JANE GALT GIVES THE PATRIOT ACT PARANOIDS a cold shower in: Asymmetrical Information: We're all gonna diiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!
I'm thinking of the purveyors of political and social doom. A few weeks ago, I was talking to a libertarian who was arguing that the Patriot Act was a one-way ticket to totalitarianism. We were violating fundamental rights that had been enshrined in the constitution for 200 years, and once we'd given them up, it was going to be a short step on the slippery slope to a police state. I share her fear of government intrusiveness. But this a markedly ahistorical view of the constitution and the liberties it allows us to enjoy, which is no more accurate for its extreme prevalence in libertarian circles. There is no primal state of liberty, created by the Constitution, from which we have slowly but inexorably been moving away. Liberties have been granted, and taken away, and granted again throughout the history of our country. Just off the top of my head: Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, the Palmer raids, the detention of the west coast Japanese in camps during World War II, the committment of anyone FDR or one of his minion's thought was especially dangerous to the war effort to St. Elizabeth's mental hospital during same, the McCarthy hearings--see this wonderful Richard Posner piece for a more elegant exegisis of the history of American liberties. The shape of liberty has changed over the 200 years of our existence, expanding in some places and contracting in others. There is no libertarian eden, located somewhere in the American past, from which we are now fallen, or falling.
Who knows who will be the best Democratic Candidate for President? God knows that's who and his name is Allah
How much longer must Allah wait before some bright-eyed American leftist realizes who the Democrats should really be nominating? He is like Allah's fucking dream candidate. And he is leaving office this month, in case you have not heard, so he is available! Seriously, Democrats, consider how closely aligned he is with most of your party. He opposed the war in Iraq and condemned it as a blatant example of western imperialism. Check. He thinks Bush is a filthy liar. Check. He is not totally opposed to shari'a, but he thinks maybe you should go slow for now. Check. Oh, and he hates the Jew. Check. What more do you want, kufr? He is like Howard Dean with a slight accent. Actually, if you believe Ariel Sharon's official cartoonists, Allah should say Colin Powell with a slight accent, no? Oho! All this time Allah has been under the assumption that Colin Powell answers to a superior, but apparently he is just some free-floating appeasement agent. Interesting. If Allah found out that one of his mujahids was going around making deals with the Jew without his knowledge, he would immediately be taken for a walk in the courtyard. But fair enough. As is said in the international language of capitulation, vive la différence.
New data says there's lots of new data
Researchers at U.C. Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems estimate that the world stored 5 quintillion bytes of information in 2002, doubling 1999's total. [CNET News.com Entertainment & Media]
...seems to be working.
YES, IT IS INSIDE BASEBALL, but it is strangely satisfying to watch a first-rate flame war with all the trimmings erupt in the Blogsphere. And, as is so often the case, here is Blogging's Bad Daddy Dave ("I invented you!") Winer first to the table with his signature dish of open ether cannister and K-Mart Bic:
Dave Winer:How about this. Both guys (Ballmer and Torvalds) make really shitty software. Microsoft, after decades of Windows development still can't make a robust operating system that a normal person can use. And Linux ships with every security feature wide open. An end user who actually installed it (an amazing accomplishment in itself) would end up (instantly) hosting a playground for script kiddies everywhere.Dave, a man who while somewhat proficient at writing editors, never met an editor he liked, was not long in inhaling the flashback led by the "crunchy sarcastic goodness" of
kasia with "Someone smack me if I ever do this"What follows in the comments is a fine flamefest of the kind they don't make any more. I commend you to them if watching the non-stop immolation of Southern California is getting you down."Information that can be very easily verified as false.. at many levels, but for the sake of argument let's pretend we're talking about RedHat, undoubtedly the most popular linux distribution, which 'ships' (and has for a couple years now) with a fully configured firewall, turned on by default, and all insecure (telnet, ftp) services turned off. One less weblog for me to read.. anyone who refuses to correct an obvious error that's been pointed out to then by numerous people (yet takes the time to call them 'zealots') isn't worth my time.. Not a great loss for Dave, I'm sure, but still a disappointment to me. "
Race. Sometimes It Is All in the Mind.
Like most other black folk, [Wayne] Joseph grew up with an unequivocal sense of his heritage and of himself; he tends toward black advocacy and has published thoughtful opinion pieces on racial issues in magazines like Newsweek. When Joseph decided on a whim to take a new ethnic DNA test he saw described on a 60 Minutes segment last year, it was only to indulge a casual curiosity about the exact percentage of black blood.... The experience would at least be fodder for another essay for Newsweek. He got his kit in the mail, swabbed his mouth per the instructions and sent off the DNA samples for analysis....When the results of his DNA test came back, he found himself staggered by the idea that though he still qualified as a person of color, it was not the color he was raised to think he was, one with a distinct culture and definitive place in the American struggle for social equality that he’d taken for granted. Here was the unexpected and rather unwelcome truth: Joseph was 57 percent Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, 4 percent East Asian — and zero percent African. After a lifetime of assuming blackness, he was now being told that he lacked even a single drop of black blood to qualify.
“My son was flabbergasted by the results,” says Joseph. “He said, ‘Dad, you mean for 50 years you’ve been passing for black?’” Joseph admits that, strictly speaking, he has. But he’s not sure if he can or wants to do anything about that at this point.....
After recovering from the initial shock, Joseph began questioning his mother about their lineage. He discovered that, unbeknownst to him, his grandparents had made a conscious decision back in Louisiana to not be white, claiming they didn’t want to side with a people who were known oppressors. Joseph says there was another, more practical consideration: Some men in the family routinely courted black women, and they didn’t want the very public hassle such a pairing entailed in the South, which included everything from dirty looks to the ignominy of a couple having to separate on buses and streetcars and in restaurants per the Jim Crow laws.....
He’s wrestling with a riddle that will likely outlive him, though he doesn’t worry that it will be passed on to the next generation — his ex-wife is black, enough to give his children the firm ethnic identity he had and that he embraced for most of his life.
I have to assume that Kevin Hassett at TechCentral is being disingenuous in The Tax Policy of Hate. He professes puzzlement at how the tax policies of the current crop of Democratic candidates are simply clones of one idea, driven by the hate of George Bush.
"The hate of Bush is so powerful that it has even dominated Democratic tax policy. For example, Wesley Clark announced his tax plan in a speech on Wednesday, and the details were oddly familiar. Like just about every other Democratic candidate, Clark has proposed an enormous tax hike. And what form does that tax hike take? Why the same form chosen by his competitors. Clark would roll back the tax reductions that President Bush passed for those taxpayers who make more than $200,000 per year....I submit that it is neither extraordinary nor improbable, but simply an expression of the political operating system currently being run by the Democratic candidates. Like all operating systems there are certain root assumptions running in the program. We only need to see the input to understand the output."The Democratic candidates each studied the tax code and the economy and reached precisely the same conclusion: The way to improve the world the most is exactly to reverse the tax policy of George Bush. Such a convergence of answers is extraordinarily improbable.
What needs to be asked is exactly what Democrats are fighting over. Unless the current trends in Iraq and the Economy suffer catastrophic reversals, the Presidency in 2004 will remain with the person who currently holds the job. The only way Iraq and the Economy can be turned around at this point would be if the United States were to suffer a second terrorist attack at or beyond the level sustained on September 11. In that case, the Presidency becomes a full-court war Presidency and remains beyond the reach of the Democratic Party for the rest of the decade.
No, what's being fought over by the "Amazing Shrinking Gang of Nine, Eight, Seven, Six..." is the leadership of the Democrats -- the position of 'First Loser.'
In order to become the Democrats' annointed First Loser, the candidates must appeal not to the American People en masse. They are irrelevant to this quest. No, the Democratic "winner" will be the one who most successfully attracts the greatest number of energized, committed Bush Haters. As a result, there can only be a scorched-earth program for the "Bush Tax Cuts."
Indeed, scorched-earth HateBush programs are the only programs that can be run on the Democrats Mainframe. Why? Because the Democrats' IT Department has installed an operating system best known as "MicroDem." And, as we have learned over and over, any operating system with the word 'Micro' in it is pre-ordained to be full of security holes, ridden with viruses, and destined to crash at a moment's notice.
The Once and Future Face
of the Democratic Party
It seems that every fortnight, Michael Moore, like some early precursor of Jabba the Hut or Latter-Day ambulatory version of Larry Flynt, manages to slurp up another rich greasy gobbet of publicity. He does this by running his time-tested con for enriching himself, the large lie masquerading as “Moore Truth.”
Leftists and liberals and Democrats throughout the country suck down these lies because they are, by now, addicted to The World According to Michael Moore. Like heroin addicts, they constantly need Moore to feel ‘normal.’ Even more, they need Michael to up the dose by providing ever more outrageous lies for them to skin-pop or mainline. It’s the only way they can get off. And while it is always unsettling and degrading to see a junky getting nasty and oozing while searching for his angry fix, it seems to be a fixed part of our popular culture that we will be exposed to this with distressing frequency as the run-up to the 2004 elections (to be heralded by the release of Moore’s next and even more degrading film).
Moore’s fans are addicted and as anyone who has known a junkie has learned: “Once the needle goes in, it never comes out.” Moore too is addicted. Addicted to his own fame and to the wealth that it brings him as he pushes ever more potent levels of his junk on his fans. This is not surprising since the pusher and the junk are forever locked in “the algebra of need.”
But what is surprising is the vitriol poured on Moore by those who see through his con. Let Moore eruct on the political meaning of Chinese Checkers and a thousand blogs and commentators erupt to condemn him. They rail and bluster. They enumerate his lies (and they are legion), and they catalog his sins against rationality -- numberless. They even criticize his films and provide worth to that which is worthless.
This is the wrong stance to take. This is a deep and abiding political error. This is something that must be resisted at all points and at all times.
The only way to use Moore is to “Let Moore be More Moore.”
Let him run loose across the screens and pages of the society. Let him hang from the ceiling of our culture and drip green over all below. Let his films be shown against the walls of buildings in the inner cities. Let every magazine cover in the known universe put his picture on its cover under the banner headlines: THIS IS THE FACE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY or MICHAEL MOORE: WHAT HE IS YOU WILL BECOME or MOORE MEANS MORE FOR YOU.
There should be a nationwide agreement that Michael Moore’s face and body should decorate billboards on all major highways to a level of density that it is impossible to escape his visage and his fashion sense, all with the slogan: MOORE IS THE VERY MODEL OF THE MODERN MAJOR DEMOCRAT or A VOTE FOR A DEMOCRAT IS A VOTE FOR THIS MAN.
Recordings of Moore’s reedy and whining pronouncements should be played at the beginning and end of every NPR or PBS broadcast right after their self-serving moments of silence for men killed in Iraq.
McDonalds needs to sign Moore to a Superbowl ad whose tag-line reads, “I never met a dictator or a cheeseburger I didn’t like.”
The NRA should quit grumbling and get with the program. Large Michael Moore shooting ranges should be endowed in all the states. Large targets and free Ammo Fridays.
MTV needs to shelve its current roster and put the films and film clips of Michael Moore into heavy rotation for the next 13 months.
In short, there needs to be an unremitting campaign to associate Michael Moore’s face, body and voice with the Democratic Party.
What we want is for every voter in every booth in every polling station next November, to gaze at the ballot and see Michael Moore’s face and form wavering in front of it saying: “Do you want some Moore?”
So far the opposition's only resonance with the American people follows from its line about national self-interest (i.e., better to spend the money here at home on Americans who appreciate it). But if the administration will counter that mantra and daily explain why Iraq is the landmark event of the last 20 years, then these new shameful Copperheads [*Emphasis added. See below] will evaporate as the economy improves and Iraq is stabilized, leaving the Democratic party in the same state of bitter disarray that followed the catastrophic McGovern bid in 1972, which also offered angry protests but no concrete alternative policy.Removing dictators and implanting democracies, after all, used to be just as much a Democratic idea as was the use of force to ensure national security in a world of dangerous and criminal tyrants. But now the sorry crop of would-be presidents resembles Republican antiwar contenders circa early 1939, who would have been outraged had we agreed to join Britain in stopping a nascent Hitler in Poland and France. We can imagine that the logic of the present hysteria would have led a Howard Dean and company in the dark days of early 1943 to hold press conferences damning those who got us into North Africa or the skies over Germany ("What do all these unnecessary B-17 deaths have to do with December 7?")
-- Victor Davis Hanson in "The Event of the Age"
Who were the original Copperheads? Here's a definition with disturbing parallels:
Copperheads "Peace Democrats"Reference:Copperheads
Republican Abraham Lincoln was able to win the 1860 presidential election largely because the Democratic party had torn itself into several factions and could offer no united opposition. In the North the Democrats divided into two factions- the War Democrats and the Peace Democrats. Neither group agreed with the way the Republican administration conducted the war, but the War Democrats at least supported the fight for the Union.The Peace Democrats were opposed to the war and would have accepted a negotiated peace resulting in an independent Confederacy. Most Peace Democrats were from the midwestern states of Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, but political dissent was widespread throughout the North. Midwesterners had close economic and sentimental ties with the South, and many of them bitterly opposed the Union's war against what one of them called "the injured, incensed, downtrodden people of the South."
In 1861, Republicans started calling antiwar Democrats "copperheads", likening them to the poisonous snake. By 1863, the Peace Democrats had accepted the label, but for them the copper "head" was the likeness of Liberty on the copper penny, and they proudly wore pennies as badges.
