Over the Rainbow

2011-10-20T18:11:00.001-04:00

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Wtz7JqaRix0/Tp8AElmZEqI/AAAAAAAABTs/vW3RLfehfIQ/s1600/Hausu.jpg

2011-08-02T11:00:00.001-04:00

The human body is a machine which winds its own springs.
It is the living image of perpetual movement.

-Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, Man a Machine

Vaucanson

Vaucanson’s duck

Video of a contemporary replica of Vaucanson’s duck
(at the Museé des Automates de Grenoble)

When first presented to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 1928, the automaton was of unknown origin. Once restored to working order, the automaton itself provided the answer when it penned the words "written by the automaton of Maillardet". – Wikipedia

The Jaquet-Droz Automata - a very detailed webpage

Automotamania – For all Your Automaton-Restoration Needs
Maintains great images and videos

The Turk – not an automaton but a hoax: a man hidden inside played chess

The Turk at Wikipedia

Charles Babbage, the father of computing, at Wikipedia

Babbage’s Difference Engine was not constructed during his lifetime
but replicas were later made.
It's also the subject of a collaborative novel by
the cyberpunk pioneers William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.

Ada Lovelace, “the first programmer”

Alan Turing, who proposed the “Turing test”
for artificial intelligence, and the man behind the Enigma machine,
which is said to have won World War II.

The first robot? A scene from the original production of Karel Capek’s R.U.R.

R.U.R.

The Golem

Mickey Mouse: Mickey’s Mechanical Man

The Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz

Elektro and his robot dog Sparko

Pinocchio’s now a boy

Who wants to turn back into a toy . . .

-Rufus Wainwright

Talos, the living bronze statue of Greek mythology,
as imagined by Ray Harryhausen in his 1953 film,
Jason and the Argonauts

Forbidden Planet: Robby the Robot with his creator Morbius

The Day the Earth Stood Still: Gort, the robot from outer space,
sent to enforce worldwide peace with the threat of
total annihilation

Audio-animatronic Abraham Lincoln at Disneyland

Star Wars: C3PO and R2-D2

Blade Runner: Rachael, a replicant

RoboCop

RoboCop: The ED-209

The Terminator: A human face

The Terminator: The machine beneath the skin

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Data, a fully functional android with a positronic brain

Real Robots

Genghis

Rodney Brooks’ homepage at MIT

Cog is not quite sure what to think of you

Naveed Ahmad, “The Humanoid Robot Cog”

Cog has its own homepage

Cog on YouTube

Cog tries out for a garage band

Interesting Robotics/AI Information on the Web – a pretty exhaustive site

ASIMO wants to say hi

Asimo on YouTube running

More Asimo – Cool if you speak Japanese

Asimo climbs stairs, kind of

AIBO the Robot Dog

Kismet’s homepage, including plenty of video of Kismet displaying facial expressions

Say Hello to QRIO! (the “next generation” after ASIMO—both now discontinued

Robonova Ballet

Masahiro Mori’s Uncanny Valley at Wikipedia

Charting the Uncanny Valley: Part 1 of 7

Karl F. McDorman presents a lecture on the Uncanny Valley – Part 1 of 7

2011-07-28T06:56:00.003-04:00

the very justly famous Lady from Shanghai Mirror Maze scene, granddaddy of all mirror mazes

2011-04-12T09:48:00.001-04:00

Where are the great alcoholic Jewish characters of American literature?

Arnost Lustig

2011-02-26T14:52:00.000-05:00

Arnost Lustig has passed away in Prague at the age of 84. He had cancer for several years. He became a family friend not long after his arrival in Washington DC in the early '70s. He grew up in Prague and was sent to concentration camps in his teen years; he escaped for a while when American planes mistakenly bombed a train on which he was being transported to Dachau. Much of his work as a writer and filmmaker for decades returned to those experiences, in books like "Diamonds of the Night" and "A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova." In the '60s he was a prominent artist, working with most of the great Czech filmmakers of the time like Milos Forman and Jan Nemec, but finally resigned the Communist Party in 1967, and left the country during the Prague Spring of 1968. In the years since the Velvet Revolution, Vaclav Havel provided him with an apartment in the Prague Castle, where he spent much of his time. He was something of a national hero; I remember the family saying that he never seemed to pay for a meal or a cab ride; everyone wanted to talk to him. There's a documentary called "Fighter" about his long friendship with another Czech writer; their careers are contrasted, as Jan Wiener opposed the Communist regime early on and thought of Arnost as a collaborator.

I remember Arnost wearing an ascot and calling people "darling" until he realized that American film insiders didn't really do that; and calling me (and most other people) "you beast!); and telling me about getting drunk with Chou En-lai; and getting up from the table at our Passover seder, picking up the phone and saying, "Mr. President, we are eating matzo ball soup!"; and writing in my copy of "A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova," "For Bernard--the poet almost the best!"

Kenneth Mars RIP

2011-02-15T10:24:00.000-05:00

The Producers (1968) - Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars)

Betty Garrett RIP

2011-02-15T10:21:00.001-05:00

Betty Garrett discusses the Hollywood Blacklist - EMMYTVLEGENDS.ORG

Poem

2011-02-12T23:23:00.002-05:00

All of a sudden I’m feeling that traffic-

light yellow is really a beautiful color. Is it

the tint, do you think, or the luminosity, with all its

terrible and endearing associations--“the force that through the green

fuse drives the flower”? Quotation is just plagiarism with a human face.

I began by thinking I might actually have an idea there, but I wrote something instead.

2011-02-12T08:55:00.000-05:00

The more I hear American politicians and commentators extolling the virtues of democracy, the more I feel like I'm in East Germany in the 1960s.

The Sheik

2011-02-11T21:43:00.001-05:00

From my class blog at Sex in American Cinema

The plot of The Sheik is very different from that of Our Modern Maidens, but the mixed message about women and sexuality is the same.
Lady Diana Mayo (Agnes Ayres) is admired for her independence, high spirit and modern ideas, but when she is kidnapped by an Arab sheik, Ahmed Ben Hassan (Rudolph Valentino), she finds herself falling under the spell of his exotic masculinity. In the popular novel on which the film is based, Lady Diana learns to appreciate the sheik only after he takes her by force; in the film, he restrains himself and wins her with his consideration and respect for her. (When the film was re-released during the Code years, a scene of attempted rape had to be cut.)

Even so, the character of the sheik is recast for the film as the child of European parents, adopted by an Arab sheik; anti-miscegenation laws of the time would have precluded scenes suggesting romance and kisses between a European lady and an Arab man. The film was banned in Kansas City all the same.

The Sheik was crucial to Valentino's career as the greatest male sex symbol of the time--and created a huge backlash among American men, who boycotted the film and railed against the "effeminacy" of his screen image. He died at 31 in 1926, setting off a mass outpouring of grief among American women that was a significant moment in the history of Hollywood's power over the public imagination.

Our Modern Maidens - After the Wedding

2011-02-11T21:41:00.002-05:00

From my class blog at Sex in American Cinema

Right after the wedding, Billie discovers Kentucky in tears, and puts it all together: Kentucky is pregnant by Gil! She resolves to free Gil by pretending that she herself is a fallen woman.
Note the gay friend who comes forward, offering to stand by Billie when everyone else spurns her (at the end of this clip). As Vito Russo shows in The Celluloid Closet, such clearly gay characters--especially sympathetically portrayed, as here--virtually disappeared from Hollywood movies under the Code. Now, of course, they're a recognized convention.

Heiress Billie Brown, (Crawford), is engaged to marry her long-time sweetheart, budding diplomat, Gil Jordan, (Fairbanks). When Billie goes to see senior diplomat, Glenn Abbott, (La Rocque), about ensuring that Gil get a favorable assignment, Billie and Glenn are undeniably attracted to one another. Gil is likewise attracted to Kentucky Strafford, (Page), Billie's houseguest, who becomes pregnant by Gil. Gil finds that he loves Kentucky, but marries Billie instead. Once Gil finds that Billie really loves Glenn and Billie finds that Gil loves Kentucky, their marriage is annulled and both are paired up with the people they truly love.
-Wikipedia synopsis.

Our Modern Maidens - Billie and Glenn

2011-02-11T21:38:00.001-05:00

From my class blog at Sex in American Cinema

When Glenn realizes Billie has been using him, he takes his revenge by pretending to believe she is as "modern" as she says, and then rejecting her. The scene exemplifies the great paradox of sexual innocence and seduction in Hollywood cinema: A woman is insulted if a man attempts to seduce her, and just as insulted if he doesn't want to.

Heiress Billie Brown, (Crawford), is engaged to marry her long-time sweetheart, budding diplomat, Gil Jordan, (Fairbanks). When Billie goes to see senior diplomat, Glenn Abbott, (La Rocque), about ensuring that Gil get a favorable assignment, Billie and Glenn are undeniably attracted to one another. Gil is likewise attracted to Kentucky Strafford, (Page), Billie's houseguest, who becomes pregnant by Gil. Gil finds that he loves Kentucky, but marries Billie instead. Once Gil finds that Billie really loves Glenn and Billie finds that Gil loves Kentucky, their marriage is annulled and both are paired up with the people they truly love.
-Wikipedia synopsis

Our Modern Maidens - The Seven 'Leven

2011-02-11T21:37:00.002-05:00

From my class blog at Sex in American Cinema

The world depicted in Our Modern Maidens (1929) was collapsing even as the film was completing production--the Depression ended the era of flappers and college hijinks. Audiences soon lost their taste for stories of the carefree rich. And within a year of the introduction of sound in 1927, they would no longer go to silent pictures. (Our Modern Maidens was filmed without sound, music and sound effects being added later.)
The film's treatment of sexuality is typical of the period: The audience is teased with the image of a woman who is daring and "modern," and refuses to be bound by conventional morality. But of course it's a pose. The female lead can't be allowed to be a truly "bad" girl. Still, there are several elements that would never have gotten past the Code a few years later.

Heiress Billie Brown, (Joan Crawford), is engaged to marry her long-time sweetheart, budding diplomat, Gil Jordan, (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). When Billie goes to see senior diplomat, Glenn Abbott, (Rod La Rocque), about ensuring that Gil get a favorable assignment, Billie and Glenn are undeniably attracted to one another. Gil is likewise attracted to Kentucky Strafford, (Anita Page), Billie's houseguest, who becomes pregnant by Gil. Gil finds that he loves Kentucky, but marries Billie instead. Once Gil finds that Billie really loves Glenn and Billie finds that Gil loves Kentucky, their marriage is annulled and both are paired up with the people they truly love.
-Wikipedia synopsis

In this early scene, Billie sets out to fascinate Glenn because she believes he can advance her fiance Gil's diplomatic career.

Old Wives for New - Cecil B. DeMille, 1918

2011-02-11T21:35:00.001-05:00

From my class blog at Sex in American Cinema

DeMille became famous making slightly provocative films about beautiful women and "modern" love affairs. In Old Wives for New, Charles Murdock feels trapped in an unhappy marriage. His wife Sophy has "let herself go" and takes no interest in the world beyond her home. On a camping trip he meets the fascinating Juliet Raeburn, a beautiful young self-made woman he feels is his true soulmate. When rumors circulate that Charles has found a lover, he throws suspicion upon a less reputable woman who has pursued him in order to spare Juliet from social disgrace.

The Big Heat (1953)

2011-02-11T21:32:00.001-05:00

From my class blog at Sex in American Cinema

Another film noir classic from Fritz Lang. In The Big Heat, Gloria Grahame is not a temptress--well, only a little, anyway. Instead, she's the gangster's girl with her own moral code. When she steps outside the gangster's influence, she's punished with shocking violence.

Scarlet Street (1945)

2011-02-11T21:30:00.002-05:00

From my class blog at Sex in American Cinema:

Another pairing of Fritz Lang as director with Edward G. Robinson as the "little man" who turns murderous under the influence of a temptress. Scarlet Street was considered so dark and sordid that it was actually banned in several American states and cities, despite passing the Code board.

Film Noir: The Woman in the Window

2011-02-11T21:29:00.001-05:00

From my class blog at Sex in American Cinema:

The German director Fritz Lang was a very direct link between the German expressionist films of the '20s and film noir. Lang claimed that he fled Germany immediately after Joseph Goebbels invited him to become the head of a nationalized film industry under Nazism. In the US, he directed some of the classics of noir. It's possible that the genre reflects the disillusionment of German refugees like Lang and Billy Wilder when they discovered the same struggles for power in the promised land of America that corrupted their native European world.
In The Woman in the Window, a mild-mannered professor falls under a woman's spell and finds himself enmeshed in a web of criminality, deception, and homicide. (The professor is our friend Edward G. Robinson, Keyes in Double Indemnity.) Lang got around some of the strictures of the Code by framing the main action as a dream.
(You can find the rest of the film on YouTube following this initial excerpt.)

More Film Noir - Maltese Falcon trailer

2011-02-11T21:27:00.001-05:00

From my class blog at Sex in American Cinema:

Come closer . . . I'm going to tell you an astounding story . . .

The Maltese Falcon is, like Double Indemnity, one of the sources and pillars of film noir as style and genre. Even in the trailer you can see another of the hallmarks of film noir: Deception, duplicity, lies, and deceit. The typical film noir not only appears cynical and "dark," it unravels a complex plot in which nothing is as it first appears. (This may be another reason why retrospective narration is common in film noir.)

At the heart of the mystery, spinning out webs of deceit, there always seems to be a woman.
Mary Astor as Brigid O'Shaugnessy is one of the great deceitful femmes fatales of noir.

Sam: Was there any truth at all in that whole story?
Brigid: Some . . . not very much.

