke Company. I’d take the hilt and accouterments of the cheapo replica and put them on the real sword, and hang it on the wall. When some asshole sees it, and says, “You won a 180 million dollars and all you could think to do is buy that piece of crap, you nouveau riche idiot?” I could cut his head off with no effort whatsoever.
• I hate squirrels, so I would purchase a Barrett M82 .50 sniper rifle.
• I’d need more cars. So, I’d buy a black 1950 Mercury convertible coupe (plate: BLUES), a 1969 Camaro in dark green with a white racing stripe (plate: BTCHN), and a 1955 Hudson limo.
• I’d pay off all my family’s bills – mortgage, car payments, credit cards and utilities for a year. Some friends would get this treatment, too.
• I'd go to the art galleries downtown, pick out the ugliest crap modern art, buy it, take it home and build a bonfire out of it.
• I’d set up a trust fund to pay for the education of all the children in my family, and provide scholarships for lazy, underachieving white kids. (There would be substantial overlap between these two categories.)
• Beneath a modest mansion modeled after Stan Hywet and Abbotsford House, I would construct the Ministry bunker and catastratorium.
• For elegant dining and formal occasions, I would get a BMW 760i. Twelve cylinders of ultimate driving pleasure. (plate: BOBSGEO) And an Acura NSX, just because. (Plate: WKNPNUB)
• World Tour!
• I’d buy all the books I want. That’s a lot of books. Maybe I’d even buy that book I never heard of that NDR read.

All of that might come to ten million dollars. I’m sure I could live quite comfortably on the interest off of another ten million. What would I do with the remaining $50 million? That’s a no brainer:

I’d buy my own spaceship company.

Here's an interesting one: former Steely Dan and Doobie Brothers guitarist Jeff Baxter has become a high powered defense consultant. From Wizbang.

Normblog excerpts an article in the Wall Street Journal (for suscribers only) by Fouad Ajami:

To venture into the Arab world, as I did recently over four weeks in Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, is to travel into Bush Country...

The weight of American power, historically on the side of the dominant order, now drives this new quest among the Arabs. For decades, the intellectual classes in the Arab world bemoaned the indifference of American power to the cause of their liberty. Now a conservative American president had come bearing the gift of Wilsonian redemption.

Check it out.

Researchers believe they have found the Queen Anne's Revenge, the wreck of the ship belonging to Edward Teach (AKA Blackbeard) off North Carolina. The ship is believed to have sunk in 1718, and is being raised piece by piece to confirm its identity.

And another thing. Let this be a warning to the Ministry's enemies and ill-wishers. That illiterate SOB Teach was a real pain in the keister. He and his band of looting maniacs failed to recognize a good thing when they had it, got greedy, and forced us to take desparate measures. A good piece of work, taking that slave ship. But everything after that was a total cock-up. Never send an illiterate mercenary to do a thinking man's job, is what I say. Do you know why The QAR ran aground that night in 1718 in waters that Teach had sailed many times before? Could it have had something to do with the ship drafting rather lower than usual? After all we happen to know there was ten feet of water in the hold thanks to a butt-head sabotaged while the crew was watering and provisioning in Falmouth. Could it have had something to do with a broken keel and disastrously weakened backstays on the mainmast that somehow gave way? And could the last thing that welching two-timer of a "pirate" have seen when he was run down and cornered like a dog in Okracoke been the director of our Bermuda branch office grinning down the barrels of a brace of pistols?

We're not saying.

To the researchers of the future: Good luck finding Jimmy Hoffa.

Worried about getting lost on the beltway? Don't trust new-fangled GPS receivers? Well, just get one of those useless AOL cds, some lego bricks, and a couple mirrors; and you can build your own sextant, and navigate by the stars. This looks like a pretty cool little project, and one I will certainly undertake in a couple years when my boy is old enough to appreciate it.

Hat tip: James Rummel of Hell in a Handbasket.

Down to your right (no, your other right), you'll note that several new sites have been added to the list of places you might enjoy knowing about.

Well, you would have noted if you happened to have memorized the Ministry Legion of Merit as it stood yesterday, and were able to perform a quick alphabetic matrix subtraction in your head.

Since not everyone has those skills, the new additions are also listed directly below. Each of these sites is characterized as much by being well-written as by its heterotopicality. In random order:

Velociworld
Fine, Why Fine?
TigerHawk
Garfield Ridge

Thank you for your cooperation.

Thanks to Murdoc, who laughed at our pain during our recent geek deathmatch, we now know that we are not in fact the uber-geeks we hubristicly imagined ourselves to be:

Two Deranged Mongoloid @#!?%wit British Dorks Immolate Themselves in Mock Lightsabre Duel Using Flourescent Light Bulbs and Gasoline

For once, the category used here is almost literally true. If either of these lackwits expires due to injuries sustained in their brief yet glorious attempt to be just like Anakin Skywalker in Episode III, they will certainly be on the short list for a Darwin Award.

[wik] And they got it on tape!

The groovy economist over at the Idea Shop has an interesting post on why tax policy, well, sucks:

There’s a lot of evidence that people aren’t always rational, and suffer from a range of cognitive biases. But thanks to arbitrage, rational people stand to profit when irrational people let prices and wages stray from efficient levels. That’s what justifies the economist’s assumption of rationality—a small number of rational profit-seekers keep markets rational as a whole even when many participants aren’t.

Unfortunately, tax policy has no such mechanism. Tax policymakers suffer the same cognitive biases as everyone else, but the "market" for tax policy—made up of legislators, voters and lobbyists—is much less self-correcting. In traditional markets, bad business practices get pushed out by competition, and bad pricing decisions get corrected through arbitrage. But in tax policy, inefficient tax laws can survive on the books for generations.

