the Greater Nomadic Council

On Politicians

An excerpt from Plato's "Gorgias":

Socrates: Then what we said before, it seems, is correct: we are unaware of the existence of a single good politician in our state. You admitted that there was none now, but have mentioned some former examples and selected these we have just reviewed. They, however, have been shown to be on a par with present-day specimens. So, even if they were orators, they did not make use of the true art of rhetoric (otherwise they would not have been discarded) or even of the sort that merely flatters.

Callicles: Yet surely, Socrates, not one of the present breed has come within miles of accomplishing such feats as did any one at all of the elder statesmen.

Socrates: Nor am I, my dear friend, censuring them, at least as servants of the state; they seem to me, in fact, to have been more serviceable than the present generation, and more capable of giving the state what it wanted. But as for transforming its desires instead of toadying to them, as for persuading and coercing fellow citizens to the point of self-improvement, there is not, in a word, a whit of difference between generations. Yet this and this alone is the task of a truly good citizen.

The Job

I have told a few of you guys about this, but I haven't been able to get in touch with others. I have my first real job. Well, my first office job anyway.

It was getting down to the end of the school year, and I was getting nervous about my prospects for any job at all. In retrospect, I bungled the job search at every step of the way. Most big firms hire in the Fall for the following summer (some even seek commitments in September for jobs that begin in May or June of the following year). These are the "soul-crushing summer jobs" that Wings and Vodka talks about on occassion, and while they are probably more available for UT students, my grades are good enough to put me in the running for them. Anyway, I didn't start applying early enough, I didn't apply for some jobs that I would have been perfect for, and I even turned down a few job offers late last year because I thought something better was going to come around. My last hope was the US Attorney's office--I interviewed with them a few times, but I ended up not getting the job. I was left with accepting a position with a judge (which does not pay, and is among the least prestigious law jobs one can have), and was on the brink of accepting a position with a Tarrant County District Judge when something wonderful happened:

I got a call from a Dean at my school. Before he was a dean, he was my torts instructor in my first year, so I know him pretty well, and had sent him my resume earlier and told him about my difficulties. He is a Yale-educated former JAG officer, and is generally a very straight-laced man. Comically, he introduced himself on the phone thusly: "Hello, this is Associate Dean Reginald P. Higganbotham from Texas Wesleyan University School of Law" [name changed to protect the uptight]. I thought it was a joke--one of my friends being stupid--and I almost laughed and told him to f-off. Happily, I didn't, and it turned out that he had a job immediately available for me. Very very lucky.

The job is with a small firm (eleven attorneys) near downtown Funky Town. (I'm not going to mention the name because I don't want Google to crawl over it and prospective clients to see this stupid post.) The location is great because it is near the courthouse, but not in downtown, so the parking is easy. Anyway, the firm represents about thirty school districts, including the FWISD, which is cool because it's really the only place a practicing attorney can work on Constitutional Law issues. It's full-time, nice pay (in fact, the senior partner told me that if I find that I'm underpaid, to just let him know), I don't have to wear a suit everyday (pretty casual office, really), and I get my own office. The office is probably 20'x15' or so, and has a giant window overlooking the park and river. Everyone in the office is very friendly too. In short, it's just about perfect for me.

I turned in my first memo on Friday. So far, I'm not sure if I have been very helpful or efficient, but every attorney has told me that was the case with their first job. I've been there eight or nine hours a day every day, but I feel guilty about billing that much (because my hours are billed directly to clients), so I've only billed about half my time. That, too, will probably change as I become more comfortable.

Anyway, that's the update. I've been too busy these past few weeks to post much on the blog, and I'm sorry to break my silence with something so trivial, but I'll try to offer some substance soon. There are a few topics I've been meaning to research, and if I ever get around to them, I'll put them up. Kimika and Smeej will be good additions, and will hopefully take up some of my slack.

Peace to your grandneice.

A Lollapalooza For Us Old-Timers

My God, Lollapalooza has a sweet line-up this year.

If that isn't awesome enough, they're teaming up with MoveOn to get out the vote.

Working for Change, One Purchase At A Time

The Working Assets Visa Card. For everyone tired of feeling guilty about conspicuous consumption!

Irony aside, this is a good idea and smart way to raise money.

Server Outage

It seems the server died for most of yesterday. Thankfully, we're back. Now I can get email again (not to mention waste hours obsessively reloading the blog).

The Landmark Forum

The Landmark Forum is a global, multimillion-dollar organization that claims to be able to change how you live your life over the course of a three day weekend. The crux of its promise is that it will enable you to be more authentic in your interactions with those around you, making your relationships more lasting and real and helping you live your life to its fullest potential. I have been fascinated with the program for a while, as its structure is a strange mix of cult and self-help elements, something that is I suppose not that uncommon now and which I think has substantial implications for those looking to diagnose the state of society as a whole. I was recently invited to one of the introductory meetings of the Forum, and I plan to write an article about my impressions of the program. As a preliminary examination for this article, I just want to throw out a few thoughts on what I find so intriguing and disturbing about this program and others like it.

Part of me is not interested in being a harsh critic of the forum. I don’t want to go on a tirade about how it’s a cult – it’s arguably a one-dimensional viewpoint for understanding something very complex. My impression, from seeing part of the program firsthand and from interacting closely with people in the process of going through the forum, is that the content of the program is not inherently harmful, consisting as it does of various commonsensical notions of living life with authenticity and honesty. However, as presented by the forum, these are the ideological equivalent of candy corn, pleasant when on the tongue but providing little more than the illusion of real nourishment. This is the aspect of the program that I’m most interested in examining as a thought exercise.

But it’s important to point out some of the more obviously scary aspects of the program as well. At the core of the program is the assertion that not only does Landmark have the solution to all of your problems, but that it has the solution to everyone’s problems, and that nothing outside of the Forum is necessary. There are stories on the net (particularly at this encyclopedic rundown of material) of people questioning the tenets of the Forum during meetings and being harshly shouted down by the leaders. These are the sorts of things that suggest the program’s status as a borderline cult. It doesn’t help that the program is ultimately descended from Scientology, by way of a Scientology offshoot called EST, whose charismatic founder, Werner Erhardt, sold the “technology” to others in the early nineties. It’s unclear whether Erhardt, who now lives abroad, still pulls strings at Landmark. The dramatic surface differences between Landmark, which lacks any religious aspect, and Scientology or even EST means that the comparison is not an easy one to make, but perhaps the most intriguing thing about the Forum is how they have translated the psychological tactics of more extreme programs to the seemingly benign language of "efficiency" and "communication" training.

But even setting those issues aside, the actual content of the program is presented in ways that promise to ultimately stunt personal growth and offer cheap emotional rewards. Here are some thoughts:

-The content is utterly ahistorical. There is no acknowledgment that any of the ideas and practices have a source outside of the heads of those who have put together the program. It may sound like snobbery to lament the fact that Plato has no place in this particular discussion of how to live your life, but it is symptomatic of the inherently authoritarian nature of the program. As a moneymaking concern, it must claim unique knowledge and keep its participants under its auspices for as long as possible.

-The use of catchphrases and neologisms points to both the attempt to mask the roots of the Forum’s ideology and the essentially dumbed-down nature of what is being taught. Participants are taught to accomplish their goals by “being unreasonable”, a phrase seemingly intended to add a veneer of spunky attitude and revolutionary fire to the boring concept of following through and overcoming obstacles. Those who are dishonest with themselves about their goals and desires are said to be “running a racket.” Participants must “enroll” themselves and others – by which they mean making a full commitment, though I suspect that the linguistic short-circuit between this concept and the constant drive to recruit new members is not accidental. Even more ridiculous is the idea of participants’ “Already Always Vision,” a translation of “preconception” fit for a kindergartener.

