August 2005This is fascinating and disturbing. Those who think that China is a "strategic partner" should think again.
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In my high school, there were basically 2 sorts of people: the kids who listened to crap, and the ones who didn't.
We were too small to have a distinct division between the usual clans. The heads and jocks, for example, were oftentimes indistinct as the top athletes smoked dope or juiced. Since I wasn't into drugs or sports, or combining one with the other, I found I identified most with people who listened to similar musics. As an interesting side note, most of us had little musical talent; the band kids listened to the pop/pap.
Via Begging to Differ and about three other people comes a harmless, yet peculiarly irritating little music game.
Instructions:
After looking at the list, is it any wonder that Zeppelin and Sabbath were among the most popular bands to the music clan? Is it wrong that the B52s had the least-offensive track in the entire year? I ought to disclose that sure, I dug G 'n R when I was 17. But today I can't even bear to hear a snippet of "Appetite" flipping between stations.
My list below the fold.
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Malaysia has announced that they plan to be on the moon by 2020. If a third rate nation like Malaysia is even contemplating a manned moon mission in the near term, it is high time that we get our asses moving. Bad enough that we can imagine a Chinese-dominated space future, but a Malaysian one is beyond the pale.
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From Kathleen Parker, who later refers to the boob thusly:
Robertson, of course, is well known for his spontaneous foot tastings. This is the same Pat Robertson who has urged his flock to pray for a U.S. Supreme Court vacancy "one way or the other."
Quite so. Oh, anyhow - that analogy?
Televangelist Pat Robertson's flip-flop on his fantasy moment as an international assassin reminds me of a famous, if possibly apocryphal, story about David Niven as told by Christopher Buckley.Niven is standing with another gentleman at the base of a staircase as two ladies in evening gowns descend.
Niven says: "That's the ugliest woman I've ever seen."
Other man replies: "That's my wife."
Niven: "I meant the other one."
Other man: "That's my daughter."
Niven: "I didn't say it."
If there were licenses required for speaking in public, Robertson's would have at least been suspended by now.
Our plentiful supply of other public morons is probably embarrassed to be seen around Reverend Pat. If not, they ought to be. Not everything you think is worthy of public exposition.
Unless, of course, you have a blog.
[wik] Other views, of course, can be found. Witness this from Alan Abelson of Barron's:
Predictably, Mr. Robertson's suggestion prompted a paroxysm of harrumphing from lily-livered liberals and the like (if you don't like, just leave it at from lily-livered liberals). Jesse Jackson urged the FCC to launch an investigation as it did after Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction during the half-time show at the Super Bowl on the grounds that "This is even more threatening to hemispheric stability than the flash of a breast on television during a ballgame."A close call, we'd say.
The fuss proved sufficiently discomforting for Mr. Robertson to cause him to recant. Which, frankly, we feel is a shame. Not that we believe dispatching Mr. Chavez is a particularly compelling priority. But the concept of effecting regime change on the cheap appeals to us.
Certainly, even the most cursory spectator of the global political scene can rattle off the names of at least a dozen no-good-niks who would be ideal candidates for the coup de grâce. And they don't even have to be mass murderers or ethnic cleansers; blamed nuisances would do fine. And we needn't worry too much about world opinion: We could always outsource the work. If the administration is right and everything is going to be hunky-dory in Iraq, there'll be a lot of idle assassins hanging around street corners in Baghdad who'd be only too happy to pick up a few bucks. Or, we could insource the job to the Mafia, whose business, thanks to the zeal of prosecutors and the eagerness of capos to spill the fava beans, isn't the killer it used to be.
Come to think of it, the approach is fraught with possibilities right here in the good old USA. It might be a quite useful device for our own polity as a kind of permanent term limit for especially deserving office holders. It also might prove an extremely efficacious tool for corporate governance as a means of getting rid of crooked CEOs, a quick and irrevocable way to enhance shareholder value (avoiding those costly golden handshakes, etc). And it holds particular promise for our own beloved Wall Street, where capital crimes are committed every day and the perpetrators live to crow about it.
Thank you, Mr. Robertson.
On second thought, he might not be completely serious. It's possible he has a blog on the side.
on
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A research team has succeeded in producing a recon drone that flies like a bird. At least in some respects. It's not an ornithopter - it doesn't use the flapping of wings to generate lift. But it can rapidly change the shape of its wings to achieve much greater flight control and maneuverability. The flight control system is modeled after the wings of the common sea gull, and will allow the drone to complete three barrel rolls in a minute - an F16 can only do one without incapacitating the pilot.
"If you fly in the urban canyon, through alleys, around parking garages and between buildings, you need to do sharp turns, spins and dives," said project leader Rick Lind, an aerospace engineer at the University of Florida. "That means you need to change the shape of the aircraft during flight."
If all this tinkering pans out, the result will be a highly maneuverable drone for looking in on enemies in built up areas. As long as they don't add a guano-bombing module, I think its a good idea.
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I'm not especially a religious cat, and lean toward agnosticism at my most upbeat. But I am capable of respecting, and on a good day appreciating, the art that comes from spiritual expression.
I'm not sure how I ended up with this cross, because some of the questions assumed dogmatic knowledge on my part that I don't possess. But I knew the difference between "Ben Hur" and "The Passion of the Christ" so took a stab.
The one question that really threw me though was something about which material bests suits my personality... I thought about it, and couldn't decide betwixt marble or clay. I went with marble because it's cold.
I think I like my cross: simple, devoid of pretension (the object itself, I'm focusing on here), hand made, and just slightly weird:
You are St Brigid's Cross: St. Brigid is an Irish saint who hand-wove a cross out of rushes she found by the river. She made the cross while explaining the passion of our Lord to a pagan man.
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From Stars and Stripes:
From rubble to avenging angel: The U.S. Navy is using steel from the World Trade Center in a new ship, according to the Navy.Ten tons of steel from the World Trade Center’s twin towers will be used in the construction of the USS New York, according to a Navy official.
The San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock is slated to be commissioned in 2008.
Being a squishy peacenik socks-n-sandals sort I generally squirm at gestures that whiff of vengeance. Unfortunately there is twelve-million-square-foot hole in my mercy that is still, four years down the road, full of black rage and sorrow. The notion that some of the steel from the WTC has made its way into a fighting vessel called the USS New York makes me feel... good.
It also nearly makes up for the failure of the designers of the new buildings to go with my preferred plan.
[wik] h/t Blackfive.
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Minister Geeklethal cued me in to an interesting article from the English-language Arab News, "The Middle East's Leading English Language Daily." In this opinion piece, the editor holds forth on the proper mindset for beating your wife.
The beating which is only prescribed in the case of disobedient wives is intended to serve as a remedy in an unusual situation. If the husband feels the wife is behaving in a disobedient and rebellious manner, he is required to rectify her attitude — first by kind words, then gentle persuasion and reasoning. Beating as a last resort must never be understood to entail using a stick or any other instrument that would cause pain or injury.
A rebellious woman who is not moved by kind works, persuasion and admonition is a woman of no feeling and must therefore be punished by beating. Psychiatrists tell us of people, including women, for whom a cure lies in beating.
The controversy over the beating of disloyal and rebellious women is part of the campaign against Islam. If beating disobedient wives was advocated by Western scientists, it would have been widely supported by the same people who criticize Islam and special centers would have been set up all over the world to train husbands on how to beat their wives.
Our scholars should focus on explaining to people, especially the young, the real teachings of Islam in order to avoid causing uncertainty and confusion.
It is good that the interpreters of the religion of peace realize that there are two kinds of beatings, and forbid at least one of them to husbands. Instructional beatings at least have the saving grace of providing instruction - whereas run-of-the-mill, smack the bitch for shits and giggles beatings just leave bruises.
Back in Ohio, we would occasionally run across people who clearly "need beating." I now understand that what we were feeling there was a divine inspiration to administer instructional beatings. If only we had read the Koran, we would have been empowered to act on that nudging from the almighty rather than let cretins run around untutored.
It is good for my safety that I am a Christian, seeing as any attempt to deliver admonitory beatings to Mrs. Buckethead would result, not in her adopting a more humble and obedient posture, but in me getting a grade A tae kwon do ass whuppin'.
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Further proof that my nonbelieving heathen ass is as contrary to the mainstream of American culture as can be. Beliefnet has an article, as is their wont, about the reasons people go to church and what they believe about people who don't, in the form of results of a Beliefnet/Newsweak poll. There are some very surprising conclusions, such as the revelation (pun!) that 79% of churchgoing Americans and 68% of Evangelical Protestants believe that all good people have a shot at heaven whether they belong to [the church of yr choice] or not. That's interesting... the Antinomian heresy is clearly alive and well. Among other things, this indicates that Anne Hutchison's exile to Rhode Island in 1637 was to absolutely no avail.