Film Noir

2011-02-11T21:25:00.001-05:00

From my class blog, Sex in American Cinema:

All Hollywood genres are significantly defined by their treatment of sexual themes and imagery. Musicals are traditionally built on fairy-tale romances and the display of women's bodies; the western often personifies the opposition between nature and culture as a complex heterosexual love story, troubled by an undercurrent of homosexual attraction.
But film noir is an especially provocative case. Film noir plots are defined by their cynical view of corrupted heterosexual love, and by seductive female figures who betray male heroes--and arouse unsettling, ambivalent feelings in the audience. The dialogue in film noir is allusive and elliptical, and often comes across as more dirty-minded than any explicit depiction could be. The lighting characteristically suggests obscure forces lurking in the shadows. The world of film noir is steeped in fetishism: nothing is what it appears to be, and more importantly, nothing is as it should be. The prevailing moral order is both threatened and challenged by the eruption of desires that are usually repressed and unacknowledged. It's not a sunny picture.
For our purposes, perhaps the most interesting aspect of film noir is that it constitutes a counter-tradition within Hollywood film: a self-conscious subversion of the image of American life that the studios generally sought to present. Central to that image is an abiding faith that men and women can find their deepest needs satisfied in romance, courtship and lasting marriage. Film noir proposes instead that sexuality is dangerous, unpredictable and often destructive.

A pretty good introduction to film noir can be found in the Wikipedia article on the topic.
A more extended treatment can be found at John and Stephanie Blaser's Film Noir Studies.

Golden Boys #4 at Dennis Cooper's blog

2011-02-10T10:56:00.001-05:00

More at DC's

I just think the name Jimmy Hughes is as suggestive as any photograph.

I have received a solicitation to join a Romanian fitness club. At least that's what I think it is; my Romanian's a bit rusty.

Another sanctity-of-marriage Republican has been discovered soliciting women for sex online and has had to resign. Yawn.

I am spending the afternoon with Mae West and Busby Berkeley. Last week I thought I was Barbara Stanwyck (Baby Face); this week I think I'm Mae West (I'm No Angel). My life as a playlist of classic film titles.

Cary Grant: Do you mind if I get personal?
Mae West: I don't mind if you get familiar.

It's all in how she says it--which applies to me, too, of course.

Pimple Zoo at Dennis Cooper's blog

2010-02-13T14:03:00.000-05:00

Galerie Dennis Cooper Presents 'Pimple Zoo', a group show guest-curated by James Mitchum
'Hello, everybody. I'm James Mitchum, an artist and student and a devoted lurker of Dennis Cooper's blog. I asked Dennis if I could curate an exhibition in his virtual art gallery and he was kind enough to agree. I was recently writing a paper for school about the representation of animals (including fowl, rodents, insects, and other creatures) in contemporary art. While I was doing my research I found what I think are some very interesting art works. I thought I might share a selection of my favorites with you. I hope you'll find my little show worth your time. Thank you Dennis and all of you fine d.l.s for giving me so much silent pleasure and knowledge.' -- J.M.

I liked it.

2010-02-12T21:34:00.002-05:00

I like garfieldminusgarfield.net

Pee-wee

2010-01-15T09:41:00.001-05:00

Quoted this week in The New Yorker in a Talk of the Town piece:
Pee-wee Redux by Michael Schulman

Poem: “Do you think I’m a mean person?”

2009-12-17T10:15:00.002-05:00

Do you think I’m a mean person? I’ve put so much effort
Into not being mean. Not that I want to come off like
Being nice requires some special effort on my part;
I think it comes naturally to me. Or not nice exactly,
I’m not really nice; anyway, is nice the opposite of mean,
Or some other, neutered category of forgettable meh-ness?
Meh is one of the words of the year. That speaks volumes
About the year, huh? But what am I asking you for?
After writing poems for thirty years, I still think you can
Answer me?

12-17-09

2009-11-08T10:43:00.002-05:00

Chickpea

Dream

2009-08-31T09:18:00.002-04:00

I am working on a large manuscript made up of lots of unconnected notes, each a few words to several pages long. I decide to just string them together without trying to edit them into a whole. I am writing possible titles on a page of notebook paper in blue ink: "Because I Don't Care," and "Because I Can't Be Bothered."

2009-06-26T13:54:00.001-04:00

Gov. Sanford's Affair

This letter appeared today in the Washington Post

Friday, June 26, 2009

I am a gay man. My partner lives 12 time zones away. We are in a monogamous relationship, and we do not cheat. We get to see each other only twice a year for less than three weeks. Although he is a professional in marketing, the United States will not let him immigrate because he was not picked in the lottery. The federal government would not recognize our relationship if I married him. The government will not allow us to be together.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford ["S.C. Gov. Sanford Admits to an Affair," front page, June 25] and Sen. John Ensign (and former House speaker Newt Gingrich and senator Larry Craig) oppose same-sex marriages even as they do their best to destroy the institution of marriage in the United States.

I pay my taxes. I served in the military. I was an Eagle Scout. In short, I am a good, but second-class, citizen. It's very hard not to be infuriated by the double standards.

WILLIAM McCOLL

Washington

2009-06-26T07:07:00.001-04:00

I dreamed that Conan O'Brien died. Everyone was supposed to gather in a public square for a special announcement.

2009-06-24T09:22:00.001-04:00

I'm a little hesitant to say so, but I think "Year One" is fricking hilarious. I realized I liked it because it recalled--very much--the "Carry On" movies I was crazy about as a kid. A totally non-hip movie, too. Everyone in it has found their inner borscht belt comic and does shtick (and how often these days do you see a movie where you have to be Jewish to get some of the jokes?), and Oliver Platt should get an Oscar for creating the kind of evil gay character you're supposed to be appalled by. Jack Black and Michael Cera have Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis chemistry; I hope they do a whole series of stupid comic romps through various historical periods. Then they should fuck all the Sex and the City women, make a comic version of Cloverfield, and retire after they finish their brilliant satire of The Wrestler with Michael Cera in the Marisa Tomei role.

From J. R. Coetzee's review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume 1: 1929-1940

2009-06-14T11:24:00.006-04:00

A dictum he quotes from his favorite philosopher, the second-generation Cartesian Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669), suggests his overall stance toward the political: ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis, which may be glossed: Don't invest hope or longing in an arena where you have no power.

*

One of the more unexpected of his literary enthusiasms is for Samuel Johnson. Struck by the "mad terrified face" in the portrait by James Barry, he comes up in 1936 with the idea of turning the story of Johnson's relationship with Hester Thrale into a stage play. It is not the great pontificator of Boswell's Life who engages him, as the letters make clear, but the man who struggled all his life against indolence and the black dog of depression.

I don't know why this should be unexpected--I can't think of a better match-up to an earlier writer for Beckett. There's something Beckett-y about Rasselas and maybe London, and of course there is a fascination with paring-away rather than adding to language in Johnson; he sabotages himself in his less successful work by getting carried away with his command of English.
Now I wonder if I hadn't come across Beckett's idea long before I got the notion of having Frank Barber narrate the story of Johnson and Hester Thrale.

* "I . . . seem never to have had the least faculty or disposition for the supernatural."

*

. . . one can venture to say that psychoanalysis of the kind that Beckett underwent with Bion--what one might call a proto-Kleinian analysis--was an important passage in his life, not so much because it relieved (or appears to have relieved) his crippling symptoms or because it helped (or appears to have helped) him to break with his mother, but because it confronted him in the person of an interlocutor or interrogator or antagonist in many ways his intellectual equal, with a new model of thinking and an unfamiliar mode of dialogue. Specifically, Bion challenged Beckett--whose devotion to the Cartesians shows how much he had invested in the notion of a private, inviolable, non-physical realm--to re-evaluate the priority he gave to pure thought. . . . In the psychic menagerie of Bion and Klein, Beckett may also have found hints for the protohuman organisms, the worms and bodiless heads in pots, that populate his various underworlds. Bion seems to have empathized with the need felt by creative personalities of Beckett's type to regress to prerational darkness and chaos as a preliminary to an act of creation.

This is something I'm going to want to return to a LOT. It seems like the Key to Everything--especially transcending the assumptions about character in realism in favor of something "protohuman." Oddly enough, this reminds me of Bert States' comments on dreams.

*

His guide here is Cezanne, who came to see the natural landscape as "unpproachably alien," an "unintelligible arrangement of atoms," and had the wisdom not to intrude himself into its alienness. . . . Cezanne has a sense of his own incommensurability not only with the landscape but--on the evidence of his self-portraits--with "the life . . .. operative in himself." Herewith the first authentic note of Beckett's mature, post-humanist phase is struck.

2009-06-10T13:43:00.003-04:00

In case any of you boys are thinking of moving to another US city.

From Randall Jarrell's essays on Auden

2009-06-10T13:31:00.005-04:00

Another of Auden's virtues is his great capacity for growth or change--he is as incapable as a chameleon of keeping the same surface for any great length of time. It is rather queer and pathetic to mention as a virtue this capacity for change, in the case of a man who changed away from his best poetry, got steadily worse, for many years, but he has begun to get better again, and is not laid away in that real graveyard of poets, My Own Style, going on like a repeating decimal until the day someone drives a stake through his heart.

Quoted by Charles Rosen in NYRB, Nov 20 08

2009-04-23T21:49:00.001-04:00

Why "desire"? Why not "hunger"?

Everyone in the world needs to see this

2009-02-10T19:04:00.001-05:00

Why the best stuff on TV never actually gets broadcast

The Destructive Center

2009-02-09T12:35:00.002-05:00

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 8, 2009

What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?

A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.

Even if the original Obama plan — around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial fraction of that total given over to ineffective tax cuts — had been enacted, it wouldn’t have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 trillion over the next three years.

Yet the centrists did their best to make the plan weaker and worse.

One of the best features of the original plan was aid to cash-strapped state governments, which would have provided a quick boost to the economy while preserving essential services. But the centrists insisted on a $40 billion cut in that spending.

The original plan also included badly needed spending on school construction; $16 billion of that spending was cut. It included aid to the unemployed, especially help in maintaining health care — cut. Food stamps — cut. All in all, more than $80 billion was cut from the plan, with the great bulk of those cuts falling on precisely the measures that would do the most to reduce the depth and pain of this slump.

On the other hand, the centrists were apparently just fine with one of the worst provisions in the Senate bill, a tax credit for home buyers. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research calls this the “flip your house to your brother” provision: it will cost a lot of money while doing nothing to help the economy.

All in all, the centrists’ insistence on comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted will, if reflected in the final bill, lead to substantially lower employment and substantially more suffering.

But how did this happen? I blame President Obama’s belief that he can transcend the partisan divide — a belief that warped his economic strategy.

After all, many people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate.

Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate.

Mr. Obama’s postpartisan yearnings may also explain why he didn’t do something crucially important: speak forcefully about how government spending can help support the economy. Instead, he let conservatives define the debate, waiting until late last week before finally saying what needed to be said — that increasing spending is the whole point of the plan.

And Mr. Obama got nothing in return for his bipartisan outreach. Not one Republican voted for the House version of the stimulus plan, which was, by the way, better focused than the original administration proposal.

In the Senate, Republicans inveighed against “pork” — although the wasteful spending they claimed to have identified (much of it was fully justified) was a trivial share of the bill’s total. And they decried the bill’s cost — even as 36 out of 41 Republican senators voted to replace the Obama plan with $3 trillion, that’s right, $3 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years.

So Mr. Obama was reduced to bargaining for the votes of those centrists. And the centrists, predictably, extracted a pound of flesh — not, as far as anyone can tell, based on any coherent economic argument, but simply to demonstrate their centrist mojo. They probably would have demanded that $100 billion or so be cut from anything Mr. Obama proposed; by coming in with such a low initial bid, the president guaranteed that the final deal would be much too small.

Such are the perils of negotiating with yourself.

Now, House and Senate negotiators have to reconcile their versions of the stimulus, and it’s possible that the final bill will undo the centrists’ worst. And Mr. Obama may be able to come back for a second round. But this was his best chance to get decisive action, and it fell short.

So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren’t good.

For rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. “Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,” he declared on Saturday, and “the scale and scope of this plan is right.”

No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.

2009-01-31T10:31:00.001-05:00

Posted on a Bear site under the title: "is this self-defense or sex education?"

Calling a Time Out

2009-01-25T12:27:00.002-05:00

by George McGovern
Thursday, January 22, 2009

As you settle into the Oval Office, Mr. President, may I offer a suggestion? Please do not try to put Afghanistan aright with the U.S. military. To send our troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan would be a near-perfect example of going from the frying pan into the fire. There is reason to believe some of our top military commanders privately share this view. And so does a broad and growing swath of your party and your supporters.

True, the United States is the world's greatest power -- but so was the British Empire a century ago when it tried to pacify the warlords and tribes of Afghanistan, only to be forced out after excruciating losses. For that matter, the Soviet Union was also a superpower when it poured some 100,000 troops into Afghanistan in 1979. They limped home, broken and defeated, a decade later, having helped pave the way for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is logical to conclude that our massive military dominance and supposedly good motives should let us work our will in Afghanistan. But logic does not always prevail in South Asia. With belligerent Afghan warlords sitting atop each mountain glowering at one another, the one factor that could unite them is the invasion of their country by a foreign power, whether British, Russian or American.

I have believed for some time that military power is no solution to terrorism. The hatred of U.S. policies in the Middle East -- our occupation of Iraq, our backing for repressive regimes such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, our support of Israel -- that drives the terrorist impulse against us would better be resolved by ending our military presence throughout the arc of conflict. This means a prudent, carefully directed withdrawal of our troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and elsewhere. We also need to close down the imposing U.S. military bases in this section of the globe, which do so little to expand our security and so much to stoke local resentment.

We cannot evade this reckoning. The British thought they could extend their control over Iraq even while pulling out their ground forces by creating a string of bases in remote parts of the country, away from the observation of most Iraqis. It didn't work. No people that desires independence and self-determination wishes to have another nation's military bases in its country. In 1776, remember, 13 little colonies drove the mighty British Empire from American soil.