The Copperheads mounted a forceful and sustained protest against the Lincoln administration's policies and conduct. The most popular of the Copperheads was Democratic Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham, who in 1862 introduced a bill in Congress to imprison the President. Instead, Vallandigham and a host of other Democrats, including judges, newspaper editors, politicians, and antiwar activists, were arrested and imprisoned without trial on the orders of Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton, who had decided to take off their gloves in dealing with persons "guilty of any disloyal practice".
Fascinating Fact: At the 1864 Democratic convention, Vallandigham persuaded the party to adopt a platform that declared the war a failure and called for negotiations with the Confederacy.
An upclose and personal message from Jeff Bezos of Amazon from the omniverous online retailer's home page:
We'd prefer having the video of Jeff Bezos discovering the power of the "Resistojet" up close and personal, but for now we'll settle for spending even more money at Amazon.
What elements make up a path to a third way in contemporary American politics? It is more than self-evident that millions of citizens are, to say the least, disenchated with the two major options presented to us at election time. It is manifest that "There's something happening here. / What it is ain't exactly clear."
Or, at least it was unclear yesterday. Today, in a detailed and insightful mediation, Michael Totten responds to a bit of predictable Timesian blather by James Atlas, with an internal checklist of what he does believe. His conclusion is:
"So when James Atlas at the New York Times says we liberal hawks are turning into conservatives, I have to say sorry, but no. Foreign policy is one subject among many. I may have a neocon wrench in my toolbox, but my liberal and libertarian tools are awfully useful, too. Neoconservatism may have its virtues, but Independence is better."He's correct. But of more interest are the steps by which he gets there, and the issues he illuminates en route.
Read the rest at: An Inquiry into Neoconservatism (Updated)
Monsters, Gregg. Monsters from the Id.
“You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to believe that Web logs are to some extent a function of the id. They come out so fast and so unedited they often express our feelings more accurately and even deeply than more carefully wrought writing. This is their blessing and their curse." -- Roger Simon
Godwin's Law prov. [Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."
Last week Gregg Easterbrook, the New Republic’s blogger, decided to decapitate Quentin Tarantino’s new blockbuster Kill Bill, using the bluntest tool in a film critic’s chest -- a bleat against the increasing levels of violence in cinema. But along the way he had the thought that increasing violence in films might, just might, be associated with the urge to make money in Hollywood. At that point he sent his brain out for a burger, but his body continued typing. While his brain was on a break, he wrote:
"Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else by promoting for profit the adulation of violence?”Then, with his brain still out to lunch, Easterbrook, as he puts it,
“.... worked on this alone and posted the piece. Twenty minutes after I pressed 'send,' the entire world had read it. When I reread my own words and beheld how I'd written words that could be misunderstood, I felt awful."It was, of course, too late for feelings. The whole world had read it and the whole world had understood it. Reaction was swift, sure, and ruthless. It was heightened when, once Easterbrook had understood that he had, perhaps, “miswritten,” he failed to post an UPDATE along the lines of “Errr, well, what I really meant to say was...” but waited several days before issuing a Non-Apology Apology.
By the end of this week the item had soared out of the Blogsphere and roosted in the major media where the larger autopsies of Cyberspace Bloopers are performed. Chief among these was the Saturday morning LA Times column “Regarding Media: If it sounds like anti- Semitism, maybe it is” by Tim Rutten which gives the best encapsulation of the story to date.
In the meantime, ESPN (as Jeff Jarvis notes) is bent on proving yet again that media corporations are even dumber than their employees, slunk up onto the net to remove Easterbrook as a writer and as a presence on their web site. While this may have seem like a good idea to ESPN's challenged intelligence at the time, the stage is no set for a rousing Web-wide discussion of Free Speech.
But what has yet to make the wires is the back story to Rutten’s column, the transcript of the conference-call-cum-symposium on the issue, conducted in camera on Friday. This secret conference call included Gregg Easterbrook, Roger Simon, Tim Rutten, and Glenn Reynolds (without whom no discussion of the greater meaning of the Blogsphere is allowed to take place.) Although all involved took the pledge of confidentiality, nothing is really secret on the Net except the truth.
Here at American Digest, through unindicted co-conspirators, we have obtained a transcript of that high level conference. In the interests of keeping leaking at the top of the nation's to-do list we are making public some choice excerpts from that "chat:"
Easterbrook: "How ironic that a simple and devoutly Christian New Republic scribbler with no ambition beyond a modest measure of 250,000 unique visitors a day should out of a clear sky find his blog besieged by an army of fellow creatures, all grimly determined to be of service.""I have confessed, abased myself, and apologized with automated email responses. And yet, always in my mind I seem to feel the creature is lurking somewhere close at hand, sly and irresistible, only waiting to be re-invoked for blather, spew, and blogacide. I have come to hate the Blogsphere"
Tim Rutten: What, to your mind is, the "Blogsphere"
Gregg Easterbrook: "A single machine, a cube 20 miles on each side."
Prof. Glenn Reynolds: "Why total potential here must be nothing less than astronomical!
Roger Simon: "Nothing less. The number 10 raised almost literally to the power of infinity."
Rutten: “ Gregg, what is the most important thing you have learned about the Blogsphere?
Easterbrook: "A blogger doesn't need brains. Just a good loud voice."
Prof Reynolds: “Like a chain saw, it can hurt you real quick if you get stupid around it.”
Simon: "If you refuse to issue an ‘UPDATE:” the next attack on your Blog will be more deadly and more .... brutal."
Rutten: "How do you know that?
Simon: "Know? I seem to visualize it. I... if you wish, call it a . . . .premonition."
Easterbrook: But how can you know these things, O Chef of the Future?
Simon: "Remember, Easterbrook, anti-Semitism is an invisible being that cannot be disintegrated with atomic fission, much less a non-apology apology."
Easterbrook: "But, Roger, I was talking about money, not Jews."
Simon: "Statements about money and Jews tear can tear blogs apart here on the planet of the Forbidden Posting."
Easterbrook: "That's true enough. But any statement stupid enough to survive 3 billion electron volts of pure Web flames would have to be made of solid nuclear material. It would sink of its own weight to the center of this planet."
Simon: "Well, you wrote it yourself and blew it out your capture buffer!
Easterbrook: "There's your answer and my new story. I'll say, "My brain must have been renewing its molecular structure from one second to the next. I dimly remember typing “Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money...” and then pressing send and thinking ‘You ought to see my new mind. Up there in lights. Bigger than Glen’s now." That's it and I'm sticking to it.
Rutten: “I don’t want to follow that because it leads to the question of medication and I don’t write on mental health issues. Besides, my newspaper is looking plenty crazy already. Mr. Simon, could you sum up Mr. Easterbrook’s issues?
Simon: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. It is simplicity itself. Easterbrook was too close to the problem and his Thorazine hadn’t kicked in. The Web creators had completed their project. Big machine ... no external censors and no internal compasses . . . true non-disintermediated spew at the touch of the Send button! But the Web creators forgot one thing...."
Rutten: "Yes, what?
Simon: "Monsters, Tim. Monsters from the Id! Easterbrook was warned to UPDATE, he didn’t, and now he's paid. Let his blog be deleted from a billion bookmarks.
Rutten: “But what does this mean for the future of the Blogging machine?
Prof. Reynolds: "Nothing! It means nothing, you fool! Easterblog is a bug not a feature. I CRUSH IT! Blogging is THE BIG MACHINE! "8,000 cubic miles of relays. Enough power for a whole population of creative geniuses. Operated by remote control, operated by the electromagnetic impulses of individual Blogging brains! It will, dare I say it, RULE THE WORLD!"
Rutten (Quietly setting phaser to ‘stun’) : "To what purpose?”
Prof. Reynolds: "Purpose? Purpose? Unfortunate plebeian scribe on dead trees! Once perfected my ultimate BLOGGING MACHINE will instantaneously project, from any blogger, solid blather to any point on the planet! Yes, any insight, memory, whine, spew or bad concept they can keyboard will be known to all for all time. For any purpose, ANY PURPOSE! Blogging is the Philosopher's Stone of Publishing. Publication by mere thought without any thought. Easterbrook is merely ahead of his time. Why Easterbrook is the living incarnation of Days of Future Past! (Which remains one of my all time favorite albums)"
Simon: "But like you, Reynolds, Easterbrook forgot one deadly danger. His own subconscious hate and lust for self-destruction. He forgot those mindless beasts of his own subconscious! And so those mindless beasts of his subconscious had access to a machine that could never be shut down. Don’t you see, Reynolds? Your BLOGGING MACHINE is the secret devil of every soul on the planet all set free at once to blather and spew and slur! And kill careers!”
Easterbrook: “But...but.... all I did was hit the send button before pulling my head out of my ass.”
Simon: "You still refuse to face the truth."
Easterbrook: "What truth?”
Simon: "Easterbrook, that thing you wrote. It's you."
Easterbrook: "Oh, God! You’re right! My evil self is in my send buffer and I have no power to stop myself!
Easterbrook (as the posting spews all over known Cyberspace and causes the servers at the New Republic to crash while the “letterstotheeditor@newrepublic.com” mbox) explodes: "I deny you, foul posting! I GIVE YOU UP!
Prof. Reynolds: ‘I’ll link to that.”
Take a deep breath because you'll need it to read the title of Popular Science's The Visualization of the Quantification of the Commodification of Air Travel:
Your every whim and wish, your every decision and opinion and complaint probed and parsed by the airline executives whose very future depends upon their ability to understand you —you, the paying customer and captive creature. Your shape, your weight, your feelings about a packet of pretzels insufficient to feed a gerbil: These are their science and their business. So too the gases you emit, the diseases you carry. The airlines crave intel on your food allergies, your tolerance for G-forces and your propensity for air rage. They must know how your body holds up in low humidity and low air pressure and heightened radiation. Their thirst for knowledge is almost unquenchable, their research effort so vast as to approach futility. "Outside of lab rats," says industry consultant Michael Planey, "airline passengers are the most analyzed subjects in the world."And enjoy the entire article. A checklist of the airline industry's unremitting campaign to convince every American that there is no point and no reason to fly anywhere, ever.The following is a distillation of what the airlines know about us, their lab rats. It's a breathtaking, though at times vertigo-inducing, view.
Enjoy the flight.
Yes, "bad." A complex moral position in a Tarantino film. He's really wrestled with the definition of "bad," hasn't he.One of these days he'll make a movie where the hero kills a kid. And if it gets cut from the final release, he'll hang on to a copy so he can run it in his home theater, and sit in the middle of the room with a bucket of popcorn in one hand and his personal pink crayola-stub in the other. James Lileks' Bleat
The truth beyond this is that Tarantion would see to it that sooner or later this was released as the Director's Cut. And, of course it would be wildly successful. American's wince at the costs of a real war, but shell out gladly for carnage simulated to a super-fine level of granulation. Didn't see that decapitation clearly enough? Hey, here it is from another angle in slow-mo.
Depressing as it may be, the reality is that we've finally, in our search for a perfect and secular world, walked blithely into the land where a great many internally driven moral compasses point in only one direction -- Down.
One of the many dubious fruits of an ever-expanding search for the limits of personal liberty. Why there is a search is curious. Certainly it is well-known that liberty has no limits in present-day America beyond "Your right to smoke ends 150 miles from where my nose begins."
A smoke-free society that shells out hundreds of millions for simulated-snuff films. Yes, that's the goal. Isn't it?
Mark Steyn's forward-looking loss statement for the Democrats -- Desperate Dems no match for Arnie:
Nazi! Racist! Don't forget Florida! Here's Bill Clinton! It's not much of a message, is it? And, if the party's short of ideas, it's even shorter of stars. The fact that in the most populous state in the nation the two leading Democrats are Gray Davis and Cruz Bustamante is as telling as anything. The gubernatorial pool is where you look for presidential talent, and right now their only star governor is Jennifer Granholm, who can't run for president because she was born in British Columbia. That's why in Thursday's debate half the presidential candidates are sad-sack senators dulled by decades of deal-making and Beltwayspeak and the other half are goofs and oddballs. The shortage of talent is so severe they've had to parachute in Wesley Clark, a man who was playing Republican fund-raisers and waving pompons for Bush and Cheney the day before yesterday. Gen. Clark's star power seemed to have dimmed to a 30-watt bulb by Thursday. The Clark ''bandwagon'' is like those Gray Davis ''tightening'' numbers. Do you really think he'll make it through to New Hampshire?Oh, well. If I were a Dem, I'd go with Howard Dean. Even if he loses, he'll de-Clintonize the party along the way, which ought to be the most important priority. Otherwise, it's all down to Sen. Rodham Clinton in 2008 -- or, as Paul Maslin would put it, the triumph of the Hill.
Those two little blotches are a person and an automobile.
Click to enlarge
Eighty-Seven Billion dollars ... This is what the President is asking for. It is 100 feet tall, 250 feet long,ï¿Š and 125 feet wide. A stack of singles would be 28,998,000 feet, or over 5,492 miles, or a round-trip between Washington DC and Los Angeles, California. (2,650 miles, one-way).A Boeing 737-200 jet is 100 feet long. You could fit 2 of those jets nose to nose along the length of this pile, and have room to spare.ï¿Š$87 billion is more than all of the states' current budget deficits, combined.ï¿Š$87 billion is more than twice the amount we're spending on Homeland Security.
A masterful illustration of what $87,000,000,000.00 looks like. From Dave Faris at Crunchland. What is even more interesting is seeing how he gets there from one thin dollar.