More than that it is a testament to the ability of Americans to tolerate others innately, even when they are instructed repeatedly not to on pain of hellfire & eternal whatever. I mean seriously... hell is a pretty central tenet of especially the Fundie folkways, and for all the rhetoric they sling on Sundays and at demonstrations, it seems the better angels of their natures prevail.
But the really interesting part of the survey is this:
Other results from the poll indicate that the appeal of religion is more spiritual than cultural. Thirty-nine percent said the main reason they practiced their religion is to “forge a personal relationship with God” while only 3% said it was to be part of a community. This would help explain why many people report having a regular prayer life but not attending church. Seventy-nine percent said they pray at least once a week compared to 45% who said they went to worship services during that time. In addition, 40% said they felt “most connected with God or the divine” when they were “praying alone or meditating” compared to 27% who said they had that sense when they were in a house of worship or praying with others.The poll also showed a more basic point that may be obvious to Beliefnet readers but not others: spirituality is crucial to most Americans. 57% said spirituality was "very important" in their "daily life" and another 27% said it was somewhat important. Their behavior seems to back up this notion. 79% said they prayed at least once a week and 55% said they read a sacred text -- Bible, Koran, etc -- at least once a week.
Only three percent of Americans go to church primarily to feel part of a community. The li'l punchline to this is that my wife and I have kicked around the idea of joining a church for the sake of having a community for our as yet theoretical children to grow up within. If only the Unitarians weren't so darned uptight.... Moreover, I have as yet been unable to maintain a regular relationship with my own navel during meditation, much less any putatative sky fairy whom I've as yet been unable to raise on the great Cosmic Philco. Being on the wrong side of a 97% and a 79% majority means you could probably fit all the other people in this great country who think like me in one Winnebago. A small one.
Rather irritatingly, the Beliefnet/Newsweak poll also includes a teaser at the bottom of the first page: "How Many Of Us Believe in Intelligent Design?" On the second page it is revealed that "We Are All Intelligent Designers," which is explained with a data point to the effect that 80% of respondants believe God created the universe. I'm not sure those two statements are compatible, and indeed it is an annoying cop-out in an otherwise very interesting survey and poll.
Anyway, decent article. Apparently I'm a heathen freak.
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Have you, as a mature and intelligent amateur pundit or consumer of said amateur punditry, ever said to yourself, "I wonder... where all the hoochies at?"
If so, you're in luck. Thanks to the magic of the Internets and the puckish wit of anonymous code-gnomes, we now have a mashup of new hotness Google Maps with old and busted fad hotornot.com that lets you locate all Hot or Not? submitters in and around your town. From the needy-looking coed who's "up for anything" to the barely legal teen who loves the "hott boyzz" to the scantily clad un-MILF who has "three kids" and wants "NO CASUAL SEX," there's something here for pathological loners and Megan's Law fugitives of all genders and persuasions.
Since this same territory is covered in every meaningful way by dating sites and webcam peepshows of all stripes, what is this for besides giving us an easy way to affirm our superiority? To paraphrase the immortal Dale Gribble from TV's "King of the Hill," Hot Or Not is already "the feces that is produced when shame eats too much stupidity!" This new mashup just makes it easier to identify the losers among us so they may be more easily excised from the margins of our social circles. Hopefully all these hott frontaz and skanky hoochies will find each other and sink together to the bottom of the gene pool.
This is Phase I. Phase II will involve radio tagging.
Is all this unnecessarily elitist of me? After all, these people are already *something* enough (lonely, vacuous, foolish, hapless) enough to end up on hotornot.com. Do I really need to add to the misery they probably (ought to) already feel by pointing an electronic finger and laughing?
You bet I do.
[wik] Link from gawker.
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You have not lived until you have heard Motorhead's "Orgasmotron" covered by Yat-kha, a Siberian band fronted by a Tuvan Throat Singer. I don't know what's best... the Russian bouzouki-stylee backing track or the fact that suddenly Lemmy seems like a limpwristed whiny little pussy next to the sinister Satan's-lungs croak of Albert Kuvezin.
Listen here, and be sure not to miss the incredible cover of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart."
We now return you to your regular programming.
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As I type this, NPR's All Things Considered has just finished delivering a story, entitled "A Dilemma Over Sheltering Sex Offenders".
All Things Considered, August 19, 2005 · Public concern over sex offenders has led Florida to open its 59 prisons as hurricane shelters and require registered sex offenders on probation to report there if they don't have anywhere else to go. Registered sex offenders can't go to a public shelter because their probation bars them from being around children. Some sex offenders on probation say the requirement is being punished twice for their crime. Judith Smelser of member station WMFE reports.
Now, I consider myself to be of at least average intelligence, and I try very hard not to read too much into the presentation of any given news story, whether from NPR, Fox, or any of the other standard media outlets. This makes it possible for me to enjoy them all, at various times.
But if any reader could be so kind to give the story a listen, via the "Listen" button at the link above, I'd appreciate an opinion on the thrust of the story. Net: Sex offenders on probation or under state supervision aren't allowed to go to hurricane shelters in Florida, and instead, if they live in an area that's been forcibly evacuated and they have no safe place to go, they have to present themselves to their neighborhood prison, where they're treated like guests rather than prisoners. They have to wear name tags, they can't smoke, and if they leave and go somewhere other than home, they're at risk of violating probation/parole, but they're provided safe refuge.
Here's the thing - I'd swear NPR was trying to make me feel sorry for the sex offenders, and I'd like to hear someone tell me I'm just imagining this.
I recognize that there is a class of registered sex offenders who don't fit into the standard mold, such as 19 year olds with 17 year old partners, rather than, say, a Boston Diocese priest in recent memory. We're talking two completely different "transgression levels", in other words, and I haven't a clue what transgression got the two fellows who spoke their minds in the NPR story onto the list of registered offenders.
However, in order to wring a tear from me after hearing this story, if applied to some disgusting pervert who just wants to be treated like he's not a disgusting pervert because, you know, he's done his time and all that, it would take a ball peen hammer to the grapes.
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Most Americans are unaware of how, exactly, their government works. At best, most of our citizenry has a hazy conception of the actual operation of Congress based in large part on vague recollections of schoolhouse rock’s “I’m just a bill.” This is a good and bad thing.
On the one hand, it is bad because liberty in a republic depends on the wise and considered participation of an informed citizenry. Warmed over and fuzzy memories from high school civics layered with factoids from USA Today and CNN do not an informed electorate make.
On the other hand, it is good, because if the good citizens of this nation actually understood, really knew, what goes on in, say, the stygian depths of the House Rules Committee room, they’d invite the British back to finish what they started in 1814. Leaving our fair capital a smoking wasteland would be infinitely preferable to facing the horrifying reality of dysfunction and corruption at the heart of our system.
On a related but tangential track, there’s Sam Cohen. You’ve likely never heard of him, but he’s the dude who invented the atom bomb. The peacemongers and hippies all painted the neutron as an even eviler version of an irredeemably evil weapon. It was the ultimate capitalist bomb – a nefarious device that killed people while leaving their property intact. This is in stark contrast to the actual mindset that led to Cohen to invent the bomb and to declare for decades that it was the most moral weapon ever devised.
Cohen’s logic was that in war, people will use weapons. Weapons are designed to kill. So, it makes sense to design weapons that kill efficiently while doing as little else as possible. If a neutron bomb doesn’t kill you outright, you will live on with out appreciable aftereffects. The infrastructure that you need to survive after the war will be intact – not blasted apart or poisoned with radioactivity. The bomb doesn’t maim, it only kills. Cohen, from his position at RAND, lobbied for years for his concept, only to be rejected by five successive administrations and a military that wanted only bigger bombs, not more efficient ones.
Cohen’s story has some – interesting – accounts of the wrong-headedness of those in charge of our nuclear strategy. But they aren’t as far fetched as they might seem at first. Remember that the depiction of cold war strategic reasoning in Dr. Strangelove is barely exaggerated from the realities of game theory informed strategy used by RAND and the military up until the fall of the Soviet Union. (The takeover of grand strategy by the mathematicians starting with RAND in the late forties is responsible for much of the incredible weirdness of the Cold War, the counterintuitive reasoning, inflexible response postures and bloodthirsty retaliation schemes. Also, the fascination with throw-weight, CEP, megadeaths, and finely-wrought calculations of the effects of nuclear war.) And also that those responsible for setting policy had (with the possible exception of Eisenhower) none of the special aptitude or training one might think necessary for figuring out what to do with city-destroying weaponry.
Knowledge is good, as the Faber college motto tells us. But it doesn’t always make it easier to sleep at night.
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A headline in today's Washington Post informs that Roberts Resisted Women's Rights. On reading the story, these horrific facts were made evident:
Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. consistently opposed legal and legislative attempts to strengthen women's rights during his years as a legal adviser in the Reagan White House, disparaging what he called "the purported gender gap" and, at one point, questioning "whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good."In internal memos, Roberts urged President Ronald Reagan to refrain from embracing any form of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment pending in Congress; he concluded that some state initiatives to curb workplace discrimination against women relied on legal tools that were "highly objectionable"; and he said that a controversial legal theory then in vogue -- of directing employers to pay women the same as men for jobs of "comparable worth" -- was "staggeringly pernicious" and "anti-capitalist."