In 2003, the Bush administration ordered an invasion of Iraq, supposedly to reduce terrorism. But six years later, there is more terrorism and civil strife in Iraq, not less. The same outcome may occur in Afghanistan if we make it the next American military conflict.

Mr. President, the bright promise of your brilliant campaign for the White House and the high hopes of the millions who thronged the Mall on Tuesday to watch you be sworn in could easily be lost in the mountains and wastelands of Afghanistan.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz has estimated that the war in Iraq will have a total cost of more than $3 trillion. That war has clearly weakened our economy and our armed forces even as it has made the national debt soar. The Bush administration committed itself to Iraq before the recession. Today, with our economy teetering, does the Obama administration believe that it is time for yet another costly war in yet another Muslim country?

I'm aware that some of my fellow Americans regard me as too idealistic. But sometimes idealism is the best realism. And at a minimum, realism and idealism need not be contradictory. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has not only angered Iraqis who have lost family members, neighbors or homes; it has also increased the level of anger throughout the Muslim world and thrown up obstacles to our political leadership in that deeply important part of the planet.

Like you, Mr. President, I don't oppose all wars. I risked my life in World War II to protect our country against genuine danger. But it is the vivid memory of my fellow airmen being shot out of the sky on all sides of me in a war that I believe we had to fight that makes me cautious about sending our youth into needless conflicts that weaken us at home and abroad, and may even weaken us in the eyes of God.

As you have noted, Mr. President, we take pride in our soldiers who conduct themselves bravely. But as you have also said, some of these soldiers have served two, three and even four tours in dangerous combat. Many of them have come home with enduring brain and nerve damage and without arms and legs. These troops need rest, rehabilitation and reunions with their families.

So let me suggest a truly audacious hope for your administration: How about a five-year time-out on war -- unless, of course, there is a genuine threat to the nation?

During that interval, we could work with the U.N. World Food Program, plus the overseas arms of the churches, synagogues, mosques and other volunteer agencies to provide a nutritious lunch every day for every school-age child in Afghanistan and other poor countries. Such a program is now underway in several countries approved by Congress and the United Nations, under the auspices of the George McGovern-Robert Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Act. (Forgive the self-serving title.) Although the measure remains painfully underfunded, with the help of other countries, we are reaching millions of children. We could supplement these efforts with nutritional packages for low-income pregnant and nursing mothers and their infants from birth through the age of 5, as is done here at home by WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.

Is this proposal pie-in-the-sky? I don't think so. It's food in the stomachs of hungry kids. It would draw them to school and enable them to learn and grow into better citizens. It would cost a small fraction of warfare's cost, but it might well be a stronger antidote to terrorism. There will always be time for another war. But hunger can't wait.

George McGovern, a former senator from South Dakota, was the Democratic nominee for president in 1972.

2009-01-24T22:12:00.002-05:00

The director and screenwriters of Valkyrie have managed to make a film about the attempted assassination of Hitler that leaves you entirely indifferent to whether or not the plot succeeds.

The Principal's Office -

2009-01-15T10:19:00.001-05:00

Eight Years of Madoffs

2009-01-12T07:37:00.002-05:00

By FRANK RICH
Published: January 10, 2009

THREE days after the world learned that $50 billion may have disappeared in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, The Times led its front page of Dec. 14 with the revelation of another $50 billion rip-off. This time the vanished loot belonged to American taxpayers. That was our collective contribution to the $117 billion spent (as of mid-2008) on Iraq reconstruction — a sinkhole of corruption, cronyism, incompetence and outright theft that epitomized Bush management at home and abroad.

The source for this news was a near-final draft of an as-yet-unpublished 513-page federal history of this nation-building fiasco. The document was assembled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction — led by a Bush appointee, no less. It pinpoints, among other transgressions, a governmental Ponzi scheme concocted to bamboozle Americans into believing they were accruing steady dividends on their investment in a “new” Iraq.

The report quotes no less an authority than Colin Powell on how the scam worked. Back in 2003, Powell said, the Defense Department just “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ” Those of us who questioned these astonishing numbers were dismissed as fools, much like those who begged in vain to get the Securities and Exchange Commission to challenge Madoff’s math.

What’s most remarkable about the Times article, however, is how little stir it caused. When, in 1971, The Times got its hands on the Pentagon Papers, the internal federal history of the Vietnam disaster, the revelations caused a national uproar. But after eight years of battering by Bush, the nation has been rendered half-catatonic. The Iraq Pentagon Papers sank with barely a trace.

After all, next to big-ticket administration horrors like Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and the politicized hiring and firing at Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department, the wreckage of Iraq reconstruction is what Ralph Kramden of “The Honeymooners” would dismiss as “a mere bag of shells.” The $50 billion also pales next to other sums that remain unaccounted for in the Bush era, from the $345 billion in lost tax revenue due to unpoliced offshore corporate tax havens to the far-from-transparent disposition of some $350 billion in Wall Street bailout money. In the old Pat Moynihan phrase, the Bush years have “defined deviancy down” in terms of how low a standard of ethical behavior we now tolerate as the norm from public officials.

Not even a good old-fashioned sex scandal could get our outrage going again. Indeed, a juicy one erupted last year in the Interior Department, where the inspector general found that officials “had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.” Two officials tasked with marketing oil on behalf of American taxpayers got so blotto at a daytime golf event sponsored by Shell that they became too incapacitated to drive and had to be put up by the oil company.

Back in the day, an oil-fueled scandal in that one department alone could mesmerize a nation and earn Warren Harding a permanent ranking among our all-time worst presidents. But while the scandals at Bush’s Interior resemble Teapot Dome — and also encompass millions of dollars in lost federal oil and gas royalties — they barely registered beyond the Beltway. Even late-night comics yawned when The Washington Post administered a coup de grâce last week, reporting that Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne spent $235,000 from taxpayers to redo his office bathroom (monogrammed towels included).

It took 110 pages for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan research organization, to compile the CliffsNotes inventory of the Bush wreckage last month. It found “125 systematic failures across the breadth of the federal government.” That accounting is conservative. There are still too many unanswered questions.

Just a short list is staggering. Who put that bogus “uranium from Africa” into the crucial prewar State of the Union address after the C.I.A. removed it from previous Bush speeches? How high up were the authorities who ordered and condoned torture and then let the “rotten apples” at the bottom of the military heap take the fall? Who orchestrated the Pentagon’s elaborate P.R. efforts to cover up Pat Tillman’s death by “friendly fire” in Afghanistan?

And, for extra credit, whatever did happen to Bush’s records from the Texas Air National Guard?

The biggest question hovering over all this history, however, concerns the future more than the past. If we get bogged down in adjudicating every Bush White House wrong, how will we have the energy, time or focus to deal with the all-hands-on-deck crises that this administration’s malfeasance and ineptitude have bequeathed us? The president-elect himself struck this note last spring. “If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated,” Barack Obama said. “I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.”

Henry Waxman, the California congressman who has been our most tireless inquisitor into Bush scandals, essentially agreed when I spoke to him last week. Though he remains outraged about both the chicanery used to sell the Iraq war and the administration’s overall abuse of power, he adds: “I don’t see Congress pursuing it. We’ve got to move on to other issues.” He would rather see any prosecutions augmented by an independent investigation that fills in the historical record. “We need to depoliticize it,” he says. “If a Democratic Congress or administration pursues it, it will be seen as partisan.”

We could certainly do worse than another 9/11 Commission. Among those Americans still enraged about the Bush years, there are also calls for truth and reconciliation commissions, war crimes trials and, in a petition movement on Obama’s transition Web site, a special prosecutor in the Patrick Fitzgerald mode. One of the sharpest appointments yet made by the incoming president may support decisive action: Dawn Johnsen, a law professor and former Clinton administration official who last week was chosen to run the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice.

This is the same office where the Bush apparatchik John Yoo produced his infamous memos justifying torture. Johnsen is a fierce critic of such constitutional abuses. In articles for Slate last year, she wondered “where is the outrage, the public outcry” over a government that has acted lawlessly and that “does not respect the legal and moral bounds of human decency.” She asked, “How do we save our country’s honor, and our own?”

The last is not a rhetorical question. While our new president indeed must move on and address the urgent crises that cannot wait, Bush administration malfeasance can’t be merely forgotten or finessed. A new Justice Department must enforce the law; Congress must press outstanding subpoenas to smoke out potential criminal activity; every legal effort must be made to stop what seems like a wholesale effort by the outgoing White House to withhold, hide and possibly destroy huge chunks of its electronic and paper trail. As Johnsen wrote last March, we must also “resist Bush administration efforts to hide evidence of its wrongdoing through demands for retroactive immunity, assertions of state privilege, and implausible claims that openness will empower terrorists.”

As if to anticipate the current debate, she added that “we must avoid any temptation simply to move on,” because the national honor cannot be restored “without full disclosure.” She was talking about America regaining its international reputation in the aftermath of our government’s descent into the dark side of torture and “extraordinary rendition.” But I would add that we need full disclosure of the more prosaic governmental corruption of the Bush years, too, for pragmatic domestic reasons. To make the policy decisions ahead of us in the economic meltdown, we must know what went wrong along the way in the executive and legislative branches alike.

As the financial historian Ron Chernow wrote in the Times last week, we could desperately use a Ferdinand Pecora, the investigator who illuminated the history of the 1929 meltdown in Senate hearings on the eve of the New Deal. The terrain to be mined would include not just the usual Wall Street suspects and their Congressional and regulatory enablers but also the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a strangely neglected ground zero in the foreclosure meltdown. The department’s secretary, Alphonso Jackson, resigned in March amid still-unresolved investigations over whether he enriched himself and friends with government contracts.

The tentative and amorphous $800 billion stimulus proposed by Obama last week sounds like a lot, but it’s a drop in the bucket when set against the damage it must help counteract: more than $10 trillion in new debt and new obligations piled up by the Bush administration in eight years, as calculated by the economists Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current Harper’s Magazine.

If Bernie Madoff, at least, can still revive what remains of our deadened capacity for outrage, so can those who pulled off Washington’s Ponzi schemes. The more we learn about where all the bodies and billions were buried on our path to ruin, the easier it may be for our new president to make the case for a bold, whatever-it-takes New Deal.

2009-01-10T23:59:00.001-05:00

Wouldn't it be great if it turned out that "yummy" is Chinese for "This tastes bad"?

I'm a Real Dream Expert

2009-01-07T08:35:00.002-05:00

Joel Garreau's Washington Post article on dreams of teeth says so.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is Thankful for......

2008-12-01T15:11:00.001-05:00

Bjorn Borg - Love for all

2008-11-26T19:27:00.001-05:00

2008-11-08T17:31:00.001-05:00

It's Straight to Hell Day at Dennis Cooper's blog with a reprint of my Mythomania essay.

2008-11-07T11:46:00.002-05:00

Slatted_Light at Dennis Cooper's blog had this comment today so detailed and so right-on that I'm saving it here:

I think you should have at least some cautious hope on the Prop 8 legal battle, dude. Like all LGBT rights issues, the deck is stacked against it but there is a clear shot here, even if it is a long shot. The real question is – as Heliotrope pointed out – whether it would be wiser to try this out before a future Obama Supreme Court later on rather than have the California Court overrule the amendment which could risk a legislative constitutional convention. A constitutional convention is actually also a very big long shot as well but of course the risks are high too. More likely the court will rule that Prop 8 was an amendment and not a revision because – as always with LGBT issues – the argument can be easily be mounted that the amendment has not involved “a broad attack on state court authority to exercise independent judgment in construing a wide spectrum of important rights under the state Constitution” – the current standard set for what constitutes a revision under Californian law. The amendment’s supposed ‘specificity’ saves it in that regard because, unlike the really excellent example Bernard gave yesterday of revoking Miranda rights, Prop 8 could be argued not to “necessarily or inevitably alter the basic governmental framework” of the Constitution – which was the reason an attempt to strike down a gay marriage ban as a constitutional revision in Alaska failed because the Court, citing California precedents, held that a proscription of LGBT marriage rights was discrete enough an issue not to upset the constitution’s fundaments. I think I’m still for a legal challenge though simply because I loathe the idea that elections can be used to strike down equal rights for minorities. The difference once again is the fact that the California Court already found the right to marriage to be extant in the constitution under the equal protection powers recognised when antimiscegenation laws were struck down. The argument has been made by Eugene Volokh that – in looking at the legal history – it is possible that “the amendment process may be used to cut back on the scope of a state constitutional right as well as to add to the scope of such a right.” The thing to question here, though, is the concept of ‘scope’. It isn’t that all marriage rights are being reduced in their reach (say, for instance, like in reducing marriage to a union of only one person to one other) but rather that the availability of this right is being circumscribed utterly from a specific group deemed ineligible for it. It isn’t a matter of scope, or scale, but of type, or kind. This is exactly why the California Court felt the need to refer to the antimiscegenation laws in the first place: because the marriage rights of queers is about granting access not limiting impact. I feel as though it’s important for the queer community to take a stand on that ground too because it’s not ‘only’ about their right to union now but also about a defence of citizenship’s relation to constitutionalism and a stand against the distortion of democracy into a mechanism for arbitrary rule and acclamatory discrimination. Even if a constitutional convention were to be called in the wake of the California Court overruling the amendment, the fact that it had overruled it would be significant in itself, demarcating the court’s authority and setting a very important precedent for future rights battles.