Check the link and get a feeling for real folding money.
In the course of human events, there is a long list of disasters filed under "It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time." Following the landslide vote in California on Tuesday, there are many people here and around the nation that are praying the Recall proves to be one of them. They are the same people who in more superstitious times would be whistling through the graveyard humming:
There's something strange in your neighborhood
Who you gonna call?
Ghostbusters!
There's something weird and it don't look good
Who you gonna call?
Ghostbusters!
I ain't afraid of no ghost
I ain't afraid of no ghost
It's clear a couple of days after the Recall that there is something strange in the neighborhood, something strange and it don't look good -- for the Democratic Party, that is. And, in all likelihood, in time, for the Republican Party as well.
Daniel Henninger has an illuminating essay (To Find the Center, Turn Right ) in this morning's Wall St. Journal on the seismic shift that the recall election portends and, as far as he goes, he's correct in his analysis:
"...once the tectonic plates of this recall-cum-gubernatorial election stopped shifting, the one political monument that I saw lying in pieces was the traditional notion of just who and what constitutes a "moderate." As of Tuesday's reordering in California, I think the definition of political "moderate" has shifted seismically to the right...."... Arnold Schwarzenegger upended two other longstanding shibboleths--media bias and the "litmus test."
Media bias, long thought to be a cyborg that hunts down and destroys GOP candidates, may be morphing into a new engine of GOP voter turnout. And the single-issue litmus test (abortion, gun control, et al.), assumed to be a constant obstacle to GOP success, may also be finished. The overturned dumpster of moldy womanizing stories did not faze either evangelicals or women, the primary target. Among women, 43% voted for Mr. Schwarzenegger (and in this soccer-mom Disneyland, an additional 14% voted for the not-too-cuddly Mr. McClintock). "
Henninger is always an astute commentator on our politics and our culture, but for all that he is right in this article, he is not yet ready to take the next step. He's not quite ready to see that there's a new game in town.
His thesis is that one block of voters shifted from one side of the political spectrum to another part of that spectrum -- a blue shift instead of a red shift, if you will. From my perspective here in a small town on the Southern California coast, the mood Tuesday was more in line with the ee cummings poem that ends with, "listen: there's a hell of a nice universe next door, let's go."
You see, I think what the Recall portends for America across the next two national election cycles is a vast migration to an entirely new political party that is neither Republican nor Democrat. It doesn't have a name yet and it doesn't have a leadership either, but it is forming across the nation just as certain as the law of gravity.
In order to make his case for the center shifting to the right of moderate Republicans, Henninger studies and interprets the "exit polls." That's not a bad idea, and a lot of pundits are going to be popping off Exit Poll Powerpoint slideshows by the thousands in the coming weeks to buttress their positions. But, as we all know, Powerpoint is really beside the point. And reading Exit Polls or any other kind of polls is just our era's version of Arithmancy, Augury, The Tarot and other forms of divination. In the end, the only poll that counts is the one they count on election day. That poll tells us that the people of the previously staunchly Democratic state of California have booted out one staunch Democrat, rejected a paunchy one, and elected ... a hybrid Republican?
In the rooms where the leaders of the National Democratic Party party, the DJ is certainly spinning, "Strange days have found us / Strange days have tracked us down." And as everyone knows, you just can't dance to that song.
But if the Republicans are kicking back and lighting up stogies with Arnold at some Hummer tailgater in Anaheim, they'd better check the filler in those blunts. Because the same bell that tolled clearly for the Left and the Liberal Democrats on Tuesday will be heard by the Republicans once their festivities chill.
What the California Recall signals is not, to my mind, a shift from one party to the other, but a signal that, in a very real sense, the party's over for both parties.
Thinking back over the months consumed by the launching of the recall petition, the accruing of the signatures, the certification process, and the events leading up to the election itself, a dominant theme was "Isn't this just crazy, isn't it a circus, isn't it just so, so California?" And the answer was, "Why yes it is all that. All that and more. So what?"
The voters of California, in their astounding turnout of 7 million, will tell you what.
What it is is that there are a lot of people here in 21st century America who are fed up with a political structure built in 19th century America. Worse than that, much worse than that, they are bored with it. Bored, numb, disbelieving, untrusting, unenchanted and retroactively neither amused nor entertained. They know in their bones, and have known since September 11, 2001, that joke time is over. Up until now the popular way of expressing this deeply disgusted feeling with American politics was, whenever we have an election, to stay away in droves. And for the waning decades of the 20th century, this implicit "None-of-the-Above" vote grew larger.
Yes, we had the regular shirt-tearing plaints of the professional political establishment that it was horrible how fewer and fewer people voted. Yes, we suffered through the tawdry tedium of "Get Out the Vote" campaigns from the League of Women Voters to the banality of MTV video campaigns. The truth, however, was that both parties of the political establishment liked it the way it was.
The fewer people that voted, the easier and cheaper it was for them to load up the vans with the aged, the infirm, and the unionized, and truck them on down to the polls on election day. The fewer people who actively engaged in politics, the better the control of the professional political establishment over them. And the better the control, the more controllable the outcome. And the more predictable the outcome, the fewer the people who voted. As someone said a few days ago, "I try to become more cynical every year, but lately I just can't keep up."
What the Recall in California portends is that the current game in politics is scoreless, deep into extra innings, has few people in the stands, and is about to be called on account of increasingly severe seismic events across the political landscape. As Henninger notes in his metaphoric lead, California is used to living on the fault lines, and the Recall was one of them.
The untidy thing about Democracy is that, every so often, the people remember what it means and what can be done with it; that we can use this large and clumsy tool to change our fortunes, to deal us up "another future from a brand-new deck of cards." And every so often, it is the case that "politics as usual" makes the people so disenchanted and so angry that they begin to move in mysterious ways.
And that, rather than merely to the right, is where the electorate of California is moving. That's a death knell for the Democrats and it shouldn't warm the cockles of the cold Republican hearts either. Any movement on this level can only be, in the end, away from politics as usual and towards a new condition of Democracy. Only in California? Not at all. California may be crazy, loose and experimental but California, much more than the establishment enclaves of the East coast, controls the culture and determines which way the nation moves in the future.
William Gibson has written that "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." Well, the future has arrived in California and it doesn't look like the Democrats or the Republicans. I'm not sure what it looks like or what its name is, but I do know it is different, and I do know that the future will, because of what happened Tuesday in California, be very different than the future we had the week before. How do I know this? I'd like to say I've got the polls, and I've got the facts, and I've got the numbers. But I've got none of these things. I don't trust them anyway.
What I have got is a feeling, a feeling I haven't had for a very long time. But I remember when I did.
The last time I had this feeling this intensely was on December 3, 1964 when, as a very young man, I stood on the bricks of Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley and listened to a fiery and impassioned man say:
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!Last Tuesday, I felt that machine cough, sputter and start to wind down.
Maria: I can't believe it, it's like a dream. What's wrong?
Arnold: I just had a terrible thought: what if this is a dream?
Maria: Well then kiss me quick before you wake up.
-- Total Recall
Granted it is difficult to tell what a political wild-card will do once he ascends to power. Who could have known 2 days after Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California that he’d one day be President of the United States (other than Nancy and her astrologer, that is)? Who could have known that Jesse Venture would spend the better part of his tenure as Governor of Minnesota body-slamming himself into the tarmac at every opportunity (other than James Lileks and 145,252 bloggers locked inside Live Journal, that is)?
But with Arnold, we can see what he is about to do by looking at his past. Now that his Life Achievement Oscar is in like Flynn for 2015, he can relax and use his office to relive, revitalize and remake his movies in real life. Hey, wouldn’t you?
Yup, the best way to figure out what’s about to happen is to amble down to your local video store and check out every Schwarzenegger film they’ve got for an at-home Arnold festival. If you do, you’ll be in a Vulcan mind-meld with the new governor and nothing that’s about to happen will surprise you. After all, he knows the scripts and if his opponents do not, well they’d better scramble over to scripts.com and start boning up.
Let’s go to the video tape and see what’s in store for California.
Conan the Barbarian:
Long held by those with exquisite taste in films to be the best Arnold movie ever. A film in which the essential Arnold is first exposed (in more ways than one) to the world at large. A film that has too long been allowed to languish in B-movie purgatory as a two-fer-one with "Bucket of Blood" at Amazon.com. With the inaugural moment, Arnold will signal the touchstone of his political philosophy during a photo-op with the President:
George W Bush: Arnold, what is best in life?
Arnold: To crush Democrats, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the feminists!
Predator:
Wherein Arnold plays last man standing and uses primitive weapons to destroy an invasive alien species.
This film telegraphs that the borders down Mexico way are about to get a bit more dangerous to cross. Nobody sneaking into California can now really be sure that there isn’t some very large and heavily spiked tree trunk set to unload on them as they crawl through culverts. Flaming arrows following blood-curdling battle screams are going to keep San Diego up nights for some time to come.
Dillon: Simple set-up. One day operation. We pick up their trail at the border, run 'em down, grab ‘em and bounce them back across the border before anybody knows they were here.Look for razor wire bouquets from the Pacific to Nevada. Get long on companies that manufacture land mines.
Arnold: Whaddya mean "we"?
Batman & Robin’s Mr. Freeze:
This is an easy one. Those “essential” programs essential only to about one half of one percent of the population?
Freeze: I'm afraid my condition has left me cold to your pleas of mercyAs for the Indian casinos getting to keep their all their money?
Freeze: Tonight, hell freezes over!
Kindergarten Cop:
“Oh come on... STOP WHINING! You teachers are soft! You lack discipline! WELL I'VE GOT NEWS FOR YOU, YOU ARE MINE NOW! YOU BELONG TO ME!”Arnold has sworn to sift the crap out of the fouled sandbox that passes for public education in California.
Well, it is time to pass a note over the head of the local teachers’ union that says: JOKE TIME IS OVER.
Teachers’ Union: So who are you, man?
Arnold loads his shot-gun
Arnold: I'm the party pooper.
Prepare to hear the massive wails of tens of thousands of teachers working six hours a day and effectively seven months a year that they just don’t get ENOUGH MONEY for this part-time career.
Look for legions of underemployed and underbrained school administrators to start filing for early retirement at full pay before the frost is on the pumpkin.
Arnold’s tactics here will be simple and straightforward: The kids get the money and the milk and the cookies. Great teachers get a date and get kissed. The vast legion of slackers and freeloaders that comprise the Teachers Union get Schwarzenized. Well, not all of them. A couple of teachers walking around on stumps in every school will get those test scores soaring overnight. (And, no, he’s not going to yell at the little kids. He learned that lesson in the movie.)
Terminator, The:
Hasta la vista the car tax.
“Democratic party hacks. Old... powerful... hooked into everything. Trusted to run it all. They say they got smart. A new order of pork barrel. Then it saw all citizens as a piggy bank not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a millisecond: triple taxation.”Short form. It won't be back.
Terminator 2 -- Judgment Day:
Drivers Licenses for Illegal Aliens get taken away in an old-time strip search.
Arnold: I need your clothes, boots, your driver’s license and your badges!
Illegal: Badges? Badges? We don’t got to show you no steenkin’ badges!
Terminator 3 -- Rise of the Machines:
In which the Democratic Party of California and points east ceases to exist if it doesn’t get a clue, a candidate, a reason to live, and a witness in a nanosecond.
Bill Clinton: Put down your weapon! And the coffin! Please? ... Pretty please.? ... Hey, you into wife-swapping?”
Twins:
This is a toughy. It was such a short campaign it is hard to know who Arnold owes and who his cronies are. Obviously you wouldn’t want the Baldwin Brothers in charge of the State Liquor Control Board. On the other hand Arnold could demonstrate the magnanimity of victory by appointing Ariana Huffington and Gary Coleman as Safe Sex Ambassadors to the California Penal System and San Francisco, respectively.
Arnold: I don't know what the problem is, but I'm sure it can be solved without resorting to violence.
Red Sonja:
Arnold’s old pal, Brigitte Nielsen, is sent into the California Legislative Chambers to enforce compliance with a sword and a bustier. A win-win all around - - except for the ten aged senators whose Pacemakers explode on the first day.
Legislator: California is my land, all that pass through pay me tribute.
Red Sonja: (drawing her sword) Suppose I don't. Suppose instead I open that great, fat belly of yours?
Commando:
This is one of Arnold’s most instructive ‘taking care of business’ movies. It teaches that when he finds a bunch of thugs have kidnapped something dear to him, such as a state, it’s clobberin’ time. Look for him to make an impression on various legislative committees by sending around this 15 second outtake from his recent remake of Commando:
Arnold: Remember, Arianna, when I promised to kill you last?
Huffington: That's right, Arnold. You did!
Arnold: I lied.
Pumping Iron:
Arnold’s overall economic program has been foreshadowed by this film in which he plays, tellingly, himself:
“I don't have any weak points. I had weak points three years ago, but ... my goal always was, to even out everything to the point ... that everything is perfect. Which means if I want to increase expenditures a half inch, the state’s productivity has to increase. I would never make a program increase or decrease, because everything has to fit together, and all I have to do is get my budget routine down more perfect, which is almost impossible to do, you know. It's perfect already.”Those who find this too simplistic for their tastes can take solace that it is a vast improvement over Arnold's original economic theories as expessed in Hercules in New York:
Hercules: Bucks? Doe? What is all this zoological talk about male and female animals?