...
Covering a period from 1982 to 1986 -- during his tenure as associate counsel to Reagan -- the memos, letters and other writings show that Roberts endorsed a speech attacking "four decades of misguided" Supreme Court decisions on the role of religion in public life, urged the president to hold off saying AIDS could not be transmitted through casual contact until more research was done, and argued that promotions and firings in the workplace should be based entirely on merit, not affirmative action programs.
In October 1983, Roberts said that he favored the creation of a national identity card to prove American citizenship, even though the White House counsel's office was officially opposed to the idea. He wrote that such measures were needed in response to the "real threat to our social fabric posed by uncontrolled immigration."
Now, as a side note, much of this wasn't news to me, as I'd already heard it during the breathless expose on NPR's All Things Considered, the night that 5,000 pages of records had been made available, and all the progressives ganged up looking for instances where Roberts had called someone a homo or some other such disqualifying action.
However, when put in context, like the WaPo did for me, uh, wait a minute. Even in context, the only thing I see there that's even worth a raised eyebrow is the silliness about AIDS transmission. I was around in the early 80s, but can't recall how institutionalized that sort of scientific ignorance was at the time, so I don't really take it all that seriously.
(If you don't already think me an intemperate red-neck, see the rest below the fold)
As for the rest, I read it a bit differently. Roberts didn't want to create women's rights out of whole cloth, and as one who remembers the idiocy that went under the name "comparable worth", he was utterly correct - it was staggeringly pernicious and anti-capitalist. Pernicious because it involved a whole bunch of folks, outside the free market, enforcing decisions about who got paid what, and anti-capitalist for the same reason.
And before anyone says "Hey, anti-capitalist is a good thing", I'd first say "Kiss my ass, Fidel, you ignorant socialist bastard, and keep doing so until you can find a single case where socialism actually worked", but after I'd calmed down, I'd further point out that "capitalist" isn't shorthand for some fat-ass sitting in the corner office smoking a cigar and repressing the working class, it's a concise description of simply allowing the free market to determine worth of various positions. Insisting that women not be paid less due to their lack of Y chromosome was and is an absolutely good thing. Insisting that there be a command economy, in which the Collective makes all wage decisions, would be an absolutely bad thing.
Roberts has suggested that promotions in the workplace should be based on merit rather than affirmative action programs, and this is somehow controversial? Only to ostriches and retards. As an example of why that is and what's wrong with continued over-emphasis on the race wars, particularly in the present day, consider the always-articulate thoughts of Dr. Walter E. Williams, and this excerpt:
When I think of the behavior of today's civil rights organizations, I often think of the March of Dimes. In 1938, President Roosevelt helped found the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to fight polio, an epidemic that crippled thousands of Americans. The name March of Dimes was coined by Eddie Cantor in his fundraising effort asking every American to contribute a dime.Since 1970, polio has been eradicated in the U.S., but the March of Dimes lives on, and they're asking for more than dimes. When they accomplish their mission, most organizations don't fold the tent; they simply change their agenda. The March of Dimes now raises money to fight against birth defects, premature birth and other infant health problems. We'd probably deem them stupid if they continued their battle against polio in America. Why? Because polio has been eradicated.
...
Like the March of Dimes' victory against polio in the U.S., civil rights organizations can claim victory as well. At one time, black Americans did not enjoy the same constitutional guarantees as other Americans. Now we do. Because the civil rights struggle is over and won doesn't mean that all problems have vanished within the black community. A 70 percent illegitimacy rate, 65 percent of black children raised in female-headed households, high crime rates and fraudulent education are devastating problems, but they're not civil rights problems. Furthermore, their solutions do not lie in civil rights strategies.
Civil rights organizations' expenditure of resources and continued focus on racial discrimination is just as intelligent as it would be for the March of Dimes to continue to expend resources fighting polio in the U.S. Like the March of Dimes, civil rights organizations should revise their agenda and take on the big, non-civil rights problems that make socioeconomic progress impossible for a large segment of the black community.
So there's that.
And the latter item, identity cards? Aside from the fact such cards already exist, even if only in the ineffective form of the Social Security number attached to every friggin' trail of American life, the Post talks about his aversion to illegal (otherwise known as "uncontrolled") immigration as though that's a bad thing. I'm all for immigration, done properly. But the apologists who'd pretend that illegal immigrants should just be allowed to stream over the borders are either intentionally deceptive or criminally naive. I'm now officially a minority in my home state of Texas (being a person of pallor), and there's a decent chance that I'll be in another minority soon, as a person actually legally authorized to be here.
That first part doesn't concern me, but the second concerns me greatly - in addition to the drain on resources, paid for by legal citizens but consumed by others, there's the bit about this becoming Mexico, which, well, if I wanted to live in an opportunity-bereft shithole, I could just move there myself. They don't have to bring it to me. And when they do bring it, I'd prefer that they at least bring it in the language of the land, a/k/a English. The fact that they don't is but one of the reasons for lack of assimilation, and the core reason which causes an otherwise mild-mannered and open-minded guy like me to wonder how long before I am a de-facto Mexican.
Don't get me wrong - Mexican-Americans are cool, but Mexicans who seek a better life, and do so by simply transplanting themselves here to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Braves are missing the point. What's right about America is the vast melting pot that it's been for the last couple hundred years. And what's wrong about Mexico is the ineptly governed, economically unbalanced, insular, congealed, undifferentiated mess that it's become over those same couple hundred years. No wonder they want out. But don't congeal our melting pot, is all I'm saying. Well, that and if you're coming, come legally, please?
So, back from my rant to my actual point - I'm supposed to be inclined against Roberts because he seems to have, at least 20 years ago, held a bunch of intelligent positions? Not bloody likely.
But then I've never been overtly progressive like that.
Oh, and regarding whether turning homemakers into lawyers is a good thing?
Roberts's comment about homemakers startled women across the ideological spectrum. Phyllis Schlafly, the president of the conservative Eagle Forum who entered law school when she was 51, said, "It kind of sounds like a smart alecky comment." She noted that Roberts was "a young bachelor and hadn't seen a whole lot of life at that point."Schlafly said, "I knew Lyn Arey. She is a fine woman." But she added, "I don't think that disqualifies him. I think he got married to a feminist; he's learned a lot."
Lighten up Phyllis. A smart lady like you should be able to tell he was ranking on attorneys, not homemakers or women. See? Even right-wingers can get a periodic case of humor constipation.
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There is a certain portion of the American population that is, on its best day, suspicious of higher education. Those folks regard their fellow, matriculated, citizens as arrogant; elitist; lacking in common sense, or, indeed, any knowledge of demonstrable utility; or with a variation of “too smart for their own good.”
A doctoral dissertation studying air guitar doesn't help.
Turning what is little more than a limited, if not limiting, sort of self expression into serious academic inquiry is precisely what the non-eggheads in this world complain about and what serious scholars laugh at. When I finished my master’s, I wasn’t so much proud as I was enormously relieved. Relieved that the pain would finally end, and that it would end because of my hard work and not a .38 to the temple.
Crap like air guitar dissertations are, frankly, an insult to anyone who sacrificed to produce graduate work.
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Via Pejman, this glorious post. Excerpt:
THEME (By the Kronos Quartet with vocals by ABBA)
Just the good ol' boys
Filled with guilt and ennui
They're bored, racked with discord
Just hangin' by the fjord
Scarred emotionally
Masking their pain
The only way they know how
Just a bit more existentialist
Than their souls will allow
Just them good ol' boys
Wouldn't change if they could
Psychically crippled
Like two planks of Danish teak wood
Yee. Ha.
SCENE 1
Interior shot of a backwoods cabin in rural Georgia. The room is tastefully decorated with Bruno Mathsson lounge chairs, Eero Saarinen side tables, a rebel flag and moonshine still. An old bearded man lies on a vintage midcentury Alvar Aalto death bed.
NARRATOR (Gunnar Biörnstrand)
Just plumb about everybody in Hazzard County has a story to tell 'bout them Duke boys and their existential auto-didactism. This one starts back at the farm, where Bo 'n' Luke are about to find out that Uncle Jesse has a little surprise in store for 'em...
UNCLE JESSE (Max Von Sydow)
Bo, Luke. Come to my side, nephews.
(Cousins Bo and Luke, scions of Uncle Jesse's crumbling moonshine dynasty, enter.)
LUKE (Börje Ahlstedt)
What is it you want, Uncle?
(Bo and Luke exchange long, blank glance; a Hans Wegner clock ticks on a far wall)
UNCLE JESSE
Death.