Another related aspect of this problem is the asymmetry of the opposing sides. Those in favor of ‘bad’ tax policy (special interests, social engineers, tax accountants and other vermin) are concentrated and focused on their evil work. It is their job to impose these policies on the rest of us, and they have considerable time, skill and resources to devote to that job. Contrariwise, those who favor a simple, transparent, neutral and non-confiscatory tax code (the rest of us) all have day jobs. As attractive as a rational tax code is, and no matter how much we might benefit from such a thing, there are many things that compete for mindshare. For me, the perfectly reasonable and rational tax code is competing with any number of other policy issues, job, time with family, beer and Civ III. The opponents are distracted and diffuse, and so we get the tax code we deserve.

This puts me in mind of something else, too. Different arenas have different time scales. The response time in markets can often be nearly instantaneous. New information immediately affects the price of stocks. In the soi-disant Information Technology Industry (one out of three ain’t bad) the turnover in new software, techniques and indeed people is, shall we say, brisk. In science, things are slower. New paradigms are adopted (so they say) about as quickly as the old generation of distinguished scientists can retire. But the response time of political systems can stretch to centuries.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, bureaucratic inefficiency and glacial response times is bad. The tentative nature and sloth-like vigor of the intelligence reform effort over the nearly five fricken years since 9/11 is a poster child for government incapacity and lack of adaptability. My security questionnaire still had questions about commies on it, for chrissakes.

All of that is unquestionably bad. But, but, what if government weren’t slow? Imagine a government that could reach decisions quickly; create plans and implement them in days; use innovative technologies and management tools to deal with problems in real time. Scared yet? It is well that government’s vast power is balanced by its diffidence and incompetence. In Frank Herbert’s second best novel, he introduces the Bureau of Sabotage. BuSab exists to slow down, interfere with, and screw with the heads of all other government agencies. It is the ultimate citizen advocate, because it stops the government from doing things. In the story, BuSab had its origin in an earlier government that was efficient and fast moving, as well as tyrannical and oppressive. The early BuSab operatives used any means necessary to slow down the operations of this government, and sowed enough chaos that it was able to evolve into a more reasonable and sane government.

Not to be all defeatist, but I think that part of the price of a reasonable government is bad, or at least out-dated policy. Not that we shouldn’t try to reform and improve, but a government that was rapidly responsive to our every need and want would be far, far worse.

What books are you embarrassed to not have read? That meme has been circulating the blogosphere in recent weeks, and I've finally succumbed. I'm happy to say that I have, by dint of a intergalatically awesome high school English teacher and dogged personal application, managed to read a whole bunch of books that I can be proud of. But not all of them. That's going to take a lifetime. By the same token, I have spent long stretches of my life obsessively reading science fiction, fantasy, or history (which it amuses me to mention next to each other here, as though they were equivalent genres (which perhaps they are...)) and have accordingly had some potentially very bragworthy reading time crowded out by Piers Anthony.

Please note that I am counting as "read" books that I started, got plenty of the gist of, and read the importants sections and skimmed the rest. In this way I can say I have "read" The Federalist Papers, Democracy in America and The Bible. Sure, I haven't abosorbed every word, but I know that Joshua Judges Ruth and that industry is important to Amurricans. And stuff like that.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby. To be honest, this is one I'm not sure I'm ever going to get to. I didn't read The Catcher in the Rye until last year, either. Since both that and Gatsby are reputedly best consumed as a teen, my enthusiasm for them has ebbed. Nobody can seem to tell me what I would be getting out of this one anyway. Nevertheless, the uniform reaction elicited in people by my admission that I have not read this Great Classic is one of disbelieving wonder and pity, as if I told them I was a 30 year old virgin.

John Locke: Second Treatise. Apart from excerpts and explications, I have not read any Locke. Considering that my last act as an historian was to write an intellectual history of the debate over women, suffrage, and citizenship before 1850 which relied heavily on Locke (since my sources themselves did), this omission can be viewed as an act of breathtaking academic dishonesty. Someone call David Horowitz!! See remarks above in re: history, fantasy, and science fiction. I have also not read my Hume or Hobbes, but I have read Mill as well as Paine and various Revolutionary-era works on the social compact, so I guess I feel okay about this. No; thats' wrong. Guilt all over.

Dante: Inferno. I actually have read excerpts of this one, but I have to put it in this list because nothing stuck. Worse than that, Inferno is practically required reading if you wish to understand half the literary references in the great classics of the 17th and 18th centuries. In fact, I'll make this entry a trifecta and toss in Plato and Socrates as well. Read a little; learned less. Just as I am reduced to cat-and-tennis-ball staring when Buckethead and GeekLethal trade barbs about whether Operation Barbarossa would have worked better had Company Ziggledezee employed a Gabba Gabba strategy and feinted toward St. Yabbahey (since my knowledge of military history is shallow in all respects), thus it goes when trying to keep up with Adams or Madison- or even Paine- in full smackdown mode. Ditto Pilgrim's Progress, which was seemingly handed out free in cereal boxes to early American thinkers. The difference being, of course, that I have not guilt whatsoever over not reading Bunyan.

James Joyce: Ulysses. I know, I know. Nobody reads this. But people do. And if I can get through Gravity's Rainbow and The Name of the Rose, why in hell does the first page of Ulysses fill me with dark foreboding of tedium to come?