Jingle All the Way:
A brief perusal of this otherwise mercifully forgotten film instructs us on the method Arnold will use to “Just Say No” to special interests, no matter what they promise him.
Trial Lawyers: Hey, Pal, you want a Turbo Man for Christmas?
Arnold: Forget it, I'm not gonna sit on your lap. You guys are nothing but a bunch of sleazy conmen in Armani suits. You heard me right. Conmen. Degenerates. Low-lifes. Thugs. Criminals!
Trial Lawyers Association: In Sacramento them are compliments, Partner.
Eraser:
It won’t be enough to just stop new taxes from being force fed to Californians. We’ll expect Arnold to roll back the stone from our chests, even if he has to resort to extreme measures.
Agent: This is Arnold. He'll be handling your personal security.
California: My protection?
Arnold: New identity, relocation, I'll take you through it step by step.
California: What are you talking about? I'm not going anywhere!
Arnold: You're in an extremely high risk situation,California. That should've been explained to you.
Red Heat:
Tired of having the immense cost and abiding failure of the War on Some Drugs messing with your life? Arnold’s "Red Heat" has a program that will not only end the war on drugs, but put a little more cash back into the budget as well as clearing up the messy problem of career politicians.
Arnold: Chinese find way. Right after revolution, they round up all drug dealers, all drug addicts, take them to public square, and shoot them in back of head.
Advisor: Ah, it'd never work here. Politicians wouldn't go for it.
Arnold: Shoot them first.
The Running Man
Is this the first and last step into politics for Arnold. Las Vegas is currently running a pool to see how long it takes for the first committee to re-elect is formed. But will he run and if elected will he serve?
Gray Davis: You bastard! Drop dead!
Arnold: I don't do requests.
Meanwhile, back on the set of Total Recall 2003:
Arnold: Where am I?
Johnnycab: You're in Sacramento.
Arnold: What am I doing here?
Johnnycab: I'm sorry. Would you please rephrase the question?
Arnold: How did I get this job?
Johnnycab: They held an election. You got in.
As low as it wants to go in order to get one more kid's attention and money. In Mike's List: ISSUE 72 Mike Elgan points to the way in which the AOL Disc Marketing Virus has spread to the rest of the marketingnoids that afflict the public. Their new targets? Children, of course:
In the old days, the disk-spamming industry meant that AOL was marketing to adults. Now, it's everybody -- including AOL -- marketing mainly to kids.This is, of course, a minor annoyance, but then our culture seems to be filling up with minor annoyances making for major headaches.Adults, after slaving over a computer at work for 12 hours aren't likely to grab a free CD at blockbuster and shout "Wow. A Free CD! I think I'll spend my evening exploring these exciting offers."
But kids, the marketing geniuses have learned, are easy targets for these giveaways. I went to the movies last night, and there was a CD glued to my bag of popcorn. The CD envelope was clearly targeting teenagers, trying to get them to install the disk and check out movie trailers and buy movie-related junk.
And why shouldn't the marketingoids go after kids using the AOL model? After all, the AOL chatrooms pioneered the proliferation of porn and inappropriate sexual suggestions to and between the young. DISCS4KIDS just a logical brand-tooling extension of the "more is better for you" mindset.
It seems strange to me that with all the frantic activity to control "Spam on the Net," nothing seems to be done about the Spam in our postal mailboxes, Spam dropped on our doorsteps (How many different Yellow Pages do you need?), and Spam shoved into our shopping bags, hands, and under our windshields.
In New York City, thousands of people stand around on streetcorners pushing flyers for everything from Pedicures to Laptops to Lapdances into your hands. The primary purpose of this, as is readily evident down the block, is "litter distribution." Yet nobody seems to be mounting a 'nationwide online campaign' to "Stop the Drop!" Nope, it would seem that Americans can put up with any method of dispersing marketing garbage into the environment as look as they don't have to delete Spam from the subject lines of their inbox every day.
The "AOL Disc virus" is just a place holder for vast foetid shoals of marketing detritus that sweeps over your daily life in a volume that will fill the most commodious recycling containers in the world. We've got the AOL disc virus everywhere, we've got the nationwide kid's scavenger hunt for the Oreo that turns your milk blue and makes you sort of rich. There's always more at the door.
Eliminate Spam in email? Otay! But don't stub your toe on those phone books on the way out the door to the local multiplex where you'll kiss ten bucks goodbye in order to sit through five commercials and sixteen previews before getting what you paid for.
Look for those popcorn boxes at the movies to contain Trojan Condoms -- the trial size -- soon. The only questions are when, and will they only be slipped in during R-rated film? Well, at first. But then, in order to "increase market-share" and imprint brands on children, look for them to show up in Disney films within the decade. Complete with a cute little booklet where Mickey shows you how to use them. Safe Sex and Popcorn. Let's do it "for the children."
"What we are witnessing is the beginning -- the early movement--in the death of the two-party system as we know it. This is a revolt of the pragmatic center. And that is a good thing for the American people because those parties and the media that feed on them have indeed become a form of nomenklatura. They depend on each other. They are the mutual gate keepers of an old and sclerotic bureaucracy from which their jobs flow in a system of patronage as elaborate as the Czar's. No wonder watching CNN tonight I felt as if I were watching a wake. They are threatened by what is going onï¿‘as they should be." -- Roger L. Simon: Mystery Novelist and Screenwriter
Slate inadvertently points towards a likely ACLU tactic for taking the Recall to court in Wanted: A Legible Voting Ballot.
A study carried out by USA Today and seven other newspapers in 2001 concluded that faulty design, not punch-card machines, was responsible for voters' confusion in Palm Beach County in 2000. Despite this finding, states have focused their election-reform energies on upgrading old punch-card machines to optical-scan systems or on implementing electronic voting. They have dismissed or ignored the butterfly layout's problematic design as an aberrationï¿‘a stupid mistake on the part of local officials.
Seems to me that any lawyer with a thirst to throw the Recall into the courts could just find a willing judge to agree with him that people are just too stupid to figure out an "illegible" ballot design.
ACLU: "Your honor, surely you can see that this design can only confuse and baffle voters with IQs less than room temperature. How can democracy be said to be fair if we haven't got 1,000 unemployed web designers throwing up 10,000 proposed designs for ballots before any election is allowed to take place. This design is a blot on democracy and may well cause the Democratic Party to lose!"
JUDGE DOH:"To lose! My God man you're right! Can't have that. This election is hereby placed in escrow until further notice!"
Why not? Isn't it clear by now that defeating the will of the people is only a matter of finding the right judge? After all, the ACLU were able to find three judges last month to agree with them that minority voters were too stupid to figure out punch-card ballots.
Now the argument will be that voters are too stupid to correctly because the ballot wasn't well-designed. Hey, somebody has got to protect voters who have managed to register while being utterly illiterate. Why not the ACLU?
Across the street they've nailed the curtains
They're getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
A perfect image of a priest
They're spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words
And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls
"Get Outa Here If You Don't Know
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row"
-- Bob Dylan
The California Recall Fornication Festival currently climaxing in minute-by-minute updates throughout the nation instructs us yet again in what our media expects of candidates: pseudo moral celibacy in thought, word, and deed stretching from the cradle to the grave.
It is of passing interest that while the "profession" of "Journalism" requires no moral celibacy on the part of scribes ( pride, envy, wrath, sloth, lust, avarice, and gluttony being required activities for advancement -- Current Champion: Courtesy Roger Simon), the position of the industry en masse is that none of the seven deadly sins are allowed to be present in a candidate for office. But since all this is well know, we will let this interest pass for the moment.
Our sermon for today is "What doth it profit a man to gain the office of dogcatcher or above, if he must bid adieu to his sexuality in late childhood?" It obviously has profited Gray Davis since he has no discernible sexuality whatsoever. Wrath would seem to be his sin, but wrath well hidden. With no photos of his frothing rage or tape of his highly pungent obscenity streams this sin gets a pass by the media. Besides since they really can't put it on the air in family hour, what good would it do? Indeed, the only sexually charged photo ops for Davis involve being seen with proven sexual predators of the Clintonian persuasion to enhance his prospects of clinging to his job. But since neither knows what the meaning of is is, another hall pass is issued by the media.
No, to be elected today a man (or a woman) must prepare at an early age to either leave no trace of a human existence, or determine never to have one in the first place. Like the pagan religions of antiquity or the cloistered Catholic orders that persist into our era, today’s politicians must be -- according to our media -- the last surviving virgins over 18 in the United States of America.
Of course, they must also be married and have children, although these can, on occasion, be rented.
So, a married, virgin priest (of any one of the six genders) is acceptable to media such as the Los Angeles Times and its co-conspirators, if they can be shown to have something like a family attached for photo ops.
In addition, such a person must be 'politically qualified.'
To innocent Americans weaned on the standard social studies classes served up in high school, these qualifications may seem to begin and end in the state of being a citizen. This is, of course, wrong.
'Political qualification' begins in high school when the aspiring virgin moves towards the priesthood by running for class office in place of puberty. It continues throughout the ensuing decades as getting elected takes the place of getting laid. With luck, the qualified virgin climbs the fund raising rungs and learns how to pass the hat -- and take the soft funds within or without the unmarked "giving envelopes."
Along the way, the virgin priest learns to respect the deacons and bishops and cardinals of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Patronage. In due course, he is rewarded with nifty clothes, drivers, security, free lunches, unctuous smiles, false friendship, and lessons in how to pawn any principle he may have for a mess of pottage.
Finally, sexless, graceless, bereft of conviction, with a hand full of gimme and a mouth full of much obliged, he has accrued enough markers to be boosted into office.
Much palaver ensues en route to his balsa throne. Much is made of his family, his upbringing, and little of his views and opinions since by then his views and opinions are what he is told to have. Indeed, they are what he has had since any vision or values or morals he once possessed were removed with his genitals about the time he received the required advanced degrees in either accounting, social work, or law. (Pick one or all three.)
During the ritual of his ascension, he eats the ritual meals of rubber chicken and an endless spectrum of ethnic foods, for there are as many food groups as there are victim groups. At these ritual meals he pronounces the approved prayers over the congregation. He assumes ritual poses with the leaders of the congregation. He blesses infants with a kiss. Various scribes examine his views via a ritual series of stimuli eliciting rote-learned responses surprising to no one. Should some small transgression (or even large ones) be discovered, mea culpas are extracted at lens point until all are assured the sexual organs have been sanded down to a nub.
Then he is placed on the sacrificial altar of the election and, if found, at last pure of any visceral or earthly taint he is elevated. Music is played. Balloons tumble. Hossanahs are raised. Oaths are administered.
And then his reign begins. He finally ascends into the capitol to sit upon the right hand of the State, hence to judge the special and the not-so-special interests. A man so pure, so bereft of any soul, so pure and white, so in aspect like Mister Rogers, so empty of any sexuality, that it is all he can do not to begin screwing everyone in the state in the first 24 or the last 24 hours of his reign.
A man, in short, much like the aptly named Gray Davis.
"The Mattel Agent Zero M Sonic Blaster 5530 fires compressed air with a deafening blast. Our measurements top out at 157 dB-above a level that can do permanent damage to the hearing of an adult. We rate the toy Not Acceptable."
Well, it's obvious that nobody asked a nine-year old boy. These days he'd rate it: "Very-cool-can-I-buy-it-I'll-pay-you-back-honest."
Jonah Goldberg at The Corner on National Review Online has crafted a short and sweet position paper on the "Leak" scandal that blew up over last weekend.
"I need to see more than what's out there to think this is anything like the big deal the press and the Democrats are making it out to be. I'm all in favor of having the Justice Department investigate. I'm all in favor of firing whoever did the leaking, if he or she did as the reports suggest. But it sounds like the leaker is dropping in rank and importance as is the transgression. Wilson's wife is a desk jockey and much of the Washington cocktail circuit knew that already.Terse, sensible and shows all the signs of turning out to be true.It seems to me that the energy driving this is A) Obvious Democratic opportunism and scandal-hunger B) Media opportunism as this is the first Bush "scandal" that isn't manufactured outside the White House (could someone explain what Bush did wrong on Enron again?) C) A burning desire to flesh out a fleshless storyline that the Bush White House clamps down on "dissenters" D) An even more burning desire to make Karl Rove into the Sid Blumenthal of this administration.
Which brings us to another issue: comparisons between this administration and the last. First of all, Rove is not Blumenthal for several reasons but the most important is that Rove's got real power. Blumenthal was a Tolkieneque Wormtongue at best and more likely a slipper-carrier. On the larger front, I will be able to take only so much sermonizing from liberals over this scandal considering the fact that the last White House knowingly filed false criminal charges against inconvenient employees (the Travel Office), invented new privileges and abused old ones to stonewall at ever turn (Bush is commanding full cooperating), and generally accused critics of every form of bad faith imaginable.
So yes, by all means investigate what I predict will be a very minor story. But let's not pretend the Republic is in danger.
I confess I didn't get the whole "huffing and puffing and blow the house down" tone of this story from the get-go. It seemed, as all these stories will seem in the current political climate, just another effort by the administration's enemies to find something, anything, that would bring it into disrepute. This has been tried numerous times in the past six months and it will be tried numerous times again in the run up to the election.
It is a variation of the 'Big Lie' technique -- spread a lie or series of lies often enough and loud enough and people will start to believe them no matter how small or far-fetched they may be. This variation may be called the "Lie Inflation Gambit" in which the opposition takes a small lie or even a small bit of truth and blows it up into something resembling the Pillsbury Doughboy attacking New York in the last few minutes of Ghost Busters. It lurches, it casts a big shadow, people run screaming from the onslaught -- but in the end it simply blows up and leaves a large mess behind.