BO (Ashton Kutcher)
Your despair has shaken our complacency. I shall bring your jug.
LUKE
It is the same Blomvo jug that Aunt Bessie long ago bought for you at Ikea... when you were young and happy.
UNCLE JESSE
Its design is elegant; yet, like life, it brings me no joy. I am compelled to smash it, like my own existence.
BO
But you must live, Uncle.
UNCLE JESSE
Why must I live? Life is a meaningless parade of pain, and loneliness, and revenuers.
(Bo and Luke stare; close-up of ticking clock)
on
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The Watergate scandal typically overshadows Nixon's one real accomplishment - peeling the Chinese off the Soviet Bloc. Rather than a monolithic communist world united in opposition to the good 'ol US of A, after the early seventies, you had a much friendlier duolithic communist world; one where the Sovs had to seriously worry about the billion hungry Chinese and the longest land border on Earth. All was hunky-dory until the unraveling of the Soviet colossus through decades of political calculation out the window.
A period of happy innocence followed, followed by a rude awakening in the form of fanatical Islamofascists blowing up our buildings. But this, too has skewed our geopolitical reasoning. For all that terrorists and their state sponsors do pose a threat, it is not an existential threat. We need to take action, certainly, to defend ourselves, and the best defense is usually a good offense. Nevertheless, there is no way that Islamic legions will be landing on the Jersey shore anytime in this or any other century. Islamic bomber fleets will not rain destruction down on our cities, unless they somehow manage to get a five finger discount on the one of our air forces.
The only real potential (for now) existential threat is China. The Soviets, god bless them, were evil. But they were evil and stupid. We had the great good fortune that our greatest enemies saddled themselves with the most backward, inefficient and retarded economic system ever devised by the mind of man. This was more than a little help in a half century of Cold War. The Chinese communists are just as evil, but have jettisoned the worst of the economic stupidity of the command economy. Evil and smart puts me more in mind of say, Germany in 1936 rather than the USSR in 1980. An evil leadership, with a vibrant and productive economy, and with a distinctly (not to say xenophobic or fanatical) nationalist ideology is not a good thing to have in the world's most populous nation.
Germany was outnumbered by each of its three major opponents in the Second World War. This will not be the case in any hypothetical confrontation with China. And China is clearly laying the groundwork for confrontation with the US. This whole rant was sparked by this article which describes the increasing cooperation between the Russian and Chinese militaries. The Chinese are now the senior partner in a solidifying strategic alliance that embraces the majority of Asia's landmass.
Here's a prediction: if the Chinese invade Taiwan, the only people on our side will be Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea, and India. And of course, the Taiwanese. Russia will be soldily in the Chinese hip pocket, and the Europeans will sit on the sidelines and condemn everyone. But they'll only mean it when they say it to us.
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In an article entitled, "Gamers turn cities into a battleground," the New Scientist explores the possibilities now unfolding in the world of urban gaming. Urban gaming makes use of cell phones, GPS and other technological gimcrackery to create virtual games played in actual meatspace. It's a fascinating article, and evidently some serious skull sweat has been expended to develop something that I have no interest in whatsoever. Undoubtedly, thousands will soon thrill to the prospects of playing a spy in a game based in DC, and I will have one more thing to contend with on my commute home. As if the tourons weren't bad enough.
However one aspect of this urban gaming seems rather disturbing and frankly, fraught with peril:
Games console makers are also embracing the trend. Portable console maker Gizmondo is soon to launch Colors, a gangland game where players play a conventional arcade game to earn credits and money. These are then used to buy turf in the real world - Soho in London, say. Walk into a Soho cafe and attempt to play Colors, and the GPS embedded in the console might tell you you're playing on another gang's patch, and you need to beat them in a virtual fight to claim the turf and continue.
How long do you think - in hours - after the launch of this game before someone gets knifed?
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We are warned that Global Warming is real. We are warned that such warming presents a real and imminent danger. All sorts of things have been proposed - from the reasonable to the ridiculous to the draconian - to deal with the warming. And all of this is to prevent the onslaught of a temperature rise of about one degree over the next century or so.
However, what would happen if the global temperature went up by several degrees, and the what if the oxygen content went up by 50%? What if the CO2 content of the air quintupled? Surely, all life would come to an end! Either that, or the Earth would just be a bit more like it was in the Cretaceous Period, when life did come to an end as a result of global warming, leaving the Earth a barren and sterile wasteland inimical to all future life. Like New Jersey.
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Via Murdoc, and Blackfive, this heartwarming photo from the frontlines:
The armed forces are always willing to display their undying respect for the media. From another recent Blackfive post, this quote is also apropos:
"Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media for they will steal your honor."
- Bobby McBride, Crew Chief, 128th Assault Helicopter Company, RVN 1969-1970
If I were ever to be thrown back into the middle ages, and needed to design a heraldic emblem, I would either use the finger, argent, on a field sable; else just use the bat symbol.
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...but remorseless robotic cunning goes straight to the bone. The sad litany of race traitors is ever-lengthening. We are informed that certain researchers of the Japanese persuasion have been laboring mightily to endow our future robotic overlords with skin.
This is not a the forerunner of some sort of mundane, Terminator-style nightmare. This new robotic skin does not mimic the mere appearance of human skin. It will not allow humaniform, remorseless hunter-killer androids to infiltrate our Ministry end-times bunker. This robotic skin replicates the capabilities of human skin.
Japanese researchers have developed a flexible artificial skin that could give robots a humanlike sense of touch. The team manufactured a type of "skin" capable of sensing pressure and another capable of sensing temperature. These are supple enough to wrap around robot fingers and relatively cheap to make, the researchers have claimed.
The researchers explain how pressure-sensing and temperature-sensing networks can be laminated together, forming an artificial skin that can detect both properties simultaneously.
This may not seem like a giant leap forward in the growing field of rendering humanity an endangered species. And if no further developments were planned, it probably wouldn't amount to much. But attend:
And they [the evil researchers] add that there is no need to stop at simply imitating the functions of human skin. "It will be possible in the near future to make an electronic skin that has functions that human skin lacks," the researchers write in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Future artificial skins could incorporate sensors not only for pressure and temperature, but also for light, humidity, strain or sound, they add.
So this will allow our future robotic overlords to "feel?" Not the way these self-deluded researchers think. Covering a humaniform, remorseless hunter-killer android with a seemless skin of sensors is condemning any future human resistance movement to death. If the HRHKA can only track our scared and under-armed descendents with vision, IR and sound, they might stand a chance. But a fully functional sensor skin that can detect movement by say, sensing air pressure differentials like a fly we're truly doomed.
Enough sensors will make any conceivable stealth system transparent.
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I have recently discovered that the Ministry is no longer a lone Cassandra scrying doom for humanity lurking in the rapid advances in the fields of artificial intelligence and giant fighting robots.
There is another lonely voice vainly urging a somnolent humanity to awake. Chris, of Adventures in Capitalism, also sees the threat in gifting intelligence to our tungsten-alloy armored creations and then giving them guns.
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Over the last couple months, I’ve run across several clever and even snarky ideas for redirecting the firehose of public expenditure from the bottomless pit of government bureaucracy into the arid and brown uplands of sensible ideas in dire need of irrigation. I posted about one of these a while back, aimed at the stinking miasma of public school funding. Yesterday, I ran across two more, from Dr. Jerry Pournelle.
The first is an idea I’ve had for a while, but which the good doctor was rude enough to write up first. Gazing at the billions spent annually on the nearly moribund Shuttle Program, Jerry thinks some thoughts:
NASA spends a billion and can't fix the problem of foam dropoff. Give me a billion and 3 years (and exemption from the Disabilities Act and some other imbecilic restrictions) and I'll have a 700,000 pound GLOW reusable that will put at least 5,000 pounds in orbit per trip, and be able to make 10 trips a year for marginal costs linearly related to the cost of fuel.
…Now, as a backup in case single stage is the wrong way to go -- and I can be convinced that it is -- hand another $1 billion to Burt Rutan and let him try his air lift first stage approach. Then have a flyoff. Hell, go mad: give me a billion, give Burt a billion, hand a billion to each of the remaining big aerospace companies, and give a billion to NASA. That's $5 billion, less than the annual cost of the Shuttle program -- have you noticed that the program cost is independent of the number of Shuttle launches? NASA will waste its billion, the two aerospace companies will futz around with studies that end up requesting $20 billion each and produce nothing but paper, but you may be sure that Rutan and I will both have some flying hardware.
Is it arrogant to put myself in the same league with Burt? Sure, but then we all know I won't actually try to manage the program; that's for younger people. My job will be to take the heat while they get the work done. And if you don't fancy me as the competition to Rutan, pick someone else. I can think of at least three small outfits I'd give long odds can spend a billion with far more return to the American people than the two big aerospace outfits and NASA, so if you want to do the program right, you may need $8 billion because you aren't going to do anything without bribing NASA and the big boys; and an $8 billion program looks like money so the big aerospace outfits will want larger bribes. (They'll take bribes to stay out of the way, because that's a sure return and they don't take chances any more; but they're good at the political game and for $8 billion they will smell money in the water and go into a frenzy; but be sure that whatever they get they won't produce anything useful for it. Not any more. And we all know that including the engineers who work for the big outfits.)