What sense does it make that a program designed to enhance its participants’ communication skills works so hard to distance participants from the world around them by teaching them to speak what is essentially a new language? These terms are uniformly attached to everyday concepts, and can only serve to cloud issues when participants discuss their emotions and relationships with those outside of the circle. Presumably, the sideways glances and outright mockery that these people receive when they start trying to “enroll” their friends in repairing their relationships serve to drive them back to the program, where people understand them.

-The program is premised on a profound paternalism, bordering on authoritarianism. Notice the implication of the participant’s passivity in this description of an advanced seminar:

The Living Passionately seminar promises a profound shift in your relationship to being alive. It leaves you playing the game of life with a renewed sense of purpose, grace, and ease. In the seminar, you will create a personal charter - an invented direction and foundation from which to build a life worth living. You will be left with an unprecedented sense of vitality and an ability always to bring yourself back on course even in the most challenging times.

The language of the Forum’s literature is that of giving you advances in your life, rather than providing you with the tools to advance yourself. In practice, this means that the seminar, rather than being an open realm of exploration, is a highly structured sequence that is largely identical for each participant.

-I’m not even sure I’m ready to get into the frightening implications of coming up with a “foundation from which to build a life worth living” over the course of a two-day seminar, but that this promise would be appealing to the forum’s prospective customers only confirms my assessment that the program’s target market is those who have led relatively unexamined lives, and moreover those who are going through personal crises.

I'm interested in hearing anything you guys are familiar with on questions of psychobabble, nonreligious cults, use of neologisms to dumb-down complex concepts, etc.

A few links:

The Best of Est

Large Group Awareness Training programs

buscaglia.com

Outrageous Betrayal: The Real Story of Werner Erhard from Est to Exile

Crazy Therapies : What Are They? Do They Work?

Landmark Forum: Just a Bowl of Cherries?

Chernobyl Bike Tour a Fraud

Boo. It turns out this was just a fraud. The pictures are real, but the story surrounding them is not.

(via BoingBoing)

Proportional Race

2blowhards has an interesting post about proportional racial representation. The key questions:

1) Why should we expect, always and everywhere, proportional racial representation? How nuts are we? 2) Shouldn't we be more cautious about turning to the "racism" explanation than we often are? And 3) Don't we have to give these things some time, after all?

He makes a good argument for why we shouldn't expect proportional representation quite yet due both to reasons of self-selection and the inherent strengths and weaknesses of various cultures. Obviously the disproportionality that can be attributed to economic or educational disparities would be nice to eradicate, but I'm not so sure about when it derives from cultural differences. Do we really want every race or culture in America to be that homogenous?

UPDATE: Fixed to actually contain a link to the post.

Abu Ghraib and Pornography

Susan Brison writes a cogent examination of the blurring between performance, pornography, torture, and worse that the Abu Ghraib photographs highlighted. Drawing connections between the prison photos, the faked "rape" porn run as real by the Boston Globe, a 1984 Penthouse bondage/torture pictorial, and lynching postcards from earlier in the century, she stops short of condemning the sexual impulses that drive some of the most shocking pornography, but does highlight a wide variety of the issues involved. I'll make no secret of being a fan of porn, but there's some genuinely stomach-churning stuff out there, and I'm quite curious about the part of the human (male?) brain that gets a sexual kick out of degradation - is it societal, or is it so hard-wired into us that it will drive our abuse of one another until the end of time?

Media Bias Followup

Strange Doctrines has a post on the subject that says a lot of what I tried to say in an earlier discussion, but says it much more coherently. Here's a key quote:

Do mainstream media exhibit a reliable political bias? The vagueness and complexity in the question as asked leave me without a settled opinion. In any case, the the claim that media have either a "conservative" or a "liberal" bias simpliciter (even assuming that the terms media, conservative, liberal and bias are well defined) is an incredibly strong claim that is itself politically charged and obviously subject to the political bias. Getting a handle on what objective phenomena would be entailed by such a hypothesis would be a pretty serious undertaking ill served by impressionistic musings, glib inferences drawn from cherry-picked examples, and methodologically suspect studies.

Another Failure of the Press

Campaign Desk criticizes the press corps for its inability or unwillingness to debunk misleading campaign ads.

Mimi on Muppet Genitalia

She writes:

Leaving aside the problem of how we have simply got to stop making dirty references about the Muppets in the presence of Nora's soon-to-be-comprehending ears, why is the notion of an uncircumcised Ernie so funny? I think it has something to do with the dusky feltiness of his "skin." That night I thought a bit more about Muppet genitalia---the slender gothic cock of the Count, the unnaturally pink labia of Prairie Dawn, the terrifying prospect of Cookie Monster's furry blue junk (god, think of the SCROTUM on that guy!), but then I started to freak out a little so I just went to bed early.

Speech Roundup

To start, read the transcript of Bush's Army War College speech. Read it? Good. Now on to the reactions.

Phil Carter breaks the speech down into its five points and analyzes each one, praising a couple and pointing out the problems with the others.

Andrew Sullivan unsurprisingly gives the speech a B+, but also points out that Bush seemed overly defensive.

Salon provides the reactions from a number of different analysts. Most of them criticize Bush's disingenuous conflation of Iraq and al-Qaeda as well as question what sort of sovereignty Iraq will have with 138,000 foreign troops in the country.

Matthew Yglesias writes that the speech "sounded good," but that our "actual foreign policy is rather shabby and threadbare." In other words, he doesn't think Bush is as committed to stable, liberal democracy in Iraq as his rhetoric implies.

Outside the Beltway does an extensive roundup of the major new media reactions while snarking a little along the way.

Pejman Yousefzadeh thinks the speech won't change anyone's mind and also adds a few snarks of his own.

That's it for now, but I'll be updating this post throughout the day as others weigh in.

UPDATE: William Saletan sees the speech as another example of Bush's inability to admit mistakes or learn from the past.

2ND UPDATE: Kevin Drum thinks Bush is setting us up for disappointment by trying to fool "a hundred million people" that "we're handing over 'full sovereignty'".

3RD UPDATE: Noam Scheiber thinks Bush contradicted himself by both calling Iraq a front in the War on Terror and then apologizing for Abu Ghraib. He also thinks the admissions of minor mistakes weren't enough.

Paul Berman Taken Down

Anyone who is interested in the debate between liberal doves and hawks on preemptive war and liberal responses to terrorism should take a look at Ian Buruma's excellent review of Paul Berman's well-meaning but profoundly misguided "Terror and Liberalism".

I admire Berman's devotion to liberal internationalism and humanist ideals, as well as his genuine passion for social justice. But Buruma explains, far better than I ever could, why "militant Wilsonianism" is bound to become more militant than Wilsonian, and how a martial zest for worldwide liberal humanist revolution could lead to a zealotry that would undermine liberal principles, in addition to turning potential allies against us.

Media Bias Revisited

Matt takes up the debate again about liberal bias in the media. After reading the Pew Center report and thinking about this issue some more, I think I may understand where our disagreement stems from.

Before dealing with the results of the Pew Center poll I want to look at the methodology. For the purposes of this discussion, I accept this poll as indicative of a trend, but I do not accept the numbers themselves. A brief glance shows a disturbingly small sample size. The average number of "working journalists and editors" surveyed is only slightly over 33. In some cases, only five were polled. No reliable statistics can come from such small sample sizes. Furthermore, only 67% of those initially contacted even answered the survey. Also, of those polled, most were either executives or senior editors. If one is to argue that an individual journalist's beliefs influence their writing, then this seems more like an attempt to pad the numbers than to discern a bias among journalists. I would like to see a much larger sample size limited to working journalists and their immediate editors before I can fully accept the results. However, for the sake of this argument the methodology is just a quibble, so on to the results.