We've seen the Yellowcake Inflation in which the famous 16 words occupied a part of pundit mindspace larger than Australia for several weeks. We've no doubt got a week or so more of the CIA Outing blatherfest to suffer through. But all in all I can't help thinking that the spectacle of the opposition spending the next year blowing frantically into an endless series of thin trial balloons is going to be, in the end, simply an undignified political posture from which to conduct an election. In the end, if you bend over to blow up tiny items to more than life size, the electorate just kicks you in the rear.
We polliwoggle.
We polliwiggle.
We shake in lakes,
Make wakes,
And wriggle.
We quiver,
We shiver,
We jiggle,
We jog.
We're yearning
To turn ourselves
Into a frog.
-- Douglas Florian
Thanks to the usual conjunction of overweening ambition and a Sahara of empty airtime, the American public has been sentenced to have its teeth set aflame with great regularity until the motley collection of Democratic primaries puts paid to the current Peanut gallery of Presidential hopefuls. Yes, due to the malign convergence of a media with far too much time and far too little news, we are doomed to be exposed for months without end to nearly a dozen Democratic candidates with way too much time and far too few policies. The result will be much like watching pollywogs contend for resources as the heat of the approaching elections shrinks their pond.
Since the news, much to the distress of serious people, always seems to focus 'where the action is,' this is the season where all electoral action is to be found watching the gelid mass of Democratic pollywogs struggle to transform themselves into one gigantic frog that the party hopes the electorate will kiss into Princedom come November, 2004. It has not been a pretty picture and it is going to get worse.
In the end, it will look a lot like pollywog ponds towards the end of a long, hot summer day, and smell about the same. But it is going to be "where the action is," and we're going to find it hard to avoid watching it -- even if the only sane response to watching the twentieth stump speech of Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, or Al Sharpton is poking out your pupils with red-hot needles.
When I was a boy I lived in a rural town in Northern California. Behind our house was a fallow field with a small stream cutting through it. In that stream, at certain times of the year, frogs mated and laid eggs which, in time, became pollywogs (aka "tadpoles"). Collecting a group of tadpoles was a simple matter of quick hands or a small net. Either way, my brother and I, in the manner of wanton boys, would collect a dozens in a jar on idle summer afternoons, and transfer them to a small pond we'd scooped out of the dirt a yard or so from the main stream and filled with water. Since there were a lot of pollywogs in the stream we always had a lot of pollywogs in our ponds. Once there, we'd sit down and watch what they did.
The pond always seemed to support a few pollywogs in fine style. They'd wriggle and wiggle about freely and dive into the cool mud. They seemed, for a time, happy in their new environment. They were free of all the challenges and dangers of the main stream. They didn't have to buck the current. They didn't have to worry about the large bass that seemed to hoover the stream bottom for pollywogs whenever they felt a bit peckish. The pond's water even had a warmer, more languid feel to it. It promised to support slime and pollywogs love slime. And they had the undivided attention of a small, but fascinated, group of supporters who had brought them together. The artificial pond to the side of the main stream seemed pollywog paradise.
Ah, but paradise on earth is a fleeting thing -- especially on a hot summer day. As the day wore on, the sun began to shrink the pool. (Sometimes aided by my brother and I with a couple of jars and the impatience of small boys.) As the pool got smaller and the water more shallow, the pollywogs began to find themselves in a pickle.
Less water meant less room. They began to bump up against each other. Even less water started to threaten them with annihilation. They began to crowd together with the weakest being forced, inexorably, towards the surface and the strongest starting to burrow as deep into the mud as they could.
If they could have found their way back to the main stream from the pond, they all could have survived. But they had been removed from the main stream by their erstwhile supporters and placed in the pond. They didn't know the way back and, by that time, lacked the means to get there. If they had been full grown frogs, they'd have reached safety with a few well chosen leaps, but they hadn't yet been transformed and so, even though they didn't know it, time had run out for them when they had let themselves be captured by those with a special interest in them and taken from the main stream.
Sometimes my brother and I would take pity on the mass of pollywogs now lumped together in a muddy, gelid mass, but often times it would get late in the afternoon and our mother would call us home to dinner. And so, we'd run off to a good dinner and a blameless sleep while our most of our pollywogs continued their metamorphosis into compost.
The next day we'd go out to the pool and glance with only a momentary interest at the previous day's pollywog pond. At times there would be a few left alive gasping and throbbing in a half-cup of water. We might take those and put them back in the main stream, but most of the time we'd just kick dirt over them to stop the smell, dig a new pond a few yards further down the main stream, scoop up some more pollywogs and begin anew.
And so it goes in this run-up in what has to be the most contested struggle for the Democratic nomination in memory -- which will be followed in short order by what will most likely be the most uncontested Presidential election in memory.
A lot of main stream commentary has now flowed over us about the struggle of the Democratic party to make itself acceptable to a wide majority of Americans. But this, to my mind, is not fresh water but hogwash.
The Democratic Party as it was in its salad days no longer exists. What we have instead is a rag-tag collection of extremely liberal and frankly leftist interest groups that have managed to hijack the name of the party for their own uses. The genius of Bill Clinton was to recognize that the Democratic Party had ceased to function as either Democratic or as a Party, and to heave enough towards the center in order to be elected once, and keep it centered enough to re-elect him to a second term. Without a Bill Clinton in office these last few years, the real nature of the Democratic Party as it evolved beneath the Clinton camouflage has reemerged to take control and to send up the pile of pollywogs that currently contend.
But what are they contending for? Surely it cannot be the Presidency since, no matter what current polls may say, there is no candidate among the pollywogs that can become anything other than a frog. And a frog will not defeat George W. Bush in 2004. The only rational goal any candidate can hope to achieve will be the leadership of the Democratic Party through becoming its chosen but hopeless nominee. And of the most likely victors, Kerry, Dean, and (only possibly as of this writing) Clark, none of these can be seen to have the vision or the character to hop the Democratic Party out of its shrinking pollywog pond and back into the main stream.
Indeed, the only hope currently on the national scene that could return the Party to the main stream and back into the Oval Office is the one Democrat that is known to have kissed a frog that magically turned into a Prince -- Hillary Clinton. The fact that her Prince reverted to a very large frog is beside the point in politics. The kissing of the Frog Prince is all that counts to today's desperate Democrats.
The only question for Hillary, who has been wise enough so far to stay out of the Pollywog Pond, is whether or not she will be foolish enough to challenge Bush in 2004 and lose, or will wisely wait until 2008 when the water will be less likely to dry up around her as she begins to find her way back to the main stream with a hop, skip, jump.
Now how much would you pay?
Today's Wall Street Journal relates a fascinating tale about a book that should be, from all signs, a winner in U.S., Through Digital Lens
Rick Smolan and David Elliot Cohen, the creative team behind the best-selling coffee-table book "A Day in the Life of America," have rejoined forces for another book, ending a legal dispute with their former publisher and a decade of giving each other the cold shoulder.Putting a digital spin on a publishing genre they helped define, Messrs. Smolan and Cohen are about to publish "America 24/7 ," a panoramic view of life in the U.S., as captured in more than 1,100 digital color photographs. The book, to be published next month by Pearson PLC's DK Publishing unit, is an enormously ambitious project. It distills more than 250,000 digital photographs taken during a week in May by an estimated 25,000 photographers, including 1,000 professionals outfitted with new digital cameras.
That means a "high concept" book by a team that has previously produced "a hit" coupled with a lot of grassroots' input and professional panache. It means a book produced to high values by DK, a house that knows how to make a book of pictures shine, that knows how to layout and produce a coffee table book at the top of that genre. What could possibly go wrong?
There's other good news about this book -- well, good news and bad news depending on how you look at it. First there's a digital gimmick that gives a nod to the rise of the Web in publishing: Consumers can upload a picture of their choice for the cover for only $5.99 at a web site and have a cover custom printed for their edition. Think of it, a book replete with images of America done by some of our best photographers with you picture of Aunt Nettie, Jimmy's new puppy, your sister's new baby, or your wife's great legs in brand new fishnet stockings on the cover. What's not to like about this? Second, Barnes and Noble has made this title their "lead Holiday book." Third, the publisher is claiming a print run of 400,000 copies against 320,000 orders. Fourth, a print and TV campaign is "being planned." Fifth, there will be the standard touring exhibit winding its way through the rocks and rills of middle America.
All in all, a stunning plan. What could possibly go wrong?
What could go wrong is that this is a book that is being published with a list price of $50.00. And, like so many others of its ilk, it can run aground on the shoals of instant remainderism due to the single fact that the entire trade book publishing industry simply cannot and will not look at in the clear light of day: the price of books fare exceeds their perceived value.
Perceived value is the key to the buying of books by ordinary people, and ordinary people not only think that books are overpriced, they are taught that they are overpriced by the publishing industry itself.
When a person decides whether or not to buy a book, the price is not the first thing they look at but the last. Other questions come first. Is it by an author I know? Is it about a subject that I am interested in? Is it beautiful to look at and handle? Does it promise me a great experience in reading or looking at it? If the answer is yes to those questions, the potential customer then looks for (sometimes with difficulty) the price of the book. When he finds it, the price goes into the balance not only against the level of attraction felt at that moment, but against an industry whose chief message to its customer over many decades is: "No matter what price you see here, you can get it cheaper somewhere else if you search hard enough or wait long enough." This is the magic moment in which the august industry of book publishing merges with the less august industry of the automobile sales industry. And the answer is often, "I think I'll look around a bit more" as the selected volume is slipped back on the shelf.
Book publishers know that their goods are vastly overpriced and will be more than happy to supply you with all the reasons, current and historic, for why this is so -- "it is a sale-or-return industry," "every book is a unique product," "shipping costs are out of control," paper or ink or printing or binding costs "simply cannot be contained," "magnesium futures have exploded," etc and so forth. And these things are all true. Also true are the unmentioned facts that many books are published that should never see the light of day; that many books have commanded advances that should never have been paid; and that, deep down, the book industry is saddled with a sales force and a sales machine that might have made sense when Eisenhower was President, but has absolutely nothing to do with how business is done in 21st Century America.
Nor do all these excuses alter the fact that many potential book-buyers are not at all attracted by the $25 hardcover novel, the $35.00 hardcover non-fiction release, or the $50.00 and going-up coffee table book even when you can put your own pan on the cover. When people look at most books with these asking prices they think, "Twenty-five dollars? Where?" and make a mental note to check the library or Amazon.com to see if they can get a deal. But mental notes are seldom worth the paper they are printed on and all too often they potential customer forgets the title and moves on to other items entirely. Everything the book industry has done to sell that book has come to naught through the final asking price.
America 24/7 for all the elements it has going for it will be easily rendered into another expensive failure this Holiday season through the very simple fact that it has simply priced itself out of the market. A fact that it shares with every other new book you can find on the shelves.
Less than a week into his political career, Wesley Clark is coming unclued. As stated in stunningly picaresque prose by Doc Searls in his entry: Wesley Clark Suicide Watch
If Wes Clark wants his campaign to snowball, he's going to need a lot more snow downhill than he's got right now. If he keeps scorching the grass under that snow, his ball's going to be rolling in dirt.Now Doc Searls has got to be one of the most sane and optimistic people on the Internet. I don't always agree with him, but that's not important. What is important is that Doc Knows Net as few others do. If he thinks the Clark campaign has the sniffles, it's pretty sure that the campaign has contracted walking pneumonia and just hasn't gotten the results back from the lab.
This particular Clark campaign cockup [Follow Doc's links] involves shutting down a number of "Draft Clark" websites in order to engulf and devour and centralize, centralize, centralize the message.
Once a general with a command and control Jones, always a general with a command and control Jones. It would seem that Clark is a case of "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
Ah, well, I'm sure the Dean campaign could always use a few more disaffected web heads to row his boat merrily down the stream.
Dean to Dems: My way or the highway.Tucked away at the bottom of an interminable feature in the LA Weekly (Out of Left Field), comes this glimpse into Howard Dean's scorched earth plan. Asked about the Clark campaign's chances, Dean said:
"I mean, we've already got 39,000 people working for us all around the country . . . I really do believe - and I think about this - I want to get this nomination, and if I don't . . . these kids are not transferrable. I can't just go out and say,"Okay, so I didn't win the nomination, so go ahead and vote for the Democrats." They're not going to suddenly just go away. That's not gonna happen."Does this mean that Dean's current Online Children's Crusade will transmogrify into some sort of Internet-powered hybrid of the Ross Perot and Ralph Nader campaigns?
Pointer via Tacitus
The good news is that college will "only" cost you your first ten years salary. The bad news is that you'll have to spend an extra 36 bucks to attend.
Worried that class sizes are getting to big and that students aren't getting enough out of lectures, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is requiring students to pay $36 for a small, wireless handheld transmitter for giving feedback and answering questions.We see a huge business opportunity for students that would simply wear a couple of dozen of these gizmos to class for his fellow students.To connect with students in vast auditoriums, professors sprinkle multiple-choice questions through their lectures. Students point and click their transmitters to answer, pushing blue buttons numbered 1 through 9 on their keypads. A bar graph appears on the professor's laptop, showing the number of right and wrong answers; teachers can slow down or backtrack when there are too many wrong answers.