Herman Melville: Moby-Dick. You have to understand where I live and the people I know. I live north of Boston and socialize with historians, librarians, and archivists most of whose work revolves in some way around New England's past. They tend to talk about Nathanael Hawthorne as though he was still alive (or recently deceased) and can tell you more about Herman Melville's tortured love life than about Desperate Housewives. So, though I have read enough Hawthorne to stay afloat in pleasant conversation, I have only read Melville in a terribly abridged children's edition that does't quite cut it. Sure, I can yammer on and on about the loving detail brought to the interclary chapters on whaling (and even spin theories on structural homages to Moby-Dick contained in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath), but at the end of the day I know that such pleasant party exaggeration is really empty posturing. I really should just bite the bullet and waste six weeks wading in ambergris and purple prose.

(Thanks to Hei Lun of Begging to Differ for finally putting me over the edge.)

Cause Lord knows, they need the help.

From Rocket Jones.

[wik] Note from the Ministry of Future Perfidy ca 2025: Rocket Jones' site is long dead, and for all we know so is Ted since we haven't heard from him in over a decade. So we've replaced the dead image link with this cute kitten.

Wandering through Ace's site, I ran across this little number. Ace links to an interesting theoretical exercise, to wit, how many five year olds could you take in a fight?

This gendanken experiment has some ground rules:

• You are in an enclosed area, roughly the size of a basketball court. There are no foreign objects.
• You are not allowed to touch a wall.
• When you are knocked unconscious, you lose. When they are all knocked unconscious, they lose. Once a kid is knocked unconscious, that kid is "out."
• I (or someone else intent on seeing to it you fail) get to choose the kids from a pool that is twice the size of your magic number. The pool will be 50/50 in terms of gender and will have no discernable abnormalities in terms of demographics, other than they are all healthy Americans.
• The kids receive one day of training from hand-to-hand combat experts who will train them specifically to team up to take down one adult. You will receive one hour of "counter-tactics" training.
• There is no protective padding for any combatant other than the standard-issue cup.
• The kids are motivated enough to not get scared, regardless of the bloodshed. Even the very last one will give it his/her best to take you down.

This is a tough one. While we can assume for the sake of argument that most adults could defeat any given five-year-old with little difficulty, facing hordes of the little booger eaters is a different ball of snot. According to this government chart, the average weight of a five-year-old boy is about 40lbs. You get ten of those, and you're talking 400 aggregate pounds of booger eater. If, as the scenario stipulates, these kids get training from a Navy Seal or Green Beret or DC meter maid, they are going to have at least some idea of how to use their numbers against you.

And that's the crux of the matter. If you could somehow trick or fool the kiddies into attacking one on one like the evil minions in a kung fu movie, you could probably win against even an arbitrarily large number of kindergartners. But if they can mob you and get you on the ground, it's all over. Instead of Bruce Lee, you'll be like the grasshopper in one of those old national geographic flicks, being devoured by hungry, hungry ants.

I think even against well trained and thoroughly briefed muchkins, I could take twenty. My reach and strength would allow me (I hope) to keep them from swarming effectively. I could maintain my footing and triumph. Much more than that, and the half-pints would always have a sufficient numbers to saturate my defenses, and take me down.

[wik]Johno, lest you think I am completely inconsistent, I am aware of the implied contradiction between this post and the email I sent you this am. I can only offer this: on Allah's post, Dr. Rusty Shackleford said in a comment, "I guess these things are funny up until the time you have a kid in kindergarten." My boy's only two. Allah also links this Decadent Westpost, which I didn't find as amusing, especially since it personalized the fight. Anonymous opponents somehow are fine, hey, they might be evil or something: Chinese Communists or mutants or Norwegians.

Perhaps oddly for a guy with a temporary disdain for political commentary, my first short note at the new home so graciously provided by my friends here at the Ministry has a political tinge. It's occasioned by Buckethead's posting about the proposed changes to Senate rules, now made moot by the agreement reported this evening.

As that matter's already well covered at the link and comments above, my take's a bit macro. Harry Reid, in the tradition of folks from both sides of the political aisle, has engaged in a long-running game of pissing on peoples' shoes while claiming it's raining. Similarly to the theatrics of Trent Lott, who originated the phrase "nuclear option", and Bill Frist, among others repeatedly use it, the game involves sleight of hand, repeated ad nauseam until the hoped-for moment when everyone forgets their legs are being pulled, with vigor.

As evidence for Sen. Reid's success, the Washington Post makes reference to the proposed rule changes as "an arcane constitutional question", when it's neither arcane nor even a constitutional question at all. Mr. Reid regularly refers to it as a (capital C) "Constitutional matter", intentionally confusing the actual requirement for "advice and consent" with his desire to let the minority outvote the majority. Frist, Lott, and the rest haven't helped by talking about the "nuclear option" as though a change to the Senate rules was utterly unprecedented and disgusting, sort of like wiping out a couple cities in Japan.

Yeesh. You can't get a straight story out of either, and it's become a battle of drooling retard sound bites, none of which accurately reflects the position of its dispenser. In my admittedly non-existent perfect world, Reid would make a case to the public at large that those "extreme" judges such as Owen and Brown are actually extreme, rather than, say, not holding the political views that he thinks they should hold as females, African Americans, or in one case, both. Claiming to disagree with their views isn't the same as convincing the rest of the Senate or the American public you're right. Just ask Tom Daschle, if you can find him. But it's easier to cast it as a constitutional infringement, or the trampling of the rights of a group who, ahem, didn't carry the majority in either house of Congress.

And the Republicans? Sure, it's easy to change the rules, far easier than making your case and doing what Senators do - trading horses. There's not much room for give and take on a yes/no vote for a judicial appointment, particularly in a case when so much testosterone's already been spilt. Gilding the proposed rule change under the previously chosen name, "nuclear option" (until Karl Rove dictated other nomenclature) was a great way to further inflame prostates all 'round, but not good for much else, like an actual resolution to the matter.

