"Stimulated by some irregular passion"

Ezra's post on Pandagon (via Corrente) about the need to consider a theistic viewpoint in constructing a progressive argument has me thinking once again (or still) about the "founders" and the Enlightenment. The post is titled "To Save The Enlightenment, We Must Destroy It," but you know, I'm not sure we really represent the Enlightenment fairly all the time. Because this post will be very long (god help me, I am quoting from my dissertation below), I will cut to the chase and explain, in a nutshell, what I mean. I don't want to sound like I've been reading too much Derrida, but what I've been thinking about are these binaries that structure our political debates. Currently, the binary seems to be reason/religion. In the Debates on the Constitution, perhaps an even more (or at least as) frequently employed binary was reason/passion or enlightenment/embodiment.

I'm unconvinced that in the "real world" these binaries are as instructive as the rhetoric, now or then, would lead us to believe. That is to say, the progressive agenda is no less driven by moral concerns than the conservative one. We may prefer to call them "ethics," but the ideals of tolerance, justice, and equality are indeed, moral values. In turn, the conservative platform is no less dominated by policy and legalistic concerns than the progressive one. I don't think these motivations are so easily parsed as we might like to believe. And it's been my observation that when we on the left feel threatened by an increasingly powerful fundamentalist Christian faction, we tend to underscore this binary rather than break it down.

And so, in blog after blog (including my own), you can read posts dedicated to a misty-eyed remembrance of the Enlightenment, a time when, we would all have you believe, "founding fathers" such as Jefferson and Madison clearly understood the absolute distinction between reason and religion. Now don't get me wrong, it would make me happier than I can describe if we could just dispense with Jesus talk now and forever in the political public sphere and never have to think again about how to talk with and persuade religious conservatives that ours is a "moral" platform. It's not how my mind works in its resting state. But that's not the world we live in and I guess what I'm trying to argue here is I'm not sure that's ever been the world we've lived in.

Okay, here comes the long dissertation part. Following are some quotes from my chapter on the Debates. Were I less Sunday-lazy, I would rewrite them so that they didn't look plucked from an academic document and better fit the paragraphs above, but oh well.

Despite its British authorship, Clarissa proved to be a potent cautionary tale for American citizens. The immoral seducer à la Richardson’s Lovelace became an omnipresent cultural figure in the early American republic, cropping up, not only in the novels of the eighteenth century, but in the political writings as well. To some, the citizens of the republic were in danger of being seduced by America’s privileged elite who were attempting to create a strong government that served their own interests above those of the nation as a whole. To others, the source of citizens’ seduction was the allure of too much freedom and not enough governmental control; the siren song of excessive liberty could lead Americans away from decisions that would protect them and ensure their safety. In either case, seduction was a pitfall to be wary of in a system of representation, where misrepresentation is always a possibility.

. . .

In a typical articulation of these fears, John Adams writes to his friend William Cunningham, “The people are Clarissa and democracy is Lovelace” (19; 15 March 1804). Adams expresses the common warning that the people’s virtue may not save them in the face of political players, or a political system, stronger than themselves.

. . .

Adams is obviously worried that the credulity and inexperience of the American people will make them too sympathetic an audience to seductive rhetoricians and thus lead them to support political players who do not have their best interests at heart. In his letter, Adams draws a parallel between the “inevitable” demise of Clarissa at the hands of Lovelace and the fate of the American people and the republican political sphere. And here, it is worth quoting the whole of the passage from which the above sentence is extracted to underscore the deliberate nature of the comparison and the way in which Adams saw the story of the fallen woman as such an apt metaphor for his more pessimistic speculations about the potential future of the United States:

You say the awful spirit of democracy is in great progress. I believe it and I know something of the nature of it. It is a young rake who thinks himself handsome and well made, and who has little faith in virtue—When the people once admit his courtship, and permit him the least familiarity, they soon find themselves in the condition of the poor girl, who told her own story in this affecting style.

. . .

The next day he grew a little bolder—but promised me marriage. The next day—he began to be enterprising: But the next day—O Sir! the next day he got me with child.

Democracy is Lovelace, and the people are Clarissa. The artful villain will pursue the innocent lovely girl to her ruin and her death—We know that some gentleman will arise at last, who will put the guilty wretch to death in duel. But this will be no friend of the lady. Perhaps a son, a pupil or a bosom friend of Lovelace, himself. The time would fail me to enumerate all the Lovelaces in the United States. It would be an amusing romance to compare their actions and characters with his. The Federalists appear to me to be very inattentive to public events as well as characters. (19–20)

The rhetoric and tropes that animate Adams’ letter recur obsessively throughout all forms of the period’s writing. To understand the struggles over establishing a body politic in the early republic, it is important to appreciate not only the fears that Adams expresses but also the implications of the language he uses to express those fears. Seduction novels provide tropes and language to describe who is fit, and who is not, to participate in the United States’ self-governance. Both the Federalists and Antifederalists discuss the dilemmas of constituting the early republic—the state and the body politic—in terms imported from the popular fiction of the time. The language that describes the heroines of these novels and the dangers they face animates the debates over the Constitution. The use of the rhetoric of seduction novels had very real political effects. The novels from which these figures are drawn focus on men who are not what they seem and who act according to self-interest rather than public principle. Many, perhaps most, novels of the period feature young innocents who are wooed, seduced, and then abandoned by profligate men. This figure of the seducer lurks, sometimes in the foreground and sometimes in the background, in book after book. Indeed, with his deceitfulness, dishonesty, and selfishness he embodies many citizens’ anxieties about the threat that people’s baser impulses pose to democracy.

It is not difficult to see the seduction plot as an argument against women’s suffrage and for a male-dominated representative democracy, whereby men are chosen to represent women’s interests and to decide for them. According to the ur-plot of the seduction novel, innocent women need protection from potentially lethal men; they need someone older, wiser, and more rational to “read” the intentions of others and to intervene to make reasoned decisions in their best interests. Gender, of course, was a primary filter through which citizens were included or excluded from the political public sphere. But using the seduction novel as a lens through which to read early national political arguments reveals a more complicated relationship between gender and political participation. Gender becomes not just a biological but a rhetorical category and further, a rhetorical dialectic. Not only do women need protecting, but those who need protecting are like women. That is, the Clarissas of America—be they male or female—need the shelter of a strong state and a system of representation, and further, those who need this kind of protection are Clarissas. In the debates over the Constitution, the Federalists borrow the elements of seduction novels such as Clarissa to figure working men as impressionable, and thus seducable, in short, to feminize working men and thus rhetorically figure them as unfit to participate in government. In this way, in the debates over the Constitution, gender becomes a way of figuring economic class.

That's the substance of the argument. The chapter discusses it at great length (yes, I know, so does this post). I will not bore with an entire rehearsal of the argument, but here are a few more extracts:

The majority of people, however, need protecting from the more sinister passions of political con men. Vividly conflating sexual and political violation, Madison explains:

. . . there are particular moments in public affairs, when the people stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice and truth, can regain their authority over the public mind? (“Fed. LXIII” 2:318)

Employing the literary figure of the rake and his victim enables “Publius” to characterize the strong political opinions of the interested political player as fueled by sexual appetite. Subject to “irregular passions,” the people are “stimulated” and thus easy prey for “artful” men. The “temperate and respectable” have to intercede when the people are presented with such an “illicit advantage” or alluring politician, because at such times, the people are not governed by reason. They make decisions based on sensation or impulse, not thoughtful judgment. Madison, thus grounds the cause of political manipulation or faction in the body.

Continuing the same reason/embodiment binary, the Federalists argue for the proposed Constitution as a kind of medication, a salve for the ailments of the public body:

A patient who finds his disorder daily growing worse; and that an efficacious remedy can no longer be delayed without extreme danger; after coolly revolving his situation, and the characters of different physicians, selects and calls in such of them as he judges most capable of administering relief, and best entitled to his confidence. The physicians attend . . . They are unanimously agreed that the symptoms are critical, but that the case, with proper and timely relief . . . it may be made to issue in an improvement of his constitution. (Madison, “Fed. XXXVIII” 1:776)

If the people are prone to being led by their passions, vulnerable to violation by scoundrels, the framers will supply the cure for this disorder. The physician/Federalist positions himself in relation to, but removed from the body of the public. The principle of representation allows him this salutary removal or distance. Standing above the body, he can diagnose and treat it, pronouncing the Constitution healthy for the constitution.

The Antifederalists often used the same rhetoric to structure their arguments, smearing the Federalists as an elite minority who wish to take advantage of the working class.

In contrast with this elite corruption, the Antifederalists often positioned themselves as “simple” or “common” men. “John Humble,” for example, calls his essay a “humble address of the low born of the United States of America, to their fellow slaves” (emphasis in original, 1:224). Taking up “Publius’” metaphor of the sick body of the nation, “Humble” revalues physicality as a positive attribute, distancing himself from the corruption of the leisure class:

Whereas it hath been represented unto us that a most dreadful disease hath for these five years last past infected, preyed upon, and almost ruined the government and people of this our country; and of this malady we ourselves have had perfect demonstration, not mentally, but bodily, through every one of the five senses: For although our sensations in regard to the mind be not just so nice as those of the well born; yet our feeling, through the medium of the plow, the hoe, and the grubbing axe, is as accute [sic] as any nobleman’s in the world. (1:224)

Although “Humble” clearly satirizes the view that the “commoners” are incapable of rational reason, he does so by reclaiming embodiment as a badge of distinction, not dishonor. In invoking “the plow, the hoe, and the grubbing axe,” “Humble” underscores the value of physical work as the bedrock of virtue and gestures toward a distrust of book learning as a reliable method of character building. The “medium” here is not the mental labor of “a chosen body of citizen,” but rather the manual labor upon which the leisure of those chosen few rests. Working the land ought to be as important as owning it according to “Humble.”