Like the other polls Matt linked to in our previous discussion, the majority of journalists identify as moderate. Among those that don't, liberals significantly outweigh conservatives, but both are minorities. However, the report also finds a much stronger bias when it comes to two specific cultural issues, namely homosexuality and religion. Here overwhelming majorities both accept homosexuality and think a belief in God is not necessary as a basis for morality. In contrast, the general population is very evenly split on both these issues. This, I think, is the crux of the matter.

As a non-religious person, issues like this are not terribly important to me. I am more interested in foreign and economic policy with cultural issues, particularly those that intersect with religion, a distant third. Matt, on the other hand, is a devout Catholic so these issues are presumably far more important to him. His posts on Down to the Piraeus would seem to confirm this. Since the majority of those journalists polled hold beliefs on these issues far removed from Matt's own and these are issues he finds highly important, he's going to notice this disparity much quicker than I would. This naturally leads him to assume the media is generally liberal. I, however, notice when the media let the Bush administration make misleading statements or outright lies about foreign and economic policy without providing opposing viewpoints. This has lead me to assume the news media are simply irresponsible and more interested in access and profits than the truth. Obviously, neither of us has a high opinion of the media, but we differ on the reasons.

Looking back over our previous discussion, it seems clear to me now that when Matt claims there's a liberal media bias, he's concerned mainly with a liberal cultural bias which I'm perfectly willing to grant him. However, in turn, I would hope that he, and other propagators of the liberal media meme, will understand that on other issues the media have consistently allowed the Bush administration's claims to go unchallenged. This is changing now, but I think that's largely due to his falling poll numbers. When Bush's approval rating was high, little criticism of his policies was heard. The news is a business that realizes most people prefer to have their beliefs reinforced rather than challenged. So long as the majority of Americans believed and supported Bush, the news media went along. However, that is a topic for another time.

The disagreement over the media's liberal bias comes down to one's focus. I can see now that for those for whom cultural issues are paramount or simply different from those held by many journalists it would be quite easy to perceive a liberal bias. Perhaps this explanation is wrong—in which case I hope someone corrects me—but it seems reasonable to me. If it is the case, I plan to keep it in mind in future debates and hope that others do the same. Perhaps we can all amicably move on to more important and interesting debates.

Two Americas, Both Getting Screwed.

It's a bit dated (from April's Harper's) but the insights in Thomas Frank's article on the dramatic phenomenon of working-class support for Republicans will not go stale any time soon. Any Democrat with a desire to understand why the last thirty years have seen social policy vastly overshadow economics in the decision-making process of the average Middle American voter must read this (in all its plain-text, illegally-reproduced glory). He runs down the "myths of Red America," explicating just how the farmers and laborers who helped put Bush II into office have been convinced to shoot themselves in the foot again and again, and like it.

Explaining why he and his neighbors voted for George Bush, [a small-town Pennsylvania man] said: "These people are tired of moral decay. They're tired of everything being wonderful on Wall Street and terrible on Main Street." Let me repeat that: They're voting REPUBLICAN in order to GET EVEN WITH WALL STREET.

I won't go so far as to say the entire Republican ascendance is based on a bait-and-switch, as the people taking the bait obviously care comparatively little about the switch. But as Frank goes on to point out, a remarkable point of consistency in the Republican agenda has been their failure to deliver on the moral reforms that they promise: abortion, affirmative action, gay marriage - these are currents that the Reds have been unable to reverse, but their supporters continue to give them one more chance, even as they get hammered by the economic policies that had little or nothing to do with motivating their votes.

Edit: I completely failed to make the connection that this is the same Thomas Frank who edits the Baffler and wrote The Conquest of Cool, a book on which I have written at some length.

Quiz About This Quiz

Here's a nice and challenging quiz. All numerical answers are integers. You can check your answers here.

1. What is the sum of all numerical answers in this quiz (including this one)?
2. How many questions in this quiz have an answer of "true"?
3. True or False: Question 1 has the highest numerical answer in this quiz.
4. How many answers are the same as this one (including this one)?
5. True or False: All numerical answers in this quiz are positive.
6. What is the average of all numerical answers in this quiz (including this one)?
7. True or False: The answer to question 4 is greater than the answer to question 2.
8. What is the answer to question 1 divided by the answer to question 8?
9. True or False: The answer to question 6 is equal to the difference between answers 2 and 4, minus the product of answers 8 and 4.
10. What is the answer to this question?

Changes in the Senate

Mark Schmitt wrote a fascinating post about how the Senate functions today as opposed to the past.

German Anti-Americanism

I found this article that portrays the growing anti-Americanism in Germany via David's Medienkritik. From the article:

A gentleman who works for German television provided the most crowd-pleasing question. Herr Niles wanted to know why no one seems concerned with the absence of political debate in George W. Bush's America, where a chilling conformity and group think has taken hold.

This is rank ignorance on the same level as Americans who think the French are all just "cheese-eating surrender monkeys". Unfortunately, the article implies that it's a wide-spread phenomenon. There may be plenty of ignorant xenophobes and proto-fascists in this country, but they comprise a small minority. I despise the current administration and laws like the PATRIOT Act, but I'm far from thinking the US is a police state. Idiots.

Why We Need A Philosopher's State

Scott Sherman outlines how the New York Review of Books became one of the lone voices of sanity and dissent in post 9/11 America. Worth reading.

Administrivia

I've changed the way posts are archived so they should be more future-proof and help prevent comments spam. The default archiving method for MT is just too easy for spammers, even with MT Blacklist installed. I've tested the changes out and everything seems to be working, but if you notice any broken links, please point them out. Thanks.

Spray and Slay

The British paper "Independent on Sunday" has published disturbing new allegations on the conduct of the Iraq war. The website is full of links lambasting the occupation. I'm not familiar with the newspaper's ideological agenda nor am I happy with the tone of the first article, but this is a major British newspaper, so there it is.

Personally, I take heart in the fact that our leadership is absolutely shocked that such incidents may be taking place. We can be certain they won't happen again.

Incidentally, the phrase "Spray and Slay" reminds me of a certain film passage...

LOCKHART
(reading)
"Not While We're Eating--N.V.A. learn marines on a search and destroy mission don't like to be interrupted while eating chow." Search and destroy. Uh, we have a new directive from M.A.F. on this. In the future, in place of"search and destroy," substitute the phrase "sweep and clear." Got it?

JOKER
Got it. Very catchy.

Screen Scraping to RSS

All websites should provide RSS feeds. It's clearly the NextBigThing for the web, the first emergence of usable, useful agents on the Net that pull content for you. Unfortunately, it's mainly only blogs that provide feeds, but I've found a couple of wonderful resources to get around this. First off is Syndic8, an enormous list of feeds. However, if you the site you want to subscribe to isn't listed there, just create your own feed with MyRSS, a free screen-scraping service. Down with the tyranny of HTML!

Gunkanjima, the Deserted Island

Via Meta Filter comes this article about Gunkanjima, a deserted Japanese island that was once a coal-mining center:

Eventually, the mines faced an end, and in 1974 the world's once most densely populated island become totally deserted. The island, after all its inhabitants departed leaving behind their belongings, became an empty shell of a city where all its people disappeared overnight, as if by some mysterious act of God.

A quick google search also turned up this photo gallery. Reminds me of the bike tour of Chernobyl.

Logic Games

So, you want to be a lawyer? Make sure you practice those logic questions for the LSAT:

During a long night of post-exam drinking, four law students--Jesus, Keanu, Lothar, and Mikey--make their way to a men’s room that contains five adjacent urinals--1, 2, 3, 4, and 5--and two stalls--A and B. Each of the law students has had three liters of beer in the last hour and must relieve himself immediately. They proceed according to the following restrictions:

Here's the rest of the question.