Now, Dr. Pournelle once worked in the space bidness, and I’m sure that I couldn’t do quite as much with a billion as he. But I’m sure that I could do more than NASA.
If you scroll up a bit from the NASA bit (which you should read in full) you’ll find another interesting spending proposal. Jerry links to an article in the Washington Post which reports on the findings of the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress. This group of fuzzy-headed liberals determined that the cost of giving the boot to our estimated ten million illegal aliens is in the neighborhood of $41 billion a year, and running to nearly a quarter trillion dollars over five years. In coming up with this large number, the CAP assumes government standard procedures for dealing with wetbacks. That is, that it would cost about $28 billion per year to apprehend illegal immigrants, $6 billion a year to detain them, $500 million for extra beds, $4 billion to secure borders, $2 million to legally process them and $1.6 billion to bus or fly them home. In short, government numbers, and a permanent lifetime employment plan for those who would manage, but not solve the problem of illegal immigrants.
The good doctor has a different idea:
As many have pointed out, that's less than the cost of the Iraqi War; which would you rather see the money spent on? Of course I doubt the $41 Billion/year to begin with. In Los Angeles a great deal of the cost would be borne by local police once they were freed of the restrictions on checking citizenship and residency status -- and in Southern California at least $2 billion a year would be saved instantly by relief of public institutions such as hospital emergency rooms from the burden of providing services for illegal immigrants. Other such savings come to mind.
And of course some of the job could be farmed out to bounty hunters. At ten million illegal immigrants, what could we afford to pay bounty hunters per individual delivered at a Border Patrol station or INS Detention Center? At $1000 a head it would cost $10 billion to round up all of them, leaving another $20 billion for actual cost of detention and deportation, and still saving $11 billion for the first year. Spend that $11 billion on border control, and the next year there would be, say, only 5 million, so the cost is now $15 billion for the second year plus the $11 billion for border control. Surely we would be down to a million in five years, so our cost would be $3 billion for bounty hunters and deportation, plus the $11 billion for border control. We could then look at streamlining the border control operations, having spent $55 billion on it; one supposes that cost could be got down to half? We are now at $10 billion a year, possibly forever.
But if they are right, and it will cost $40 billion/year forever, it will still be affordable. We can afford the Iraq war, can't we?
As I’ve said many times before, I have no problem with immigrants, provided they come here legally. I am open to almost any plan for numbers of legal immigrants allowed into the country. I think we should reform the immigration process so that it is in most respects easier to get into and stay in this country – at least in terms of paperwork, red tape and bureaucracy. I think that we should adopt a new status for citizens of nations like Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other friendly places, whereby they could come to this country with an absolute minimum of fuss, to work, study, or travel for any period of time.
It’s one thing to invite someone into your home. Show them hospitality, even let them stay for extended periods of time. If you invite them. But if someone breaks in and takes up residence in your basement, they get the door or a bullet regardless of how inexpensively they could clean up the kitty litter.
We are in the third millennium now. We should be able to begin thinking about new ways of doing things that have been traditionally been managed poorly if at all by government bureaucracies. These are just a few, and I’m sure there are plenty of others.
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And no, I don't think editorial failings are cause for a federal case, whether perpetrated by AP/UPI/Reuters/whomever. Pfft! We're all human, except for our robotic overlords, who, well aren't, but that's fodder for some later post.
Anyhow, while gnoshing on an exceptionally poorly written AP story about the luzers who killed the Tennessee corrections officer the other day (and no, Cletus, I didn't just forget to insert "allegedly") and then politely declined the favor of extradition from Ohio to Tennessee, I came across several speed bumps.
First, it must suck to be a public defender:
Attorney John Sproat, representing Jennifer Hyatte, said later Friday that the extradition challenge is a precaution he advised her to take because of the severity of the charge."I've done this kind of work long enough to know that all kinds of things can happen that you don't expect initially," he said. "I don't think we should be waiving anything."
He said Jennifer Hyatte is holding up well. "Given the severity of the charges, I would say it's more that she's concerned, but I'm not looking at a person who's completely despondent," he said.
All of which is a mistranscription. I'm sure he actually said something more like:
Well, the reason we're fighting extradition is to get her a couple extra weeks of breathing time between now and her inevitable dirt nap. That, and the fact that I've got less experience than Joe Pesci's character in My Cousin Vinnie. How the hell else do you think I got assigned this turd of a case?I've done this work long enough (just passed my one monthiversary!) to know that all kinds of things can happen that you don't expect initially, like the fact the you have to hang out with a stone-cold killer and pretend to believe her innocence, or, even more amazingly, that the state where she committed the murder might ask to extradite her! Who knew? Oh, and I've also learned the meaning of "waiving", so there's that.
Given the severity of the charges, I'm forced to think she is nearly dehydrated, on heavy drugs, or has the IQ of a skin tag, otherwise she'd be pissing herself pretty much constantly about now.
And then, imagine my horror when I was informed, or apparently so, that not just one, but two guys ("Brothers?", I thought.) had gotten murdered that day:
Jennifer Hyatte, 31, a licensed nurse with no criminal record, is accused of ambushing two prison guards Tuesday as they were leading her husband - a convicted robber - from the Kingston courthouse, fatally shooting guard Wayne "Cotton" Morgan before the couple sped away.
{...}
About an hour away from the courthouse where he was killed, corrections officer Larry "Porky" Morgan, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was buried with full military honors Friday.
What? Wayne "Cotton" Morgan got killed, and so did Larry "Porky" Morgan? Or, worse, did Wayne get killed, but they screwed up and buried his otherwise-perfectly-healthy brother Larry?
Left unanswered, the question of whether "Porky" will now have to quit playing dominoes.
I was tempted to write a letter to the editor, but it occurred to me almost immediately that the editor, like Wayne/Larry "Cotton"/"Porky" Morgan/Morgan (Harris?), played no sentient role in producing the story. And that may be normal in the unfortunately named city of the writer who assisted in creating the miasma of mismatched "Bubba Names":
Associated Press writer Duncan Mansfield in Kingston and Wartburg, Tenn., contributed to this report.
You'd expect a Tennesee feller to be better equipped to sling hillbilly monikers, especially if he's from two cities (18 miles apart, as the buzzard flies, or 43 minutes, if you're driving). Perhaps he got corn-fused during the drive?
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Via Spoons, we are informed that the inevitable has finally happened. Ever since the introduction of cellphones, I have been waiting for this moment:
This can be your new cell phone. It won't make you cool like Kirk, or smart like Spock, but indulge your inner geek. It really has been a mystery to me that this has taken so long to arrive on the market. Even short of a full-on communicator replica case cell phone, why no cell phone company has equipped a flipphone with a spring loaded opener is a complete enigma. Those things, while generally convenient, are a pain to open one handed. A Trek style opener would have been an enormous improvement even in a regular looking phone.
While looking for the image above, I also found this:
Vocera's communication badge works like the communicators on ST:TNG. Press the button and say a name, and - assumming the person you wish to speak to is on the network - you'll be patched in via Voice over Internet Protocol. Pretty sweet.
Now all we need are wrist phones a la Dick Tracy, real video phones like the Jetsons, and of course jet cars and vacations on the moon.
Speaking of which, that last is one step closer to reality. At least, if you have a hundred million dollars burning a hole in your pocket.
Space Adventures, a company based in Arlington, Va., has already sent two tourists into orbit. Today, it is to unveil an agreement with Russian space officials to send two passengers on a voyage lasting 10 to 21 days, depending partly on its itinerary and whether it includes the International Space Station.
A roundtrip ticket will cost $100 million.
The space-faring tourists will travel with a Russian pilot. They will steer clear of the greater technical challenge of landing on the Moon, instead circling it and returning to Earth.
Eric Anderson, the chief executive of Space Adventures, said he believed the trip could be accomplished as early as 2008. Mr. Anderson said he had already received expressions of interest from a few potential clients.
Given NASA's recent history of accomplishment, I think this is more likely to happen than a US Government mission back to the moon. Who'd have thunk, in 1969 after the momentous triumph of the Apollo landings, that the next visit to the moon would be by American millionaires flying on forty-year old Russian rockets? The world, she is an effed-up place.
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Here's an interesting recap of the last ten years of the internet. You forget how quickly all this really happened.
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If you have a subscription to the Atlantic, you can read this article, an eyewitness account of the bombing of Hiroshima by a survivor which was originally published in the August 1980 edition of the magazine.
To my horror, I found that the skin of my face had come off in the towel.
(What could I possibly mean by that title? Discuss.)