“Humble” continues the conceit, explaining that, far from evincing a cure, the framers are perpetuating a hoax:

And whereas a number of skilful physicians having met together at Philadelphia last summer, for the purpose of exploring, and if possible removing the cause of this direful desease [sic], have . . . found out and discovered, that nothing but a new government consisting of three different branches, namely, king, lords, and commons . . . can save our country from inevitable destruction.—And whereas it hath been reported that several of our low born brethern [sic] have had the horrid audacity to think for themselves . . . and, dreadful thought! have wickedly began to doubt concerning the perfection of this evangelical constitution, which our political doctors have declared to be a panacea, which . . . will infallibly heal every distemper in the confederation . . . (emphasis in original, 1:224)

The “panacea” offered by the doctors of the Constitution is nothing more than a cure that would effect their own aggrandizement and the further oppression of the citizens who wield a plow rather than a pen. The honest sincerity of the working man serves to underscore the corruption of the advice offered by politicians such as “John Adams, Esquire, in the profundity of their great political knowledge” (1:224).

And part of the chapter's conclusion:

Herein lies the major downfall of the Antifederalist position: by insisting upon their own embodiment, their physicality, Antifederalists unwittingly positioned themselves outside of the realm of the political public sphere. The desire for full presence, an embodied incarnation of power is to deny the nature of democracy and, of course, the nature of any system of representation, be it political, literary, or economic. As Derrida has taught us, representation always involves slippage, a concept which Antifederalists failed to understand. Although the Antifederalists sensed the opacity in the quasi-metaphoric relationship of representation put forth, they were unable to offer a workable solution to the dilemma.

I've been thinking about all of this for weeks now, and I guess the substance of what I'm trying to say here is that, to at least some degree, these distinctions are a rhetorical slight of hand. Maybe I am just reiterating Ezra's point in an overly ponderous way--I don't know--but it seems to me that the Debates bear on so much of what we are all writing about and thinking about. Don't we want to revise the "Enlightenment"? Don't we want to work for a more populist politics that didn't depend on a marginalization of the "embodied" or "unreasonable," but instead worked diligently to enfranchise them? I think that we on the left can sometimes be guilty of the Federalists' worst excesses of elitism, and at the same time, at this point in history, we may be making strategic errors similar to those the Antifederalists made. That is, by insisting on a Manichean distinction between reason and spirituality or religion we may be dooming our principles because of our rhetoric.

Okay, anyone who actually read this whole post absolutely deserves a gold star. Thank you for bearing with me.

Hhow poetic

Emergency landing due to engine trouble. Story at Blue Lemur.

Is it just me, or does Tommy Thompson look astonishingly like a ventriloquist's doll in this pic?




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Life is too short, truly

NYT has issued its annual list of notable books of the year. Next week, they will publish the 10 best, culled from these 100. My first thought, in scanning the list, is I need to take some time off work. I feel woefully under-read.

The things drunk people do

I guess getting a tattoo is too passé. Is it just me or do these sound like T.Rex songs? (via Fark)

Resistance

Next week Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) will hear Jeremy Hinzman's case that he should be granted refugee status. A former paratrooper who served the US army in Afghanistan, Hinzman has since become a Quaker and applied for (and been refused) conscientious objector status by the military. As Simply Appalling, from whom I got the story, reports, movement is afoot to form a "Freedom Underground" to help deserters find safe haven in Canada. Hinzman's case is, in this respect, a sort of acid test for Canada's treatment of known deserters. Carl Rising-Moore is one of the activists calling for Canada to provide safe refuge to deserters:

The question is, given strained U.S.-Canada relations and the fact information is shared between the RCMP and their American counterparts, can Canadians offer substantive aid to U.S. deserters? That's what Rising- Moore is here to find out, although he's quick to add that he regards the cross-border escape hatch as the last option for suicidal soldiers. "I'm telling them to go to their clergy, go to their commanding officers, and to claim conscientious objection while in the military, and to fight it out like that. But if they're considering pulling the trigger on themselves, I'm telling them to desert, just as George Bush Jr. did during the Vietnam War."

If you want to support Hinzman, his site gives contact information for the Canadian Prime Minister and Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. As the prospect of a draft is not impossible, the outcome of Hinzman's petition weighs heavily. Hinzman is not the only deserter to have applied for refugee status in Canada, but his is, as far as I know, the only public case. For more on soldiers who have become war resistors, see Tom Joad. His site reports on the status of individual resistors and gives a number of links to related sites.

Throw me something mister!

The latest in the tee shirt wars seems to be Stephen Truszkowski, the eighth grader, who has been suspended for wearing a tee shirt that says "The Real Terrorist Is In The White House" on the front, and "End the Tyranny" on the back. The Progressive has the story:

McAllister [the school Principal] also called Truszkowski a terrorist and taunted him by saying that he should wear a shirt that says, "I'm a terrorist," Truszkowski recalls.

"Why would I do that?" he says he asked the principal.

"Because you're pretty much just splitting the school in half," McAllister said, according to the student.

Once again I say "terrorist" has become a right-wing catch all that almost sounds like playground name calling...you "doo doo head." If it's making someone uncomfortable, it must be terrorism. Because you know those are the values our country was founded on: life, liberty, and the pursuit of complacency.

The story was originally reported in Delaware's News Journal:

Susan Nida, a parent, said she would never allow her seventh-grade daughter to wear a shirt like that to school. She said political clothing does not belong in a school setting.

"I think it's just as bad as wearing revealing clothes to school," she said. "I don't necessarily think the student should be suspended, but he should cover it up."

I love that. Wearing a political tee shirt is equivalent to wearing a see through tee shirt. In other words, politics is obscene. I may not be able to define politics, but I know it when I see it.

Biometrics creep me out

So I got my Discover Card "don't forget to charge a lot this season" magazine this week, and it features a story on Pay by Touch, a company that is apparently installing finger print reading machines in retail locations so that customers don't have to deal with the hassle of lugging around those cumbersome credit cards. Am I wrong to be creeped out by this? Is it just because I'm a luddite who doesn't want my flesh associated with my finances? I don't know, but it does give me the willies.

Whack a mole

Russia seems to be taking a page from our book:

MOSCOW - Russia may use its strategic bombers to unleash preventive strikes against terrorists outside its borders, the commander of Russia's air force said Friday.

. . .

ITAR-Tass commented that Russia had initiated discussion of preventive strikes over a year ago "due to Washington's regular employment of this method in international affairs."

Meanwhile, Russia's Federal Security Service said Friday that an Arab mercenary who was killed in southern Russia late last month was a top representative of the al-Qaida terror network in the troubled North Caucasus region, which includes Chechnya.

. . .

Russia has played up claims of a large foreign mercenary presence among Chechen rebels to shore up its argument that they are closely linked to international terrorists, justifying the Kremlin's harsh response

They don't call it the "Junk email" box for nothing. My nomination for spam email of the week.

Everybody got a valid passport?

I think we need to institute a system of fascism alerts. Today is at least an orange alert day, with Kerik replacing Ridge, Nebraska Gov. Michael O. Johanns as the new ag secretary, and most notably, a complete dismissal of due process or human rights in the cases of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners. My buddy yelladog is also sounding the alert this morning; you can get more information from his blog, but here are a couple of tidbits.

Here's a paragraph about our new secretary of agriculture:

Johanns has come under criticism from civil liberties groups for official actions that they said promoted conservative Christian beliefs. In May 1999 he signed a proclamation declaring a March for Jesus Day, and he later endorsed a Back to the Bible Day in honor of a fundamentalist Christian group in Nebraska.

And here's a bit about Kerik:

As police commissioner, he had less than friendly relations with the F.B.I., and occasionally was criticized for his use of power. In writing his memoirs, which touched on 9/11 and detailed his abandonment by his mother, who was a prostitute, he used police officers to conduct research, a move that earned him a $2,500 fine from the city's Conflicts of Interest Board. He was also once accused of dispatching homicide investigators to question and fingerprint several Fox News employees whom his publisher, Judith Regan, apparently suspected of stealing her cellphone and necklace.

In the last few years, Mr. Kerik, 49, has spoken broadly about the lessons of Sept. 11 and the kind of response that terrorism requires.

In an interview earlier this year, he said that one of his most important experiences in Iraq was "to see the hatred for the United States and what certain elements out there thought of the U.S. and how dangerous it could be."

He added that many "say that we have to sort of put 9/11 behind us, move on."

"You can't put it behind us," he said, "and you can't forget about it. Because if and when you do, they're going to come back."

And picking up on the thread that September 11 will now define our approach to security and justice, AP reports on our government's new torture policy:

Statements produced under torture have been inadmissible in U.S. courts for about 70 years. But the U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of 550 foreigners as enemy combatants at the U.S. naval base in Cuba are allowed to use such evidence, Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle acknowledged at a U.S. District Court hearing Thursday.

Some of the prisoners have filed lawsuits challenging their detention without charges for up to three years so far. At the hearing, Boyle urged District Judge Richard J. Leon to throw their cases out.