Kerry Considers Delaying Nomination

Kerry may delay his acceptance of the nomination in order to even the monetary playing field with Bush, whose official nomination will come a month later. I'm not positive this is a good idea. It's a great tactical idea, but I'm not sure about its strategic value. The Bush campaign could very likely attempt to twist this into evidence of Kerry dishonestly manipulating the system to his advantage. Naturally, it would be nothing of the sort, but if Bush could successfully implant that idea into enough minds it could damage Kerry's chances.

However, even if that ploy were not successful, it's not clear that the one month advantage Bush is currently scheduled to enjoy would make a difference. He has already significantly outspent Kerry with no noticeable affect on his approval ratings. If that trend continued through the summer, then Kerry could stay relatively quiet during the month he's waiting for Bush to be officially nominated without worry. Of course, by then more people may be paying attention to the race than currently so ads could have a larger influence than now, making it a risky gamble. Perhaps Kerry could count on the largely Democratic 527s to take up the slack while he waited to dip into the $75 million general election fund, but since he cannot coordinate with those groups there's no guarantee they would promote strategically sound messages or any worthwhile ones at all. Still, the Republican convention is scheduled for August 30th through September 2nd so there would still be almost three months during which the coverage will be much more intense than that leading up to the conventions.

Obviously the best decision is one that will maximize Kerry's chance of winning the election. If we assume that the ability to outspend or at least match spending with one's opponent has a large affect on the outcome, then I tentatively support postponing the nomination. The chance that the Bush campaign will be able to spin this detail into something damaging to Kerry seems small given the complexity of campaign finance rules and the fact that Kerry's nomination would then be almost the same time as Bush's. Since it also seems safe to assume that money spent in the few months before the election will be significantly more valuable than money spent before then, the decision may turn out to be both sound tactics and strategy. Of course, Kerry is only considering the idea now, which means he's probing the public's potential reaction. There's plenty of time left for him to decide. Regardless, it's heartening to see his campaign focusing on the endgame this early.

Legal Graffiti

Test your tagging skills. I have none.

Cicada Hate

What? There are people who don't love insects?

World's Tiniest Guitar

"Scientists at Cornell University have constructed the world's tiniest guitar, and have recently plucked its strings with a laser beam."

Really, they should have made a violon.

(via Aeiou)

Cooking Cicadas

Andrew Sullivan's been a great source lately. Today, he links to a video of a chef preparing cicadas.

Funny Accents

This anecdote may only be funny to Francophones, but I think anyone who knows a second language will be able to relate. I remember one time when I was in southern France, where the accent is extremely different from the Parisian French I was taught, I was trying to talk to the bus driver to figure out where my stop was for the hostel. When I told him I was from Texas, he naturally started talking about the rodeo and asked me if I rode horses. Of course, combining that cultural disconnect with the fact that I kept asking him to repeat himself made for a wearying conversation. I did learn a new phrase though.

Upcoming Speech

"In a public address next week, Bush plans to lay out in more detail the course for the remaining month and a half before the scheduled transfer".

Maybe this speech will finally be the one where Bush doles out more than what Sullivan calls "valid but superfluous boilerplate," but, if past history is an indication, I doubt it. So far, every one of Bush's speechs that were meant to plug the holes of his sinking ship have been only mediocre at best. To expect a man who has consistently shown himself incapable of articulating a lucid, well-conceived strategy to suddenly do so now is just wishful thinking. I predict that Bush will offer vague reassurances, few details, and only a feeble recognition of past and current difficulties.

Kerry Chooses Campaign Slogan...

...and it's incredibly lame. For those of you too lazy to follow links, he's chosen "Let America be America again". Blech. I'm all for ripping off poems, but this slogan is only good if you actually read the poem it's derived from. Without that context the slogan really doesn't make much sense. Maybe Kerry's going to boom out these lines at some point:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Of course, millionaires who co-opt poems about alienation, oppression, and inequality seem silly, but that's just politics. I guess he's planning on taking this new slogan and combining it with Edwards's "Two Americas" campaign themes. Stir in a little foreign policy and it's probably a good plank, but still a bad slogan—not that it matters. After all, who pays attention to campaign slogans other than politics addicts and wordsmiths?

Left Wing Hate

Check out these banners. Finally, we can all let down our guard and come out as the freedom-hating, faggot-loving, pinko atheists we are.

(via die puny humans)

Bush's Ineloquence

Andrew Sullivan nails it:

Events transpire and are interpreted by critics and the anti-war media and by everyone on the planet but the president. All the president says is a broad and crude reiteration of valid but superfluous boilerplate. This is not war-leadership; it's the abdication of war-leadership.

As I've consistently said, whether you supported the war on Iraq before it started is irrelevant. All of us must now support any humane, moral, and realistic effort to succeed unless and until it becomes absolutely clear that success is not possible. However, due to his insulation, intellectual laziness, and ineloquence Bush has not and will not make this case. He cannot even lead well enough to prevent the constant fighting between departments in his administration, so it's no surprise he cannot lead the nation. Eloquence and intellect do matter after all.

Hackers All the Way Up

From Slate's Department of Big Questions comes this:

Was our universe created? That is, was it brought into being by an entity with a mind? This is a question I began pondering after my recent inquiry into the end of the universe. (For some reason, cosmic mysteries are best contemplated in pairs.) It is the fundamental issue that separates religious believers, ranging from Deists to Gnostics to Southern Baptists, from nonbelievers. To many atheists, the very idea that our world could have been created by a conscious being seems downright nutty. How could anyone, even a god, "make" a universe?

I wonder how long before the Intelligent Design folks reference this article as support for their claims.

An Obsrevashun.

I've noticed something. Something important:

While Linsday Lohan is a brand of hot that has me questioning whether I'm a good person or not, The Olsen Twins, much more enduringly popular, are a matched set of bony-assed, visibly soulless skanks.

What do these facts, taken together, say about our culture and the world we live in? I would suggest a few starting points - first, the sensationalism of the freak has more drawing power than the subtleties of the beautiful. Second, despite hip-hop's best efforts, the Kate Moss skeletal body type may yet make a comeback. Third, oh god, I'm definitely not a good person.

Also, could somebody who's not at work post the Lohan nipple-slip pics in their reply? Just for, you know, perspective on the issue.

ATTACK of the KILLER Cicadas

Andrew Sullivan ALERTS US to the ALARMING TRUTH about CICADAS:

What do Cicadas eat? HUMAN CHILDREN are the primary source of nutrition for CICADAS.

Are Cicadas POISONOUS? Yes, CICADAS have a DEADLY VENOM that is injected through a small bone like tube known as the "Cicada deadly venom tube". The venom can KILL a human being INSTANTLY.

Viridian Room

Try to escape.

(via Mahalanobis)

Strategic Coffee Intake

A tip for students and other caffeine addicts:

A lot of people start their day with a big cup of coffee, hoping that the caffeine will invigorate them. But findings published today in the May issue of the journal SLEEP indicate that there might be a better way to stay awake for long periods. According to the report, low doses of caffeine administered at regular intervals may provide improved pick-me-up benefits.

(via Boing Boing)

Marshall on the Polls and Kerry

Josh Marshall makes a good case for why John Kerry's recent silence is exactly the right response to Bush's collapsing support:

Let's think of this battle as a prize fight, with both men in the ring. If you're up on points and the seconds are ticking down on the final round, what do you do?

Simple: stay out of his way.

Trying to land punches when he's desperate and going down gives him the opportunity to hit back. And in such a dire moment that may be all he has. Why give him the opportunity?