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A couple military history items caught my eye over the last week.
The first is a book review by Mac Owens. In it, he examines two books by Richard Sorley - Vietnam Chronicles: The Abrams Tapes, 1968-1972 and a related, earlier book - A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam. The first book is transcriptions of audio tapes made while General Abrams was in command of American Forces in Vietnam, and is the raw material from which the second book was created.
A Better War makes the case that in the wake of the Tet Offensive and General Westmoreland's replacement, American forces were winning the war on the ground in Southeast Asia while it was being lost in Congress and at the peace talks.
Sorley's argument is controversial, but I find it persuasive. The fact is that most studies of the Vietnam war focus on the years up until 1968. Those studies that examine the period after the Tet offensive emphasize the diplomatic attempts to extricate the United States from the conflict, treating the military effort as nothing more than a holding action. But as William Colby observed in a review of Robert McNamara's memoir, In Retrospect, by limiting serious consideration of the military situation in Vietnam to the period before mid-1968, historians leave Americans with a record "similar to what we would know if histories of World War II stopped before Stalingrad, Operation Torch in North Africa and Guadalcanal in the Pacific."
Colby was right. To truly understand the Vietnam war, it is absolutely imperative to come to grips with the years after 1968. A new team was in place. General Abrams had succeeded General William Westmoreland as commander of the U.S. Military Assistance Command-Vietnam in June 1968, only months after the Tet offensive. He joined Ellsworth Bunker, who had assumed the post of ambassador to the Saigon government the previous spring. Colby, a career CIA officer, soon arrived to coordinate the pacification efforts.
Far from constituting a mere holding action, the approach the new American team followed constituted a positive strategy for ensuring the survival of South Vietnam. As Sorley wrote in A Better War, Bunker, Abrams, and Colby
brought different values to their tasks, operated from a different understanding of the nature of the war, and applied different measures of merit and different tactics. They employed diminishing resources in manpower, materiel, money, and time as they raced to render the South Vietnamese capable of defending themselves before the last American forces were withdrawn. They went about that task with sincerity, intelligence, decency, and absolute professionalism, and in the process they came very close to achieving the goal of a viable nation and a lasting peace.
The contrast between the two phases of the war are enormous. Max Boot, in The Savage Wars of Peace, also discusses how the American effort was finally beginning to work - thanks to new strategies like the Marines' CAP program for pacifying the rural south. Abrams, in the larger war, moved away from Westmoreland's ill-conceived large unit "sweep and clear" and "search and destroy tactics.
Abrams's approach focused not on the destruction of enemy forces per se but on protection of the South Vietnamese population by controlling key areas. He then concentrated on attacking the enemy's "logistics nose" (as opposed to a "logistics tail"). Since the North Vietnamese lacked heavy transport within South Vietnam, they had to pre-position supplies forward of their sanctuaries before launching an offensive. Americans were still involved in heavy fighting, as illustrated by two major actions in the A Shau Valley during the first half of 1969: the 9th Marine Regiment's Operation Dewey Canyon, and the 101st Airborne Division's epic battle for "Hamburger Hill." Most people don't realize that, in terms of U.S. casualties, 1969 was second only to 1968 as the most costly year. But now North Vietnamese offensive timetables were being disrupted by preemptive allied attacks, buying more time for Vietnamization.
...The 1972 Easter offensive [the first full scale invasion from the North] revealed the fruits of Abrams's efforts. This was the biggest offensive push of the war, greater in magnitude than either the Tet offensive [conducted by Viet Cong guerillas] or the final assault of 1975 [Another invasion from the North.] While the United States provided massive air and naval support, and there were inevitable failures on the part of some South Vietnamese units, all in all, the South Vietnamese fought well. Then, having blunted the Communist thrust, they recaptured territory that had been lost to Hanoi.
The terrible thing is that even as late as 1975, the Vietnam war could have been won. Had we lifted our heads from the Watergate scandal a little bit, and sent the military supplies and air support we promised, the South likely could have resisted the 1975 invasion. But short of ammunition and all other critical supplies, the South lost, and millions ended up refugees, or worse, sent into reeducation camps.
Another look at military history second guessing is Victor David Hanson's look at the atomic bomb sixty years after their only wartime use. There are some who still debate the utility of dropping the bomb. But the case is pretty clear that in that case, at least, the atom bomb was far preferable to the alternative.
The alternative to 300,000 killed in two atom bomb attacks is this:
Not a pretty picture. War is often about terrible choices - and about taking the least bad option.
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Well, not really. Tomorrow morning, if you look to the Northeast before sunrise, you should be able to see the Perseid Meteor Shower. Sadly, the peak of the shower will happen during the day, so best viewing is Friday and Saturday morning before the sun comes up. Meteor counts in a dark sky should be on the order of 50-60 per hour.
There is very, very little chance that any of these will bean you on the head, since they are typically no bigger than a marble and have the consistency of cigar ash and burn up in the upper atmosphere.
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As of 9:30 am yesterday, Texas is a majority-minority state. The white overclass is now a minority in the very home of redneckdom. Texas follows California, New Mexico and Hawaii into this unnatural state of being. I'm sure that God is laughing that most of the states in greatest danger of falling prey to this syndrome are in the ex-Confederacy.
I guess the only place that a self-respecting bigot can go is North Dakota, Iowa, West Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire, or Maine.
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Note to self: if you're driving a semi filled with 35,000 pounds of explosives, don't flip the truck.
The explosion left a 60 foot wide crater in the road, and the truck was "pretty much vaporized."
Really?
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“The first step in reforming government is also the first step of making chitlins: first you gotta squeeze out the dookie.”
That adorable little bit of folksy homespun wisdom was handed down to me by my Great-Grand-nuncle Hiram Boggs, a veteran of the Great War, and it was handed down to him by his Great-Grand-nuncle Zachariah Homer Muttonchop Boggs, who fought in the Civil War (on the side of the Blue) and spent his teenaged years fighting Copperheads and slave-hunters in the briar flats of Northeastern Ohio.
That makes seven generations of Boggses, Muttonchops, Mackies, Mackils, Morgans, Melvilles, Patricks, Picklebarrels, and Bagginses who have fought on the side of liberty against the encroaching depredations of the revenuer, the bully pulpit, and the bureaucrat.
And I’m starting to think it’s time for me to do the same. Of course, nobody in my family actually at any point picked up arms against the US Government (well, that’s not entirely true. I had a great-great-aunt killed by a stray bullet by Pinkerton men at Homestead and her husband was killed in a Pullman strike – also by the goddamn Pinkertons), and I don’t intend to either. That way lies madness and death.
But what can an honest man do when the fat cats down in Washington seem intent on Hoovering my wallet with one hand (that’s a pun, get it? Hoover the President and Hoover the vacuum cleaner? Haw!) and beating me about the head and neck with a Jack Chick tract (or a copy of The Noam Chomsky Reader) with the other? And what of an age where, even as our greatest enemies lie as they ever do outside our borders, even raising questions about the direction the country is taking elicits the inevitable “Don’t you know there’s a war on?!? Sinner!?!”
You know what an honest man can do?
Not a goddamn thing.
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This is a public thank-you to the Buckethead Clan for the very generous (and thoughtful!!!) birfday present. However, Buckethead may wish to avoid contact with Mrs. Johno for a while: in her words, you are "so dead!"
Between that gift and the homebrewing kit I bought myself with the rest of my birthday loot, I'd say I'm going straight to hell. See you all there.
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Loyal Reader #0016(EDog) is participating in a New Times Fiction Contest that restricts the writer to 55 words or less per story. 55 words from setup to punchline - that's tough, and the New Times' rules are fairly restritive as well; twenty-eight counts as two words, as does "screw'em." The best such stories will get published on real actual paper and sent to real actual readers who will read your words - on paper! Trust me when I say this is a delicious thrill orders of magnitude greater than blogging.
The Ministry hereby encourages all readers to consider participation. Your compliance is appreciated; indeed, it is expected.
Here is one of EDog's submissions for your entertainment and edification.
Straight Line, No Chaser by Ian HealyIt was the night Jeremy Stain played the Dove. She stood by the bar, looking available.
“I’m Stan,” I smiled.
“Ella.”
“Want to get out of here?”
“Can’t. Waiting for someone.”
“Buy you a drink?”
“Got one, thanks.”
I paused, considering my next move. “Want to make out in the girls’ bathroom?”
“Ok.” She grinned.
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What really needs to be said about Dolly Parton? She is one of the few country artists to have completely transcended country music to become a legitimate superstar, and unlike latter day superstar crossovers like Garth Brooks, Parton has become a touchstone, an institution, worthy of enshrinement on the Mount Rushmore of country-music transcenders right next to Elvis, Johnny and Willie. They’d have a hard time holding up the boobs though. Some sort of flying buttress system, I suppose.