And so now we've got a compromise. Since I believe 80% of Americans are clustered within a standard deviation of dead center, I'm drawn to the conclusion that roughly 80% of the populace is, like me, happy that some form of resolution's been reached. (Yes, I just made that 80% up. Twice. Out of whole cloth)

Complete happiness, however, remains elusive. I'd enjoy the ability, for once, to deactivate the bullshit filter when listening to my elected representatives as they troll for dupes.

I haven't read Lileks for a while. Months really. Not because of anything he wrote, or didn't write, but simply because I was locked in the solipsistic confines of unemployment and seasonal affective disorder. And going to the park with my son. I tune in for the first time (in months) and what do I find? Exactly what I expected.

I’m still impressed by the movie’s look, the sound, the costumes, the level of ingenuity demonstrated by every frame of the movie in which the insipid words or insubstantial characters do not ruin. If it came from Lucas, it’s krep. It’s like the reverse of Orson Welles – the intellect at the center of the enterprise is bereft of novel ideas, but is kept afloat by indulgent studio support and willing talent. The dialogue in AOTC isn’t completely unlistenable – better Lucas should write exposition dialogue than anything emotional, or you get love scenes in which characters say “I hate sand. It’s dry and gritty. I much prefer your vagina.” Or whatever “Anny” said. But even in the exposition scenes Lucas has an ear made not of tin but some metal alloy created specifically for its inability to channel sound; hence he has his big bad guy announcing not just the creation of an Army, not just an Army of the Republic, but a Grand Army of the Republic. So the Empire is the North, marching to put down the rebellious breakaway South. I’m supposed to root for the slavery side. Noted.

Is there any living screenwriter who’s worse at naming people and places? Naboo, for God’s sake.

From an ABC news piece on an audit of Medicaid in New York State:

[New York State Comptroller Alan] Hevesi asked Michael Leavitt, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in a letter Sunday to "take immediate action to ensure that sex offenders do not receive erectile dysfunction medication paid for by taxpayers."

What? Yes, that's right...

Scores of convicted rapists and other high-risk sex offenders in New York have been getting Viagra paid by Medicaid for the last five years, the state's comptroller said Sunday. Audits by Comptroller Alan Hevesi's office showed that between January 2000 and March 2005, 198 sex offenders in New York received Medicaid-reimbursed Viagra after their convictions. Those included crimes against children as young as 2 years old, he said.

Gaaaaaaah. One thing you can count on... whenever a story like this breaks, the politicians will descend like ants to lap up the publicity. Senator Chuck Schumer: come on down!

"While I believe that HHS did not do this intentionally, when the government pays for Viagra for sex offenders, it could well hurt many innocent people..."

Thanks, Chuck. That really clarifies the issue for me. I though it was about cutting government waste: I'm relieved that you've twigged to the notion that giving boners to babytouchers is not in anyone's best interest. Although I do have to wonder: why is the government subsidizing Viagra for anyone? What sense does that make. (Well... as much sense as requiring soldiers to surrender their nail clippers to TSS, but letting them hold on to their M-16s and bayonets, but I digress.)

Hat tip to Reason's Julian Sanchez, who goes where I dare not in his choice of headline.

Virginia Postrel, writing in the New York Times, makes an interesting argument:

Some people say they want "just the facts," and fault reporters for introducing too much analysis. Others complain that stories do just the opposite, treating all sides in a conflict as equally valid. The news-buying public seems to want contradictory things.

But one person's contradiction is another's market niche. Those differences help answer an economic puzzle: if bias is a product flaw, why does it not behave like auto repair rates, declining under competitive pressure?

In a recent paper, "The Market for News," two Harvard economists look at that question. "There's plenty of competition" among news sources, Sendhil Mullainathan, one of the authors, said in an interview. But "the more competition there has been in the last 20 years, the more discussion there has been of bias."

The reason, he and his colleague, Andrei Shleifer, argue, is that consumers care about more than accuracy. "We assume that readers prefer to hear or read news that are more consistent with their beliefs," they write. Bias is not a bug but a feature.

In a competitive news market, they argue, producers can use bias to differentiate their products and stave off price competition. Bias increases consumer loyalty.

That would certainly explain many things, including Fox News' success. By appealing to a previously untapped market segment, they rapidly gained viewers and brand loyalty.

An interesting historical note to the debate over the judicial filibuster comes from Anne Althouse, who notes that the Constitutional Convention considered requiring a supermajority to reject nominees:

Mr. Madison, suggested that the Judges might be appointed by the Executives with the concurrence of 1/3 at least of the 2d. branch. This would unite the advantage of responsibility in the Executive with the security afforded in the 2d. branch agst. any incautious or corrupt nomination by the Executive.

[wik] On the other side of things, here's some interesting information on other means by which nominations could be blocked from hilzoy of Obsidian Wings.

[alsø wik] My earlier discussion of this is here.

By way of our gracious bloghostess, Kathy Kinsley, I learn that the ever-modest and self effacing Donald Trump has a few issues with the proposed Freedom Tower project that he'd like to raise, if it's not too much trouble for everyone:

Denouncing the existing plans for rebuilding Ground Zero as the "worst pile of crap architecture I've ever seen", Mr Trump argued that erecting two new, even taller twin towers was the only valid response to the terrorists. ...Describing the Freedom Tower as an "empty skeleton", Mr Trump said its construction would be a capitulation. "If we rebuild the World Trade Centre in the form of a skeleton ... the terrorists win. It's that bad,"

Myself, I was never too happy with the plans for the Freedom Tower. The fact that it was to be 1776 feet tall was kind of cool, but I never thought the plan was all that attractive. Not bad, but not great:

And at 1776 feet, its only a bit taller than the current tallest building, and smaller than some proposed skyscrapers:

And compared to tallest structures, including free-standing, non-skyscraper thingies, well, it's not terribly impressive:

The CN Tower is already taller than the planned height of the Freedom Tower. But you may argue, "Hey, that's a tower, not a skyscraper." Well, you'd be right, but only trivially right. Further, as you can see from the diagrams, there are at least two planned skyscrapers that will be taller than the Freedom Tower. That, to me, is unacceptable. To build a tower to be the tallest in the world - for a couple years - that's a waste of time. I argued during the first go around that we need to build something stupendously, in-your-face-huge. It doesn't have the visual impact of Kathy's favorite design, but I'd argue that psychological impact would be even greater. If we built something in the 650 meter range, we'd probably be safe for a while. But I'm thinking that we should just go balls to the wall and build a skyscraper an even 1000 meters tall. Don't just break the record, break the record when the building's only a little more than half done. 