We've already seen with the attempted ribbons throwing smear and other dishonest obsessions with minor parts of Kerry's past that the Bush attack machine will gladly and tenaciously latch on to any issue they can to direct the cameras towards Kerry in an attempt to both tear him down and, more importantly, distract the public from the reasons for Bush's crumbling support. It's far more likely that only bad things would happen for him if Kerry tried to pile on the criticism right now. It's better that he save his resources and energy for the fall when more people will be paying attention, Bush's image will be permanently damaged, and the election will be only a few months away.

Gay Marriage redux

I only mention this article due to one line:

Vincenza Martorano and Julianne Gale, 22-year-old college students, were sleeping on the steps of City Hall in Somerville, with 10 of their friends.

"It's a great honor to be the first ones in line," Ms. Martorano said.

Look, New York Times, we're old friends. So I'll forgive you this mistake. But I do feel compelled to explain, just so there's no confusion next time. In all articles about gay marriage, you're supposed to show pictures of the 22 year old lesbian schoolgirls, not the 57 year old, overweight machinists, okay?

It's all right, I forgive you.

Raven Theory of Mind

Are ravens aware that other creatures have minds, too? This article suggests so. And in case anyone hasn't seen the tool-making crow video, here it is, largely for my own archival purposes.

You leave me . . . breathless.

The server is really slow, but you really only need to hear the first ten seconds of a guy doing an acapella version of Slayer's "Angel of Death" to pretty much get the idea.

Check it out.

Also includes "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "21st Century Schizoid Man," and various other classics. I like this kid's style.

Via SE (NSFW).

Cicada Mania

Via De Rerum Natura, I discovered Borneo Chela, a new biology blog that is in the process of documenting the magicicada emergence and moulting. An earlier post also references Cicada Mania, the byline of which is "dedicated to cicadas, the most amazing insects in the world."

Faking Manliness

My coworkers were high school dropouts and ex-convicts, and my boss was a grizzled old ex-logger who once had every bone in his body broken when a log rolled over him. And then there was me, a guy with 8 credits of philosophy under his belt and callus-free hands. You know how in the old WWII comic books, like Stg. Rock or whatever, there's always some pacifist scholar in the company with a nickname like "Abacus?" I was essentially that guy, minus the glasses.

You can read the rest of the story here.

Erosion

Last year I sailed.
Already spring warns, "I arrive."
It will quickly end, then
The long lake summer.

Last time we almost sank.
We hung from the hull
Like shipwreck survivors.

The wind forgets me—
I cannot remind her now.

Each year I sail less,
Overscheduled days or simply
Too lazy for the rigging ritual.

Jagged time transmutes
Minutely into silt.
Stone discs litter shores
Like conquered lives.

Sleepless, I snap a tether
And drift—
My body swells whitecaps and
Gust-snapping sails. I skim
The last oceans to taunt
Reckless elements.

Where Have You Been?

Are you a world traveller? Do you want to get depressed? Calculate what percentage of the world you've seen. With only 10 countries visited, I have a meager 4%. At least I have long-term plans to fix this.

(via ohlalaparis)

Andre 3000 and Adult Swim Team Up

If this is true, I expect it to be great. Adult Swim is consistently, excellently ground-breaking so I don't see any reason why this should be any different. Add in Andre's crazy funkiness and I think you have a nice combination.

Explaining Away Abu Ghraib

Via Andrew Sullivan, here's Tim Noah's roundup of Abu Ghraib apologists. Sullivan also points out this from John Derbyshire:

The Abu Ghraib "scandal": Good. Kick one for me. But bad discipline in the military (taking the pictures, I mean). Let's have a couple of courts martial for appearance's sake. Maximum sentence: 30 days CB.

That's only number one in a four item list where he tries to prove my point. He also writes this:

Revelations about sexual hanky panky in US armed forces: Outrage. I want to see someone cashiered -- a general, at least. This is no way for soldiers to behave when on active service. Gross, unpardonable violation of military ethics. Whose damn fool idea was it to mix men and women in the same units?

At least he's capable of being outraged about things. Torture just isn't one of them.

Bush as CEO

Mark Schmitt expounds on Kevin Drum's idea that Bush should be viewed as the CEO President. Both articles are at least a week old, making them already stale by blogging standards, but Schmitt's article is just too good to pass up.

Reform Party Endorses Nader

Ralph Nader won the endorsement of the Reform Party on Wednesday, giving him access, if he accepts, to the presidential ballot in the seven states where the party still has legal status.

The states include the crucial battlegrounds of Florida and Michigan, where Mr. Nader would not have to collect signatures and where he could conceivably swing the presidential election if the voting was close. He would have had to collect more than 92,000 signatures to get on the Florida ballot alone, and the Reform Party's action, which is essentially the party's nomination, relieves him of that requirement.

You can read the rest here. Just in case you've forgotten, the Reform Party was the one Ross Perot created.

Not Just a Few Bad Apples

Despite the disgraceful attempts of a few to downplay the Abu Ghraib tortures, most of the Republicans on the investigating committee would be "very disappointed if the only people prosecuted are sergeants and privates." It's good to see they're interested in the truth and punishing everyone responsible rather than playing politics.

Is It Hot in Here?

Here's an eye-catching headline: Republican Opposition Stalls Patriot Act Reauthorization. The headline is from Drudge, the article is from The Hill. The President wants to reauthorize the USA-Patriot Act this year, even though it remains effective through the end of next year, and a sizeable number of Republicans wish to restrict its power. Something I think I've missed out on in school is a legal look at the Act itself. It's a gigantic document, and only the most totalitarian aspects are well-known. It was mentioned in my Criminal Law course, and I think my school offers a topical survey that covers it, but I won't be able to take it. What do I need with all these personal liberties anyway? I'm not using them, so I may as well give them to someone who will.

Texas is a Nader Hater

24. Ralphie, a prospective presidential hopeful, came up short of the 64,076 signatures needed to get on the Texas ballot as an independent. The deadline was May 10. What should Ralphie do?

a) Concentrate his limited time and resources on states in which may actually have a chance to get on the ballot.
b) Drop out of the race, because getting on the ballot is comparatively minor hurdle for independent candidates in American presidential elections.
c) Start his own electoral college. It'll have a baseball team and everything.
d) Sue Texas.

If you chose d), you're right. Richard Winger, in The Hill, says that Nader has a good chance at sucess. Rick Hasen, of Loyola and the blog "Election Law," disagrees. Anyway, Nader's done it before, but probably never quite so pointlessly.

Update: So I'm a day late. It's still funny.

Visualizing Government

From a wacky Stanford kid comes Political Friendster. How long before this, like its namesake, is an unusable pile of excrement?

(via Matthew Yglesias)

Stalin World

This place sounds like fun:

During a recent gala opening, thousands of invited guests were greeted at the gate by an actor dressed as Stalin; a Lenin look-a-like, complete with a goatee and cap, sat fishing by a nearby pond. Guests were invited to drink shots of vodka and eat cold borscht soup from tin bowls, while loud speakers blared old communist hymns. Nearby, red Soviet propaganda posters read: “There’s No Happier Youth in the World Than Soviet Youth!”

I wonder when the New York Times will publish a fawning review in its new Arts & Communism section.

I Am Asian

Check out McDonald's new campaign to attract people "living on the rim" to their grease outlets. Even better, they seem to have trademarked the phrase "I Am Asian". In a show of solidarity, I hereby trademark the phrase "I am hungry". Next time you say it, you owe me five cents.

(via Boing Boing)

Californians are Strange

This is absurd: Presenting the 2004 Masturbate-a-Thon. I haven't looked all the way through the site (and I have no idea what a "swag bag" is), but it I guess people pledge money for time blocks of self-gratification. You can participate there (San Fransisco, of course) or at home. It puts me in mind of the immortal words of Mark Twain, from "Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism":

....