One other thing I’ve found particularly disheartening in the wake of Prop 8 being approved is the vitriol that it has triggered from gay liberals – mostly gay male liberals, I have to point out – against the African-American vote. Joe Mills posted a good example the other day from Dan Savage. If you didn’t get a chance to read the link he put up, I’m sure by now you’ve at least heard the exit poll figure which announced that 70% of African-Americans voted Yes on 8. That’s been bandied about by outraged gays as some sign that blacks are the new queer-crushers. Here’s what Savage had to say: “I’m done pretending that the handful of racist gay white men out there—and they’re out there, and I think they’re scum — are a bigger problem for African Americans, gay and straight, than the huge numbers of homophobic African Americans are for gay Americans, whatever their color.” He pretty much sums up the barely concealed – and totally clueless – intolerant anger that’s now doing the rounds as a quick fix solution for why Prop 8 failed. Of course, it’s garbage. Naturally homophobia exists among African-Americans, just as it does as much among women as men; it’s a heterosexualist alliance. But in the first place, as Joe M pointed out, this focus on African-Americans is a total distraction from the distributive power of homophobia in American society, where the funders and organizers and purveyors of this anti-LGBT movement are white religious conservatives and – as Bernard noted too – the PR machinery that they have developed. It wasn’t African-American churches that put Prop 8 on the ballot; it was the white religious movement, this time refracted through the Mormons; and that’s what counts. African-Americans aren’t the obstacle to progress; they’re the road. And as for the exit poll itself, I’m not sure that it proves that much at all. For starters, the sample is so small, 2240 respondents, of which 10% – 224 – were African-American that it’s hard to say what it signifies exactly about the wider vote. True, the African-American vote in Florida on the gay marriage ban there did attract a similar number in the exit poll – 71%. But as a commenter pointed out on this blog, in California, "According to the exit poll, the final overall split was 51.88 (for) to 49.12 (against). So, if the blacks had voted the same as the latinos (53% in favor), it still would have just passed 50.18 (for) to 49.82 (against). BUT, if blacks had voted in the same way as whites (just barely against Prop 8), the measure would have just barely failed 49.78 (for) to 50.22 (against)." What that means is that there is nothing specifically obstructionist about the bogeyman of black homophobia in the way that Dan Savage has it above. Rather, the obstructionism (as ever) is in the common consensus that has been assembled to deny the LGBT community rights across groups. Indeed, as that same commenter concludes, “Getting more blacks out to vote did not affect the outcome of Prop 8. If, however, blacks were less anti-gay marriage, the Prop could have been Voted NO and would have failed.” The point I’d add is that if any of the groups had been less gay marriage the difference would have made in what was a fairly close ballot.

This nasty reaction to African-Americans in particular, however, in the wake of Prop 8 does indicate something very clear to me though. Namely, that LGBT activism really needs to move past its own anti-religious bias. This great article points out that far more than any theft of their rights by callous blacks at the polls, the real reason Prop 8 went down was due to serious organizational failures. The No on 8 campaign was well financed but it was slow on the uptake and sluggish in attempting to create a solid base. Not only that but as this blog points out, the racial disinterest in the No campaign also played into the minority result at the polls. Commenters like Andrew Sullivan are saying that the 8 'debacle' shows that the legal route is the one to take as it only triggers this sort of electoral backlash. I completely disagree. I’m all for the courts as a grounds for securing the rights of queers. Antimiscegenation laws went down in California in 1948 without some mass conversion of social opinion beforehand and there’s no reason gays should have to cool their heels and wait for the world to change now. Plus laws themselves alter opinions. But at the same time, there does need to be a stronger activist component to the gay rights movement that tries to assemble a wider grassroots base when it faces contestation of its rights. That, in turn, requires rethinking how to grapple with the things that hold a homophobic consensus together and one of the most important of those things is religion. At the moment, the conservatives simply own religion when it comes to discourse on queers. Gays and lesbians really make little attempt to try and open up a dialogue with churches and carve out a theological case in the wider community for why it is that religion is not antithetical to homosexuality. Part of the popular leeriness toward queer marriage is the concept that the admission of queers will secularise it. This is one of the dogwhistle meanings behind the words when conservative preachers beat on about the threat to 'sanctity' of marriage, LGBT activists aren’t addressing this. They aren’t trying to define what determines the inviolability of the marriage bond in terms of the Bible, what makes it holy, in a way that decentralises the heterosexualism that the right insist upon. Nor are they combating the assumption that the Bible is straightforwardly ‘against’ homosexuals. A good starting point on this that can be seen in Daniel Karslake’s very brilliant documentary, For the Bible Tells Me So, which should be widely distributed - for free - to voters in a form of DVD leafletting.

Beyond this, what I find so remarkable is to the degree to which gay rights have gained such traction by drawing on 'like race' arguments to ascertain their equality in the courts but the ongoing obliviousness amongst gay activist to seize on one of the key elements that gained abolitionism authority in the 19th century: namely, biblical battles over passages in the Bible. Conservatives may seem to have the final word on this issue in terms of the Biblical text because there are undeniably passages in the Bible which draw down censure and condemnation and exclusion on homosexuality. But slave-holders had the same advantage and they were argued down. In fact, the act of arguing their moral authority down in this way decisively fed into secessionism. There is already plenty of excellent work being done on the intricacy of the relationship between homosexuality, sexuality and religion but I feel that the over-inflated sense that all churches and believers participate equally in intolerance toward gays acts as a real roadblock to any sustained effort to try and synthesise and promote this information and, through it, form a much-needed religious voting bloc to counter the popular conservative sin and sanctity narratives. Gay activists really need to start guest-speaking in churches wherever they can; to make their case to congregations; and doorknock and have discussions for gay marriage based on appeals to religious rights and biblical exegesis as much as civil equity arguments. The two are coupled together when it comes to queers - they can't be drawn apart. In particular, too, one group of gays and lesbians – a small splinter to be sure, but a vital one – is really left to the side of LGBT activism when they should be at the forefront. These are religious queers. Religious queers are utterly crucial, especially because they are denied rights twice when it comes to gay marriage exclusion: not only in terms of their civil rights, but in terms of their freedom of worship. In that regard, they are able to make the totally legitimate counterclaim that their freedom of religion is being impinged upon by the manipulations of the anti-gay church, who can then be presented as un-American for attempting to inhibit the liberty to worship free of interference that the separation of church and state was designed to facilitate. This avenue of attack has not nearly been explored enough because the idea of a queer religiosity has been taken as accomodationist and normalizing. To an extent, this is true because the Savages and Sullivans of the queer movement have been left to be the advocates for this approach up til now. But religious queerdom really isn’t reactionary in itself, not even moderate; it’s intensely radical because it proposes to make mainstream a reading of sexual relations that does not allow homosexuality to be the easy other of religion. It works to defuse the non-communicability of the pair – which is where conservatives most basically triumphs. A queerness that can rally Christians rightly done is hardly a turn toward assimilation. In fact, it is absolutely against the status quo.

2008-11-04T23:10:00.004-05:00

Obscure

Star Trek Voyager Character

Elected

President

of United States of America

Yma Sumac, 1922-2008

2008-11-03T09:33:00.008-05:00

By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 3, 2008

Yma Sumac, a Peruvian folk entertainer with an astonishing vocal range who surged to fame in the 1950s with an "Incan princess" mystique that captivated millions of record-buyers in search of exotic sounds, died of cancer Nov. 1 at an assisted living facility in the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles. She was believed to be 86, according to personal assistant Damon Devine, who said he had seen the birth certificate.

Nearly every biographical aspect of Ms. Sumac's life was long in dispute, including her age, her town of birth and her ancestral claims that on her mother's side she was a descendant of the last Incan emperor, Atahualpa. Fueled by an intensive publicity machine, the rumors grew so thick at one point that she was jokingly rumored to be a "nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn" who had merely reversed her name, Amy Camus.

Ms. Sumac thrived during a postwar period of American music when the exotic was hip and the composer Eden Ahbez ("Nature Boy") was briefly in vogue. Los Angeles Times music critic Don Heckman once called Ms. Sumac "a living, breathing, Technicolor musical fantasy -- a kaleidoscopic illusion of MGM exotica come to life in an era of practicality." Onstage and off, Ms. Sumac adopted a regal poise and stretched back her raven hair to make her haughty cheekbones even more pronounced. She was fond of flamboyant clothing often laden with gold and silver jewelry, and she spoke of her musical influences among jungle animals.

"At night in my bedroom I hear the whoo-whoo of the little birds and I hear the dogs barking very sad," she told People magazine. "That's what I put in my records. I don't bark bow-wow, but I bark whoo, and I sing like the birdies."

As an interpreter of Andean folk-influenced songs, her voice sailed, growled, roared and yelped effortlessly across four octaves -- from bass to soprano to coloratura soprano. She was adept at mimicking animal calls, from toucans to jaguars, and one never knew where she would dot melody with quick, piercing high-D notes. "She's either got a whistle in her throat or three nightingales up her sleeve," said a bassist with whom she recorded early in her career. Composer Virgil Thomson found her voice "impeccable" and recommended her for "the great houses of opera."

Ms. Sumac extended her heyday through the late 1950s with albums for Capitol Records, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. After headlining in Las Vegas and touring internationally, Ms. Sumac drifted into obscurity by the 1970s. Her older recordings popped up on film soundtracks, ensuring that her sound, if not her name, remained in the popular consciousness.

Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavárri del Castillo was born Sept. 13, 1922, possibly in the Andean community of Ichocán. Ms. Sumac said she was self-taught and developed great discipline in breathing technique. She caught the attention of Moisés Vivanco, a musicologist and composer from Lima, and they married in 1942. She joined his 46-member troupe of Indian singers and dancers, became a presence on South American radio and began recording folk music under the name Imma Sumack.

In 1946, Ms. Sumac and her husband started a folk trio that mostly played on the Borscht Belt circuit and the back room of a Greenwich Village delicatessen. Her breakthrough was a 1950 engagement at the Hollywood Bowl, which attracted record and film executives. Her subsequent album, "Voice of the Xtabay" (1950), sold more than 500,000 copies. (The "Xtabay" of the album title was fabricated as an Incan word.)

Other albums followed, including "Mambo!" (1954), with fiery arrangements by Billy May, and "Fuego del Ande" (1959). Many of the songs were composed by her husband and based on Andean folk themes, even if purists found them less than authentic.
She played an Arab princess in a short-lived Broadway musical "Flahooley" (1951) and appeared in the Hollywood films "Secret of the Incas" (1954) with Charlton Heston and "Omar Khayyam" (1957) with Cornel Wilde.

By the early 1960s, her popularity in the United States was waning, but she made a triumphant tour of the Soviet Union in 1961 -- Nikita Khrushchev reputedly was a fan -- and cultivated a small but devoted following in Asia, Europe and Latin America. A comeback album of rock music, "Miracles" (1971), had a limited release, and her appearance on David Letterman's late-night show in 1987 was greeted by sarcasm by the host, who asked "Who is this woman?" after her heartfelt rendition of one of her earliest hits, "Ataypura." Periodic concerts and the 2005 release "Queen of Exotica," a massive anthology of her work, kept her most-fervent fans happy and renewed her cult appeal. The magic-comedy team Penn & Teller used her music to score their stage routines. To some music writers, she was an inspiration to punk and rock performers. "All the big stars came to see Yma Sumac," Ms. Sumac told Newsday in 1989. "What is the name of that one, I think Madonna?"

Ms. Sumac's personal life was troubled at times. Her marriage to Vivanco ended in divorce in 1957 after it was revealed that he had fathered twins with his wife's former secretary. She later told a reporter that Vivanco was "cuckoo," adding, "All men is cuckoo."

Survivors include a son from her marriage, Charlie, and three sisters.

Pentagon Finds Company Violated Its Contract on Electrical Work in Iraq

2008-10-25T10:51:00.000-04:00

By JAMES RISEN
New York Times October 24, 2008
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has rebuked its largest contractor in Iraq after a series of inspections uncovered shoddy electrical work and other problems on American military bases there, according to several Defense Department officials.

The Defense Contract Management Agency, the Pentagon agency in charge of supervising contractors in Iraq, determined in August that KBR, the Houston-based company that provides virtually all basic services for the American military in both Iraq and Afghanistan, has been guilty of “serious contractual noncompliance” in Iraq, the officials said.

The Pentagon’s finding could lead to cuts or delays in payments to KBR, and ultimately to a decision by the Army to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses and fees due the company, officials said, but they added that no decisions on financial penalties had been made.

Defense officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal deliberations, declined to elaborate on the reasons for the new findings, except to say that they related to electrical problems and other issues.

KBR, formerly a subsidiary of Halliburton, has had a virtual monopoly on military services contracts in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, garnering more than $24 billion from its business in the war zone.

Questions about the quality of KBR’s electrical work on American bases in Iraq have plagued the company throughout 2008, leading to investigations and hearings by Congress as well as an inquiry by the Pentagon’s inspector general.

Internal Pentagon documents obtained by The New York Times suggest that the electrical problems may be more widespread than had been believed. A chart compiled by Army officials and not previously made public shows that more American personnel have been electrocuted in Iraq than the Bush administration has acknowledged.

At least 18 people have died from electrocution since the March 2003 invasion, including 10 from the Army, 5 from the Marine Corps, 1 from the Navy and 2 military contractors. The most recent electrocution occurred on Feb. 24. A chart listing each electrocution provides details but does not identify the victims by name.

This is the second time that the Pentagon has raised its figures on electrocutions in Iraq. Last spring, the Defense Department said that 12 American personnel members had been electrocuted in the country, and then later told Congress that the accurate figure was 13.

KBR is scrambling to respond with a plan to correct the problems cited by the Defense contracting experts, Pentagon officials said. Pentagon officials held a private meeting with KBR officials in Washington last week to review the company’s response, several of the officials said.

Heather Browne, a spokeswoman for KBR, declined to comment on the Pentagon’s finding.

In the past, some Army contracting experts have complained that their superiors in the Pentagon have been reluctant to confront KBR over its fees and the quality of its work. For example, the Army’s top official in charge of the KBR contract at the beginning of the war has said that he was removed from his job in 2004 after challenging KBR’s billing records for its work in Iraq.

The issue of shoddy electrical work on American military bases in Iraq first emerged in the wake of the death in January of Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Maseth, a Green Beret from Pennsylvania who was electrocuted while taking a shower in his barracks in Baghdad.