One of the most attractive designs I've ever seen for a skyscraper was from Frank Lloyd Wright. Ol' Frank thaought that his mile high "Illinois" from 1956 could have been constructed with the technology of the day. The big problem was insufficient elevator technology, and cost. Reduced in scale to a kilometer, something like this could certainly be built today. It might cost a bit, but imagine this on the New York skyline:

Accept for that whole thirty years' war thing, and Luther's anti-semitism and potty mouth.

I can't sleep, and evyone and their brother have linked this, so why the hell not. Here's a link to Iowahak's wonderful lutefisk post. This post made us ponder why we didn't have him on our blogroll. Since we couldn't come up with a definitive answer, we blogrolled him. This post also serves a useful purpose from Newsweak's point of view: it puts the blame on where it belongs, on the rioting fundamentalist loony tunes rather than on the slipshop reporting which has made them famous.

“It is important that we remember that Lutheranism is a religion of peace,” said Army spokesman Maj. Richard Lehrman. “And we need to remember to avoid insensitive behavior and remarks that will cause these peaceful Lutherans to go on another bloody killing rampage.”

I know how true that is. I was raised Lutheran, and not just milquetoast ELCA Lutheran, but Missouri Synod. That's just one step shy of the wahabi fundamentalist equivalent for Lutherans, the Wisconsin Synod.

The last sentence sums up the situation as well as anything I've seen:

“Oh yahh, I tell ya what, dere’s a lotta bad stuff goin’ on in dat outfit over dere,” said a young Decorah cleric who identified himself only as ‘Pastor Doug.’ “I heard dem infidels are switchin’ da prisoner’s Leinies with Schlitz.”

Ja, you betcha.

Elliot Kalb, author of Who's Better, Who's Best in Baseball?, has a list of the top ten greatest streaks in sports over at Fox Sports. Here's the list:

1. Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak
2. Johnny Unitas' 47 consecutive games with a touchdown pass
3. Edwin Moses' 122 consecutive victories in 400-meter high hurdles
4. Wilt Chamberlain's 45 complete games in a row
5. Brett Favre's 225 consecutive starts at quarterback
6. Greg Maddux's 15 or more wins for 17 consecutive seasons
7. Cal Ripken's 2,632 consecutive baseball games
8. Dale Long, Don Mattingly, Ken Griffey Jr. hitting home runs in eight consecutive games
9. Kareem Abdul Jabbar's 1,000 or more points scored in 19 consecutive seasons
10. (tie) Byron Nelson's 11 consecutive tournament wins in golf in 1945; Tiger Woods' 142 consecutive tournaments making the cut

Read the article for the details, but I have to agree that Johnny Unitas' record is underappreciated, as I hadn't really been aware of it. Interesting that some of the greatest names in sports don't appear on this list. No Babe Ruth, for example. Not that their achievements were unworthy, I guess, but just that they didn't come in streak form.

Lest any readers think I've been slacking on my vow to read fifty books in 2005, I'm happy to report that I'm well ahead of schedule, halfway through book 24 and here it's only mid-May. My writing on those books, however, has been sadly remiss. Below the fold, my incoherent maunderings about books six through nine on my list.

China Mieville: The Scar
Jacques Pepin: The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen
David Sedaris: Me Talk Pretty One Day
Kevin Boyle: Arc of Justice; A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

China Mieville - The Scar

I blogged earlier this year about Mieville's second novel Perdido Street Station, and if you'll recall my main beef was with Mieville's ambition as an epic novelist and fabulist outstripping his talents as a writer. Luckily, I read its sequel, The Scar, before the earlier novel so was able to remain sanguine about the eventual blooming of his skills throughout.

Set in the same world as PSS, The Scar concerns the adventures of Bellis Coldwine, an acquaintance of the man who caused all the terrible trouble in Perdido Street Station and has as a consequence been forced to flee the brutal justice of the government of her home city of New Crubozon. She catches the first ship out of town, and through a series of misadventures finds herself a prisoner-citizen of the floating pirate city of Armada. Armada is ruled by The Twins, lovers who are secretly taking the floating city on a quest to what eventually proves to be the edge of the world. In the meantime, mysterious forces try to stop them.

Mieville's tendency toward writing a film script in lieu of a novel has almost completely vanished in The Scar, and his tendency to dramatic overreaching is constrained somewhat by the fact that most of the action takes place at sea. Even though the story certainly concerns (*spooky voice*) forces beyond our control, and therefore is ripe for indulgent over-writing, everything hangs together nonetheless.

Mieville is especially strong when filling out the world he's imagined; the various neighborhoods of Armada, ruled variously by the Twins, by vampires, by half-humans with dangerous blood, and by cactus people; the underwater society of the mermen and the reminisces of a city ruled by the dead; the lost nation of mosquito-men; the internal politics of Armada and the geopolitics of New Crubozon; the strange relationship between people and the rare bit of magic.