Michelangelo and all of the other old masters--"old masters," I will remark, is an abbreviation, a contraction--have used similar language. Michelangelo said to Pope Julius II, "Self- negation is noble, self-culture beneficent, self-possession is manly, but to the truly great and inspiring soul they are poor and tame compared with self-abuse." Mr. Brown, here, in one of his latest and most graceful poems, refers to it in an eloquent line which is destined to live to the end of time--"None knows it but to love it; none name it but to praise."

I challenge anyone to name a wittier American author.

Banana Guard

No, it's not some strange mercenary police force charged with safeguarding the world's dwindling banana supplies, but a "unique, patented device [that] allows for the safe transport and storage of individual bananas". I thought that's what the peels were for.

(via mimi smartypants)

A Vow of Silence

The Human Guinea Pig takes a vow of silence for a few days. Moderate amounts of hilarity ensue.

NYU Adjuncts to get Health Benefits

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

"About 2,300 part-time instructors at New York University would receive pay raises, and, for the first time, health benefits, pension contributions, and some job security under their tentative first contract with the university."

A progressive trend, or just a freakish outlyer?

Full article in the extended.

"Details of the contract, which was approved by negotiators for the university and the adjunct instructors' union last month, were made public last week. Union leaders have scheduled informational meetings on the contract for this week and have urged members to ratify the six-year pact, which would become effective in September.

The agreement between the adjuncts' union -- Local 7902 of the United Auto Workers -- and the university ended more than a year and a half of bargaining and narrowly averted a walkout by adjunct faculty members (The Chronicle, April 30).

The pay and benefits outlined in the contract will help the institution attract some of the top part-time instructors, a university spokesman said on Sunday. Union officials could not be reached for comment.

According to a summary of the contract on the union's Web site, the pay scale would vary for different types of adjunct instructors. In the first year, part-time instructors teaching lecture courses would earn at least $90 for each hour of class time. Adjuncts earning $75 or more per hour would get a pay increase of $15 per hour.

Part-time instructors who teach studio courses would get a minimum of $65 per hour, and those providing individual instruction would get $55 per hour. Adjuncts in noncredit courses would get $50 per hour. The pay scales would increase in each year of the contract.

Adjuncts who have taught for six consecutive semesters, not including summer terms, would be informed in May what courses they would teach the following academic year. NYU could change teaching assignments for those adjuncts only if enrollment was low, a class was canceled, or the curriculum was changed. Those instructors would receive severance pay if their contracts were not renewed for any other reason, and they could appeal nonrenewals.

The new health benefits, which would apply to all adjuncts, would be based on hours of teaching. The university would pay half the cost of individual health coverage for adjuncts who taught at least 84 hours in a school year or at least 150 hours of individual instruction, not counting summer terms. NYU would pay three-quarters of the cost for adjuncts who taught 126 hours per year or 225 individual-instruction hours. Family members would also be eligible for health coverage.

Starting in 2008, NYU would contribute 5 percent of an adjunct's salary to a pension fund for instructors who have taught for two or more years.

John Beckman, the university's spokesman, said on Sunday that NYU had given more than what other institutions provide for adjunct faculty members.

"From our standpoint, both sides should and do feel positive about this contract," Mr. Beckman said. "Our initial offer was already considerably above the prevailing wage for unionized part-time faculty, and the final negotiation is above that."

The final contract will help NYU attract the best and brightest adjunct faculty members with real-world experience, Mr. Beckman said. "Being in New York City, we're very lucky for being able to attract part-time faculty who are at the very top of their profession," he said. "This is a generous contract, but that was a conscious decision on our part."

By DAN CARNEVALE

Tom Curley

An interesting statement from the president of the Associated Press regarding the power of the state vis à vis the freedom of the press.
(Merci Sale Bête)

Cyborg Name Generator

Be the bot. From the introduction:

As Jung observed in his seminal work Der Sechsmilliondeutchmarkmann, each of us has within our soul a desire to know what our name would stand for if we were a cyborg. At long last, we have the technology. The Cyborg Name Generator will provide you with not only your cyborg name, but a personalized graphic suitable for embedding.

I am D.A.V.I.D., and I think I'm going to put this acronym on my Texas Trials & Appeals exam on Tuesday.
(Via Gross Anatomy)

More On Withdrawing From Iraq

Dennis Kucinich debates Michael O'Hanlon over at The American Prospect.

The Critical Celebration of Mediocrity

My sincere apologies.....I just couldn't resist a post on "Friends". I tried....hard...because I have to assume that some Nomad here loves Friends, or has a significant other who does. I mean, who couldn't like Friends but a heartless intellectual with a perversely ironic sense of humor like me? Indeed, this question seems to be a popular one lately.

As part of the publicity wind-up to the last episode (which I thankfully did not see), a variety of articles from across the cultural and political spectrum appeared. Naturally enough, a typical move is to compare Friends to Seinfeld or Sex and the City. Here is a quote from TNR's Seigel, as he basks in offending the tyranny of "sophisticated taste"....

The function of "Friends" is to be comforting, or "pleasing" as Serra would say. The function of "Sex and the City" was to entertain, yes, but also to unsettle and to provoke in its candor (it failed on both counts). You could enjoy both shows, but you couldn't be devoted to both shows. The difference between the two series' audiences was like the difference between our cultural "elites," for most of whom God is dead, and great numbers of Americans (and American voters), for whom God is a living presence.

He goes on to say
The show was absurd; its people were caricatures; its humor was often silly, even sophomoric; it could have been set in Akron so un-hip were its situations and environment (yet its indifference to Manhattan chic was a relief); its popularity made it more and more stilted, self-conscious, and empty as the seasons wore on--and when it was good, it was consoling and hilarious. It did the work that sitcoms have always done. "Friends" ennobled the setback, lent dignity to ordinary experience, proclaimed mere survival a triumph greater than wealth, or success, or fame. Adorno would have plotzed.

This is intelligent, if a bit mystifying. Siegel seems to understand Adorno perfectly well yet be completely indifferent to Adorno’s point that such sitcoms make a mockery of the utopian possibilities of the medium—a possibility visible in groundbreaking shows like Southpark that both entertain and provoke their audience.

Meanwhile, other critics identify Friends as a guilty pleasure. I can certainly understand this. Hell, I like to watch “Mash” when I'm bored and nothing better is on, and it certainly isn't funny either. I am aware of that, yet I watch it anyway. And I can certainly appreciate that a lot of tired people like watching something like "Friends" at 10 pm after a long day--but that doesn't mean "Friends" was a quality show. "Seinfeld" and "Sex and the City" serve the same function and remain, quite simply, funnier. Christopher Suellentrop intelligently suggests that the show's appeal was really that of a soap opera. I think Sex and the City falls into the same category--after the 3rd season it failed to be consistently funny and became more interesting as a dramatic series. However, the difference is that Sex and the City remained interesting. And Seinfeld, by comparison, remained hysterical all the way to the end.

Anyway, I can't help laughing over the Salon staff's anecdotes on when they stopped watching Friends as well as long list of letters on the topic. It's not just entertaining because much of the writing is hilarious, but also that such intelligent people were actually compelled to write this down. Does guilt over not having lame taste really weigh on people so heavily? Hmm...what exactly does that say about me?

Anyway, here's a great quote...

I can't say that I remember ANY full episodes, but I do remember scenes (in no particular order):

The rest is a blur.