Sergeant Maseth’s family went public with their questions about the circumstances surrounding his death and filed a wrongful death lawsuit against KBR, accusing the company of failing to adequately maintain the building’s electrical system.

The Maseth case led to investigations of electrical work on American bases by Congress and the Pentagon’s inspector general, and ultimately prompted an order for comprehensive safety inspections of the electrical work at all American military facilities in Iraq.

Officials said that the Army recently reopened its investigation into Sergeant Maseth’s death, after obtaining new testimony and evidence in the case, including the discovery that another soldier had suffered electrical shocks while assigned to the same room as Sergeant Maseth.

KBR has “fully cooperated with Army C.I.D. on this matter, and we will continue to do so,” Ms. Browne, the spokeswoman, said, referring to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command. “KBR maintains that its activities in Iraq were not responsible for Staff Sergeant Maseth’s death.”

vlad and friend boris presents 'Song for Sarah' for mrs. Palin

2008-10-24T11:59:00.001-04:00

The George Wallace We Forgot

2008-10-24T11:41:00.001-04:00

By RUSS RYMER
The New York Times
October 24, 2008

JOHN McCAIN deplored them, Barack Obama distanced himself from them, but the comments that Representative John Lewis of Georgia delivered on Oct. 11 may turn out to be some of the most trenchant — and generous — of the campaign. Mr. Lewis charged Mr. McCain and Sarah Palin with “sowing the seeds of hatred and division” in their fervently red-meat rallies, not unlike “a governor of the State of Alabama named George Wallace” whose race-bating rhetoric, Mr. Lewis noted, contributed to the 1963 bombing of the Birmingham church in which four young girls were killed.

The context of Mr. Lewis’s critique is not as has been presented: a saint of the civil rights movement likening a decorated war hero to an infamous racist. Rather, it was a collegial (if rough) caution from one brother to another, about a third, politicians all.

Mr. Lewis’s authority to chastise Mr. McCain comes not from his Bloody Sunday stand on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965, but rather from his subsequent record on the hustings. His mettle was tested not only in Selma but also in three tough campaigns, characterized by tactics of personal destruction.

The first was his race in 1966 to retain the chairmanship of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. For three years, Mr. Lewis had used his office to promote SNCC’s early emphasis on black and white activists working hand in hand. But by 1966, that inclusive and nonviolent climate was under siege. Peaceful marchers found themselves shadowed by a volunteer bodyguard of shotgun-wielding black militants, and a group known as the Atlanta Separatists was demanding that all whites be expelled from the civil rights leadership.

Things came to a head at SNCC’s convention in May that year, when late-night, back-room maneuvering elevated Stokely Carmichael to the chairmanship, ousting Mr. Lewis. Whites were purged from the organization, and its longtime white supporters were vilified. Carmichael’s successor, H. Rap Brown, changed the group’s name to Student National Coordinating Committee and directly advocated violence. Mr. Lewis’s long labor for racial comity lay in tatters.

In 1982, Mr. Lewis, along with other newly elected black Atlanta city councilmen, faced sound trucks rolling through their neighborhoods accusing them of race treason for not supporting a major road project favored by Mayor Andrew Young. Mr. Lewis stood his ground. He confided to me, then a reporter for The Atlanta Constitution, how upset he was at some of the bullying aimed his way.

In his first bid for Congress, in 1986, the battle that counted was the Democratic primary, where he faced off against Julian Bond. Mr. Lewis was running behind, crippled, some said, by his lack of eloquence. Partisan portrayals (not necessarily perpetrated by Mr. Bond) rewriting his role in civil rights history angered him, and hardened his steel. He fought his way into office by outworking his opponent and — eloquently enough — outdebating him. He brought to Congress not only a visceral understanding of what it’s like to be clubbed into unconsciousness, but also a deep familiarity with the damage inflicted by take-no-prisoners political campaigning.

So to call Mr. Lewis simply a Freedom Rider is to give incomplete acknowledgment to his political struggles.

Likewise, to describe George Wallace as a simple racist is to give his biography short shrift. As a circuit court judge in the 1950s, Wallace was respectful toward blacks, and as a legislator from 1947 to 1953, he was a moderate. In 1948, when Strom Thurmond led the Southern delegations out of the Democratic convention to protest the party’s pioneer civil rights plank, Wallace stayed in his seat. Though no fan of the plank, he was yet more Democrat than demagogue, and was instrumental in rallying the other Southern alternate delegates to save the convention’s quorum, and pass its platform.

He might have carried a tolerant message into the Alabama governor’s mansion in 1958, but he lost the race after spurning the support of the Ku Klux Klan (which then backed his primary opponent, John Patterson) and being endorsed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Sadly for Wallace’s state, his region, his nation and himself, he did not respond as John Lewis did after his defeat by Carmichael. Mr. Lewis, whenever confronted with calls to divisiveness, chose to redouble his commitment to reason and tolerance. After his loss to Mr. Patterson, Wallace is said to have turned to an aide and declared, “I was out-niggered ... and I’ll never be out-niggered again.”

After Wallace finally won the governorship in 1962, his administration was never as race-hostile as his campaign appeals implied; black leaders found his office door open, and often his mind, too. But he would eternally pay the price for the methods he used to gain that office.

I once saw that price on vivid display, at a Wallace for president rally in downtown Boston. In 1975, that city was contorted by its own race war over school busing, and the enormous two-tier assembly hall was packed. It was an angry crowd — a black television cameraman was punched as he walked up the aisle. In the middle of Wallace’s remarks, there was a loud explosion, and Wallace, who had been paralyzed by a bullet three years earlier, fell forward from his wheelchair into safety behind the podium.

The noise was caused by a crashing klieg light, knocked over in a fracas as a heckler in the balcony was attacked by the crowd. As Wallace clambered back into his chair, his supporters beat the protester bloody and tried to dump him over the balcony rail. “Just an undecided voter, folks. Just an undecided voter,” Wallace pleaded into his microphone, but there was no quelling the fire. “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!” people in the hall thundered, until the man was rescued — barely — by Secret Service agents.

In the final debate of this presidential campaign, faced with John McCain’s demand that he repudiate Mr. Lewis’s analogy, Barack Obama said he didn’t think his opponent was another George Wallace, and that sounds reasonable if you assume Mr. Lewis was referring to Wallace the vile racist, not the more tragic Wallace, the one-time straight campaigner who bartered conviction for expedience when he thought a raw appeal to division could gain him crucial votes.

It would behoove everyone in the current race for America’s highest offices to pay attention to what Mr. Lewis was really saying, and judge it for its provenance in his long experience. Better than perhaps any living American, he knows that courage on the front line is one thing, and on the campaign stage quite another, knows how tiny and harmless the seeds of fanaticism can seem, how one cry of “kill him” can crescendo into a chorus that can’t be stifled. Mr. Lewis might be deemed generous in wishing on no other member of his profession the harrowed look I witnessed in George Wallace’s eyes as he struggled up off the floor in Boston and beheld what a hell he’d wrought.

Russ Rymer is the author of Genie: A Scientific Tragedy and American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth and Memory.

The Mask Slips - Bob Herbert in today's New York Times

2008-10-11T12:09:00.000-04:00

The Mask Slips

By BOB HERBERT
Published: October 10, 2008
The lesson for Americans suffused with anxiety and dread over the crackup of the financial markets is that the way you vote matters, that there are real-world consequences when you go into a voting booth and cast that ballot.

For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be.

Voters in the George W. Bush era gave the Republican Party nearly complete control of the federal government. Now the financial markets are in turmoil, top government and corporate leaders are on the verge of panic and scholars are dusting off treatises that analyzed the causes of the Great Depression.

Mr. Bush was never viewed as a policy or intellectual heavyweight. But he seemed like a nicer guy to a lot of voters than Al Gore.

It’s not just the economy. While the United States has been fighting a useless and irresponsible war in Iraq, Afghanistan — the home base of the terrorists who struck us on 9/11 — has been allowed to fall into a state of chaos. Osama bin Laden is still at large. New Orleans is still on its knees. And so on.

Voting has consequences.

I don’t for a moment think that the Democratic Party has been free of egregious problems. But there are two things I find remarkable about the G.O.P., and especially its more conservative wing, which is now about all there is.

The first is how wrong conservative Republicans have been on so many profoundly important matters for so many years. The second is how the G.O.P. has nevertheless been able to persuade so many voters of modest means that its wrongheaded, favor-the-rich, country-be-damned approach was not only good for working Americans, but was the patriotic way to go.

Remember voodoo economics? That was the derisive term George H.W. Bush used for Ronald Reagan’s fantasy that he could simultaneously increase defense spending, cut taxes and balance the budget. After Reagan became president (with Mr. Bush as his vice president) the budget deficit — surprise, surprise — soared.

In a moment of unusual candor, Reagan’s own chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Martin Feldstein, gave three reasons for the growth of the deficit: the president’s tax cuts, the increased defense spending and the interest on the expanding national debt.

These were the self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives who were behaving so profligately. The budget was balanced and a surplus realized under Bill Clinton, but soon the “fiscal conservatives” were back in the driver’s seat. “Deficits don’t matter,” said Dick Cheney, and the wildest, most reckless of economic rides was on.

Americans, including the Joe Sixpacks, soccer moms and hockey moms, were repeatedly told that the benefits lavished on the highfliers would trickle down to them. Someday.

Just as they were wrong about trickle down, conservative Republican politicians and their closest buddies in the commentariat have been wrong on one important national issue after another, from Social Security (conservatives opposed it from the start and have been trying to undermine it ever since) to Medicare (Ronald Reagan saw it as the first wave of socialism) to the environment, energy policy and global warming.

When the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the discoverers of the link between chlorofluorocarbons and ozone depletion, Tom DeLay, a Republican who would go on to wield enormous power as majority leader in the House, mocked the award as the “Nobel Appeasement Prize.”

Mr. Reagan, the ultimate political hero of so many Republicans, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In response to the historic Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation ruling, William F. Buckley, the ultimate intellectual hero of so many Republicans, asserted that whites, being superior, were well within their rights to discriminate against blacks.

“The White community is so entitled,” he wrote, “because, for the time being, it is the advanced race...” He would later repudiate that sentiment, but only after it was clear that his racist view was harmful to himself.

The G.O.P. has done a great job masking the terrible consequences of much that it has stood for over the decades. Now the mask has slipped. As we survey the wreckage of the American economy and the real-life suffering associated with the financial crackup of 2008, it would be well for voters to draw upon the lessons of history and think more seriously about the consequences of the ballots they may cast in the future.

2008-10-07T13:25:00.000-04:00

My comment at Dennis' blog today - following up on Hamlet Day

Jax: Did you mean Shakespeare-related film recommendations? Some of my favorites are (but I have funny tastes and I also don't know how many of these were mentioned already):
Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000), the one with Ethan Hawke.
Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well (marginally a version of Hamlet)
Aki Kurasmaki's Hamlet Goes Business--a really great quirky indie movie, and I wonder if Almereyda didn't borrow from it.
Shakespeare Behind Bars - a documentary about an ongoing prison project. When you find out the relation between the characters and the crimes committed by the actors who play them, it blows your mind.
Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, maybe the best Shakespeare adaptation ever (from Macbeth)
Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (from The Tempest)
Derek Jarman's The Tempest
Forbidden Planet (as an adaptation of The Tempest)
Scotland, Pa. (from Macbeth) - mostly for Christopher Walken doing an amazing Christopher Walken imitation

I hate:
Julie Taymor's Titus
Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet

I'd also like to give a shout-out to Marjorie Garber's book "Shakespeare's Ghost Writers," a very clever deconstruction of the supernatural in the plays, especially good on Macbeth and Hamlet.

And now with your indulgence the funniest Shakespeare-related post I've seen lately--one of my students linked it from McSweeney's after I already put together the Day here:

HAMLET
(FACEBOOK NEWS
FEED EDITION).

BY SARAH SCHMELLING

Horatio thinks he saw a ghost.

Hamlet thinks it's annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies.

The king thinks Hamlet's annoying.

Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better.

Hamlet's father is now a zombie.

- - - -

The king poked the queen.

The queen poked the king back.

Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends.

Marcellus is pretty sure something's rotten around here.

Hamlet became a fan of daggers.

- - - -

Polonius says Hamlet's crazy ... crazy in love!

Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet are now friends.

Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.

Hamlet thinks Ophelia might be happier in a convent.

Ophelia removed "moody princes" from her interests.

Hamlet posted an event: A Play That's Totally Fictional and In No Way About My Family

The king commented on Hamlet's play: "What is wrong with you?"

Polonius thinks this curtain looks like a good thing to hide behind.

Polonius is no longer online.

- - - -

Hamlet added England to the Places I've Been application.

The queen is worried about Ophelia.

Ophelia loves flowers. Flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers. Oh, look, a river.

Ophelia joined the group Maidens Who Don't Float.

Laertes wonders what the hell happened while he was gone.

- - - -

The king sent Hamlet a goblet of wine.

The queen likes wine!

The king likes ... oh crap.

The queen, the king, Laertes, and Hamlet are now zombies.

Horatio says well that was tragic.

Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, says yes, tragic. We'll take it from here.

Denmark is now Norwegian.

Andrew J. Bacevich on The Disaster

2008-10-06T10:45:00.000-04:00

He Told Us to Go Shopping. Now the Bill Is Due.

By Andrew J. Bacevich
Sunday, October 5, 2008

It's widely thought that the biggest gamble President Bush ever took was deciding to invade Iraq in 2003. It wasn't. His riskiest move was actually one made right after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when he chose not to mobilize the country or summon his fellow citizens to any wartime economic sacrifice. Bush tried to remake the world on the cheap, and as the bill grew larger, he still refused to ask Americans to pay up. During this past week, that gamble collapsed, leaving the rest of us to sort through the wreckage.