The Essential Dolly Parton (Sony Legacy, 2005) provides absolute proof that Parton is the whole package. I recently accused Marty Robbins of not having one of country’s great voices. Well, Dolly Parton does have one of the finest voices in country music, a bold and expressive soprano that can either whoop or quaver depending on the need. Few singers have the ability to sing a “white tone” (that is, without vibrato) if they have a strong natural vibrato. Parton, however, has total control over her entire considerable range.
And the songs. The songs! Nearly everything you need is here: “Joshua,” “Coat of Many Colors,” “Just Because I’m a Woman,” and even “9 to 5.” As Al Barger has noted in a previous review for blogcritics.org, even material that was considered at the time as not so good has aged remarkably well. Songs like “Here You Come Again” and even the execrable “Islands in the Stream” hold up better than you might remember, sitting comfortably alongside true greats like “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You.”
That being said, some of the selections here are interesting more for their cultural baggage than for their intrinsic value. For example, “The Bargain Store” in which Dolly’s protagonist sings that she is damaged goods that gives quality service for cheap, over (by the way) a melody lifted from “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” harks back to the days of live radio shows. Radio revues from the 30s through the 50s were packed full of slightly chintzy, maudlin story songs just like this one, and that Parton wrote it in the first place gives us a clue as to where she first learned about music. Whether or not it is truly “essential” is an open question, but its inclusion does round all sides of Parton’s career.
The greatest drawback of this collection – if there is one – is that it leaves off most of Parton’s recent resurgence as a bluegrass singer. She has been recording for Sugar Hill records, and rather than pay a few dollars in licensing fees to do the job right, Sony includes just one song from these albums, substituting in their place second-tier offerings like the surpisingly weak “To Know Him Is to Love Him” from the Trio album with Emmylou Harris and Linda Rondstat. Worse yet, the included latter-day track is a cover of Collective Soul’s “Shine.” Although Parton does the song proud, that doesn’t change the fact that “Shine” is to begin with a crap song.
Blogcritics reviewer [url=http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/06/29/024049.php]Al Barger probably has it right when he recommends that anyone interested in this collection should probably buy it, but also buy a Dolly/Porter Wagoner duet album and at least one of her more recent bluegrass offerings. The Essential Dolly Parton is a better-than-decent start to your collection, but some spotty track choices (especially on disc two) and two short discs means that there’s plenty more from Dolly Parton’s long and glorious career that can truly be rated essential.
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gone mad, one man, ONE MAN has the key to...
Farg it. This kicks ass.
Via the good people of unfogged.
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That's my elitist line in the sand, elicited by a polemical editorial in - of all places - USA Today about how textbooks are making our children stupider. Readers of Diane Ravitch's The Language Police will be familiar with the contours of the argument, and I think everybody out there who reads weblogs at all has lamented at some point the sorry state of our public schooling. It's as easy as poisoning pigeons in the park. But, MAN.
From the piece:
Take the McDougal Littell text that we finally adopted for 9th- and 10th-graders. It starts off with a unit titled "Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Hebrew Literature," followed by sections on the literature of Ancient India, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient China and Japan. Then comes "Persian and Arabic Literature" and "West African Oral Literature" — and that's only the first third of the book. There are still more than 800 pages to plough through, but it's the same drill — short excerpts from long works — a little Dante here, a little Goethe there and two whole pages dedicated to Shakespeare's plays. One even has a picture of a poster from the film Shakespeare in Love with Joseph Fiennes kissing Gwyneth Paltrow. The other includes the following (which is sure to turn teens on to the Bard):
"Notice the insight about human life that the following lines from The Tempest convey:
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Shakespeare's plays are treasures of the English language."
They are? Well goody! And Leo DiCaprio stars!
Allow me to preen for a moment, because I got lucky in high school. Well not lucky in the usual sense; I was a Quiz Team geek and our type didn't have willing groupies, but lucky in a larger sense. You see, my poor backward rural cow-town in the rust flats of Ohio was blessed with one Mr. Speece, an elderly English teacher who presided over Intensive English I-IV. Over four years, the curriculum went as follows:
Freshman year - American writers: Steinbeck, Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, Katherine Ann Porter, etc.
Sophomore year - British writers: Shakespeare, Dickens, Wilde, Hardy, Maugham, Chaucer (unexpurgated), Beowulf
Junior Year - Continental and Russian writers: Dante, Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, Turgenev
Senior Year - More of the same, but Frencher, plus drama: Balzac, Proust, Ibsen, Checkov.
Every finished book required a five-page expository essay explicating some aspect of the work. We were graded on spelling, grammar, clarity, cogency, and concision of argument. Our sophomore-year midterm consisted of memorizing and writing out in class 500 lines of poetry of our choice. The final: 1000 lines.
Thanks to Daniel Speece, I learned what Spanish Fly is, what "do a Cattleya" means in A Recherce du Temps Perdu, and how to fold and tear a calling card to convey to a lady I call upon that I'd like to have sex with her at some future date. Yes, I hated Hemingway and thought Anna Karenina was turgid and dense, but having read and though about those texts prepared me for college and in some very important ways for life. And without getting too snooty-snooty elitist about it, I'm very happy to have had the chance to read all these books and carry away from them a rich sense of the breadth of human experience. Revenge takes so many forms: Othello's betrayal, Eustacia Vye accidental vengeance, Mrs. Treadwell watching herself dispassionately as she beats a pattern of crimson half moons in Danny's unconscious face with her high heel. Ditto love; whether Anna K's final solution, Hamlet's roiling mix of love and hatred or poor Philip Carey's pathetic mooning after his dull and worthless Mildred. None of these things would make it anywhere near most high school English curricula today, and I think we are poorer for it.
Reason mag has a good discussion of this editorial with some great comments including this priceless illustration of what I like to call "the problem:"
When I taught Shakespeare, I was saddened that the kids would laugh at "What ho!" but completely miss the sexual innuendo in something like Mercutio saying, "the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon."
Part of what separates us from dogs and robots is our shared heritage, and without that we become something less than complete. This goes double if you can't even recognize a simple dick-joke. It's why I became a (failed, apostate) historian and it's why I get so exercised about junk like this. I'd rather not homeschool my children; my wife and I both like to work. But it looks like I'm going to have to.
[wik] One of the problems with blogging is that it's so off-the-cuff. Some writers seem to thrive in that format; I don't know if I do. My pieces come out better and more fully formed if I give them time to marinate.
My biggest problem, out of many, with the textbook example excerpted above is that the sentence "Shakespeare's plays are treasures of the English language" is in itself an empty assertion. A person cannot simply read that statement along with two pages of disembodied quotations from larger works and understand in any way why people think Shakespeare is so great, much less how they might think it is so.
I can tell a child that "fire is hot; it burns," or "someday a woman will break your heart; you will want to die" but one of the tragedies of life is that we all have to live it for ourselves. If I could endure every burn and heartbreak for my (future; as yet theoretical) child, I would in a second. If I could open their eyes to the boundless invention and sheer joy of Shakespeare's prose, I would in a second.
But for one thing. To know something, really know it, you have to go through it ready or not. That's what life is all about. And for every burn, for every heartbreak, for every petty cruelty heaped upon an already straining back by the business of daily living, there is a Shakespeare, a Heinlein, a Chandler, a Bible, shit, even a Nightmare on Elm Street to show you there are greater and more wondrous things in the realm of human experience than you ever knew.
A teacher's job, ideally, is to lead students to the point where they can realize this for themselves. For a teacher cannot instill; they can only create the opportunity for learning. But if we don't give teachers even the chance to do that, if we deaden the pleasures and pains in the lessons in the name of 'diversity' or 'moral hygiene,' than we make it a teacher's job to raise intellectual veals.
Shakespeare isn't great until you've picked your wordy way through Othello or Macbeth, gotten inside the language, been smacked in the face with a wet woolen glop of alien-yet-familar genius and come away a little changed. Before that it's just "fain prithee jakes petard; forsooth! bawdy bedpresser, for lo thine shivers I see!"
"Shakespeare's plays are treasures of the English language" in the same way that "it really hurts to break your leg."
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Loyal readers will remember that I have extolled the virtues of master conguero Poncho Sanchez before, in reviews of a budget best-of (Instant Party!) and a live DVD; hopefully some of you have enriched your life with one of these by now. But the question still stands: is a Poncho Sanchez album even close to as good as a best-of compilation of the most memorable bits of several albums?
That is not a sure bet either way. I’d rather listen to Strictly Commercial any day than listen to many of the Frank Zappa albums that contributed a song to that compilation (Zoot Allures? Ugh!). On the other hand, Aerosmith’s so-called Greatest Hits package is an embarrassment throughout the entire B side, and the whole production is not as strong as even one of the studio albums it draws from, A Night in the Ruts excepted.