If we are all going to admit (as nearly all critics do) that Friends 1) was rarely, if ever, funny 2) had no style 3) was hardly set in NY 4) was populated by clichés 5) and had exhaustingly formulaic plots…..can't we all also admit that those of us who didn't like it aren't all heartlessly overcritical, over-ironic snobs? I happen to take pride in the quality of some of the TV shows that come out of the States (think of The Simpsons and Southpark!), so it's irritating to learn that my preference for quality comedy is not merely elitist, it is also jaded. I guess it's time for me to get with the program and enter the warm, comforting, and completely illusory world of Friends.

Ooops....too late. Thank God for that. If we're lucky, perhaps our generation will develop a sense of humor and an openness to being challenged that might begin to rival the generation immediately preceding us--the generation that made The Simpsons and Seinfeld classics. One can always hope.

Predicting the Outcome

I think everyone is familiar with both of these sites but just in case . . .

Both Election Projection and Swing State Project are providing regular projections of the presidential election based on current polling data that they plug into a rigorous formulas (here and here; formulas that I find, to be honest, a little confusing). EP acknowledges being pro-Bush and SSP is pro-Kerry but they are both doing their best to be objective. Swing State, which provides regular reports on election-related news taking place in the closely contested states, provides their projections on what seems to be a daily basis under the heading of “General Cattle Call.” Election Projection is not quite as regular.

Both of them currently have the winner of the popular vote losing the electoral vote.

Swing State:
EV's: Bush 227, Kerry 231
Pct: Bush 50.7%, Kerry 49.3%

Election Projection:
EV's: Bush 274, Kerry 264
Pct: Bush 48.56%, Kerry 49.61%

History Bodyslammed by Literature

"A humanities education should focus on language, literature, and the arts, not on history and philosophy, said the Harvard University professor Helen Vendler, who delivered the annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on Thursday night. "

From the Chronicle of Higher Education - full text is in the extended. Vendler here is reiterating the argument put forward by the people who invented "English" as a discipline early last century - aargh, their names escape me for the moment. Anyway, the idea being that studying literature makes us better human beings - a functionalist view of literature as a tool for life, rather than as l'art pour l'art. Thoughts?

"A humanities education should focus on language, literature, and the arts, not on history and philosophy, said the Harvard University professor Helen Vendler, who delivered the annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on Thursday night.

"The arts are too profound and too far-reaching to be left out of our children's patrimony," said Ms. Vendler, according to an advance copy of her remarks. "The arts have a right, within our schools, to be as serious an object of study as molecular biology or mathematics."

The Jefferson Lecture is the highest honor the National Endowment for the Humanities awards a scholar. Recipients are given a $10,000 prize as well as a rare, high-profile forum in which to speak on any topic they choose.

In her speech, Ms. Vendler, a prolific poetry critic, argued that the arts teach students more about humanity and their national heritage than either philosophy or history, offering them a truer portrayal of "the way we are and were, the way we actually live and have lived."

The arts, like geography and history, "confer a patina on the natural world," Ms. Vendler added. They lend significance to a field in Gettysburg or a rustic bridge in Lexington, sensitizing us to our surroundings.

Without art, she said, we would be like the sleepwalkers of Wallace Stevens's 1943 poem "Somnambulisma," wandering through our lives "like automata, unconscious of the very life we were living." Ms. Vendler used images from the poem in the title of her speech, "The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar."

American schools, she concluded, will produce more well-rounded students once they teach an equal balance of science and art."

Cynical enough to work?

The most recent Nation issue features a variety of opinions on how to withdraw from Iraq. All are worth reading. I found former diplomat John Brady Kiesling's commentary particularly entertaining, and perhaps the most realistic of all.

In the end a fractured Iraq can be held together only by a man wrapped, like George Washington or Ho Chi Minh, in the legitimacy that derives from successful armed struggle. We should note the ease with which a scruffy young cleric united Sunnis and Shiites against the US presence. A victorious Secretary Rumsfeld could not impose Ahmad Chalabi. However, a retreating US military can designate Iraq's liberator. We must select the competent Iraqi patriot to whom we yield ground while bleeding his competitors. There will be casualties and disorder, no matter how brilliantly we orchestrate our withdrawal. But the overwhelming majority of Iraqis will rally around any man who claims to drive us out, and elections would validate his relatively bloodless victory.....

We were defeated once, in Vietnam, and the dominoes did not fall. We remained the leader of the free world, sadder but wiser. The ignorance and megalomania that brought us into Iraq are far more dangerous to US security and prosperity than would be the symbolic military defeat that gets us out.

Afghan Prisoners Murdered

Before the whole Abu Ghraib scandal, I would have been more skeptical of this, but now it sounds likely and consistent. BoingBoing has more, including a link to a video clip of the documentary on this.

Rush Limbaugh Defends the Torturers

Why does this man still have listeners? This is what he says about the tortures:

CALLER: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men --

LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?

You can read more here. I know Rush says things for shock value and primarily for the benefit of the Dittoheads who will agree with anything he says, but this is truly abhorrent.

UPDATE: Link fixed.

(via Talking Points Memo)

Derbyshire's Unracism

Many of us were confused about whom Bush was talking when he said:

There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern.

However, thanks to John Derbyshire's latest column, now we know. He's given us a perfectly insidious example of just that sort of thinking. Although Derbyshire proclaims that "[i]t does not... look as if race... has anything to do with it", he then goes on to write:

Whatever the barrier is, it makes it awfully difficult for the Arabs to take up a civilized form of government.

and:

These people are fundamentally different from us. They don't care about the things we care about — liberty, law, constitutionalism, rational economics — and can't be persuaded to. They are different from us in some permanent, unfathomable, intractable way.

In other words, race has nothing to do with Arabic inability to establish democracy—just their culture and beliefs. However, in all fairness, the second quote is what Derbyshire thinks others would believe if Iraq fails to transition into a stable, independent government, not necessarily what he himself believes. That said, the whole skeptical tone of the article leads one to the conclusion that he probably does think that. At least he's not being racist.

UPDATE: Matt points out in the comments that Derbyshire is probably just trying to make a point about the real cultural differences that might make it difficult to implement a liberal democracy in Iraq. If that's the case, and I hope it is, he doesn't do a very good job of making that clear. I don't want to needlessly offend anyone though, so if my take on the article is wrong, I apologize.

Nader to Selig: Stop It Or Else

I've changed my mind about Ralph Nader. With a populist platform like this, how can he lose?

What To Do About Abu Ghraib

This post at Parablemania has some good suggestions on how to handle the troops who tortured Iraqi prisoners. He also thinks this is "our last chance to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people." I'm inclined to agree. These criminals should be tried as quickly as possible and once they're found guilty, their punishment should be made public and highly visible. That includes anyone higher in command who even looked the other way and allowed these things to happen. That includes Bush.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan thinks Bush should apologize in Abu Ghraib and stop riding around the country in his campaign bus. Kevin Drum points out that at least one of the implicated civilians is still working in Iraq.

2ND UPDATE: Tacitus says "[r]esponsibility equating to culpability is an age-old military principle, and it ought to be applied with rigor here".

Tribes 1 and 2 for Free

Two great games available for free download. I haven't played them yet, but they're widely hailed as among the best first-person shooters ever made, and pushed online multiplayer gaming forward substantially. You can read a review here.

In other geek news, Gamespot has a tantalizing preview of Knights of the Old Republic II.

Defining Poetry

Here we go. Aaron Haspel tackles the question "what is poetry?" Jim Henley thinks we can discover the difference by looking at the etymology of "poem" and "prose". Both make some excellent observations, but neither manages a completely satisfactory definition. I'm not sure there even is one anymore. I imagine that this wasn't much of a problem two hundred years ago, before the advent of free verse. When all poetry is in meter and rhyme the definition becomes trivial. Still, it seems worth a try even if the best outcome might be nothing more than guidelines rather than a true definition. A couple of caveats before I begin: I consider verse distinct from poetry. Limericks are the former. Sonnet 116 is the latter. Also, I make a distinction between prose as a form and prose as the essence of a work; that is, a poem may be in prose and still be poetry, but prose itself is not poetry. That said, on to my wild stabbing.