Attorneys for the prisoners argued that some were held solely on evidence gained by torture, which they said violated fundamental fairness and U.S. due process standards. But Boyle argued in a similar hearing Wednesday that the detainees "have no constitutional rights enforceable in this court."

Leon asked whether a detention based solely on evidence gathered by torture would be illegal, because "torture is illegal. We all know that."

Boyle replied that if the military's combatant status review tribunals "determine that evidence of questionable provenance were reliable, nothing in the due process clause (of the Constitution) prohibits them from relying on it."

Leon asked whether there were any restrictions on using torture-induced evidence.

Boyle replied that the United States never would adopt a policy that would have barred it from acting on evidence that could have prevented the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks even if the data came from questionable practices like torture by a foreign power.

Let me close this morning's entry with a passage from the Holocaust Encyclopedia:

With the reinterpretation of "protective custody" (Schutzhaft) in 1933, police power became independent of judicial controls. In Nazi terminology, protective custody meant the arrest--without judicial review--of real and potential opponents of the regime. "Protective custody" prisoners were not confined within the normal prison system but in concentration camps under the exclusive authority of the SS (Schutzstaffel; the elite guard of the Nazi state).

The Third Reich has been called a dual state, since the normal judicial system coexisted with the arbitrary power of Hitler and the police. Yet, like most areas of public life after the Nazi rise to power in 1933, the German system of justice underwent "coordination" (alignment with Nazi goals). All professional associations involved with the administration of justice were merged into the National Socialist League of German Jurists.

Big blogger is watching you

Boing boing has a pretty funny post about MSN's new blogging tool and it's silly attempts at censorship. Xeni Jardin put MSN Spaces through its paces:

4) Uh-oh. My attempt to create an MSN Spaces blog called "Pornography and The Law" is met with rude red text advising me to can the profanity. So, if I were a law student who wanted to start a blog about the history of obscenity law in the United States, I'd be shit out of luck.

(5) Very bad news for fans of Russian literature. The blog title "Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov" is deemed inappropriate, as are any titles I try to create with the 1955 book's name.

(6) You may recall our previously-approved blog title, "Butt Sex is Awesome." That name was fine, but MSN Spaces puts the kibosh on "Anal Health for People who Think Buttsex is Awesome."

I know Blogger is like the AOL of the blog world, but I am glad that if I decide to start a new blog here, I can call it whatever the fuck I want.

Tag lines

So I've been mulling a descriptor for my blog for a while now. My dear little crazy boy friend (as in boy (pause) friend) just began a blog and I'm thinking of stealing a line from one of his posts:

"If God had Internet access he would have created the world in 7 minutes."

But that should probably be 6 minutes right? On the 7th minute he rested.

Then I came across that comment about the word of the year and I thought maybe something like:

"Notes on kakistocracy and kitsch"

There was a time when I could have gone with something like:

"I'm not gay but my boyfriend is"

But happily those years are behind me. Now I go for bipolar heterosexuals.

Anyway, I'm open to suggestions.

This feels like a bad horror movie

You know those movies where the villain never dies. He gets good and killed and then they leave the corpse alone for seven seconds and, oops, he's gone...stay tuned for sequel number eight.

Of course, with the conservatives and radical religious folks it's more like The Blob. The more they ingest, the more hungry they are.

The Economist features a gem of a story about the poor outnumbered conservatives in academia:

Yet the current situation makes a mockery of the very legal opinion that underpins the diversity fad. In 1978, Justice Lewis Powell argued that diversity is vital to a university's educational mission, to promote the atmosphere of “speculation, experiment and creation” that is essential to their identities. The more diverse the body, the more robust the exchange of ideas. Why apply that argument so rigorously to, say, sexual orientation, where you have campus groups that proudly call themselves GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and questioning), but ignore it when it comes to political beliefs?

...

Bias in universities is hard to correct because it is usually not overt: it has to do with prejudice about which topics are worth studying and what values are worth holding. Stephen Balch, the president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, argues that university faculties suffer from the same political problems as the “small republics” described in Federalist 10: a motivated majority within the faculty finds it easy to monopolise decision-making and squeeze out minorities.

Ivy-clad propaganda

The question is what to do about it. The most radical solution comes from David Horowitz, a conservative provocateur: force universities to endorse an Academic Bill of Rights, guaranteeing conservatives a fairer deal. Bills modelled on this idea are working their way through Republican state legislatures, most notably Colorado's. But even some conservatives are nervous about politicians interfering in self-governing institutions.

Mr Balch prefers an appropriately Madisonian solution to his Madisonian problem: a voluntary system of checks and balances to preserve the influence of minorities and promote intellectual competition. This might include a system of proportional voting that would give dissenters on a faculty more power, or the establishment of special programmes to promote views that are under-represented by the faculties.

There's more, but you get the idea. I really fucking hate these people. They want some sort of affirmative action program for right wingers. For fuck's sake; the reason there are more liberals in academe, if indeed that's true, is because it's a job that's all about teaching people to think critically and most of the people doing it could make far more money doing something else. If you want more conservatives there, change your party's fucking values.

George Will also weighed in on the tragedy of the liberal bias this week. He talks about the tacit assumption within the ivory tower that all colleagues are liberal. And so the conservatives are "unsheltered" by the university environment. (I'm sorry, but cry me a fucking river. I've just spent a week proving the fact that everyone in America seems to have a tacit assumption that any random stranger is a war-supporting conservative.) In any case, this of course, affects the quality of scholarship as well:

"Schools of education, for instance, take constructivist theories of learning as definitive, excluding realists (in matters of knowledge) on principle, while the quasi-Marxist outlook of cultural studies rules out those who espouse capitalism. If you disapprove of affirmative action, forget pursuing a degree in African-American studies. If you think that the nuclear family proves the best unit of social well-being, stay away from women's studies."

This gives rise to what Bauerlein calls the "false consensus effect," which occurs when, because of institutional provincialism, "people think that the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population." There also is what Cass Sunstein, professor of political science and jurisprudence at the University of Chicago, calls "the law of group polarization." Bauerlein explains: "When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs." They become tone-deaf to the way they sound to others outside their closed circle of belief.

Unless academics have stopped reading newspapers and are not speaking to anyone when they step off the quad, I find it impossible to believe they are suffering from the misconception that their ideas reflect that of the larger majority. And of course you should stay away from women's studies if you are stuck in an Ozzy and Harriet vision of social stability. Why the fuck would you want a women's studies degree? God I just want to bite some right winger in the leg right now.

Finally something to do with all those books

The possibilities are endless.

I guess they want him on the Bush cabinet

One more before bed.

This from AP:

. . .

Sen. Norm Coleman (news, bio, voting record), who is leading one of five U.S. congressional investigations into the U.N. oil-for-food program, wrote in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal that Annan should step down because "the most extensive fraud in the history of the U.N. occurred on his watch."

The Minnesota Republican joined several U.S. newspapers and columnists in urging that Annan be replaced.

. . .

Two weeks ago, Coleman's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said it had uncovered evidence that Saddam Hussein's government raised more than $21.3 billion in illegal revenue by subverting U.N. sanctions against Iraq, including the oil-for-food program.

On Monday, Annan said he was "very disappointed and surprised" that his son Kojo received payments until February 2004 from a firm that had a contract with the oil-for-food program. The Swiss-based firm Cotecna Inspection S.A., said Kojo Annan was paid $2,500 a month to prevent him from working for competitors after he left the company in 1998.

Annan said he understood "the perception problem for the U.N.," but he reiterated that he has never been involved in granting contracts to Cotecna or anyone else.

. . .

Coleman wrote in the Wall Street Journal that "as long as Mr. Annan remains in charge, the world will never be able to learn the full extent of the bribes, kickbacks and under-the-table payments that took place under the U.N.'s collective nose."

The oil-for-food program, which began in 1996, permitted Iraq to sell oil, provided that the revenue went for food, medicine and other necessities. At the time, Iraq was under tough U.N. economic penalties.

"Mr. Annan was at the helm of the U.N. for all but a few days of the oil-for-food program, and he must, therefore, be held accountable for the U.N.'s utter failure to detect or stop Saddam's abuses," Coleman wrote.

I always wonder about stuff like this whether a guy like Coleman really believes his own bluster or not. Is he seeing the parallels and playing a political shell game or does he genuinely believe the Bush administration has clean hands? I'm not sure which I'd prefer really.

For a related story, see Counterpunch's extremely depressing article about Iraq's decreasing health services and concomitant increasing deaths since the US has begun our course of regular wars with the country.

Don't try this at home

Did I promise I would go back to real news and meat and potatoes posts after jury duty? I will. Really.

In the meantime I bring you this from KATU in Portland:

KENT, Wash. - A man who placed a lava lamp on a hot stovetop was killed when it exploded and sent a shard of glass into his heart, police said. Philip Quinn, 24, was found dead in his trailer home Sunday night by his parents.

Palmdale and the American dream

I know it's bad when I'm citing USA Today articles (I promise to more substantive when my civic duty is over). In any case, the first color paper has an article about commuting which says 3.4 million people have what they call an "extreme commute" where they drive more than 90 minutes each way:

To afford a house in a neighborhood with good schools, low crime and Saturday morning youth soccer, extreme commuters keep high-paying jobs in the big cities and buy houses well beyond the traditional metropolitan area.