To understand this link between today's financial crisis and Bush's wider national security decisions, we need to go back to 9/11 itself. From the very outset, the president described the "war on terror" as a vast undertaking of paramount importance. But he simultaneously urged Americans to carry on as if there were no war. "Get down to Disney World in Florida," he urged just over two weeks after 9/11. "Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed." Bush certainly wanted citizens to support his war -- he just wasn't going to require them actually to do anything. The support he sought was not active but passive. It entailed not popular engagement but popular deference. Bush simply wanted citizens (and Congress) to go along without asking too many questions.

So his administration's policies reflected an oddly business-as-usual approach. Senior officials routinely described the war as global in scope and likely to last decades, but the administration made no effort to expand the armed forces. It sought no additional revenue to cover the costs of waging a protracted conflict. It left the nation's economic priorities unchanged. Instead of sacrifices, it offered tax cuts. So as the American soldier fought, the American consumer binged, encouraged by American banks offering easy credit.

From September 2001 until September 2008, this approach allowed Bush to enjoy nearly unfettered freedom of action. To fund the war on terror, Congress gave the administration all the money it wanted. Huge bipartisan majorities appropriated hundreds of billions of dollars, producing massive federal deficits and pushing the national debt from roughly $6 trillion in 2001 to just shy of $10 trillion today. Even many liberal Democrats who decried the war routinely voted to approve this spending, as did conservative Republicans who still trumpeted their principled commitment to fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets.

Bush seems to have calculated -- cynically but correctly -- that prolonging the credit-fueled consumer binge could help keep complaints about his performance as commander in chief from becoming more than a nuisance. Members of Congress calculated -- again correctly -- that their constituents were looking to Capitol Hill for largesse, not lessons in austerity. In this sense, recklessness on Main Street, on Wall Street and at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue proved mutually reinforcing.

For both the Bush administration and Congress, this gambit has turned out to be clever rather than smart. The ongoing crisis on Wall Street has now, in effect, ended the Bush presidency. Meanwhile, a month before elections, panic-stricken members of Congress are desperately trying to insulate Main Street from the effects of that crisis -- or at least to pass the blame onto someone else.

But in less obvious ways, the economic crisis also renders a definitive verdict on the country's post-9/11 national security strategy. The "go to Disney World" approach to waging war has produced large, unanticipated consequences. When the American people, as instructed, turned their attention back to enjoying life, their hankering for prosperity without pain deprived the administration of the wherewithal needed over the long haul to achieve some truly ambitious ends.

Even today, the scope of those ambitions is not widely understood, in part due to the administration's own obfuscations. After September 2001, senior officials described U.S. objectives as merely defensive, designed to prevent further terrorist attacks. Or they wrapped America's purposes in the gauze of ideology, saying that our aim was to spread freedom and eliminate tyranny. But in reality, the Bush strategy conceived after 9/11 was expansionist, shaped above all by geopolitical considerations. The central purpose was to secure U.S. preeminence across the strategically critical and unstable greater Middle East. Securing preeminence didn't necessarily imply conquering and occupying this vast region, but it did require changing it -- comprehensively and irrevocably. This was not some fantasy nursed by neoconservatives at the Weekly Standard or the American Enterprise Institute. Rather, it was the central pillar of the misnamed enterprise that we persist in calling the "global war on terror."

At a Pentagon press conference on Sept. 18, 2001, then-defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld let the cat out of the bag: "We have a choice, either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way that they live, and we chose the latter." This was not some slip of the tongue. The United States was now out to change the way "they" -- i.e., hundreds of millions of Muslims living in the Middle East -- live. Senior officials did not shrink from -- perhaps even relished -- the magnitude of the challenges that lay ahead. The idea, wrote chief Pentagon strategist Douglas J. Feith in a May 2004 memo, was to "transform the Middle East and the broader world of Islam generally."

But if the administration's goals were grandiose, its means were modest. The administration's governing assumption was that the U.S. military, as constituted in late 2001, ought to suffice to transform the Middle East. Bush could afford to tell the American people to go on holiday and head back to the mall because the indomitable American soldier could be counted on to liberate (and thereby pacify) the Muslim world.

For a while, that seemed to work: The Taliban fell quickly, with little need for the U.S. taxpayer to shell out for a larger military. But the Bush team turned quickly to Iraq, hoping to demonstrate on an even grander scale what the determined exercise of U.S. power could achieve. This proved a fatal miscalculation. After five and a half years of arduous effort, Iraq continues to drain U.S. resources on a colossal scale. Violence is down, but expenditures are not. An end to the U.S. commitment is nowhere in sight.

The achievements of Gen. David H. Petraeus notwithstanding, the primary lesson of the Iraq war remains this one: To imagine that the United States can easily and cheaply invade, occupy and redeem any country in the Muslim world is sheer folly. That holds true in Afghanistan, too, where the reinforcements that Gen. David D. McKiernan, the recently appointed U.S. commander, says he needs to turn things around will be unavailable until at least next spring.

Yet there is an economic lesson here too. "We have more will than wallet," the president's father said in 1989 during his own inaugural address. That is again painfully true today. The 2008 election finds the Pentagon cupboard bare, the U.S. Treasury depleted, the economy in disarray and the average American household feeling acute distress. Profligacy at home and profligacy abroad have combined to produce a grave crisis. This time around, telling Americans to head for Disney World won't work. The credit card's already maxed out, and the banks are refusing to pony up for new loans.

It's not surprising that people don't cotton to the idea of spending $700 billion to bail out Wall Street. Nor should they find it acceptable to spend as much as that, or more, to perpetuate a misguided and never-ending global war. But like it or not, the bill collector is pounding on the door. Bush's parting gift to the nation will be to let others figure out how to settle accounts.

Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book is "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism."

2008-10-04T19:14:00.003-04:00

It's Hamlet Day at Dennis Cooper's blog.

David Ignatius on the Disaster

2008-09-25T08:32:00.003-04:00

What Keynes Could Tell Paulson
By David Ignatius
Washington Post Thursday, September 25, 2008

In times like these, when even the most sober analysts are wondering if we're heading for another Great Depression, it's wise to take a deep breath, head to the basement and dust off a copy of John Maynard Keynes's modestly titled 1936 treatise, "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money."

Most of us remember Keynes from our college economics courses as the guy who advocated deficit spending to "prime the pump" during downturns. And that was certainly part of his argument. But revisiting "The General Theory," what's striking is that it's a book about economic panics and the market psychology that produces them -- and the consequent need for government intervention. Parts of it could have been written this week to describe the cascading defaults of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG.

The problem with financial markets, Keynes argued, was that investors were periodically seized by an extreme form of what he called "liquidity preference," which made them wary of putting their money into anything but the safest investments. "It is of the nature of organized investment markets . . . that, when disillusion falls upon an over-optimistic and over-bought market, it should fall with sudden and even catastrophic force," he wrote. "Once doubt begins it spreads rapidly."

That's a pretty good description of what has been happening on Wall Street over the past few months. We've gone from a bubble of overenthusiasm, in which interest-rate spreads took little account of risk, to a state of panic in which financial institutions are so risk-averse that they don't want to lend to anyone. As Keynes observed, "the actual, private object of the most skilled investment today is . . . to outwit the crowd, and to pass the bad, or depreciating, half-crown to the other fellow."

Keynes's revolutionary idea was that financial markets were not inherently self-correcting, as classical economics had argued. Left to itself, Wall Street might remain in a liquidity trap in which the markets would stay frozen and productive investment would cease. So it fell to the government to take actions that would restore confidence and stimulate investment. "I conclude that the duty of ordering the current volume of investment cannot safely be left in private hands," he wrote.

Which brings us to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and the present financial crisis. Since he intervened to rescue Bear Stearns in March, Paulson has been trying to pump cash into markets that are locking up because of the extreme liquidity preference of investors. But each rescue measure only sets up the next disaster -- so that Paulson lurches from Bear Stearns to Fannie and Freddie to AIG, and now to a government pledge to buy up $700 billion or more of mortgage-backed securities.

What advice would Keynes offer Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke? His first instinct, I think, would be to reiterate that markets, left to themselves, will not solve this sort of crisis. They need government help -- in this case, on a scale that would have daunted even Keynes -- including underwriting mortgage loans, backstopping the market for credit swaps and other steps. But if these measures are taken piecemeal, without broad political support, they may only add to the public's anxiety. Indeed, that's a real worry now: A Wall Street panic may become a Main Street panic.

Keynes's biographer, Robert Skidelsky, makes clear that at every stage of Keynes's career, he tried to think broadly about the social and political consequences of economic policy. That was true in his famous denunciation of onerous German reparations payments after World War I, which he correctly warned would lead to a future war; it was true in the magnanimity of the post-World War II international financial system he helped create at Bretton Woods.

A truly Keynesian rescue plan should do more than bail out foolish investors. How might the pieces fit into a larger design? Well, if the taxpayers are going to acquire a stake in the nation's largest insurance company, perhaps that company can be the cornerstone of a new system of universal private health coverage. If the taxpayers are going to acquire $700 billion in real estate assets, perhaps the eventual profits can fund new investments in infrastructure or energy technology.

Keynes spoke in the finicky English of a Cambridge don, but listen to what he said: "When the capital development of a country becomes a byproduct of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done." Keynes wouldn't have wanted to nationalize that casino; he was an active investor himself. But he reminds us that public purposes are best served by public institutions.

James K. Galbraith on the Disaster

2008-09-25T08:27:00.001-04:00

A Bailout We Don't Need

By James K. Galbraith
Washington Post Thursday, September 25, 2008

Now that all five big investment banks -- Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley -- have disappeared or morphed into regular banks, a question arises.

The point of the bailout is to buy assets that are illiquid but not worthless. But regular banks hold assets like that all the time. They're called "loans."

With banks, runs occur only when depositors panic, because they fear the loan book is bad. Deposit insurance takes care of that. So why not eliminate the pointless $100,000 cap on federal deposit insurance and go take inventory? If a bank is solvent, money market funds would flow in, eliminating the need to insure those separately. If it isn't, the FDIC has the bridge bank facility to take care of that.

Next, put half a trillion dollars into the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. fund -- a cosmetic gesture -- and as much money into that agency and the FBI as is needed for examiners, auditors and investigators. Keep $200 billion or more in reserve, so the Treasury can recapitalize banks by buying preferred shares if necessary -- as Warren Buffett did this week with Goldman Sachs. Review the situation in three months, when Congress comes back. Hedge funds should be left on their own. You can't save everyone, and those investors aren't poor.

With this solution, the systemic financial threat should go away. Does that mean the economy would quickly recover? No. Sadly, it does not. Two vast economic problems will confront the next president immediately. First, the underlying housing crisis: There are too many houses out there, too many vacant or unsold, too many homeowners underwater. Credit will not start to flow, as some suggest, simply because the crisis is contained. There have to be borrowers, and there has to be collateral. There won't be enough.

In Texas, recovery from the 1980s oil bust took seven years and the pull of strong national economic growth. The present slump is national, and it can't be cured that way. But it could be resolved in three years, rather than 10, by a new Home Owners Loan Corp., which would rewrite mortgages, manage rental conversions and decide when vacant, degraded properties should be demolished. Set it up like a draft board in each community, under federal guidelines, and get to work.

The second great crisis is in state and local government. Just Tuesday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced $1.5 billion in public spending cuts. The scenario is playing out everywhere: Schools, fire departments, police stations, parks, libraries and water projects are getting the ax, while essential maintenance gets deferred and important capital projects don't get built. This is pernicious when unemployment is rising and when we have all the real resources we need to preserve services and expand public investment. It's also unnecessary.

What to do? Reenact Richard Nixon's great idea: federal revenue sharing. States and localities should get the funds to plug their revenue gaps and maintain real public spending, per capita, for the next three to five years. Also, enact the National Infrastructure Bank, making bond revenue available in a revolving fund for capital improvements. There is work to do. There are people to do it. Bring them together. What could be easier or more sensible?

Here's another problem: the wealth loss to near-retirees and the elderly from a declining stock market as things shake out. How about taking care of this, with rough justice, through a supplement to Social Security? If you need a revenue source, impose a turnover tax on stocks.

Next, let's think about what the next upswing should try to achieve and how it should be powered. If the 1960s were about raising baby boomers and the '90s about technology, what should the '10s and '20s be about? It's obvious: energy and climate change. That's where the present great unmet needs are.

So, let's use the next few years to plan, mapping out a program of energy conservation, reconstruction and renewable power. Let's get the public sector and the universities working on it. And let's prepare the private sector so that when the credit crunch finally ends, we'll have the firms, the labs, the standards and the talent in place, ready to go.

Some will ask if we can afford it. To see the answer, don't look at budget projections. Just look at interest rates. Last week, in the panic, the federal government could fund itself, short term, for free. It could have raised money for 30 years and paid less than 4 percent. That's far less than it cost back in 2000.

No country in this situation is broke, or insolvent, or even in much trouble. For once, Wall Street's own markets speak the truth. The financially challenged customer isn't Uncle Sam. He's up on Wall Street, where deregulation, greed and fraud ran wild.

James K. Galbraith is the author of "The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too."

Paul Krugman on The Disaster

2008-09-23T12:36:00.001-04:00

Cash for Trash

By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times September 21, 2008

Some skeptics are calling Henry Paulson’s $700 billion rescue plan for the U.S. financial system “cash for trash.” Others are calling the proposed legislation the Authorization for Use of Financial Force, after the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the infamous bill that gave the Bush administration the green light to invade Iraq.

There’s justice in the gibes. Everyone agrees that something major must be done. But Mr. Paulson is demanding extraordinary power for himself — and for his successor — to deploy taxpayers’ money on behalf of a plan that, as far as I can see, doesn’t make sense.

Some are saying that we should simply trust Mr. Paulson, because he’s a smart guy who knows what he’s doing. But that’s only half true: he is a smart guy, but what, exactly, in the experience of the past year and a half — a period during which Mr. Paulson repeatedly declared the financial crisis “contained,” and then offered a series of unsuccessful fixes — justifies the belief that he knows what he’s doing? He’s making it up as he goes along, just like the rest of us.