One quality of poetry that Haspel suggests, but does not quite make that I find essential is music. His assertion that "poetry scans" comes close to this, but leaves out prose poems such as Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris. Henley's suggestion that "prose is what goes all the way to the end of the page" also fails to account for such works. Both formulations fail here because they deal with the form of poetry, not the content, which is where the essence, the true definition of poetry can be found.

Poetry requires music and sound to work. Even the freest of free verse contains some mixture of assonance, alliteration, rhythm, rhyme, or meter, however subtle. As Borges wrote:

Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.

Granted, he's interested in "fine poetry," not all, but he still points us towards a more general definition. One of the tasks for any serious poet during revision is to compress and strengthen the language, to improve the flow and sound. Otherwise the poem feels flat and may be nothing more than prose in verse form just as poetry may cloak itself in prose. By requiring that all poetry be first song we can discover it whatever form it takes.

The musical nature of a poem leads one to experience it almost as a chant, a magical object. In fact, poetry requires an obliqueness, a sense of mystery. Even the most prosaic, seemingly mundane poem hints at deeper meaning and forces the attentive reader to seek it out. In a weak poem there may, in fact, be nothing there, but the suggestion remains. Each word has weight beyond its meaning by virtue of being part of a poem. In a novel, long passages may do nothing more than advance the plot or describe a character. Even in a narrative poem, such as Wordworth's The Prelude, passages gain added weight. Consider The Prelude's first lines:

OH there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.
Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come
To none more grateful than to me; escaped
From the vast city, where I long had pined
A discontented sojourner: now free,
Free as a bird to settle where I will.

Though Wordsworth sets up the story here, much more occurs in these lines than simple exposition. As one of the main themes of the work is the love of nature and the benefits that confers on those who feel such love, the idea that the breeze "[d]oth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings" foreshadows this theme and elevates nature to almost the level of a deity. Although fiction often treats nature in a similar way, such as in "The Old Man and the Sea," it does so in a long, discursive way, not in a mere line and a half. This sense of the compression and density of meaning is one of the essential qualities of all poems.

Although there are other aspects of poetry, I think these two qualities, song and mystery, most and best define what is a poem. One can find the same qualities in certain passages of prose, but not sustained throughout the work or in such degree. In fact, I would consider lines like John Updike's "in the vacuum of the heart love falls forever" to be poetry hiding in a novel. However, that one line does not make the novel into poem, just as a stray prose-like line in a poem does not convert the work into prose (despite the fact that it should probably have been cut by the author). Still, it seems that this definition is inadequate. Due to the mysterious nature of poetry, it may not be possible to categorize and weigh all the elements. To some extent, the dissection and classification of poetry destroys some part of it just as capturing and killing an insect leaves one with nothing more than a corpse and a Latin-filled card.

Conflict Map

Check out this graphical representation of the wars of the 20th century. It's a very nice interface and gives plenty of information on each war.

(via Mahalanobis)

Cicada Evolution

Today must be science day. As something of a followup to this post, here's an article about the evolution of Magicicada, periodical cicadas that emerge every 13 or 17 years.

(via The Loom)

Marshmallows and the Speed of Light

A simple experiment to measure the speed of light.

(via GeekPress)

Public Service Announcement

On a lighter note, don't carry batteries in your pockets. However, lest you think PZ Myers is a fool, check out the next post on Pharyngula, especially if you're at all interested in cellular development. It's fascinating stuff, but not nearly as funny as the other post.

Torture Roundup

As I lamented in my comment to redstripe's post, I have nothing to add about the torture. It's despicable. I forced myself to look at the photographs despite my extreme difficulty with graphic real-world violence and I'm staggered. However, I want to provide something so here's a roundup of reactions.

Anna asks if we've become the enemy. Kevin Drum disagrees with Jonah Goldberg's assertion that the pictures should not have been released. Josh Marshall manages an analytical view of the situation. Glenn Reynolds provides a roundup of his own that compasses much of the conservative reaction, but LT Smash's response stands out in particular. Matthew Yglesias claims people are comparing the Abu Ghraib atrocities to Saddam's in order to minimize them, but he doesn't provide any links. I've haven't found many, but Tacitus is one of them. Brad DeLong points out the "Arab street's" right to be outraged. Finally, DailyKos provides a roundup and open thread for discussion of this.

Obviously, this isn't exhaustive, but it's a good cross section of the major voices of the blogosphere. Reading the range of responses has been calming for me by allowing me to start to analyze the event rather than just react to it. Perhaps I shouldn't be so quick to take refuge in reason, but sometimes that's the best escape. I wonder how many bloggers wrote their posts in a similar attempt to cope. For me, I think the shock I experienced was for two main reasons. The first is simply the visceral nature of the photos, the reality of torture. I've never dealt well with such things due to my penchant for empathizing. The second is one that redstripe alluded to in his previous post—this was done by Americans and Britons, people we identify with and who represent us to the world. It's as if we all had a hand in the torture, however small it was. Certainly many Iraqis and others in the Middle East will see it that way. What chance for peace and stability is there now?

UPDATE: Henry Farrell points out on Crooked Timber that this behavior may be quite common for U.S. forces. From Baghdad, river posts her reaction.

The Photos

Publication of some remarks on the email group:

It's all pretty horrible; these that mallarme provided and the Brit soldiers urinating on the captives. It makes me wonder how often this sort of thing goes on. Aside from representations in movies like "Platoon," I've always assumed that US soldiers for the most part refrained from stuff like this, while torture and humiliation is expected from some other places, but these pics make me question that. How much is propaganda?

That said, I would answer my own question by saying that, these incidents aside, this has to be a small, embarassing minority for US soldiers. (I'm not sure what level of involvement the Brig General had--I didn't see the 60 minutes piece.) In other countries, it sometimes seems like torture is governmentally sanctioned (as we know it was in Iraq, N. Korea, etc).

Normally I would let my comments rest at that, but given the brutality of these images, I want to be clear that I am in no way apologizing for the behavior of these soldiers. It is a good sign that they have been removed from duty and, (despite what NRO has said in the last few days) probably a good sign in the long term that the images have been broadcasted. Im not sure what effect their publication will have on the current situation, but it (it=the publication of the pics) has to be a good thing in the long run.

Update:
At least one source is reporting that the torture was ordered.

Blog Redesign Redux

Ok. I think I've got all the design bugs fixed that can be. One that can't really be fixed is the problem with IE and italics that causes the right side of posts to extend too far. So, if you see a problem with the new design other than that, please leave a comment describing it.

Boys of Summer

The first-place Texas Rangers swept the Boston Red Sox in tonight's doubleheader--the evening game featured an early exit for Pedro Martinez. The little Rangers are now 15-9, first place in the AL West, and the league leaders in a number of offensive and defensive categories. Alex Rodriguez's third-place Yankees are 13-11 and are 2 1/2 games back of the BoSox. The year after the Mariners traded Alex, even then the best player in the league, they won 116 games to tie the 1906 Cubs for the best-ever regular season. Now, I'm not saying that the Rangers are going to win 116, or even keep up this pace, but I am saying that it's nice to see a winning club in town for a change. Now that the Mavs and the Stars have let me down, the Great Game is all I have.

Renaissance anyone?

Update:
I'll only do this once, I promise: Texas just completed the series sweep of Boston to become the first team in the American League with sixteen wins. Maybe this summer, when I have more time, I'll write that defense of hockey that I promised along with a defense of baseball.