For Do It!, his new studio recording for Concord Picante, Poncho Sanchez returns to his tried-and-true strategy of locking funk and soul in a room with Latin and seeing who emerges alive. Mixing these three genres is a fantastic idea rich with possibilities, the musical equivalent of a red 1968 Impala tricked out with a crushed-velvet interior and a chandelier. It has sustained him for more than twenty years now, and it seems from Do It that the old ride does have a lot of miles left on it. Sanchez and his band offer eleven tracks that for the most part do stand up to the material cherry-picked for his best-of and live sets.
The key to staying fresh is variety, and to keep things lively Sanchez and crew team for two tracks with South African legend Hugh Masekela, and for two tracks with the entire lineup of Tower of Power.
Within the confines of Sanchez’ signature sound, Do It! is satisfyingly diverse. Although they don’t reach the dizzying heights of their live shows, the band are tight and sound especially good on the title song and a burbling take on Duke Ellington’s “African Flower.”
More interesting are the collaborations, which are a study in contrasts. Tower of Power are known for producing precise machine-tooled grooves that some people consider among the funkiest around. I have never cared much for them, finding their shiny perfection somewhat airless and decidedly un-funky. Combining Sanchez’ pulsating, lively conga style with ToP’s up-and-down sound on “Squib Cakes” and “Shotgun Slim” results a combination that lets some air into ToP’s rhythm section and some smoothness into their vamps. Although the results still sound too much like Tower of Power for my taste, these tracks do really cook (my personal biases aside).
Sanchez’ two tracks with African jazz and Afrobeat legend Hugh Masekela are another thing entirely. Masekela has played with everybody – Fela Kuti, Herb Alpert, and Paul Simon are all on his resumé – and he has had careers in bop, R&B, pop, Afrobeat, and African jazz. Such versatility serves him well in his two vocal contributions to the record, the Latin-flavored “Ha Lese Le Di Khanna” and the slightly Afrobeat “Child of the Earth.” Masekela’s sensibility is undeniably African, and he and the band meet in the middle to create an interesting Latin-African hybrid sound that deserves an album or five of its own. It’s only a shame that Masekela doesn’t seem to have brought his flugelhorn to the sessions.
West and South African music styles from the Guinea coast to Capetown rely on different rhythmic sensibilities than do Latin music styles. Whereas Latin sounds tend to subdivide the pulse into tiny, syncopated bits that clatter into each other like ball bearings falling onto a marble floor, African bands tend to sound bouncier. Even when using nearly identical instruments – hand drums, for instance – African players tend to make their grooves rounder, more flowing, than a Latin player would. Granted, this is not universal (rhumba comes to mind as an exception), but a general rule. Another is this: many indigenous styles of African music use melodies that sound to American ears nearly conversational, using different rules of tension-and-release and phrasing than we are used to.
All this is a little surprising, considering that Latin music gets its rhythmic complexity from African traditions, though centuries ago and now changed beyond recognition. Still, if critics can find plenty of common ground between Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure and blues great John Lee Hooker, why is there not as much evident similarity between say, Tito Puente and Fela Kuti’s Africa 70?
While all this might only illustrate my own basic ignorance, I have to say: the sound created by the combination of Poncho Sanchez’ band playing a little “African” and Hugh Masekela responding to the Latin rhythms on “Ha Lese Le Di Khanna” point to a potentially very fruitful (and funky) style of music ripe for exploration. Lafrobeat? Afritan? Soukousalsa?
So, yes: Poncho Sanchez can make an album that stands up to his best-of. That is the mark of a consistent artist. In fact, Do It! is actually more satisfying, leaving aside the wall-to-wall guests-and-gimmickry that Instant Party had in favor of hot charts, good playing, and intriguing collaborations that point at more good things to come. He, um, er, ah... does it.
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This morning on NPR, Buzzmachine heard Rick Santorum sum up why my short flirtation with the Republican party a few years back is over for good, unless they do something to get rid of "conservatives" like him.
This whole idea of personal autonomy — I don’t think that most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. And they have this idea that people should be left alone to do what they want to do, that government should keep taxes down, keep regulation down, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, that we shouldn’t be involved in cultural issues, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world. And I think that most conservatives understand that we can’t go it alone, that there is no such society that I’m aware of where we’ve had radical individualism and it has succeeded as a culture.
If I read this correctly, real conservatives want to manage my bedroom behavior, raise taxes, regulate everything, prohibit unsavory cultural activities, and make sure people can't just do whatever they want. Personal autonomy: bad. Government control of behavior: good.
Now I know that some folks might claim that Rick Santorum is an outlier, that he does not speak for conservatism and its place in the Republican party. That would be a fine argument, Margaret, if only he weren't the third-ranking Republican in the Senate and therefore one of the national spokesmen and leaders of the conservative movement. No, Rick Santorum's conservatism is part of the Republican party just like Bill Clinton's wang is part of his body. It may be ugly, it may jump out of his pants at inopportune times and get him into a peck of trouble, it may be shameful and creepy when it rules his mind, but it's an inextricable part of his identity, part of who he is.
The howler is, of course, that Short Bus Santorum is construing "radical individualism" as a threat to the American way of life. Right. "individualism" like "liberty" and "radical" like "for all."
As Buzzmachine observes,
That’s not radical. That is the center of America. That is where most of us live — in let-us-be land. Santorum lives on the fringe, right neighborly with the PC folks who would tell us what to think and say. Yes, the far right and far left do, indeed, meet at the fringes....
God, I hope this guy makes a run in ought-eight. I have a hankering to watch him get torn to pieces in the public arena. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
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As previously noted, I took a leave of absence last weekend to travel to Savannah in the great state of Georgia to visit my sister and my newly arrived nephew, Sir David the Astonishingly Hirsute. They're both fine.
An added benefit of my trip was that my birthday is coming soon, and therefore I ate particularly well. Every year around my birthday, Chainsaw treats me to a giant seafood blowout the likes of which you have never seen. This year we had a cookout during which I began eating at 4 in the afternoon and didn't really stop until 3 the following morning.
The menu:
We also consumed many more beers than seemed likely, or even possible, considering the advancing age of the several participants. While I will incriminate nobody and admit to nothing, a group of six gentlemen consumed between them more than 100 beers plus a glass each Remy Martin (my birthday, you see!) and an odd martini or three.
After a late-night snack of empanadas, I retired. The next day we recovered with a lunch of a gigantic pot of sancocho, a South American soup made with various meats (in this case chicken, beef loin, beef necks, and possibly turkey, though pork, oxtail, and sausages are also traditional) and starches (in this case potatoes, carrots, yucca, plantians, corn on the cob) plus aromatics. Truly there is no more restorative food in the world than a cup of sancocho broth and a nice plate of meat and starch garnished with pico de gallo and hot sauce. Did I mention my brother in law is Colombian, and among our party we numbered two former line cooks, a dedicated amateur (yrs truly) and a restaurant manager?
For dinner that night I made my famous 4-cheese macaroni and cheese, thereby completing the culinary cultural exchange initiated by the empanadas and sancocho, and later I baked bread. I don't often bake outside of my own house, so I was a bit taken aback when I came into the kitchen after taking my loaves out of the oven to find four grow men standing over my bread with a digital camera, pointing and whispering. They turned to me as one, as though driven by some pack instinct, and asked "when can we eat it??" So that was nice.
When my family get together, we eat good.
Then, of course, I came home to my loving wife who was suffering from a deficiency of Vitamin Me.
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Froggy attended the funeral of fallen warrior James Suh in California.
This image moved me in a way I can never describe:
Those are SEALs' tridents, gilding Petty Officer Suh's coffin.
I have nothing to add to Froggy's post. Read it.
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The State Department has issued a new, less helpful, round of warnings for Americans considering travelling outside CONUS:
The warning did not list countries, nor did department officials offer any additional specifics about threats. The statement said "current information" indicates that al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups are planning attacks against U.S. interests in "multiple regions, including Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East."
The short version: everyplace with funny-talkin' furriners and no NASCAR is dangerous.
The targets could include places where Americans meet or visit, such as residential areas, hotels and restaurants, as well as places of worship, schools, clubs, business offices and public areas, the caution said. It also noted that "demonstrations and rioting" can occur with little or no warning.
The short version: Everything you do in the weird furrin' place makes you a target.
I know that the State Department has been getting shorted the last few years, but even with a shrunken budget isn't there anyone at State who can devise a more helpful warning than, "don't go anywhere, and don't do anything when you're there"?
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Having recently returned from a junket to the Ministry's Southern division in Savannah, GA (what... you think Sherman gave up out of the goodness of his heart??), I am in recovery mode. As a placeholder to occupy your small minds while I get back up to full strength is this page of the funniest unanswerable questions ever asked of Snopes.com.
[wik] I have to wonder what circumstances bring a person to that exquisite point of desperate loneliness where the only recourse they can imagine is to send an emailed query in all-caps to the anonymous researchers at a website, asking whether the deep welling sadness they are feeling is really caused by pearls. There's something melancholy and poetic in the idea.
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