In California's Antelope Valley, across a mountain range from Los Angeles, commuters call it "driving until you qualify."

John Brooks, an economic analyst for Palmdale, a commuter boomtown 65 miles from the heart of Los Angeles with a population of 116,670, says residents literally get on the freeway and drive away from Los Angeles until they find a house with a mortgage payment that they can afford. Every mile away from the city drops the price of a house thousands of dollars.

Can I just say I really don't get it. At least three hours of my life every day to have the privilege of lawn mowing--I don't get it. But then, I never craved offspring and I thought it was a good idea to spend more than a decade of my life and tens of thousands of dollars so that I could earn the sniggering nickname "doc," so I am clearly out of step.

You may recognize the Antelope Valley from the opening of City of Quartz:

The best place to view Los Angeles of the next millennium is from the ruins of its alternative future. Standing on the sturdy cobblestone foundations of the General Assembly Hall of the Socialist city of Llano del Rio--Open Shop Los Angeles's utopian antipode--you can sometimes watch the Space Shuttle in its elegant final descent towards Rogers Dry Lake. Dimly on the horizon are the giant sheds of Air Force Plant 42 where Stealth Bombers (each costing the equivalent of 10,000 public housing units) and other, still top secret, hot rods of the apocalypse are assembled. Closer at hand, across a few miles of creosote and burro bush, and the occasional grove of that astonishing yucca, the Joshua tree, is the advance guard of approaching suburbia, tract homes on point.

The desert around Llano has been prepared like a virgin bride for its eventual union with the Metropolis: hundreds of square miles of vacant space engridded to accept the future millions, with strange prophetic street signs marking phantom intersections like "250th Street and Avenue K." Even the eerie trough of the San Andreas Fault, just south of Llano over a foreboding escarpment, is being gingerly surveyed for designer home sites. Nuptial music is provided by the daily commotion of ten thousand vehicles hurtling past Llano on "Pearblossom Highway"--the deadliest stretch of two-lane blacktop in California.

If you live in So. Cal. and haven't read City of Quartz, you really should. And yes, before you comment as such, I know I should read Ecology of Fear. It's on the list.

You know it's a "duty" because it really isn't any fun

So of course, I can't talk about what I do all day anymore, nor do I have ready access to news most of the day. Though I am surrounded by people with opinions about the news.

Let me just say this...I am really unused to sitting elbow-to-elbow with 13 other people (there are two, as-yet-unknown, alternates) in a space only marginally larger than my bathroom. My misanthropic tendencies are on the rise. Also, it would not only upset me to have a lawyer who did not know how to mute his phone, it would also upset me to have one who didn't own a comb.

Things other jurors said to me today:

In re. the former Soviet Union:

When I told them [Soviets and Ukranians] their country had missiles pointed at us, they didn't even know. Those people weren't even aware of what was going on in their country or the world. It was a bad, bad system.

In re. the war in Iraq:

I just feel bad for those poor soldiers. They don't even know who is an insurgent and who isn't. They're over there risking their lives for an ideal.

In re. West Wing:

Well, it's a good show except for all the propaganda.

Insert deep and heavy sigh here. Because I would like my other jurors to actually listen to me when we enter deliberations (if I am not picked as an alternate), I refrained from comment on the above except to say to the last remark: "Yes, well it's very well written." To which the man replied, "Yes, it doesn't assume you're an idiot." (I rested my case with that.)

On that final note, one more quick post before I go watch the propaganda show, which I still like even though "it's gone way downhill."

The real word of the year

So of course, everyone's posting on "blog" being the word of the year. In the comments on The Washington Monthly's post on "blog," I came across this:

My vote for Word of the Year would still have been for
kakistocracy.
Posted by: ckelly on November 30, 2004 at 4:44 PM

I don't know about anyone else, but I had to look it up. The American Heritage Dictionary says:

Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens

I'm going with ckelly on this one.

Work will set you free

In the category of "saying it will make it so," comes news (belated to me) that the military has renamed 17 Iraqi bases:

The Army has renamed 17 of its bases in and around the Iraqi capital, dropping cocky names like Camp Steel Dragon for more benign ones like Camp Honor.

Gone also is Camp Headhunter, Camp Banzai, Camp Warhorse and Camp Gunslinger. Since mid-September, those bases have been renamed camps Independence, Justice, Freedom and Solidarity.

The new names have been given Arabic translations, which have become the official titles that now appear on signs and news releases.

Already, on Camp Victory North, now renamed Camp Liberty, signs declare that travelers have entered Camp Al-Tahreer or Camp Liberation.

If I didn't know better, I would truly believe this to be an Onion story. Camp Headhunter has become Camp Independence and Camp Gunslinger has become Camp Solidarity. You can't make this shit up.

Please tell me they were just checking spelling

By now most of you have heard that Merriam-Webster has declared "blog" the number one word of the year. Myself, I like CNN's definition "A four-letter term that came to symbolize the difference between old and new media during this year's presidential campaign" better than M-W's "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks." If this were my online personal journal I surely would have written a post about my challenges with tasks such as getting my car washed and one titled "if you can't change your life, you can at least change your hair," but I have refrained.

In any case, the real news to me is in the rest of the list:
2. incumbent
3. electoral
4. insurgent
5. hurricane
6. cicada
7. peloton : noun (1951) : the main body of riders in a bicycle race
8. partisan
9. sovereignty
10. defenestration

It seems pretty dominated by politics and plagues, huh? Just please reassure me that people simply want to check the spelling of "electoral" or "incumbent" or "partisan." People know what those words mean, right? Why do I get the sense that most of the folks who needed to look up the definition of "incumbent" voted for him.

And defenestration? How great is that. That's always been one of my favorite words. I'm not really clear why it's the tenth most popular word to look up, unless the electoral college and the partisan politics of the incumbent have more people more upset than I thought.

Let's just not amend it right now, okay?

Of course, you all know that along with the desire to deny rights to gay citizens, another reason some folks want to amend the Constitution right now is to enable foreign-born citizens, or let's just call it like it is--Arnold Schwarzenegger--the right to run for president. My thinking on the former issue has been largely limited to "I hate bigoted people," and "I really fucking hate bigoted people," so it hadn't really occurred to me until just now that, were the bigots to get their way, it would be the first time we've amended the Constitution to deny a group of people rights based on their identity. I'm not even sure such an amendment has been proposed before. Wow. Good times everybody.

On a lighter note, Arnold's opposition is dusting off copies of the Constitution as well. A friend at work sent me this link yesterday. The more you look at it, the more hilarious it becomes. At first, you're trotting through some fairly familiar ground--the fact that Arnold's dad was an SS officer, A's reprehensible record for fondling women....Then you get to a line like this one, "Arnold was tapped for the Gubernatorial run at the occult-entrenched Bohemian Grove and rubbed elbows with the illuminati at the Rothchilds family home."

Can I tell you I laughed out loud all alone here in the apartment (well, with Nic the cat, but he's not a good mirth-sharer). The Illuminati are back!! No wonder everything's so fucked up. It's all making sense to me now.

Blame Canada

Here's a quickie I got from my sister via email.

CANADA BUSY SENDING BACK BUSH-DODGERS
Filed under: Humor— Techievampire @ 11:50 pm

Joe Blundo, THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
The flood of American liberals sneaking across the border into Canada has intensified in the past week, sparking calls for increased patrols to stop the illegal immigration.

The re-election of President Bush is prompting the exodus among left-leaning citizens who fear they'll soon be required to hunt, pray and agree with Bill O'Reilly.

Canadian border farmers say it's not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, animal-rights activists and Unitarians crossing their fields at night.

"I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn," said Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota.

The producer was cold, exhausted and hungry.

"He asked me if I could spare a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn't have any, he left. Didn't even get a chance to show him my screenplay, eh?"

In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. So he tried installing speakers that blare Rush Limbaugh across the fields.

"Not real effective," he said. "The liberals still got through, and Rush annoyed the cows so much they wouldn't give milk."

Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet liberals near the Canadian border, pack them into Volvo station wagons, drive them across the border and leave them to fend for themselves.

"A lot of these people are not prepared for rugged conditions," an Ontario border patrolman said. "I found one carload without a drop of drinking water. They did have a nice little Napa Valley cabernet, though."

When liberals are caught, they're sent back across the border, often wailing loudly that they fear retribution from conservatives. Rumors have been circulating about the Bush administration establishing re-education camps in which liberals will be forced to drink domestic beer and watch NASCAR.

In the days since the election, liberals have turned to sometimes-ingenious ways of crossing the border.

Some have taken to posing as senior citizens on bus trips to buy cheap Canadian prescription drugs. After catching a half-dozen young vegans disguised in powdered wigs, Canadian immigration authorities began stopping buses and quizzing the supposed senior-citizen passengers.

"If they can't identify the accordion player on The Lawrence Welk Show, we get suspicious about their age," an official said.

Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants are creating an organic-broccoli shortage and renting all the good Susan Sarandon movies.

"I feel sorry for American liberals, but the Canadian economy just can't support them," an Ottawa resident said. "How many art-history majors does one country need?"

In an effort to ease tensions between the United States and Canada, Vice President Dick Cheney met with the Canadian ambassador and pledged that the administration would take steps to reassure liberals, a source close to Cheney said.

"We're going to have some Peter, Paul & Mary concerts. And we might put some endangered species on postage stamps. The president is determined to reach out."