So let’s try to think this through for ourselves. I have a four-step view of the financial crisis:

1. The bursting of the housing bubble has led to a surge in defaults and foreclosures, which in turn has led to a plunge in the prices of mortgage-backed securities — assets whose value ultimately comes from mortgage payments.

2. These financial losses have left many financial institutions with too little capital — too few assets compared with their debt. This problem is especially severe because everyone took on so much debt during the bubble years.

3. Because financial institutions have too little capital relative to their debt, they haven’t been able or willing to provide the credit the economy needs.

4. Financial institutions have been trying to pay down their debt by selling assets, including those mortgage-backed securities, but this drives asset prices down and makes their financial position even worse. This vicious circle is what some call the “paradox of deleveraging.”

The Paulson plan calls for the federal government to buy up $700 billion worth of troubled assets, mainly mortgage-backed securities. How does this resolve the crisis?

Well, it might — might — break the vicious circle of deleveraging, step 4 in my capsule description. Even that isn’t clear: the prices of many assets, not just those the Treasury proposes to buy, are under pressure. And even if the vicious circle is limited, the financial system will still be crippled by inadequate capital.

Or rather, it will be crippled by inadequate capital unless the federal government hugely overpays for the assets it buys, giving financial firms — and their stockholders and executives — a giant windfall at taxpayer expense. Did I mention that I’m not happy with this plan?

The logic of the crisis seems to call for an intervention, not at step 4, but at step 2: the financial system needs more capital. And if the government is going to provide capital to financial firms, it should get what people who provide capital are entitled to — a share in ownership, so that all the gains if the rescue plan works don’t go to the people who made the mess in the first place.

That’s what happened in the savings and loan crisis: the feds took over ownership of the bad banks, not just their bad assets. It’s also what happened with Fannie and Freddie. (And by the way, that rescue has done what it was supposed to. Mortgage interest rates have come down sharply since the federal takeover.)

But Mr. Paulson insists that he wants a “clean” plan. “Clean,” in this context, means a taxpayer-financed bailout with no strings attached — no quid pro quo on the part of those being bailed out. Why is that a good thing? Add to this the fact that Mr. Paulson is also demanding dictatorial authority, plus immunity from review “by any court of law or any administrative agency,” and this adds up to an unacceptable proposal.

I’m aware that Congress is under enormous pressure to agree to the Paulson plan in the next few days, with at most a few modifications that make it slightly less bad. Basically, after having spent a year and a half telling everyone that things were under control, the Bush administration says that the sky is falling, and that to save the world we have to do exactly what it says now now now.

But I’d urge Congress to pause for a minute, take a deep breath, and try to seriously rework the structure of the plan, making it a plan that addresses the real problem. Don’t let yourself be railroaded — if this plan goes through in anything like its current form, we’ll all be very sorry in the not-too-distant future.

My political joke

2008-09-17T23:36:00.003-04:00

Q: Why did John McCain choose Sarah Palin for his running mate?

A: Jesse Ventura wouldn't return his calls.

The Tribe

2008-09-16T12:32:00.000-04:00

Dream of August 11
As I approach the door of the house with Art (the Gude Ave. house), I see that the lock has been removed. We enter the house and the TV and stereo are missing. In the bedroom there’s also a TV missing. I am anxious because I think the burglar may still be here or come back, and I say that I don’t want to stay in the house tonight. Suddenly a short young guy appears right in front of me, trying to run for the door. He’s small and slight; it’s easy to catch him. He begs me not to call the police, but his reasons are ridiculous, and I’m going to. But then anther guy dashes across the room and I’m distracted and the first guy gets away. The second guy runs downstairs. At the head of the stairs I can see that the basement is dark and I’m nervous, but as I descend I see that there are young people who are like squatters down there; they seem like anarchist hippie types that I actually would think are pretty cool. Some are gathered around a fire and I see that they are “tribal”—that is, they think of themselves as a tribe—and they’re not at all concerned that I’m there, as if they were my hosts and not squatters. I look at the back door, at the laundry room and bathroom, and at a grid in the ceiling that leads outdoors, and each time I look back there are more of these people, and it occurs to me that it’s like the gathering of the crows in The Birds. Then I find that they are discussing Hitchcock and how great his movies are.

Tina Fey as Sarah Palin on SNL

2008-09-15T08:58:00.001-04:00

2008-07-07T16:02:00.000-04:00

You know, the worst thing about having multiple personalities is trying to convince the waiter you need separate checks when you're eating alone.

C'mon Y'all, Shake That Thing

2008-06-20T10:24:00.002-04:00

Which of these is the more horrifying video? Specifically, which is the more horrifying resurrection of long-rightfully-dead cultural cliches that were horrifying the first time around?

John Cornyn Ad

2008-06-20T10:22:00.001-04:00

Bearforce1 - Shake that thing

2008-06-20T10:20:00.001-04:00

2008-06-14T12:50:00.003-04:00

How bad is The Happening?
If a tenth-grader had submitted the script in a writing class, you'd be looking for a gentle way to say, "This is some really immature work for a person your age."
The Happening would make Al Gore say, "Enough with this global-warming bullshit already."
The Happening makes Don't Mess with the Zohan look like Citizen Kane.
The Happening is beneath the dignity and the talents of Zooey Deschanel.
Watching The Happening is a lot like watching Mark Wahlberg play that scene in The Simpsons where Sideshow Bob keeps stepping on a rake and hitting himself in the face, over and over--except not funny.
As entertainment, The Happening stands as some kind of curious hybrid of watching a demented child pull the wings off flies and watching paint dry--emphasizing the worst aspects of each.

Polanski Dream

2008-06-10T10:59:00.002-04:00

Watched the Roman Polanski doc on HBO last night. This morning I dreamed that I was visiting Polanski in Paris--actually, I was with a kind of seminar group and Polanski pulled me aside to show me some stuff--he was thinking of putting together an exhibition of art that had been created as death-threats against him. There was a series of watercolors (these were very clearly stylistically like the drawings from the courtroom that were used a lot in the documentary) in which people were pulling guns on him, and there was a black and white film (like Knife in the Water) in which he was attacked by a shark. It was a very sun-filled room, everything had been archived neatly on beautiful racks, and he was asking me in a very friendly way, completely at his ease, if I thought the exhibition was a good idea.

Bush Vs. Zombies

2008-05-24T12:37:00.001-04:00

Brokeback Mountain

2008-05-20T14:16:00.001-04:00

2008-05-04T23:28:00.003-04:00

Dennis just sent this picture of me and John Bernd--dancer, lovely guy--in, I'd guess, 1980

2008-05-04T15:21:00.001-04:00

The greatest cinematic moment in all of cinematic history

The Persistence Of Memory: 'Hiroshima Mon Amour'

2008-04-24T10:08:00.001-04:00

2008-04-23T22:45:00.002-04:00

Bernard has some big ideas

"THE WORLD'S BECOME completely unpredictable on a large scale," says writer Bernard Welt.
He says that pollutants and man-made alterations have rendered our rock-steady notions of Earth as stable algorithm totally obsolete, and while he would love for this to be manifested as "a rain of frogs," we'll just have to settle for ice caps melting, winters becoming intemperately warm and other subtle indications of irreconcilable climate change.
He says all of these things when summarizing the message of a seminal piece of environmental literature: Bill McKibben's 1989 book "The End of Nature," which helped plant the idea of global warming into the lives of everyday Americans.
Welt, along with fellow writers Judith McCombs and Nan Fry, will be tackling McKibben's ideas in a poetry reading on April 19 at the Warehouse Gallery, in conjunction with the art exhibition "The End of Nature."
Why poetry?
"[Poetry] brings a kind of focused attention to the world that I think we don't have time for" in our modern world, Fry says.
That includes looking at the natural world that we live in every day, be it going out and drinking in the Appalachians or noticing the scrappy tree in McPherson Square that we usually overlook en route to the Metro.
Our idea of nature has completely changed in the last50 years, McCombs says, and "instead of Nature — the monster that you find in so much Anglo-Canadian literature — you have 'Nature,' the terribly, terribly endangered."
Each poet will be reading his or her poems about nature, or man's place in it. Fry will be reading her poems about particular aspects of nature that she enjoys, such as individual plants or animals. McCombs will be reading from her recent book of nature poetry, "The Habit of Fire." Welt plans to read a longer piece analyzing our stance toward the natural world.
But expecting to inspire social change through poetry offers it own challenges.
"When you think climate change or Free Tibet, you don't always think, 'Hey, I know what we can do — let's have a poetry reading!'" says Welt. It's hard for poetry to stay relevant, he says, in an age of "tabloidism and e-mail" — but he also thinks that our attitude toward spontaneous e-mail writing and reading could actually translate into a healthy appetite for poetry.
"If [poetry] ends up an academic hobby — the last thing you want as a poet is to be like the guy at the Renaissance Fair who goes around playing the lute," he says. "That's no fun, for a poet. So you do want to do something that has a real impact on real people, bringing up real issues."
"I want people to take nature seriously, and to think about it," adds McCombs.
» Warehouse, 1021 7th St. NW; through May 4, free; 202-783-3933. (Mt. Vernon Square)

Written by Express' Chris Combs

Bearapalooza Roadtrip 2008

2008-04-15T20:56:00.001-04:00

It's horrifying, and yet you can't look away.

Artificial People

2008-04-15T13:49:00.004-04:00

April 12-15 at Frankenfolk, blog for my Humanities section on "Children of Frankenstein": Images and video of automata; computing pioneers; artficial beings in literature; contemporary robotics; uncanny valley -- supplement to reading of Stanley Perkowitz, Digital People.
Video of automata, Elektro at 1939 World's Fair, The Tin Man, audio-animatronic Lincoln, Cog, ASIMO, dancing robots, a lecture on the Uncanny Valley, "Mickey's Mechanical Man."
Also see Dave Bryant on The Uncanny Valley.
April 4: Video and Images from Metropolis.

Klaatu Barada Nikto, Gort

2008-04-06T14:17:00.001-04:00

Dream Commentary

2008-03-31T14:37:00.002-04:00

I Dream of Hillary/Barack/McCain

My comments on dreams about Sen. John McCain

2008-03-25T15:24:00.004-04:00

I wouldn't be thinking about this if I hadn't decided to include The Communist Manifesto in Humanities this semester--the topic is Children of Frankenstein again, but I wanted to cover Marx to introduce the idea of Labor as a human relation to Nature that's profoundly changed by new technologies, and to give some basis for discussion of Metropolis, which follows next on the schedule.
Because of this, I'm thinking that the most interesting about Maria is what she doesn't do: Rottwang's apparent aim in creating the robot is to make human laborers completely obsolete--the etymology of robot as Czech for "slave." But Freder wants her as an agent-provocateur and perhaps lover.
The shift from robot to AI and the shift from industrial to service economy both involve a shift in the fantasy of the artificial person--from freeing humans from the need to do manual labor to a focus on fulfilling desires for power and sex. This is probably very old news to the post-human people, but it's a nice topic for my class.

From The Onion

2008-03-08T08:06:00.002-05:00

Bush Vows To Make It Up To Country Somehow
FEBRUARY 27, 2008 | ISSUE 44•09

WASHINGTON—Amid allegations that his thoughtless and insensitive decisions have damaged his relationship with the nation, President George W. Bush vowed Monday that he would, starting now, "make everything better."

"This time I'm serious," Bush said. "I am ready to make a fresh start if we can just put the past behind us. I promise."

Bush swears that this time he's really going to pay attention to all 280 million U.S. citizens, and try to do right by them for once.

An estimated 35 million citizens listened to the president's televised remarks while silently crying behind locked bathroom doors.

Though Bush told all Americans they owed it to him to give him one more chance, he admitted that there was no excuse for his mishandling of national affairs.

"Things have just been so crazy at work lately," he said.

During the 14-minute address Bush acknowledged that he and the country had drifted apart. He accepted some of the blame, but stressed that it was partly the American people's fault, and went on to chide them for not giving him an opportunity to explain, not standing behind him, and failing to understand his "very real" need for unchecked executive authority.

"My job is stressful," Bush said. "Trust me, things will calm down in a few months once I don't have to deal with it anymore."

The president, whose approval ratings have dropped steadily in recent years, said he had no idea how bad things had gotten until he found out that an overwhelming percentage of Americans didn't even bother responding to an opinion poll this month about his recent $3.1 trillion budget proposal.

Bush has since taken steps towards reconciliation with the American people, including promoting a promise to help alleviate the fiscal woes the U.S. has faced in recent months. Bush said he knew that the $300 he intended to give to every citizen "couldn't possibly make up for how [he has] governed," but nevertheless asked the nation to have faith in him.

"I know it's not much, but it's a start, right?" Bush said. "And it hasn't always been bad. Doesn't this remind you of that other $300 rebate I gave you in 2003? You always forget all the times I'm a really great president. We have really had some wonderful moments."

"Cut me some slack here, for Christ's sake," Bush continued. "I'm trying. I really am."

In addition to providing economic relief, Bush said he has taken other measures to strengthen his bond with the nation. According to the president, his newly proposed warrantless-wiretapping bill will greatly broaden the reach of his personal attention to the American people's needs and put him in a position to be more directly involved in their lives.

The president concluded by imploring the nation to help him rectify the situation, stressing that he always has America's best interests at heart but cannot be expected to improve things all by himself.

"You have to realize that everything I do, I do for you," Bush said. "Do you think I like denying health care to underprivileged children, or plunging the country deeper and deeper into debt? Well, I don't, and I hope someday you'll understand that. In the meantime, I'm asking the American people to try to meet me halfway on this."

Despite Bush's seemingly conciliatory stance, public response to Bush's promises has been frosty at best. Cato Institute policy scholar Brian Whitaker echoed the sentiments of many Americans, calling Bush's recent overtures "too little, too late."