There is one major downside, at least for students. The transmitters are registered and assigned a number, so it's possible to keep track of who is showing up and who is skipping class. As we dimly recall from our raucous university days, one of the few upsides to taking one... [Gizmodo]
Photo of UMass-Amherst's wireless handheld transmitter
Photo of one of those wireless handheld "Personal Response System" transmitters that are being used in large lecture classes at UMass-Amherst (and apparently in some classes at Rutgers University, as well). [Gizmodo]
"Feelings
Feelings like I wanna deck you
Feelings like I gotta get you
Out of my life"
In a spontaneous moment during a Boston TV station's interview " Dean Brings Campaign To Kerry's Turf," Howard Dean apparently forgot cameras were rolling.
"I have met with Wes Clark a number of times, that's how I know him. And I like him, and I think he's smart. He'll bring a lot to the Democratic field," said Dean. "I'm not going to say what we discussed."
Dateline: Moab, Utah
He’d hunted big game for years all over the United States. Hunting was a way of life to him. But, in all those years, he’d never shot a buffalo. He’d put his name in for the lottery that gave out yearly licenses to shoot buffalo, but year after year the winning number had eluded him. As he failed, again and again, his need to add a buffalo, an American bison, to his life bag grew to obsessive proportions. Finally, he could stand it no longer. He determined that he would buy a couple of young buffalo, raise them, and then shoot them. It seemed like a plan.
When the buffalo purchase was completed the question arose about where these buffalo were to be raised. He wasn’t a rich man and the cost to two buffalo maxed out his credit cards. The only viable option was to raise them on his front lawn in Moab, Utah. Accordingly, the buffalo were delivered and put out to pasture, or “out to lawn” as the case may be.
Besides grass the lawn also contained, courtesy of his kids, a couple of soccer balls. Shortly after the buffalo became his lawn ornaments, he was out walking among them when one of them discovered a soccer ball and butted it over to him with its nose. Impulsively he kicked it back towards the other buffalo, who passed it to the first buffalo who butted it back to him. An hour or so of passing and kicking the soccer ball between man and buffalo ensued.
When he went out on his lawn the next morning, they were waiting for him. One seemed to be playing ‘midlawn’ while the other hung back by the water trough which had become some sort of goal. The forward buffalo butted the ball towards him. Without thinking he returned the kick over the head of the forward. No good. With a speed belying its bulk, the defensive buffalo moved quickly and butted it through his legs to the porch. When it bounced off the barbecue, they seemed to do a brief victory prance. The game was afoot.
Day after day, week after week, the strange lawn ritual with the soccer ball went on and on. In truth, he had long since pulled far ahead of the buffalo in goals, but what do buffalo know about keeping score?
In time, however, the hunting season came around. He looked out of his house on the first morning and saw the buffalo waiting for him, the soccer ball in front of the forward, the defensive buffalo pacing slowly back and forth by the water trough. It came to him then that he could never shoot them. It would spoil the season -- and the soccer season, in the deserts of Utah, is never really over.
Soon after this on a hot afternoon he looked out his window and discovered, much to his delight and his neighbors’ shock, that the two buffalo on his lawn were indeed male and female.
Now it is two years later and he has four buffalo on his lawn. He doesn’t hunt anything anymore. Says he’s lost the taste for it. His old hunting buddies come by every so often and razz him about the buffalo.
“You started with two and couldn’t shoot them,” one says. “Now you got four and next year you’re gonna have five. What are you going to do then?”
He went to his garage and came back with a basketball.
"Those who spent a lifetime pasting the US as a patriarchal, racist, fascist theocratic enemy, haven't recovered from finding there actually is such an entity out there primed and willing to kill. After an initial stumble of, "Wha..? So that's what that actually looks like..." they shook their heads and attached even stronger blinders. Can't have a whole lifeview crumble just because of reality. But that is fine. They may weigh us down, but we'll pull ahead anyway because part of what we're about is letting fools be fools."Still, isn't there something about not suffering fools gladly?
”My dad says he first saw a contrail in 1947. He was walking with friends down a street in St. Louis. That was forty-four years after the Wright Brothers' flight, twenty years after the Spirit of St. Louis touched down in Paris. My dad was eleven then. I asked him about it earlier this year and he recalled a streak of pure white and a low rumble. A tiny plane atop the expanding line. I imagine my father and his chums standing there, a bit slack-jawed. Crewcuts, white t-shirts and denim pants with the cuffs rolled up to show plenty of sock. Chins up. Squinting. They knew this must be a jet airplane -- they'd read about jets and had even seen images of them in magazines and on newsreels. They stood there until the plane was gone, until the clang of a streetcar out-decibled the fading jet, until the odd white line had slipped back into the ether.” -- Contrails - Matt Rasmussen /Orion
He sticks in his thumb, and finds that it's dumb. When he's not bleating into the dry Minnesota wind, James Lileks can often be found hanging over the Backfence: Say goodbye to that American pie -- it's all dry
Singin' this'll be the day that I die / This'll be the day that I dieCheery lads, eh? I've always wondered what prompted the Good Old Boys to belt out this assertion of imminent mortality. Think back to your own high school days, when perhaps you found yourself out with some people you didn't know as well as you thought you did. You're in the woods, or by the lake. You had no ride home. The driver, who is a friend of a friend of a friend and three years older than everyone else and doesn't go to school, has started shouting WOOOOO! for no good reason. Then he starts singing "This'll be the day that I die!" over and over again. And he wants everyone else to sing it, too. Go home? he grins, flicking his Bic. We're just gettin' started!
This morning these two images were presented next to each other on the Yahoo News Photo Site:
The engraved granite plaque honoring Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where he gave his 'I have a Dream' speech nearly 40 years ago.
Workers move the Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the State Judicial building in Montgomery, Alabama
“I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”
-- Martin Luther King, “I Have a Dream” -- Fortieth Anniversary on This Day
Just a sample of the full page. Click on the "this" below for the full effect.
The must read comic of the day, week, month.Thanks to Cold Fury for lighting the way to The Lemon's brilliant depiction of the current news cycle.
Who needs the Onion - which is now mired to the wheel-wells in the Doonesbury fever swamp of tired old liberal orthodoxy feebly masked as satire - when you have stuff like this at the Lemon?In case you didn't notice, he's right about The Onion as well. Too bad, they had such nice aspirations.
Excerpts from a collection at:
As Brooklyn Slowly Drunkened (Ftrain.com)
On the street people were shadows and silhouettes, voices and fragments of bodies illuminated by moving headlights. Souls passed in darkness, voices in Spanish and English, cigarette ends bobbing from invisible mouths.World New York: The Great North American Blackout 2003"So much for the open container law," said my neighbor, popping a can. The only noise was human, and the water-rush sound of freeways. Doors slammed, the ball bearings of passing bicycles clicked, shoe leather scraped the ground. One plane, not a dozen, moved through the black sky, the moon hanging, waxing, orange-tinted.
All the bars were packed. People ignored the open container law and the cigarette ban with impunity, as they stood outside and packed the inside, joking and horsing around. There is a bit of a "so what?" attitude going around, but I'll see if it holds if the power does not come back on before morning.Fireland | stupid fucking electricityMany bars stayed open late into the evening, including Enid's on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint. Candles lit the room, the ice bins were full, and a gambling pool had been started up. A dollar per guess: when will the electricity be restored in the neighborhood? The place was packed, and jovial, with that snow-day or rainstorm kind of giddiness you'd normally see in a schoolroom. Get-togethers planned before the blackout went on without changes. A small child-sized record player put out tinny music suited to the low-fi technological environment.
And then that stupid guy who dragged out his generator and deafened the neighborhood so he could keep ESPN2 up and running. When the time comes, you will be the first I hunt for food, I thought, siphoning gas out of the Le Sabre next door.NY Daily News: The subways: A special hell
An uptown 4 train got caught north of 34th St. with dozens of 7- and 8-year-olds from the New Settlement day care center aboard."The kids were freaking out," said Danielle Dalia, 37, a secretary for the United Federation of Teachers, who was also on the train. "They were hysterical, crying and screaming."After about an hour, they were ordered to get off the train and walk along the tracks to 42nd St. They made it, but it was a tough haul."Everyone started getting hot," said Jennifer Romagno, 21, of Queens. "People were passing out. People started pushing."
There was also confusion and panic after the motorman pried open the doors of the L train that Ana Sorio was on and led passengers into the tunnel."You could hear the rats running around," she said. "Children were falling on top of each other. People were screaming. Old ladies were crying."
Nuri Urena, 38, clutched her 18-month-old daughter Cristina in one arm and braced herself against the tunnel wall with her free hand. A fellow rider carried her stroller."It was very dark. It was very hot. I thought I was going to die," she said.
On Bloggers, Dean and the Illusion of Central Position
I'd never dis the Doc, but I can respectfully disagree with Mr. Searls. Earlier today and just below, I posted a pointer to Doc Searls and David Weinberger's insightful Internet 101 refresher. But later today, I came, via The Professor, upon a Searls prognostication on the end of the politics as we know it and the dawn of a brighter finer political day. All because of blogs!
Sigh. There's a whiff of blogshot in the air these days as, fresh from the Iraq episode, blogging is starting to feel it has real traction in the larger political and social host. And, hey, a lot of bloggers on the Left are feeling dissed and left behind after the triumph of the Warbloggers and feel, hey, it is their turn now.
Searls, like a lot of Blogworld is all het up over the fact that our pols are suddenly 'blogging like it is 1999,' or 2004, or whenever.
I discovered this morning that Tom Watson isn't the only blogging MP. Richard Allen, a Liberal Democrat representing Sheffield Hallam, has one too. Add those to the Kucinich blog and the Howard Dean jihad, and it looks like the lefties are taking the same kind of early lead in electoral politics that the warbloggers took in conversation leading up to the Iraq war.Whoa, Doc! Just step away from the vehicle and keep your keyboard where we can see it.
The good Doctor then brings up Andrew Sullivan's nifty little squiblet that "bigness" is both bad, and, between the two parties, has got us surrounded. Alas, it is all too true. But then it is a big and complicated political world and, for a lot of things, bigness is the only answer.
I appreciate the longing for a kinder, gentler nation; for simpler times. for a world like yesterday but with broadband connections on the house. I just don't see it happening until a few very large issues spelled, for starters, "Korea," "Africa," "AIDS," "Globalism," "Global Freemarket Capitalism," "Global Terrorism," and "Global Thermonuclear War" are put to bed with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads. Like Gay Marriage in the near and far term, Big Government is a done deal for the duration. A lot of people don't like it, but a lot more accept it than pine for its demise. And in a Democracy, numbers count.
But it is then that Searls introduces us to the real dream he is having as Pols blog on:
I sense an opening here for a practical libertarian sensibility coming to the fore, from the grass roots; from the blogs. [Emphasis added]In this statement, I realized again that, at bottom, the Libertarian philosophy is one of the primal energy sources of the Net and that, from time to time, all things must return to it for renewal. Darpanet, Usenet, Internet, Web, Blogworld -- a continuous evolution with the same deep foundation; the same political dreams of the Founders. No, not everyone using the Net is a Libertarian. Not even close. But, at its deepest core the Net is libertarian. Why? Because much of the basic deep software on which the Net runs was written by people with a deep Libertarian bent. Not a bad thing, but a true thing. In fact the Internet, in all its manifestations, is the closest thing to a libertarian world that the libertarians are ever likely to have.
Does that mean the Libertarian dreams of the Net will ever map to the world dimensional? As much as I might like to believe that, I cannot. You might feel differently but hey, this is a libertarian space, and I do my thing, you do your thing, and if we meet a terrible beauty is born.
To return to the thought at the top of the file, when you're a blog everything looks like a post. I'm not among those whose pulse starts to race when yet another pol enters the blogrolls. I don't think it is all that significant. Why? First because it is very premature to start picking winners and losers and the reasons why. Second, because I don't think for a moment these PoliBloggers are sincere. Reasons?
Number one, they are politicians and have learned to fake sincerity from the time they ran for Junior Class President.
Number two, they noticed that Howard Dean and his Internet efforts got him some serious start-up money. Nothing like the whiff of serious money to get politicians active in anything, but just because they 'hold our hands, it doesn't mean they're going to be taking long warm showers with us until the wee hours of the morning.'
Number three: "Hey, Howard Dean is on the cover of Time and Newsweek, and Howard's a blogger, man. He gets it! He really, really gets it!"
Okay, so he gets it. I agree. And it is a wonderful thing to behold. But is Dean going to get the White House and if he does will he be the 'First Internet President, and start a "blogspot.whitehouse.gov/?"
To the first question, "Abort, Retry, Fail."
Alas, Howard Dean, Man of the Cyberpeople, is not going to be President this time around. What we are seeing here is a classic case of peaking far, far too early. What we are also seeing is the terrible political condition known as "knowing far too much too soon" about a candidate few have heard about before. And the more you know about Howard Dean, the nicer he seems as a man and the less fit he seems as a potential president.
Presidents have to map to their times and we are not in a Mondale Moment in this country. Dean supporters, since they are heavily left-populace-grassroots-green, are caught in the delusion that drives the Left -- the delusion of a world that would be at peace if only the United States would stop trying to protect itself. Bush is betting dollars to donuts that the vast majority does not share this view. And speaking of donuts, has anyone pointed out that $7 million is chump change when you are running for President. The current ante is up in the hundreds of millions as I recall.