Joe Blundo is a Dispatch columnist.

Why it is good I am not a secret agent

It kills me that I can't write about the trial, let me tell you. It is quite the anthropological experience. Let me just say this...I really hope I never have a lawyer whose cell phone goes off repeatedly during a trial.

(And here's another thing...I'm away from my computer for something like 8 hours and I miss so much news. More rats deserting the sinking ship, more former military folks conscripted, more atrocities. Heavy sigh. If I got sequestered I might actually learn how to be an optimist again.)

Juror #3 is now going to take a nap before evening work and light blogging.

Utterly silly

There's no excuse for a post like this, I know. (Have I mentioned that I have a think about against the knitting craze?)

From the In Box

Below is the text of an email from the ACLU asking to sign their "I refuse to surrender my freedom" petition. And why not do that, huh? If you're skeptical or still nursing a grudge from Skokie, check out their Lost Liberty pages. It's really a good time to be an ACLU member (though don't make the mistake of thinking it will get you out of jury duty.)

Dear Friend,

Something extraordinary is happening.

In the last two weeks, thousands of people - deeply concerned about the
direction our country has taken - have spontaneously joined the ACLU. They've added their names to those of over 400,000 other Americans committed to defending the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Today our most fundamental freedoms are in jeopardy. Only a bold, spirited
movement of people like you who refuse to surrender your freedoms can protect our civil liberties.

On January 20th, George Bush will pledge to uphold the Constitution. Our
goal is to recruit 100,000 new ACLU supporters by that day to proclaim "I REFUSE TO SURRENDER MY FREEDOM."

Let's make it clear to those who seek to take away our freedoms that they
are on the wrong side of the law...the wrong side of core American values...and the wrong side of history.

The more forcefully we speak out and the more voices that join us the more
effective we can be -- in the courts, in the press, in Congress - in protecting our freedoms against those who would trample them.

Your active participation has been so important to our work, and we hope
you will help launch this campaign by doing two things right now:

1. Sign the "I Refuse to Surrender my Freedom" pledge.

2. After you sign, ask three of your friends to take the pledge too.

Right-wing extremists are more than ready to expand the Patriot Act,
attack the separation of church and state, expand their efforts to institutionalize discrimination against same-sex couples, and limit a woman's right to make her own decisions about her body.

Some of the most powerful politicians in America are determined to undermine our fundamental freedoms and the basic constitutional principles that define our democracy.

Please stand up, sign the pledge -- and defend the principles and values
that represent the best of America.

Sincerely,

Anthony D. Romero
Executive Director

Where to shop and where to not

The Center for Responsive Politics "tracks money in politics, and its effect on elections and public policy." This page lists major retailers, how much they contributed during the 2004 election cycle, and to which party. I'll bet you can guess most of it:

• Wal-Mart Stores contributed $2,005,516, 20% to Dems and 80% to Reps
• Home Depot contributed $716,270, 6% to Dems and 94% to Reps
• Target Corp contributed $314,588, 26% to Dems and 73% to Reps

It doesn't look too good for the dems at all until you get to the Gap and Barnes & Noble (the latter which contributed $103,850, 98% to dems and 2% to reps! there go those book readers again.)

The media possibilities are better. (I may have to rethink my refusal to believe in the "liberal media.") Books always make a good gift.

I was always told, growing up, that a boycott is only good as its publicity, so if you chose to forego shopping at one of these places (say picking Costco over Wal-mart--please do), think about dropping a letter or email to them explaining why you're not shopping there or buying their products.

Or you could just boycott the holiday altogether

Me and my big mouth

Yes, I have been selected to serve on a jury. Of course, I can't say much about that except that I won't be blogging during daytime hours for the next few days. God help me if it lasts much longer than that. It's civil, not criminal so I'm cautiously optimistic. Next time I get called though, I'm wearing a black tee shirt with a big anarchy symbol on the front of it (though I love Gordon's approach--see the comments in the post below).

A few notable things. First, the Burbank court house not only doesn't have a cafeteria, it doesn't even have a vending machine that dispenses coffee. Given that we all had to assemble at 8:00 a.m., it was a bit like the land of the lotus eaters in the waiting room. The woman who led us through the orientation came off like the judicial equivalent of Nurse Ratchet (sp?). We watched two videos about being a juror (this is how you know the courthouse is in Burbank) both of which had people saying how unique and great America is because we get to be tried by a jury of our peers. Sigh. After the whole introductory rigmarole, Nurse R. softens up. She looks at us with big sad clown eyes and tells us about the comment/suggestion box. "If for example," she says in a desperate and beseeching kind of way, "If you want to suggest the Burbank courthouse get a coffee stand, you could fill out one of these cards." Poor woman. She's not a bitch; she's just under caffeinated.

So then we're sitting getting questioned by the judge who wants to determine what kinds of jobs and employers we've had and all of our family members have had. It was marginally interesting. It really is true that California has a disproportionate number of rocket scientists. I can't tell you how many Rocketdyne employee, semiconductor work-type answers there were. They come to this one guy, and the judge asks him what kind of work his oldest son does. "He's a bum," the guy says. "Hmm," the judge says, "And before he was a bum, what did he do?" "Before that he was in jail," the guy says. "And is he married?" the judge asks. "Hell no," the guy answers, "You think anyone would have that bum?" It's always good to have a comic moment, I say.

On a more depressing note, on the train on the way there, I sat across from this woman who, coincidentally, was talking about serving on a jury (I had not spoken a word). She's telling the woman next to her how horrible it was, how they brought in the defendant in all of these chains and manacles. When the jury went to deliberate, they took a vote at first, and ten of them said he was not guilty and two said guilty, she being one of the latter two. She says one of the other ten asked who thought he was guilty. "I told them I did," she says, "'Why would they have him in all of those chains if he was innocent??'" She raises her eyebrows and shrugs at her seat partner, as if to say "duh." Then she explains that the woman gave her the third degree. "So I just said fine he's not guilty. I don't need to be put through that."

Can you blame me for not having a faux seizure or breaking out into hysterical cackling or in some other way disqualifying myself? The woman's story was just wrong on every level. Sigh.

So I have no ghost-blogger to take the keyboard in case of a sudden civic duty. I'll be posting at night some, but of course, I have to actually work at night since I can't really just not do anything job-wise for a week, so it'll be intermittent. Don't forget about me.

Why it is good I am not a librarian

So I had every intention of revamping my links this weekend. Never mind that I am approaching HTML like those people who put together furniture without reading the directions and end up with a wobbly chair and a handful of screws. I accepted my limitations and was going to at least add links to the ugly list that now exists even if I can't yet make it look attractive.

But this is exactly the kind of task that stymies me. It's the categorization thing. (And here we begin to uncover some of why it took me lo-those-many-years to write my dissertation.) I had thought there are so many sites I like that I didn't want to just willy-nilly them into one impossible list. And some of them are places I read diligently, and some are places I not only visit several times a day, I feel the bloggers are my virtual friends or developing friends. And that seemed worth noting as well. So I'd thought something like "haunts" and "regular stops," but then what? Then I thought, maybe "those wild Athenians" should be called out as such, but how to categorize the rest of the planet? And then I thought maybe "inspiration" for those sites that buoy my spirits and "conspiration" for my buddies. But what else? Expiration? Perspiration?

If I use "fellow travelers" as a category, will the liberal but non-leftist folks get their feathers ruffled? Is "great stuff if you overlook the knitting/yoga" a legitimate category that anyone understands but me? These are the questions I ask myself.

All of which is to say, I have done nothing. I really must go to bed because even if I were to miraculously shed my insomnia and go to sleep this instant, I still run the risk of falling asleep in the courthouse tomorrow.

Revised link list coming soon (maybe).

Civic duty

So tomorrow I have jury duty, which means that I have be in Burbank at 8 a.m. This feels like a hardship for two reasons: I am not a morning person, even a little bit, and I am a bit freeway phobic (the latter reason being, in therapeutic terms, a wee minimization).

Though I know it is wrong of me to so completely not want to serve on a jury, I don't. Serving on a jury, right now, in my work cycle would mean that I spend all day in the Burbank courthouse and then come home to log into the network to do my waged work.

I am comforted my the knowledge that I almost certainly will be eliminated. (While this indicates much of what is wrong with the legal system, it is a comfort in the purely selfish sense that I will not have to work around the clock.) I'm sure that having written a dissertation about the Constitution and being a member of the ACLU for a couple of decades will cross me off someone's list.

Gift pick of the day

Think Geek is offering a USB Christmas Tree. You plug it into your USB port and it changes from color to color. A bargain at $13 really.

Making the world safer, one war at a time

On the front page of yesterday's LA Times (registration required) was a story titled "U.S. Lacks Reliable Data on Iran Arms." I know this is not new news (I guess we could call it "olds") and I've blogged about this before, but I continue to be astonished that we are choosing this combat Groundhog Day approach to international relations. Here is the first paragraph of the story:

Although convinced that Iran is "vigorously" pursuing programs to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, the U.S. intelligence community has few sources of reliable information on any illicit arms activities by the Islamic republic, current and former intelligence officials and Middle East experts say.

I hate to keep banging on the same drums here, but does anyone else feel like we will eventually be able to do away with journalists altogether, and we can just take last year's stories and replace the country names with this year's wars? It's like 1984's Ministry of Truth but without the effort to even thoroughly erase the record. The vast majority people don't seem to even require the Commissar Vanishes approach.