"We want to believe that he's finally going to be the president we always wanted, but we've given him so many chances," Whitaker said. "I don't think we can handle another disappointment. Maybe it's time to realize that President Bush will never be the head of state we need him to be."

"Then again, maybe our expectations are unfair," Whitaker added. "He seemed so sincere this time. He wouldn't abuse his executive powers if he didn't care about us, right?"

Whitaker predicted that the nation will likely move forward and try to forget Bush, though it may be difficult for Americans to ever trust a president again. He said the current crop of presidential contenders offers little in the way of an alternative to Bush, but maintained that "at least Barack Obama listens to us."

"Rosebud"

2008-03-06T10:38:00.002-05:00

Ellen DeGeneres on Lawrence King

2008-03-02T13:30:00.002-05:00

rememberinglawrence.org

Isn't it romantic?

2008-03-02T12:54:00.001-05:00

remember my forgotten man

2008-03-02T12:52:00.001-05:00

2008-03-01T19:02:00.006-05:00

Susan Sontag on images of war on Studio 360

2008-02-29T11:48:00.002-05:00

The single most revolting Washington Post article in recent years.

The key here, as usual, is for the reporter to project her own insensitivity, shallowness, and need for acceptance on to her subjects.

2008-02-29T10:57:00.002-05:00

U.S. Imprisons One in 100 Adults, Report Finds

By ADAM LIPTAK

Published: February 29, 2008

For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults are behind bars, according to a new report.Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million, after three decades of growth that has seen the prison population nearly triple. Another 723,000 people are in local jails.

The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 adult Hispanic men is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 adult black men is, too, as is one in nine black men ages 20 to 34.

The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that one in 355 white women ages 35 to 39 is behind bars, compared with one in 100 black women.

More here (Times)
and here (Pew report)

November

2008-02-28T11:27:00.003-05:00

I was surprised and disappointed that more than one of the reviewers of David Mamet's November claimed that the play wasn't serious about politics--a very strange complaint to make about a satire. It seemed to come from some sense that the play ought to be telling you what policies to endorse or what party to vote for, and particularly to represent a protest against the play's suggestion that the whole of democratic political process is corrupted by venality and self-seeking.

This venality and self-seeking, as Socrates might say, is so manifestly not in the politicians' own best interests that it can only be represented by Aristophanic satire. Michael Clayton is a good movie but it's rendered sentimental by its insistent attempt to divide the individuals in the midst of corporations and law firms into good guys and bad guys, although it does adopt the nice device, in common with Network (as a lot of people have pointed out), of putting forth a madman as the only one who really understands and appreciates the enormity of what's happening.

Somebody or other pointed out that in screwball comedy, the clock is always running out. November has a lot in common with The Front Page and His Girl Friday, in which the impending deadline is also an election.

2008-02-22T20:57:00.001-05:00

Jason, Michael, or David. That's all I'm saying.

2008-02-17T10:37:00.003-05:00

Two Guys and a Chick Set Off Tiff Over School Library Policy

"And Tango Makes Three," shown in a bookstore display, is based on the behavior of penguins at a zoo. (By Nam Y. Huh -- Associated Press)

By Michael Alison Chandler

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 17, 2008; Page C06

A children's book about two male penguins that hatch and parent a chick was pulled from library shelves in Loudoun County elementary schools this month after a parent complained that it promoted a gay agenda.

The decision by Superintendent Edgar B. Hatrick III led many parents and gay rights advocates to rush to the penguins' defense. Many say that the school system should not have allowed one complaint to limit children's literary choices. Some are calling for an overhaul of the book review policy. Besides, many say, what could be wrong with a book about penguins?

The book is based "on a true story . . . of what happens in the animal kingdom," said David Weintraub, director of Equality Loudoun, a gay rights organization. "It's about the joy of being part of a family. These penguins love each other. They take care of each other."

The book, "And Tango Makes Three," by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, draws on the real-life story of Roy and Silo, two chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo in New York. It also appears to make a point about tolerance of alternative families.

The publisher, Simon & Schuster, offers discussion questions about the book on a Web site. One says: "Tango has two fathers instead of the traditional mother and father. Do you have a nontraditional family, or do you know someone who does?"

As the book says, Roy and Silo were "a little bit different" than the boy and girl penguins who noticed each other and became couples. "Wherever Roy went, Silo went too." After they tried to hatch an egg-shaped rock together, a zookeeper gave them a fertilized egg to nurture. Experts say male chinstraps typically share incubation duties with females.

The 2005 book, written with simple words and colorful pictures and dedicated "to penguin lovers everywhere," topped the American Library Association's list of banned or challenged books in 2006. Parents challenged the book in Shiloh, Ill., and Charlotte. Administrators in Charlotte initially yanked the book but later restored it, according to news reports.

In Loudoun, the book was challenged at Sugarland Elementary School several months ago, officials said, by a parent they declined to name.

Following school system policy, the principal convened an advisory committee of principals, librarians, teachers and parents to review the book. The group deemed it acceptable, and the principal concurred. The parent appealed. Another committee of administrators, librarians and parents reviewed the book. That committee, too, recommended that it remain in the collection.

Hatrick made the final call. Wayde B. Byard, a schools spokesman, said Friday that Hatrick made a "split decision." Although "Tango" was pulled from the shelves, it will remain in the librarian's collection. At 16 elementary schools, the book is now part of the professional collection, where it is stored with instructional texts and can be checked out only by parents or teachers. It's still in the general collection at one middle school and two high schools.

Hatrick thought the book's content might not be developmentally appropriate for some students, Byard said. "He thought the book, for some of the younger students, would be better read with an adult or a teacher," he said.

But censorship watchdogs say Hatrick's decision still sends a strong message.

"If you are putting something behind a desk, you are saying something is wrong with it," said Judith Krug, director of the office for intellectual freedom at the American Library Association. "It's a degree of censorship, because they are making access to information extremely difficult."

Nikki George, a Sterling parent, said her daughter, a second-grader, tried to take the book out of her library at Forest Grove Elementary in Sterling last week and was told that she could not. She had heard the story last year, when a minister at her Unitarian Universalist church read it to a group of children during a service.

George said that the book helps teach a lesson that she wants her children to know: There are all types of families. "We happen to be a mom and dad and a boy and a girl," she said. "But sometimes you have a grandmother and a mother, sometimes you have just a dad, sometimes you have two moms or two dads. The important thing is that it's a family of love."

Some parents and activists want to challenge Hatrick's decision and put the book back on shelves, but school system officials say there is no process to do that.

John Stevens, a school board member from Potomac, criticized those policies. Under the heading "Put The Penguins Back," he wrote on his blog that the policies, last reviewed in 1993, are "deeply flawed and led to a bad decision."

Stevens wrote that parents should determine what is appropriate for their children. "The school should not be an instrument of censorship for parents who want veto power over the judgment of other parents," he wrote.

Stevens intends to propose a new set of policies at a committee meeting March 4.

Last school year, a Loudoun parent challenged a school library book titled "Math Curse" because of a concern that it could be associated with witchcraft, said David Jones, supervisor of library media services.

A local committee recommended keeping "Math Curse" in the library. The decision was not appealed.

2008-02-08T08:59:00.000-05:00

One doesn't go to the theater to watch the performers having fun.

2008-01-29T11:49:00.000-05:00

You can make a baby cry--but you can't talk him into it.

You can pour syrup on my head, but that doesn't make me a pancake.

The Onion

2008-01-17T15:34:00.000-05:00

My horoscope this week reads:
"Sure, the bear costume may have set you back a pretty penny, but just think of all the free tranquilizer shots you'll soon be getting."
Uncanny. Now tell me you don't believe in astrology.

In the same issue, Patton Oswalt is quoted as referring to the KFC Famous Bowl--that heap of mashed potatoes, gravy, fried chicken, corn and melted cheese that ought to appear in the dictionary next to the Yiddish term khozzerei--as "a failure pile in a sadness bowl."

2008-01-15T11:31:00.000-05:00

I never thought I could be one of those people who post incredibly obscure cool stuff they've found on Youtube, yet here I am with a link to an Icelandic comedy sketch about Eartha Kitt.

2008-01-11T15:31:00.000-05:00

I can't believe I haven't gotten around to posting the menu for the New Year's Eve dinner I made:

Fête de la veille de nouvelle année 2008
Chez Arthur et Bernard
Aves ses très chers amis Jimmy et Aggie

Hors d’oeuvres:
Rillettes de canard
Olives de Grèce
Amandes Marcona d’Espagne
Arachides “Emmenez-moi à l’ancienne Virginie”

Soupe aux petits pois et laitue de romaine avec son coulis de poivres rouges

Risotto au vin et radicchio à l’italien sur sa purée de carottes

Saumon poché avec sa sauce de safran
Asperges au gratin
Purée de céleriac

Sorbet de pomme vert

Soufflé aux épinards

Coups de hache d’agneau frites à la mode de Parme
Flageolets verts
Fenouil grillé

Assiette de fromage

Gateau simple aux poires avec sa glace “La surprise de Bernard”

Roughly translated:

Hors d’oeuvres:
Duck rillettes, Spanish almonds, Greek olives, Virginia peanuts

Green pea soup with red-pepper coulis and creme fraiche

Risotto of radicchio and red wine served on a carrot puree

Poached salmon in saffron sauce
Asparagus au gratin
Celery root puree

Green apple sorbet

Spinach souffle

Fried lamb chops
Flageolets
Grilled fennel

Cheese plate

Country pear cake with almond ice cream

Arthur was responsible for the unusually fine wine pairings.

The fish, which was about the simplest thing on the menu, was a disaster, and the souffles didn't work at all. The lamb chops, dredged in Parmesan before a coating of bread crumbs, are a very good dish. The rillettes, from Costco, was very good. Breakfast in the morning was very good: Scrambled eggs with andouille sausage and gruyere, fresh hot popovers, spicy beans made with the leftover flageoloets. (I like to serve blackeye peas on New Year's Day but I forgot to get any.)
Two nights ago I fixed a very good meat loaf with mashed potatoes with leeks mixed in, and kale--last meal before the kitchen tear-out which began yesterday.

2008-01-06T16:05:00.000-05:00

I've been watching Hitchcock's "The Paradine Case" on cable and caught this amazing crypto-queer exchange:

Handsome Gregory Peck: I came on you quite by accident.
Gorgeous Louis Jourdan: But you wanted to come on me . . .

There's a very unusual feel to this film that must delight contemporary gender theorists: although it's about a woman who murders her husband due to her infatuation with another man, it depicts the men who bring her down as heartless and foolish. That kind of appreciation of moral ambiguity is very rare in Hollywood, outside of film noir. It's interesting to consider whether this alone qualifies the film as noir despite its sharing no other characteristics at all with the noir classics.

2008-01-04T09:35:00.001-05:00

The New York Times reports today that Mike Goldberg died this week. These days he's not remembered so much as a painter as for being part of Frank O'Hara's circle, married to Patsy Southgate and the occasion for one of O'Hara's most perfect and characteristic poems:

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

(1971)

He was 82. O'Hara, if he'd lived, would be 81 himself. Today this poem makes me sad; I'm thinking of everyone who's gone and replaced by names and words.

2007-12-30T17:44:00.001-05:00

An insect bite can make you very sick. But the insect remains an insect.

Hum II Sp 08

2007-12-14T08:27:00.000-05:00

AS2000 A&C Humanities II
Sp 2008

Our topic will be: Dehumanizing Humanity – Technophobia and Technophilia in Modern Culture. We’ll look at this topic in the light of several themes: The foundation of concepts of the human in concepts of nature, work, and technology; Modern media’s power to represent and reshape humanity and social life; Technology’s enabling of the dehumanization of others; Androids, robots, and other artificial human creatures in the modern popular imagination.

Books:
Bill McKibben - The End of Nature (2006 ed.) (Random House, 2006)
Stanley Perkowitz - Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids (Joseph Henry Press, 2004)
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (Signet, 2000 – the 1818 edition. Do not get the 1831 edition.)
Susan Sontag - Regarding the Pain of Others (Picador, 2004)

Most of these are available used from Amazon or abebooks.com. But be sure to get the right edition.

The following required readings are available free online:
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – The Communist Manifesto
Henry David Thoreau – Walking
Franz Kafka – In the Penal Colony
Michel Foucault - Panopticism
Guy Debord - The Society of the Spectacle

The following films will be studied in class:
Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926)
La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)
Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

Further suggested reading:
George Orwell – 1984
Walter Benjamin – The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Bill Joy – Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us
Kevin Kelley – Out of Control
Nick Bostrom - Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios
The Unabomber’s Manifesto
Francis Fukuyama, - Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. Picador, 2002

Love Songs

2007-12-05T07:04:00.000-05:00

For "heart" read "sexual organs."

2007-12-03T23:58:00.000-05:00

Just a minute left in Joseph Conrad's 150th birthday. We started Heart of Darkness in the evening Humanities section tonight. Nothing seemed to impress them so much as the coincidence of its being Conrad's birthday. The symmetry in this semester is planned: We started out with Civilization and Its Discontents and are ending with analysis of HoD, considering whether it's the same argument in the form of narrative. (More successful and more "earned"--you can see why Conrad didn't care for Freud.)

It's funny how like Mann Conrad is. I remember suddenly realizing sometime back that The Goat was Albee's Death in Venice; of course HoD is DiV, too, only that much darker. These are metamorphosis stories--along with Kafka's actual Metamorphosis--where the central character encounters some sublime force that makes it impossible to live as he once did. It seems like they ought to be all over the place; that every bildungsroman should be a transformation, but they're not; they're relatively rare, compared to takes in which the change is just a melodramatic readjustment to the norm. The real ones are sort of grim, earnest, and religious in implications, like Diary of a Country Priest and Le diable, probablement, The Counterfeiters, Young Torless, Demian.