Burdened with only a simple plot that can move forward practically of its own volition, Mieville can let his imagination run wild in his world and in the conflicted motivations of his characters. Each one of the major players has a personality, volition, and stake in outcomes, and Mieville deploys them with Dickensian aplomb.

What a great novel. What a great, great novel. It’s been four months since I read it, I’ve read more the twenty books since then, and I still can’t shake the flavor of Mieville’s prose. Outstanding.

Jacques Pepin: The Apprentice: My Life in The Kitchen

Jacques Pepin is one of my favorite celebrity chefs thanks to his unpretentiousness. Together with his former partner in crime, the late and lamented Julia Child, he seems more concerned with showing people how to cook food the good, right way than with any fads of convenience, nutrition, or taste. Not that those fads don't have value, but I'm a conservative guy.

What?!? Yep. Conservative. I strongly believe the best way to learn something is first to learn how it’s been done before. You have to learn how to play scales on the piano, and learn your harmony and fingerings, before you can improvise with any authority. You don’t jump on the double black diamond without first skiing the bunny slopes. You need to learn why things happen before you can go making it up on your own. Not that ignorance and amateur stabs can't be both fun and productive, but if you are serious about something, it behooves you to learn the "right" way before you try to discover what "your" way is.

Pepin is one of the best instructors of basic, essential technique I've ever seen. His various television series are How to handle a knife. How to sweat onions. How to braise a chicken. He makes it all eminently comprehensible and easy, not to mention fun. This same clarity and innate geniality come through in his autobiography. Discussing his life as a cook, he traces his journey from a kitchen boy in France taking out the trash and dumping consommé down the sink (I thought it was garbage!) to the celebrity icon he is today, at least in the food world.

Fans of cooking will enjoy his anecdotes about food and kitchens, and fans of food writing will appreciate Pepin's way with words. His love of life and food come from the same place as the redoubtable doyenne of food writing, M.F.K. Fisher (if you haven't read her, go, please and do so. Nobody can make you appreciate an oyster better.). The title “The Apprentice” refers to Pepin’s commitment to perpetually trying to learn new ways of doing things, and his openness to new experiences. When some people profess to have such a commitment, it proves to be a sign that they are in fact completely over having new experiences. In Pepin’s case, however, it is as advertised and the book is filled accordingly with his enterprising spirit and (oh, let’s just say it!) joie de vivre.

And the stories! Oh, the stories! As a young chef, Pepin was in the French Navy (as a cook), and earned the privilege of cooking for de Gaulle. In France, chefs - no matter how skilled - are technicians, artisans, and their work is not considered deserving of celebrity. So, even though Pepin was the head chef to the leader of France, he was just a schlub in a tall hat. A plumber with a whisk. Consequently, when he was offered the post of head chef in the Kennedy White House (a job that would certainly have brought him everlasting renown, not to mention the people's ovation and fame (...Allez cuisine!!), he thought, "Meh… done that." Instead Pepin took a job working for Howard Johnson, developing versions of chicken cordon bleu and potato-leek soup that could be parcooked and reheated in HoJos around the country. As it turns out, this was a fortunate choice since it forced him to reconsider the rigors of his classical training in light of the needs and tastes of the modern world. (The premade chicken cordon bleu, they say, was delicious).

Fascinating characters move in and out of the narrative; a stream of childhood friends and semi-famous French chefs; Julia Child; Howard Johnson; Charles de Gaulle; food critic Craig Claiborne spiraling toward his final sad dissipation. Friends gather on the beach or at farmhouses and commence to cook fabulous meals of impeccable home cooking. And along the way, Pepin achieves everything he's ever wanted. It seems a contented author makes for a satisfying book. And it made at least one reader long for a farmhouse and a passel of friends to cook in it. Someday, someday…

David Sedaris: Me Talk Pretty One Day

I have broken a little bit with the "rules" of the 50-book challenge with this one. If the Senate can do it, so can I. I actually re-read this one while I was sick earlier this year, but since I was half out of my head when I read it again, it was just like reading it for the first time. Didn’t remember a damn thing. (A tip: if you ever want to read something familiar with fresh eyes, I strongly recommend a debilitating illness. Nothing like it in the world.) Moreover, since I was sick I was not able to make my regular pilgrimages to the local library and had to find something on my home bookshelves to read. Since nearly everything there that remains unread is either dry, dense, heavy or an obligation, I had to choose something I knew I could get through without wanting to cry from the effort. So: Sedaris.

Longtime readers will probably not be surprised to find that I consider David Sedaris a filthy son of a bitch who took my dream job. That NPR gig is rightfully mine. His sensibility and penchant for tawdry self-mythologizing resonate with me, and those same tendencies have crept into my writing (e.g. my piece on [url=http://old.perfidy.org/index.php/weblog/comments/performance_art/the most humilating performance I ever gave[/url]). It would be more accurate to say that I always had those tendencies and Sedaris has only made them more pronounced, but I'm not here to talk about myself.

Although not necessarily as full of laughs-per-minute as Naked, Sedaris works more gut-punch moments into Me Talk Pretty One Day. My favorite is the bit about Sedaris' sister Amy who likes to dress in costume, and decides to wear a face full of makeup bruises to a photo shoot for "New York's Most Successful Bachelorettes." That's just dark, man.

Kevin Boyle: Arc of Justice; A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

In the long hot summer of 1925, Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black physician, moved his family into a new house in a working-class neighborhood of Detroit. Within days, a man lay dead and a city ripped apart. Kevin Boyle, a professor of history at Ohio State (who I knew while he was teaching at UMass-Amherst, and whose adorable resemblance to youthful comic actor Topher Grace is growing less pronounced by the year), writes a gripping and insightful story of one black man's struggle with segregation, racism, and the cruel legacy of slavery.