Here's a bit more from the article:

"There are parts of the Iranian world that are not impenetrable," said a former senior CIA official who left the agency several months ago. The CIA and other U.S. spy services have been able to get a steady stream of reports on political developments inside the regime, he said, and have had some success tracking Iran's support of terrorist networks, including Hezbollah.

But Tehran "is particularly controlling and tight" in maintaining secrecy around its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, the former official said.

"As with any country that may be pursuing WMD," he said, referring to weapons of mass destruction, "that's the most difficult nut to crack."

This is a total "have you stopped beating your wife yet" approach to the question of nuclear proliferation. And here I'd like to point out that while the left gets smeared with a characterization as a paranoid group of folks, prone to conspiracy theories, our nation's posture towards Iran seems to be: if we don't know anything about weapon-making, that's because such thing are always highly secret. In other words, the less we find out about "wmd" (which I am convinced has entered political parlance because W can't pronounce the word "nuclear"), the more reason to suspect Iran has something to hide. Let's throw the witches in the water; if they drown, they weren't witches after all.

And the article's epiphany:

The combination of the hard-line U.S. diplomatic stance and the scant underlying intelligence has prompted comparisons to the United States' flawed case for war against Iraq.

What can a person say here but "duh."

The article was inspired, in part, by the CIA report released last week "Unclassified Report to Congress on the Acquisition of Technology Relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction and Advanced Conventional Munitions." The report covers July through December 2003 and has this to say about Iran:

Iran continued to vigorously pursue indigenous programs to produce nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Iran is also working to improve delivery systems as well as ACW. To this end, Iran continued to seek foreign materials, training, equipment, and know-how. During the reporting period, Iran still focused particularly on entities in Russia, China, North Korea, and Europe. Iran's nuclear program received significant assistance in the past from the proliferation network headed by Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan.

Nuclear. The United States remains convinced that Tehran has been pursuing a clandestine nuclear weapons program, in contradiction to its obligations as a party to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). During 2003, Iran continued to pursue an indigenous nuclear fuel cycle ostensibly for civilian purposes but with clear weapons potential. International scrutiny and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections and safeguards will most likely prevent Tehran from using facilities declared to the IAEA directly for its weapons program as long as Tehran remains a party to the NPT. However, Iran could use the same technology at other, covert locations for military applications.

And so on. I'm not sure we can make it another four years with W in the oval office without World War III.

W stands for...

The post below inspired me. During the campaign, those wretched "W stands for women" placards made me a bit nauseated, and when I saw them I would think

"W stands for wicked"

or

"W stands for weasel"

Now I'm thinking

"W stands for World War"

What do y'all think?

My new shirt

Yes, I know; I'm not the target audience. Nonetheless I love it.

Loquacious fuselage

No, not a new art band. These are among the 70 most beautiful words in the English language according to the more than 40,000 folks surveyed by the British Council. Respondents were living in non-English speaking countries, though it seems clear that they were learning English from Britishers; note "smashing" at #55 and "oi" at #61, for example.

I'm not sure how scientific the survey is, but it's interesting. The BBC has a couple of brief pieces on it, and here's the list:

1.Mother 2.Passion 3.Smile 4.Love 5.Eternity 6.Fantastic
7.Destiny 8.Freedom 9.Liberty 10.Tranquillity 11.Peace 12.Blossom
13.Sunshine 14.Sweetheart 15.Gorgeous 16.Cherish 17.Enthusiasm
18.Hope 19.Grace 20.Rainbow 21.Blue 22.Sunflower 23.Twinkle
24.Serendipity 25.Bliss 26.Lullaby 27.Sophisticated 28.Renaissance
29.Cute 30.Cosy 31.Butterfly 32.Galaxy 33.Hilarious 34.Moment
35.Extravaganza 36.Aqua 37.Sentiment 38.Cosmopolitan 39.Bubble
40.Pumpkin 41.Banana 42.Lollipop 43.If 44.Bumblebee 45.Giggle
46.Paradox 47.Delicacy 48.Peekaboo 49.Umbrella 50.Kangaroo
51.Flabbergasted 52.Hippopotamus 53.Gothic 54.Coconut 55.Smashing
56.Whoops 57.Tickle 58.Loquacious 59.Flip-flop 60.Smithereens
61.Oi 62.Gazebo 63.Hiccup 64.Hodgepodge 65.Shipshape 66.Explosion
67.Fuselage 68.Zing 69.Gum 70.Hen-night

Those of you also interested in the "wordiness" of words should check out Motherless Brooklyn. It's a great novel about small time gangsters told from the point of view of a man with Tourettes Syndrome.

The limits of the law

Who doesn't love Howard Zinn?

The nation then, was founded on disrespect for the law, and then came the Constitution and the notion of stability which Madison and Hamilton liked. But then we found in certain crucial times in our history that the legal framework did not suffice, and in order to end slavery we had to go outside the legal framework, as we had to do at the time of the American Revolution or the Civil War. The union had to go outside the legal framework in order to establish certain rights in the 1930s. And in this time, which may be more critical than the Revolution or the Civil War, the problems are so horrendous as to require us to go outside the legal framework in order to make a statement, to resist, to begin to establish the kind of institutions and relationships which a decent society should have. No, not just tearing things down; building things up. But even if you build things up that you are not supposed to build up-you try to build up a people's park, that's not tearing down a system; you are building something up, but you are doing it illegally-the militia comes in and drives you out. That is the form that civil disobedience is going to take more and more, people trying to build a new society in the midst of the old.

But what about voting and elections? Civil disobedience-we don't need that much of it, we are told, because we can go through the electoral system. And by now we should have learned, but maybe we haven't, for we grew up with the notion that the voting booth is a sacred place, almost like a confessional. You walk into the voting booth and you come out and they snap your picture and then put it in the papers with a beatific smile on your face. You've just voted; that is democracy. But if you even read what the political scientists say-although who can?-about the voting process, you find that the voting process is a sham. Totalitarian states love voting. You get people to the polls and they register their approval. I know there is a difference-they have one party and we have two parties. We have one more party than they have, you see.

What we are trying to do, I assume, is really to get back to the principles and aims and spirit of the Declaration of Independence. This spirit is resistance to illegitimate authority and to forces that deprive people of their life and liberty and right to pursue happiness, and therefore under these conditions, it urges the right to alter or abolish their current form of government-and the stress had been on abolish. But to establish the principles of the Declaration of Independence, we are going to need to go outside the law, to stop obeying the laws that demand killing or that allocate wealth the way it has been done, or that put people in jail for petty technical offenses and keep other people out of jail for enormous crimes. My hope is that this kind of spirit will take place not just in this country but in other countries because they all need it. People in all countries need the spirit of disobedience to the state, which is not a metaphysical thing but a thing of force and wealth. And we need a kind of declaration of interdependence among people in all countries of the world who are striving for the same thing.

From Zinn's The Problem with Civil Obedience (1970).

Dog chi

Today's gift pick, Feng Shui dog toys, comes from Postmodern Pets.



Catalog description:

You can promote balance and harmony in your dog's environment with these symbolic Feng Shui toys. Feng Shui is an ancient Chinese science that aims to create a balanced and harmonious environment by balancing Yin (cold and darkness) and Yang (heat and light). One way to promote such balance is through the use of certain symbolic objects.

The Lotus Bud symbolizes continuity, harmony, and purity. The Lucky Carp symbolizes abundance. The Cloud Ball with its auspicious cloud pattern symbolizes never-ending fortune. The Bamboo symbolizes longevity, courage, and resilience. Items can be combined to enhance the symbolic power. For example, the combination of the Lotus Bud and Lucky Carp would symbolize successive years of abundance.

At once I am thinking: 1.isn't one of the most endearing qualities about pets their very non-postmodern consciousness? and 2.my cat needs his chi balanced more than I can say.

As if you didn't get enough email already

World Movement for Democracy has a page devoted to email newsletters and listservs about human rights and activism. It's a pretty handy one-stop place to get sub information actually, with sources divided into global and regional information.

Letter from my dad about activism

So I was going to post something about Thanksgiving (even though it's over now). It being past two a.m., I was going to title it something witty like "the thankful insomniac," but posting about my dad made me go dig up some old papers, and despite the fact that it is very long and also personal, one of his letters is worth sharing. It's written in 1967 to my sister who was 20 at the time (I was two and apparently on my dad's lap when he was typing because at one moment there is a line of gibberish with "Travis' interjections" typed after it). By the time I was 20 my dad was way too sick to write such letters, and so my sister shared some of hers with me, which is how I come to have a copy.

I am delighted that you are deeply involved in the current peace demonstrations. The curse of the sixties is the commonly-encountered attitude that "I don't want to get involved." We are in danger of becoming a nation of voyeurs. I would much prefer to see you get involved and stay involved. I hope you don't lay down your protest placard until you are too weak to carry it. Believe me, at the Peace March in D.C. I was overwhelmed to see the number of grey-haired garment workers from New York whose feet started hurting when they paraded against Sacco and Vanzetti's execution for criminal syndicalism a half century ago.

Some people feel one is not worth his salt unless he is a radical at 20 and a conservative at 40. This is a vile canard propagated by the pusillanimous. One need not become a fat cat at forty. See e.g., Norman Thomas whose big manly voice, turning again to childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sounds, to quote the Bard, but who preaches the same revolt against oppression that he sounded with stentorian speeches at the turn of the century. See also Bertrand Russell, William Douglas, and Jake Podofsky. (Jake runs the delicatessen at 14th and Irving Sts.)