But hope dies hard, and when a man shows up that not only says things that make the left feel good about itself, but uses the tools of the cyberlibertarian realm in a manner that seems effective, then it is understandable that those deeply embedded in the cyberculture and Blogworld start to perceive a luminosity around a candidate that is not visible to the vast unconnected, unwired, and unconcerned multitudes.
It is axiomatic that there's a long way to go until the fateful November of 2004 and a lot can happen. It may well be that Bush can be defeated and that the Democrats can surge back and make the world safe from The Patriot Act and lower taxes. But the kind of macro-events necessary to make that happen ( massive economic downturn, abject failure of pre-emptive foreign policy, simmering sex scandal, etc...) will not have anything to do with the ability of a candidate or his cyberwranglers to type a lot of text into the entry body panel in Movable Type and hit "Save."
The Libertarians have been waiting for decades for the Internet to get big enough to elect a libertarian to a significant national office. Hasn't happened and is very unlikely to happen. Here's hoping that Blogworld won't go down the same path of hubris and find itself dead-ended in the Illusion of Central Position.
From Dr. Leda's Journal comes this taut tale of an Obsessive Roseologist and a gaggle of roseophiles: Dr. Leda and the Rose Snobs
"Now that's Jim, our secretary," she continued, pointing to the affable looking man who was standing silently at the podium. "He's one of our most pompous spray snobs. He only sprays with restricted insecticides and over-the-counter miticides, but he won't touch any fungicides. Or maybe it's the other way around, I forget. Anyway, he's calling for a vote. ""Harry has moved and Louise seconded that membership in our group be denied to anyone who grows fewer than 350 varieties of roses. They're our quantity snobs."
But Jim isn't saying anything," I observed.
"Well, no, he can't," she explained. "You see, Jim's also a fragrance snob. In fact, he's been aggressively lobbying the state legislature to pass a bill that would ban the sale of all non-fragrant roses. Anyway, we had a heated debate ten years ago over whether or not 'New Dawn' is scented, and as a result, he's not on speaking terms with anyone in this room."
BIO:"Dr. Leda Horticulture, O.R. (Obsessive Roseologist) aka Elizabeth Churchill, is a rosarian who worked for eight years at nurseries in the San Francisco Bay Area. She recently retired and moved to a beautiful old Victorian in southern Louisiana. If she told you how much room she has for new roses, you would hate her."
For the rest simply go to Leda's Garden.
The Short Attention Spans of Media Professionals Mean a Hyperactive Headline Glut for You
[Note: If you can't read all of this you may be infected by media-induced ADD / HD. Seek professional help.]
"If you tell someone they have a short attention span often enough, they might believe you enough to get one, but then they'll forget what channel you're on." -- TV producer, Fox News, 2002
Recently I became acquainted with a young boy, just turned nine. He's a brilliant and happy kid, but he has a problem with cleaning up and organizing his room. It isn't that he can't do it, he simply has to be told about every five minutes to continue the process. You see, in the course of picking things up to put away he discovers anew their potential to fascinate him. The Gameboy? "Oh, here's where I saved that last stage of Turoc. Let's see if I can get the flame-thrower and..." Any one of the 3,000 + Lego units? "Gee, I never did get the moon base hemi-dome set up, just let me put these 400 blocks in place and..." Books? "Sure thing and, hey, did Horton ever hatch that egg..."
On it goes until, after the sixth or seventh cajoling instruction, a path has been cleared for the vacuum cleaner. After which, he promptly begins taking everything he has put away out and strews it about the floor once again. Today's pop psychologists, addlepated educators and the marketing departments of large drug companies are hard at work trying to convince me children who behave like this have "Attention Deficit Disorder" or ADD. But I know enough to know they are obsessed, confused and greedy in about that order. What this young boy suffers from is no more than being a normal, heedless and all around great nine-year-old boy. He doesn't have ADD anymore than I have an elephant chained in my back yard. (Yes, I just checked.) What he has is a smart child's ability to multi-task beyond a normal adult's capacity. As adults we are often guilty of projecting our frailties onto the young. We forget that they are more nimble in all things than we are, and we are all too eager in this age of instant advice on any problem to ascribe to the young what is truly a malady confined to the mature.
No section of our society exemplifies this more than the denizens of Big Media whose efforts in spreading fear, uncertainty, doubt and confusion go forward daily with no signs of stopping and fewer signs of shame. Indeed, it is the media, more than any other group, that is happy to spread the myth of ADD / HD (Attention Deficit Disorder / Hyperactivity Disorder) affliction among the young. They are happy to do it because, in a very real way, it protects them from being seen as the single profession in which ADD / HD not only runs riot, but also spreads a virus that threatens the lives and happiness of millions. For many centuries it has been unfashionable in the West to kill the messenger. This convention, along with so many others in the post 9/11 world, may have to be reconsidered.
The recent events here at home in the political circus that is known as "Lots of Democrats Running Around Begging to Be President," and abroad in the collective media hallucinations known as "All is Lost in Iraq Because We Won," underscore the fact that ADD has infected and taken over the media.
The terrible truth is not that so many people working in the media are biased towards wanting the United States to fail all the time and everywhere (although there are more than a few who do). That is merely one of many obvious truths about media people. No, the terrible truth is that nearly 100 percent of media professionals are infected to the marrow of their bones with ADD / HD. And not just the "stars" but the whole pack of them, root and branch.
Before getting down to cases, let's look at the symptoms (with examples) of ADD / HD as listed at Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder or "CHADD" (for those who just can't pay attention to long names struggling to become clumsy acronyms.)
AD/HD predominately inattentive type: (AD/HD-I)
*Fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes:
Reuters
* Has difficulty sustaining attention:
National Public Radio.
* Does not appear to listen:
Ann Coulter
* Struggles to follow through on instructions:
Jayson Blair
* Has difficulty with organization:
Howell Raines
* Avoids or dislikes tasks requiring sustained mental effort:
Larry King
* Loses things:
The BBC
* Is easily distracted.
Foreign Press Corp in War Zone once checked into comfy hotels.
* Is forgetful in daily activities:
Fact-checkers across the media spectrum
AD/HD predominately hyperactive-impulsive type: (AD/HD-HI)
* Fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in chair:
Chris Matthews
* Has difficulty remaining seated:
Geraldo
* Runs about or climbs excessively:
Robert Scheer
* Difficulty engaging in activities quietly:
Fox News
* Acts as if driven by a motor:
The New York Times
* Talks excessively:
Charlie Rose
* Blurts out answers before questions have been completed:
Bill O'Reilly
* Difficulty waiting or taking turns:
Bill O'Reilly
* Interrupts or intrudes upon others:
Bill O'Reilly in a trifecta.
AD/HD combined type: (AD/HD-C)
* Individual meets both sets of inattention and hyperactive/impulsive criteria:
ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS, FOX, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, LAT, WAPO, TIME NEWSWEEK, etc. and so forth ad nauseum.
The examples above are only well-known personalities and other growths of the American Media Entity (AME). What is true for the stars above is also true for all
those members of AME that labor in the mud below. They have all been infected with ADD/HD and very few are seeking to get well. What they are seeking is to become even more infected so that someday they might get some air-time or ink. Ambition in the media is so viscious because the stakes are so vacuous.
The truth is that most revel in their ADD / HD media jobs simply because these are the only jobs and careers open to them that promise both wealth and fame. Indeed, the AME has, over the years, evolved slowly into the only industry that would accept these hapless personality types as employees. Software companies wouldn't use people with ADD / HD to write programs -- with the possible exception of the Microsoft Windows team. Transportation companies run rigorous background checks and random drugs tests on current and prospective employees; this means that those who labor in the media cess pits would have to spend six months getting clean before they could even hope to drive a FedEx truck. Not likely, is it?
And would you agree to have your house designed and built by an architectural firm composed of Maureen Dowd and Anne Coulter? Not unless you were planning to live in an updated version of the Winchester Mystery House where every allegation and doorway opened into a cavern of twisted little mental passages all alike.
Media types are, by heredity and training, unemployable in any other industry you can think of except, perhaps, sanitation and politics. It takes a special kind of team to design a program that requires the talking head to say: "In Iraq today, yet another innocent, much-loved American soldier was shot in the head by a member of the Resistance. Is this another step into the deepening quagmire of an administration with yellowcake on its face? We'll interview the soldier's weeping grandmother in just a few minutes. But right now, is fast food fat food?"
One look at how the screens of the various news stations appear is enough to tell you somebody at the company has severe ADD / HD and wants to get you down into the hole that they're in: Main image in the center, logo somewhere, caption identifying current blathering expert and current 30 second issue; weather and / or time on the left; promo for some upcoming blatherfest on the right; and beneath it all the ubiquitous crawl slips by giving you a bit of this story and a chunk of that story, neither of which has the ghost of a chance of ever being explicated in any detail on the main screen. Gaze at this while there's a war on and you will have a terminal case of ADD / HD before a statue falls in Baghdad. Guaranteed.
Front pages of newspapers are little improvement these days. They've been infected by the graphics uber alles syndrome too. Above the fold or below the fold or across the fold. All these have some arcane meaning. Little graphs of infolets. Small factoids of this or that. And over all the pall of snappy fuzzed-up color photographs of the latest atrocities in Iraq, Niger, or Bakersfield attached to a few short teasing paragraphs that jump to somewhere inside where you will be forced to find the information somewhere in a sea of banal ads of all sizes and shapes for everything you do not need.
Magazines are worse still with the triumph of two magazine support departments that should never be given any power over a magazine: art directors and circulation departments.
It is well-known among magazine editors that most magazine art directors have not been able to read anything other than the figures on their expense checks for decades. Instead, magazine art directors have fallen in love with video games and transferred those elements wholesale to magazine layout and cover design. The result inside and out are pages devoted to the unrestrained display of "Pix & Fonts." Within these garish displays the actual content of the article may be discovered by the dedicated reader, but he will have to take time for lunch while puzzling it out. In this brave new world art directors depend on readers being as functionally illiterate as they are, and treat them to page after page of jumbled images and typefaces that leave the eye satiated and the brain befuddled.
Now add to this dog's dinner layout style the rise of the circulation directors who, sometime at the beginning of the 1990s were told of a study that said people like to see a lot of numbers on magazine covers. This claim was enough to enable circulation directors to palm off slumping sales on the fact that there weren't "enough numbers on the cover." Hence, you now see, especially among women's magazines, the worst offenders, covers that contain no less than three and possibly seven sets of numbers on the cover. The theory is that if there are a lot more numbers than words, the potential reader's ADD will be overpowered by the HD of the cover, and they will buy the magazine safe in the assumption that they will not be asked to read anything inside.
Talk radio on the AM dial is a classic case study in media professionals with severe ADD/HD seeking to reach out and infect the entire country. A few mind bending minutes listening to Michael Savage will establish this point with the force of a power drill being run into your ear at high speed. Then, of course, you need to stick around for the 15 commercials in three minutes that support this drivel.
"And hey, what about that web site?"
The Web is, of course, the Metropolitan Opera of Short Attention Span Theatre. You'll know you are not a part of that if you are reading this sentence. Most of those who started reading are long gone for one reason or the other. They clicked away long, long ago.
Yes, on the Web factoids, links, brief opinions, quick takes and hyperlinks that open in new windows while pop-ups bloom above, below, to the right, to the left and within you and without you are what we crave. Manic clicking is what we do and few of us are above it. Few work in the long form while many just point to the next click. And of course, for those who just can't take it any longer there is always "Cntrl-Q." Yes, it can seem like the Web, the Net, the Infospace of a Billion Lies is the ultimate source of the epidemic of ADD / HD. You could think that. I have thought that. But, as usual, I could be wrong. You too.
Seen from the surface, the Web is a vast uncountable, unsearchable and unknowable infinity of links and texts in which we see, for the first time, everything that we, as human beings, are. We see the best of ourselves and the worst of ourselves. We see the greatest works of art and the most degraded images of hate, lust and atrocity. It is the first medium in which any number can play, which has almost no economic barriers to entry, and as a result becomes, in time, the perfect mirror of our souls at this time and in this place.
The Web can be, and most often is, the most trivial of our mediums. But it is also, at some times and in some way, the corrective to all the other mediums that have gone before and still exist around us.
And while it exemplifies the symptoms and effects of ADD / HD better than any other medium, it also holds within it, like the mold on bread or the pox on the cow, the cure for what ails us. As was said once a couple of years ago, the Web can "fact check your ass." It not only can, but it does, as the media moguls with billions invested in extending their ADD / HD virus to the population at large now discover with distressing regularity.
It is one thing to scheme and struggle and manipulate your way into an executive position or an anchor's chair at a major network, it is quite another to have your performance in those roles analyzed, criticized and eviscerated within 24 hours in front of an audience of thousands of your peers and thousands of critics. Media Mogul, Anchor, or Pundit: they used to be such a cushy jobs. Jobs for life. And for a fading few they remain so, but all can see that the age of the anchor, the expert expert, and the preening pundit are drawing to a close.
It may well be that the major media outlets will stagger on. In fact it is a certainty. What has changed is that fact that not every adult in the United States is ready and willing to submit to having their attention span shortened or their activity hyped by the now creaking theories of how major media can make its money.