When Sweet bought his Detroit house in 1925, he deliberately chose to move out of the slums reserved for blacks in the city, and to even avoid the nicer all-black neighborhoods in favor of a location that would underscore his maverick status and equality to all. Unfortunately, when threats were made on his life even before moving in, he chose to call on friends and family to arm themselves in defense of his house. At night outside the Sweet house, a mob would gather. As usually happens, the mob eventually spilled over into violence. The mob threw stones, someone got edgy, and in the ensuing melee, a white man got shot by someone defending the house from inside.

In Ossian Sweet, Boyle has a protagonist who it is impossible to make a hero. Born in a segregated Southern town, childhood witness to a brutal lynching, and hardscrabble aspirer to W.E.B. DuBois’ "talented tenth," Boyle brings Sweet across as a somewhat vain and high-handed, if well intentioned, man determined to make his own choices in life. His decisions all seem to have been made with the intention of stubbornly defying critics who claimed that poor black men could never become important members of society. Freed from any obligation to make a hero of Sweet (after all, Sweet is no George Washington, a godlike paragon of American "virtues," whatever they are, but rather an actual human being), Boyle can concentrate on the story and the players in it without any need to build up protagonists or demonize villains. Besides, how hard would you have to work anyway, to demonize a Klansman running for mayor on a "get the darkies out" ticket?

Through court documents, interviews, memoirs, and copious use of personal papers, Boyle reconstructs Sweet's life, his decisions as a Detroit physician, and the trial that ensued after the shooting with meticulous detail. A strong writer, Boyle is canny enough to get out of the way of his story (although he suffers from a shortage of adjectives - if every event, however horrific, is "searing," eventually the word becomes a little hokey). As the trial of Sweet and his co-conspirators approaches, the scope of the story widens as the NAACP get involved. Eventually Clarence Darrow enters the picture as a defender of Sweet, smelling one last iconic victory to cap his storied career. A Klansman runs for mayor (and nearly wins!). Corruption is unveiled. The national struggle for civil rights gets an early test, thirty years before the big one. Does Ossian Sweet get the death penalty for his complicity in the death of a white man, a fine upstanding member of his neighborhood and community? Or does Sweet finally walk, vindicated by the unavoidable stink of vicious institutional racism that clings to the whole affair? You tell me. I already read the book.

Throughout the book, Boyle masterfully balances an intimate portrait of one man's struggle with his own limitations and those society imposes on him with a larger look at how people in the 1920s lived and experienced questions of race. Although his prose is sometimes a little repetitive, his imagination and facility with primary sources more than make up for whatever linguistic shortcomings may sometimes arise. Moreover, Boyle has completely managed to transcend the limitations of genre and specialization. Although frequently labeled a “labor historian,” Boyle uses the shop floor and working environments as a jumping off point to examine deeper connections between people and communities. His 1997 article, “The Kiss: Racial and Gender Conflict in a 1950s Automobile Factory” (Journal of American History 84:2, p. 496) used an interracial kiss between co-workers at a Chrysler lineworkers’ Christmas party to examine how gender and race relations played into notions of status in the workplace and in Detroit society in general. At the time I considered it a brilliant and even audacious departure from the usual standard of written academic history, and I am gratified to see that he has not only stayed this course but gotten even better.

This week is History Week at Slate, and there is a great deal of debate on that site about whether and how real historians should write history readable by anybody but still academically rigorous. Kevin Boyle shows us how.

I can't believe I missed this! (And I can't believe our compatriot and die-hard Madchester fan NDR of Rhine River did too!!) Wednesday marked the 25th anniversary of the suicide of Joy Division lead singer and eternal downer Ian Curtis. Although one of the most appropriate rock-star deaths in history, it still instills regret to think of what he could have done if he'd had more time and a less dogged devotion to dying young.

I can't tell you how many times I've asked myself, "Man! Isn't there a way I could act out the final battle, the Ragnarok, the death of the Gods and Earth, AND indulge my sweet tooth at the same time?"

Salvation, as it were, is at hand.

Thanks to Chocolate Deities, I need wait no longer to play Heimdall and devour my ancient, toothsome nemesis, chocolate Loki.

It appears that the great Homeland Security color-coded fear-o-meter is dead. I guess this means it's time to retire our Sesame Street-themed parody of same in the sidebar. Check this quote:

"The color-coded system does not work well and has undermined the department's credibility,'' said Patrick Kennedy, a Rhode Island Democrat. "What we have now is a system that tells us to be scared. That's it.''

Yup. Though I would sharpen that a bit to: we have a system that tells us to be scared that nobody pays a damn bit of attention to anyway.

The US Government: What... what? We're doin' somethin! See? Somethin! With charts and everything! Why do you hate our freedom?!?

A few moderate senators from both sides of the isle are scurrying to and fro in an attempt to head off the looming confrontation over President Bush’s judicial nominees and the Senate filibuster rules. It seems at this point rather unlikely that they will succeed. Just so we have some solid ground to walk on, let us summarize the debate:

• The Republicans are pondering changing the Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominees. The Filibuster would remain in place everywhere else that it hasn’t already been removed.
• The Republicans are thinking about doing this because the Democrats are holding up many appellate court nominees.
• The Democrats say that it is within their rights to do this, and that it is a long standing senate tradition and part of their constitutional duty as Senators to oppose right wing fanatical nominees.
• The Republicans say that the Democrats are obstructionist wackos who are opposing every thing Bush does out of knee jerk political rancor, and that the rule change just puts things back where they were.
• As far as appellate court nominations go, Bush’s success rate so far is about half what the last two presidents whose party also controlled the Senate achieved.
• The Senate rules are not part of the Constitution, and the word filibuster does not appear in that august document. The Constitution says that the Senate must give its advice and consent to nominees, and little more.
• The senate rules for filibusters have been changed in the past – most recently by Democrats lowering the cloture threshold from 67 to 60. Even more recently, some Democrats called for the abolition of the filibuster altogether, back when they were the majority. And of course, minority Republicans screamed bloody murder then.
• All of the judges currently in limbo are ranked “qualified” or higher by the American Bar Association.
• The Republican spin is that all nominees deserve an up or down vote, not endless obstruction through empty parliamentary tactics. In other words, “If you don’t like ‘em, don’t vote fur ‘em.”
• The Democratic Spin is that the Republicans are trying to rewrite the constitution and change the Senate into a rubberstamp body, allowing extremist right wingers onto the bench. In other words, “Don’t let the Right wingers execute a naked grab for power.”

Now, on general principles, changing the Senate rules is not something that should be done lightly. However, It seems fair that a President, having gone to the trouble of winning an election and all, at least ought to be able to get his nominees a vote. On the whole, I think that the Democrats are, in fact, being obstructionists. I would have greater confidence in their claims that they are attempting to keep “extremists” off the bench if not for the fact that they have called all of Bush’s nominees “extremists.” That kind of dilutes the oomph of that word.

The test for me as to whether this rule change is a good idea or not is to flip it. Say, god forbid, the Democrats were to stage an amazing comeback and in 2008 win the Presidency, the House and the Senate. Newly elected President Moonbat sends a group of judicial nominees ranging from fairly liberal to communist to the Senate. Now, do I still think it’s a good idea that the Senate vote on them? Yes, I do. If the Republicans can dig up enough dirt, convince enough moderate Democrats, or make enough deals to keep the more left wing ones from getting 51 votes, hey! That’s great. But that’s how the system should work. The Constitution does not require a supermajority to approve presidential nominees, which is what the Democrat's current filibuster usage amounts to. The Constitution is very clear when it does require one.

So as far as I’m concerned, changing the Senate rules is okay by me, end of story.

But what really confuses the crap out of me is why the Democrats are doing this now.

The Dems are really irritating the Republicans, pushing them hard on the whole issue, pissing them off to the point where they are ready to risk whatever political backlash might come to change the rules. Reid is only offering empty compromises. All for what? To keep a bunch of appellate court nominees off the bench, nominees that the ABA ranks qualified or well qualified, and who aren’t any more right wing than the average Republican? When they know that there are going to be at least two Supreme Court vacancies in the next year or so, including the Chief Justice slot?

The Democrats are going to lose the filibuster, the appellate court nominees will go through anyway and be confirmed, and they’ll have exactly bupkis in their quiver when they get to the real battle. And as a bonus, the Republicans will be in the clear politically because the rule change would have happened well before the Supreme Court fight. That really, really blows my mind. Unless I’m really missing something, that is the most boneheaded political strategy I’ve ever heard of. (Excepting of course the Iraqi insurgents, who are so impatient that they can’t take the time to provoke the US into killing Iraqi citizens, and are skipping the middle man to go right ahead and kill the Iraqis themselves.)

I have to wonder what their thinking on this is. Or do they really think that all of these nominees are rabid, slavering, dues paying members of the KKK? Even the black ones?

Also from Marginal Revolution, an interesting argument from Freakonomics author Steven Levitt: higher abortion rates have lead to lower crime rates.

From Oxford Russian scholar Ronald Hingley:

"For it is surely true, if not generally recognized, that real prowess in wrong-headedness, as in most other fields of human endeavor, presupposes considerable education, character, sophistication, knowledge, and will to succeed."

As quoted in Robert Conquest's Reflections on a Ravaged Century.

At least some of the time, anyway. Typically here at Perfidy, we like to talk about the brain-eating, stumbly undead sort of zombie, but Tyler Cohen at Marginal Revolution is talking about consciousness, and its obverse. The basic idea is that parts of your mind operate zombie fashion, without conscious monitoring and indeed sometimes completely bypassing conscious control. Christof Koch, in his The Quest for Consciousness, says,

"Zombie agents control your eyes, hands, feet, and posture, and rapidly transduce sensory input into stereotypical motor output. They might even trigger aggressive or sexual behaviors when getting a whiff of the right stuff. All, however, bypass consciousness. This is the zombie you."

The evolutionary advantage of programmed responses is clear, given that they do not require the processor-intensive cogitation that conscious thought requires. Consciousness then coexists with the zombie you. Consciousness is a more processor-intensive form of cogitation than the sort of rote thinking of the zombie mind. Its advantage is that it, combined with sensory input and short term memory, allows judgment and interpretation of the world rather than mere reaction; provides context and meaning for those actions; and even the possibility of prediction based on internalized models.

I'm not entirely convinced that consciousness is all its cracked up to be. While I am self aware, in the sense that I watch myself thinking, and acting - I find it hard to determine whether I am actually deciding and choosing things or merely providing a running narrative or play-play of actions determined by some other, non-conscious process. Think about it - how many things to you actually decide to do, in the manner of rational, cost-benefit analysis choosing? How hard is it when you make the effort? Or are you just doing what you "want" and providing an explanation for it. Why did you want it in the first place, and where did that come from - did you "decide" to like it? In most cases, are you (the little you, the homonculus that sits an inch behind your eyes) acting or providing a post-facto rationalization for impulses and reflexes coming from somewhere else?

Consciousness may be another layer of thinking - neurons firing and synapses twanging. It is a far richer and more flexible kind of thought than zombie thinking, certainly; but I'm not sure that it is any different, in kind, from the reflexes of the zombie mind.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm not in a position to argue.