I would not suggest that you espouse every random cause that you are asked to join. You will, through life, find people anxious to demonstrate for or against anything that comes along. Some people would try to make an agnostic out of a praying mantis. It is much more effective to be a high powered rifle than to scatter your fire like a shotgun. But I hope you will not shrink from raising your voice whenever injustice is obvious to you, even at the risk of money, prestige, or person.

I do not hold with those who attack all our institutions. I am not blind to the virtues of other ways of life but I personally feel that what we have in this country is the best way of life thus far evolved by man as a functioning society. I am 100% American. But I am not like those Southerners who loved the Confederacy so much they would not wear a union suit. I want my country to present a favorable image, to maintain a posture that I find admirable, and will not yield my right to criticize it when I think it is wrong. I want America always to be the land of the three "P's"--Peace, Prosperity, and Pfreedom, for myself and my pfosterity. I want America to stay healthy because I know that when the United States sneezes much of the rest of the world catches pneumonia.

You will find another pleasant incidental benefit from a course of political activism: A deep sense of comradeship or camaraderie with those with whom you manned the ramparts. A sense of spiritual kinship develops between people who have faced a common foe or danger. I well remember how close I felt in my Army years to the other men who had bivouacked with me or shared a watch on guard duty with me. You also build up a store of exciting memories. I don't remember any particularly successful business deal I made in 1964, but I well remember marching in the Civil Rights demonstration with R. and 100,000 others. One of my vivid memories of my own college days was the time when the Nazi German Ambassador to the U.S. was a guest speaker at a tea sponsored by the German Dept. and we in the then American League against War and Fascism (spiritual ancestor of your own SDS) picketed on campus.

Finally, let me only remind you that you ought not get yourself so involved that you jeopardize yourself in your studies. It is essential that you get decent grades, continue your education, and work assiduously toward your career. Sorenson in the Saturday Review last week did not say anything much different from what many other pacifists have said in the past few weeks but his article was read by millions because he achieved such eminence in his field that his voice was effective. At the big peace march we listened intently to what Dr. Spock said largely because more than half the people there had taken castor oil when Spock told their mothers to administer it. On the other hand, I'll bet you didn't hear one word Tillie Gockenheimer said, did you? And Tillie has been marching in protest demonstrations since Kemal Pasha besieged the poor Armenians in 1916 or whenever the hell it was. But that is because Tillie Gockenheimer dropped out of high school in Pottstown, Pa. when she was 16 and has been working in a brassiere factory in High Point, N. Car. ever since.

It's funny. Before rereading this letter and without calling it to mind, I was thinking tonight about how one of the things I am most thankful for is that all of those prognostications from my youth have not come true. I am not a conservative. I have neither found god nor lost my ethics. I can't think of a reason worth compromising the principles of liberty, equality, or justice. And I am cynical only because of my frustrated idealism.

One more reason to be grateful

The ACLU is defending a Missouri High Schooler who was sent home for wearing a gay pride tee shirt. The NYT has the story. This is what Brad Mathewson's mom said:

All he wants is to wear his T-shirts. He's a typical teenager, so he's angry that they're trying to tell him what he can and can't do. We had a meeting at the school to talk about it, but we didn't get anywhere with them. They talked, I listened, and I got more and more mad. At the end I just took him home with me.

Aside from the most obvious bits of gratitude 1. I do not live in Missouri, and 2. I am no longer in high school, the story made me think about my what good parents I had too.

I think I must have been about 12 years old when I when I wore a tee shirt to school that my radical sister had given me when she was at the University of Wisconsin in the 70s. The front of the shirt had Bucky Badger, the UW mascot, in a hat with a red star on it, brandishing a submachine gun over his head. "Go Big Red" it said under the picture. I was sent to the principal's office and they called my dad at work to report that *gasp* I was wearing a Communist shirt in school. My dad's response: "Last I checked my daughter had a Constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech."

I really had a great dad. I wish I believed in heaven so I could get together with him again one day and talk to him about stuff. Though I'm also grateful he didn't live to see what a fucked up mess things are these days. He lived through enough shit--McCarthy, Nixon, the riots... but he never stopped loving America for what it could be.

How does something like this happen?

This is all over the Internet by now, but it does bear reposting. Photos are from BBC. Yushchenko's people say his facial scarring is due to ricin poisoning. (As an aside I recently found out that the other member of an ill-fated relationship I was in many years ago has apparently become one of the country's foremost experts on ricin. Ew.)

The Yush* guy

In the course of reading up on the situation in the Ukraine, I came upon this post at Le Sabot Post-Moderne (a blog from Kiev):

Reading through my comments, I'm seeing that the situation really isn't clear to some in the West. Discounting the reflexively silly Bush-haters, there are some normal people who are viewing this simply through the lens of election corruption. That's only the surface.

You have to understand the situation in Ukraine. The country is run by a series of oligarchic clans that actually found their beginnings in the Soviet Union, and then grew fabulously rich during the early days of "privatization".

Compare the situation to Russia, where an authoritarian Putin faced off against corrupt oligarchs. In Ukraine, authoritarianism and oligarchy are fused. Yanukovych isn't just another unscrupulous candidate, he's the main man of Akhmetov -- the duke of Donetsk and the richest man in Ukraine. The current president, Kuchma, is the head of a different clan, Dnepropetrovsk. The presidential administrator is Medvedchuk, who happens to run the Kiev-based Medvedchuk-Surkis clan. He also owns the two biggest Ukrainian TV stations, which is awfully convenient.

While there is jockeying for control among these clans, the overall effect is for them to sustain one another in power. They all depend on the same system for survival, and actively collaborate to keep it in place.

A good example of the clan system in action was the recent privatization of the Kryvorizhstal factory. Western firms offered 2.1 billion dollars. It was sold to the presidents son-in-law for 800 million. His son-in-law is Pinchuk, the head of the Pinchuk-Derkach clan.

Do you start to see how life works here? This isn't about a few stolen votes. It's about an entire system of fine control over the political, social and economic life of the people. Economics and politics are incestuously fused here in a way that is difficult to imagine for those in the West.

Yes, indeed, it is hard for this blogger to fathom the incestuous fusing of economics and politics. A system of nepotism that results in unfair competition in awarding recently privatized contracts?! Collusion to maintain the power status quo?! Over our heads to be sure.




Then there was this comment on the thread:

I think in the West, we are missing a frame of reference here. I had to look up the woory [sic] oligarchy in the dictionary just to make sure it meant what I think it meant. The situation is Russia is totally alien and I think we have no idea what that is, so it doesn't make a good comparison. Now I have to go look up authoritarianism. Such strange concepts in government.

But now I understand. You're saying that power and wealth is controlled within a small, elite, inbred group. The good old boy's network, as it were. Although there are actually various clans of good old boys.

So, it isn't just about election fraud. That's almost a given. It is about an entire system that is being tipped in the balance of a few small elite groups.

The Yush* guy was some sort of democratic like candidate. Or at least, one less well connected, we are to understand?...

God will punish me I am sure but I couldn't stop myself from responding that if she needed to look up the word "oligarchy" or "authoritarianism" it wasn't because she is a westerner, it was because she wasn't very well educated. (Though I did encourage her to keep learning.)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to draw spurious connections. It just was one of those moments in blogland that made me go "hmmm." But then, I am a reflexively silly Bush-hater, so take it for what it's worth.

Kiev

Yesterday in front of the presidential office.

In the spirit of the holiday

American Progress Action Fund (via After School Snack) reminds us all that we really do have reasons to be grateful.

Right...term limits. I'll give thanks for that.

Jefferson says

From a letter to Miles King September 26, 1814

Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right.

From a first draft letter to Horatio G. Spafford January 10, 1816

You judge truly that I am not afraid of the priests. They have tried upon me all their various batteries, of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying & slandering, without being able to give me one moment of pain. I have contemplated their order from the Magi of the East to the Saints of the West, and I have found no difference of character, but of more or less caution, in proportion to their information or ignorance of those on whom their interested duperies were to be plaid off. Their sway in New England is indeed formidable. No mind beyond mediocrity dares there to develope itself. If it does, they excite against it the public opinion which they command, & by little, but incessant and teasing persecutions, drive it from among them. Their present emigrations to the Western country are real flights from persecution, religious & political, but the abandonment of the country by those who wish to enjoy freedom of opinion leaves the despotism over the residue more intense, more oppressive. They are now looking to the flesh pots of the South and aiming at foothold there by their missionary teachers. They have lately come forward boldly with their plan to establish " a qualified religious instructor over every thousand souls in the US." And they seem to consider none as qualified but their own sect. Thus, in Virginia, they say there are but 60, qualified, and that 914 are still wanting of the full quota. All besides the 60, are "mere nominal ministers unacquainted with theology." Now the 60. they allude to are exactly in the string of counties at the Western foot of the Blue ridge, settled originally by Irish presbyterians, and composing precisely the tory district of the state. There indeed is found in full vigor the hypocrisy, the despotism, and anti-civism of the New England qualified religious instructors. The country below the mountains, inhabited by Episcopalians, Methodists & Baptists (under mere nominal ministers unacquainted with theology) are pronounced "destitute of the means of grace, and as sitting in darkness and under the shadow of death." They are quite in despair too at the insufficient means of New England to fill this fearful void, "with Evangelical light, with catechetical instructions, weekly lectures, & family visiting." That Yale cannot furnish above 80. graduates annually, and Harvard perhaps not more. That there must therefore be an immediate, universal, vigorous & systematic effort made to evangelize the nation. To see that there is a bible for every family, a school for every district, and a qualified (i. e. Presbyterian) "pastor for every thousand souls; that newspapers, tracts, magazines must be employed; the press be made to groan, & every pulpit in the land to sound it's trumpet long and loud. A more homogeneous" (I.E. New England) "character must be produced thro' the nation." That section then of our union having lost it's political influence by disloyalty to it's country is now to recover it under the mask of religion. It is to send among us their Gardiners, their Osgoods, their Parishes & Pearsons, as apostles to teach us their orthodoxy. This is the outline of the plan as published by Messrs. Beechef, Pearson & Co. It has uttered however one truth. "That the nation must be awaked to save itself by it's own exertions, or we are undone."