That Big Media still believes there is money to be made by shoveling its ADD / HD into the collective consciousness of America is manifest in the continuing race of television, radio, and magazines towards the bottom of the social barrel. But when they get there will they find the intelligent and affluent waiting to buy their sponsors' products? Or will they find themselves increasingly dependent on the mouthbreathers of Maxim magazine and applauders of Dr. Phil to chip in and do the Dew and buy the pickups that will keep their cash flow positive? That they've chosen to go for the latter is evident by the programming choices and editorial decisions that are clearer and clearer with every passing day. But sooner or later, like all those infected with addictions, they will bottom. And then they will know that they finally have to get clean. One of the great virtues of the Web is that it is hastening that day.
The smart part of their market, as the Web grows, is quite obviously moving away from Big Media on the one hand and demanding more substance on the other. This is the audience that is starved for substance, that is successful at their jobs, that is affluent, that wants information in depth and not just the latest soundbite or factoid. They are, in short, one of the prime targets for advertising, the mother's milk of Big Media.
They're not easily fooled and they have the tools, at last, to talk among themselves. In short, except for backward glances that sneer at Big Media's infection with ADD / HD they've determined to look at the prime sources, to do their own thinking, to consult a number of background documents. They've left the youth market, with its towering debt and low cash flow, to those who want to sell soda pop and infosquibs. They've become, in a very real sense, awakened from the decades of increasing ADD / HD that make up the Big Media mosaic. They've taken the admonition of Scoop Nisker (" If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." ) to heart. They are basing what they think and what they buy and how they feel on deeper sources than Big Media is capable of supplying.
And by the way, next year they are electing, or re-electing, a President of the United States. Odds are they'll go for a candidate who can stay the course and whose policies are not driven by the daily ADD / HD of the Big Media.
Memo to the Republican Party:
Let me begin by informing you that, with the single exception of Rudolph Giuliani , I have never voted for a Republican in my life. And I've voted in over 15 national elections, including the last Presidential election. This, if our current President stays the course, is about to change. As you know, I am not the only one. If I was on the fence, the last few months of carping and backbiting have pushed me off.
I have "Yellowcake" fatigue and compassion fatigue. I have post-September 11th Chronic Fatigue with Appeasers Syndrome. In short, I have so many things going on in my political nature that it is best to say, surveying the current crop of Democratic candidates for President, I have had it up to here with the whole baying pack of them.
And yet... and yet... There is a chance, a small chance, that the nation could end up with a Democrat as President after the elections, and with Democrats in control of the Congress. A victory such as this will, in the short or long run, cause the United States to lose a city of some size to her enemies.
I am unwilling to consign thousands of my countrymen to death in order to bring the current crop of Democrats back into power. Call me cynical and unsupportive of a Democrat's right to hold any sort of power at this time, but that's just the way I feel. Face it, they haven't been stepping up to the bar and making us feel very secure about the future, have they?
Therefore, I feel that it is necessary for the Republicans to take out heavy insurance on the next election. There is only one scenario that seems to me to fit
the needs of the United States and the world at this time. And, besides, it is time for it on more than one level.
So listen carefully. This is what has to happen.
George W. Bush will be nominated as the Republican candidate for President in 2004. There's no dispute here. Richard Cheney will also be nominated as Vice-Presidential candidate for 2004. He's done a great job and there's no reason to break up a winning team. Coming out of the convention, the Bush / Cheney ticket will be a done deal.
But it is not, I fear, the ticket that can destroy the Democratic Party. Hence, it simply won't do. After the convention, it will have to change.
It will have to change some time after the convention. Not a short time after, but not a long time either. The beginning of August would be about right. Just about then Mr. Cheney's health will become an issue. He will have to have a complete work-up and during that work-up it will be discovered that his heart simply cannot be depended upon. He will, regretfully but for the good of the country and the Republican party, withdraw his name from the ticket.
At that time, it will be up to the President to find and confirm, with all appropriate consultation and following the rituals and laws in this regard, another person for the Vice-Presidential slot. It is at this time the President must turn to the only person in his administration that can deliver absolute victory for the Republicans, destroy the Democrats for decades, and move the Republic of the United States of America into the 21st Century.
Gentle reader, I give you the next Vice-President of the United States: Condolezza Rice.
Elsewhere in the cyberverse we've been talking about role models, and the latest in a long line of hoopsters who, having been given both millions and the unremitting attention of millions, somehow fail to become perfect. Shakespeare, of course, explained this as he explained everything else about the world, the flesh and the devil: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves." Or, as one of our living poets, Paul Simon has put it:
"A man walks down the street,
He says, Why am I short of attention?
Got a short little span of attention,
And whoa, my nights are so long!
Where's my wife and family?
What if I die here?
Who'll be my role-model?
Now that my role-model is ....
Gone ...... gone,
He ducked back down the alley,
With some roly-poly, little bat-faced girl.
All along .... along ....
There were incidents and accidents,
There were hints and allegations ..... "
The Karaoke Version is here.
The overly ambitious Blair Hornstine's Harvard Dreaming has become her own personal Idaho.
Harvard has revoked its admission of Blair Hornstine, the prospective member of the Class of 2007 who made national headlines when she sued her school system to ensure she would be her high school's sole valedictorian.Following a widely-publicized report that Hornstine had plagiarized material in articles she wrote for her local paper, the Harvard admissions office has rescinded her offer to attend Harvard in the fall, according to a source involved with the decision....
From Blair's winning page on the Discover Awards
Name: Blair Hornstine
Hails From: Moorestown, NJ
Working Hard At: Moorestown High School, NJ
Scholastic Status: Senior
The Digits (GPA): Over 4.0 (Gotta' love those APs!)The College For Me: "I'm applying to Harvard, Princeton, Duke, Stanford, Cornell, Dickinson, Penn... a wide variety! But wherever I go, I'll be happy," she assures.
Potential Tuition: "About $40,000 a year."Intended Major: "Something focusing on the law."
Dream Job: Poverty lawyerWhy I Applied: "I figured it couldn't hurt!"
What I Won: As a national winner in the category of Arts & Humanities -- a whopping $25,000 scholarship.
Winning Emotions: "I was very, very excited. I kept saying, 'Oh my God, thank you!'"
And Financially, This Means... "Considering the colleges I'm applying to (so expensive!), the scholarship is pretty meaningful."
Words of Wisdom: "It never hurts to try -- you never know what you'll win and what you won't," says Blair. "And work your hardest so you can have something to apply for!"
On My Resume:
* Co-founder (with big bro') of the eight-year-old service club, M.A.G.I.C. (Moorestown Alliance for Goodwill and Interest in the Community).* Founder of the Tri-County Prom Dress Drive, which collects more than 200 dresses a year for girls from low-income families.
* Co-founder of the Tri-County Food Drive that collected 30,000 pounds of food for the hungry.
* State Chairperson for a Smile-A-Thon that funded cleft lip and palate surgeries for orphans in China. "It was one of the most amazing things I've ever done," she says. "I never thought I'd be able to go to China!"
* An Olympic Torchbearer in 2002. "I was so excited, I could barely sleep!"
How I Get It All Done: "There's plenty of time in the day!"
Hornstine was home tutored at no little expense to the community because she suffer, as stated in court documents, chronic fatigue syndrome.
One of the problems with smart people is they can be idea hamsters. Like little hyper-active rodents with too much wheel and not enough time, they compulsivley whip up one misbegotten notion after another. Notions that contain about the same level of inate common sense as a hamster confronted with a cotter pin in the lock of his cage.
Less than two weeks ago I came across an article by Richard Dawkins in the Guardian touting the hot new group description, "the brights." The Guardian gave a web address for this dubious new group, but wasn't bright enough to post the URL without spaces. Hence it was useless.
A brief correspondence with Dawkins assured me that the item was fixed. It was, in a small way, not too bright and Dawkins is a very bright man. But not bright enough to detect the smarm in the whole notion. Still, seeing that it was safely ensconced in Britain, that loves this sort of blather, I let it slide since it posed no clear and present danger to the United States.
But there's no keeping a stupid idea down in this confused age, and this morning, Whomp, there it was in the dreaded and dreadful New York Times. Yes, a full-on Times OP-ED blatheration entitled.... wait for it... "The Bright Stuff." (God, can we just please lose the punning headlines in the Times? Please? )
In this article by one Daniel C. Dennett ( Identified as "a professor of philosophy at Tufts University,"...and author of the wetly named, "Freedom Evolves.'') is a virtual fornication festival of the terminally unclued. It begins (with my interjections):
The time has come for us brights to come out of the closet.No the time is at hand for you to shut up and stay in the closet to rewrite "Freedom Evolves" until it can be printed on a bumper strip.
What is a bright? A bright is a person with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view. We brights don't believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny - or God.
Not very bright if you hope to hold elective office, but once you've got tenure you can run your mouth at any level of RPM and in any direction you wish.
We disagree about many things, and hold a variety of views about morality, politics and the meaning of life, but we share a disbelief in black magic - and life after death.
Okay, advanced Goth dating for you is out.
The term "bright" is a recent coinage by two brights in Sacramento, Calif., who thought our social group - which has a history stretching back to the Enlightenment, if not before - could stand an image-buffing and that a fresh name might help."Back to the Enlightenment, if not before... What a noble lineage! And to think, they're still here. Bring me the ducking stool, the stocks, and a sharpened pike for these wise guys. And as for the image-buff and the fresh name, well, who among us could not use a detailing and a rebranding?
Don't confuse the noun with the adjective: "I'm a bright" is not a boast but a proud avowal of an inquisitive world view.
Say it loud, "I'm bright and I'm proud!" Not at all that superstitious sort who woud confuse a noun with an adjective.
You may well be a bright.
The moment that the author, Dennett, seeks to get you down in the hole that he's in. 'Come, let us revel together in our shared superiority. Hand me the Unabridged Oxford Dictonary and the tub of Vaseline, you little minx.
If not, you certainly deal with brights daily.
Translation: "We're smarm, no harm, get used to it."
That's because we are all around you: we're doctors, nurses, police officers, schoolteachers, crossing guards and men and women serving in the military. We are your sons and daughters, your brothers and sisters.
I think at this point that the entire Rainbow coalition should sue to prevent this wholesale theft of their schtick.
Our colleges and universities teem with brights.
Our colleges and universities teem with the homeless, the useless, the hard-core unemployed, and schizophrenics on early release too, that doesn't mean they are places that at the top of our vacation list. Otherwise, the students wouldn't run screaming from the campus for Spring break.
Among scientists, we are a commanding majority.
Ah, the hidden lust to command. Isn't a shame that all the people who really know how to run the country and, dare I say it, the world, are stuck in labs and lecture halls?
Wanting to preserve and transmit a great culture, we even teach Sunday school and Hebrew classes.
Translation: "We transmit what we do not believe." Yup, that's a plan for world domination right there.
Many of the nation's clergy members are closet brights, I suspect.
The last few years have established that many of the nation's clergy are in the closet for many things, but inate intelligence was left out until today. However, if there's one thing the clergy of this nation needs it is more hypocrisy.
We are, in fact, the moral backbone of the nation: brights take their civic duties seriously precisely because they don't trust God to save humanity from its follies.
Sigh. What is one to do with such manifest detritus? Dennett goes on ad nauseum about his little club of closet Mensa addicts, but he never, for one iota of a scintilla of a jot, acknowledges what most really smart people know, i.e. deep down we are all stupid.
We're too stupid to get the world right after thousands of years. We're too stupid to follow the major religious instruction of the ages: Love each other as yourself. We're too stupid to quit driving SUVs, we're too stupid to earn enough money to buy an SUV. We are all of us just plain stupid, stupid, stupid.
At best, we're the "smart" monkey. And how smart can a monkey be, really?
Smart people know that. They also know enough, if they are also decent people, that running around proclaiming you are bright for some half-baked notion that you aren't getting your props as a group is just plain dumb. If you've got it, you don't flaunt it.
And as for the "brights" being "...the moral backbone of the nation: brights take their civic duties seriously precisely because they don't trust God to save humanity from its follies" ....
Jesus wept.
One of the most depressing graphs in recent memory. From the Department of Education web site, via Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor
Pournelle thinks this graph may disappear from the Web once the DOE realizes how terrible it is. He may have a point.
A joke that's tight and right the first time, gains a paunch and loses its punch on the 200th telling. It loses more if it begins to beg for a laugh. This has been the case for some time with Bushism of the Day By Jacob Weisberg at Slate , but, like a wretched old hound gone in the teeth, it is an impossible feature to put down. The most recent example thuds down onto the screen from the MSN servers:
Bushism of the DayBy Jacob Weisberg
Posted Thursday, July 3, 2003, at 7:20 AM PT
"My answer is bring them on." - On Iraqi militants attacking U.S. forces, Washington, D.C.
As with many Bushisms over the past couple of years, this one is taken wildly out of context and is, in effect, striving for an impression that misleads the reader. ( Eugene Volkoh is quite lucid about this in this comment. )
It may have been the case that the verbal entanglements of Bush were once amusing to those who believe his intelligence is far below theirs -- although why he is President and they are still stuck in their day jobs at the Latte Lenya Espresso and Opinions Bar is less clear. Now, however, there are fewer and fewer gut-busting gaffs available to Weisberg and company. Hence, the strained and stretching tone of many of the latest entries.
An astute editor, if Slate had one, would be looking to retire this aging chestnut for something a bit fresher. Alas, he could not do it. This feature has already spawned two booklets on the Amazon must-miss list and a host of frustrated liberals who log in only for their small bite of Bush bitters. So, on it will go... sort of like a newspaper being forced to run "Doonesbury" for decades after its initial force was spent.
"Bushisms" - Slate's monument to when, once upon a time, Bush seemed funny to the Democrats.