The above are offered in the service of pointing out that, in fact, "our founding fathers" did not intend America to become one nation under the Ten Commandments. Though I know I will be typing into the abyss, as everyone seems to be leaving their screens for the holiday weekend, I may yet post more thoughts on the myth that there even is such an entity as "our founding fathers" and the complication that is the Enlightenment. I've been pondering this for some time, but am having difficulty being concise about it.

Oxymoron of the day

Contemporary Latin Poetry

For my poet friends who are feeling oppressed by excessive exposure and a broad readership, know that the dead language option is always open to you.

They just need oxygen!

It's all coming clear to me now. The rise of the radical religious right is a public health problem. (With thanks to MacRaven for the link.)

Some kind of city on a hill

They just failed to mention what kind of hill. Dung? Beans?

If Britain continues under Labour leadership, governmental anti-terrorist provisions being proposed will parallel the siege against civil liberties in the United States. The UK Times reports the bill would permit wire-tapping evidence in court and allow drug testing of all arrested subjects. If passed, it would institute an ID card system including "secure database of addresses and biometric identities based on facial or iris recognition or fingerprints of everyone in Britain." (There seems to be some flip-flopping about whether carrying an ID would be mandatory, but it would at least be required to garner a passport.) The proposed bill would also create a sort of UK FBI and institute "new police powers to crack down on intimidation and harassment by animal rights activists" as well as other protestors.

At least the war against civil liberties is a war the UK and US can win. Can you say "Pyrrhic victory"? I knew you could.

I don't know how the great writers retain such poetry when they write about these things. All I can think is "Oh stupid fucking brave new world."

LA weekend picks

X and the Blasters at House of Blues on Sunset. Friday night.

Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia at UCLA. Sunday.

Honestly, I don't know if I can take a Nazi movie right now; I really don't. I went to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. last month and I think that was a sufficient dose. But X...that's a whole nother thing. Early punk rock is just the best, you know?

Gratitude

One of the pieces of advice you sometimes get in 12-step fellowships when you are feeling particularly sorry for yourself is to make a "gratitude list." It's the sort of advice that can really rankle a person. It's just a little too "shiny, happy people" for some of us (yes, I am outing myself, but the story is good enough to warrant it). So one night around this time of year ('tis the gratitude season here in the US after all), I'm in a meeting and this new guy is talking about trying to write a gratitude list after it was suggested to him. He says he sat in front of the paper for a long time and couldn't think of anything. Then he finally writes down "I'm alive." Then he thinks about that for a little while. And then he crosses that out. Finally he writes "At least I'm not on fire."

It is in that spirit that I refer you to Popular Science's Worst Jobs in Science, pointed out to me by those crazy Athenians, Eponymous and yelladog. Now when people urge you to be grateful on this day of thanks, you can say "At least I'm not on fire, and I'm not a landfill monitor."

Offerings from the Atomic Museum

You may or may not know that Albuquerque, New Mexico is home to the Atomic Museum, a Smithsonian affiliate. They are in the process of renaming themselves the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History because I guess that is easier to promote. Yet despite the face lift, the following items are available from their gift shop:

Tee shirts commemorating the first A-bomb explosion, Trinity (Revelations, anyone?)


A set of five bomb blue prints including Fat Man and Little Boy


A variety of DVDs about the history of the bomb and bomb testing sites narrated by William Shatner (click here to listen to Shatner's latest venture, including his collaborative piece with Henry Rollins).

And inexplicably, under the category "Fun Stuff," with the description

Let your imagination run wild! You or someone you know (perhaps the child in you?) may love optical tricks, magnetics, glow-in-the-dark toys, mobiles, robots, or other intriguing items. Check out these selections that will keep you playing. Whether you're shopping for a child or for someone who has almost everything, you'll want to keep these for yourself!

there is a category for posters: "Decorate your bedroom, classroom, dorm room, or office with these neat and unusual posters!"

with items including a poster of the Nagasaki bombing

"Neat," huh?

Maybe people are just stupid

I know it doesn't have much to do with anything, but I need to just say I find the fact that the notorious Virgin Mary toasted cheese sandwich has been purchased for $28,000 one more bit of mounting evidence that a lot of people are in fact painfully dumb.

Top ten reasons blogging beats writing a dissertation

10. You can cite yourself even if you're not the foremost expert.
9. It's okay just to write "what he said."
8. You can drink coffee while you're in the "archives."
7. ADD is an asset, not a handicap.
6. You don't have to revise after you get comments.
5. It's perfectly acceptable to write "What the hell is wrong with people?" as many times as you like.
4. You can do all your research in your pajamas.
3. Sometimes people read what you wrote.
2. You can use the word "fuck" if you want to.

And the number one reason blogging is better than dissertating...
1. No one asks you "are you done yet?"*

*(A comment which A explains "couldn't be ruder if you were having sex.")

Correlation?

According to a study by The Chronicle of Higher Education reported here (because I no longer have a sub. to the chronicle), the percentage of college students voting for Kerry was higher than the percentage among non-enrolled 18-19 year-olds. The data seem not terribly conclusive to me, but this quote was a gem:

College Republicans Vice Chairman of Events Jeremy Williams said he viewed the Chronicles' findings to be "an indication of the liberal bias in today's colleges among professors."

Sure, Jerry, that's it...it's the liberal stranglehold we're witnessing in education and the media. It's so oppressive isn't it?

Another organization, Declare Yourself, also has survey results about youth voters. They report that the Internet was the first source of information for 25% of young voters, and "Among those who cited the Internet as their primary source for news, a sizeable 62% voted for Kerry, while only 36% backed Bush."

The Declare Yourself survey report ends with a comparison of how informed youth (voters and non-voters) are versus the rest of us fogeys. They use the survey to argue that youth voters are almost as informed as adult voters. So, for instance, 90% of youth voters could identify the Vice President of the United States, versus 91% of adult voters; similarly 86% of youth voters knew who Kerry's running mate was versus 88% of adult voters. The numbers on Supreme Court Chief Justice are more skewed with 32% of youth voters and 52% of adult voters being able to answer that one. Is it so wrong for me to think if you don't know who the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is, you should have to take a class before you can vote. I mean, c'mon...9% of voters didn't know who the fucking Vice President is?

Anybody want to meet in Washington

Plans for the Counter-inaugural are afoot. I think I'm going. My sister says she'll bail me out of jail if need be. Did you know the Department of Homeland Security has designated it a "National Special Security Event"? I didn't. That just sounds so festive. Who would want to miss such a thing?

Language is a virus from outer space

You know the old saw about the Inuit having so many words for snow? Well, they have no word for "thunderstorm" or many of the other phenomena they are witnessing with global climate change. Reuters has a fascinating article on this month's report released by Arctic Climate Impact Assessment. In particular, they talk about the degree to which indigenous people are, quite literally, at a loss for words to describe what is happening to their environment:

In Arctic Europe, birch trees are gaining ground and Saami reindeer herders are seeing roe deer or even elk, a forest-dwelling cousin of moose, on former lichen pastures.

"I know about 1,200 words for reindeer -- we classify them by age, sex, color, antlers," said Nils Isak Eira, who manages a herd of 2,000 reindeer in north Norway.

"I know just one word for elk -- 'sarvva'," said 50-year-old Eira.

What a clear indicator that the world is changing too fast...when the pace of events has outstripped a language's capacity. It made me think about American English. Perhaps we need more words to talk about mass mediated democracy or the millennial economy. Maybe the reason our guys can't win an election is they lack vocabulary to even be able to construct a sound bite.

41 years ago today

Where were you when Kennedy was shot? Now you can relive the moment from Oswald's perspective. Due to be released today, the video game JFK Reloaded, asks you to fire the three shots from the Texas Book Depository. The company is calling it an educational game, designed to disprove conspiracy theories. I'm calling it Sim Assassination.

Che nesting dolls!

In response to a request, I am posting my favorite gift ideas as I run across them (see the scrabble rug and crazy cat lady action figure entries below). Today's find comes from RussianLegacy.com. If you prefer, you can get a Che and Castro set, US Presidents and Putin, or blank matryoshka dolls to create your own cast of nested heroes or villains.

News that isn't news

Does it come as a suprise to anyone that the enforcement of civil rights laws is down? Newsday has the story on a report released today by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University (I looked on TRAC's site but couldn't find a free link to the whole report). TRAC tells us the feds brought charges against 159 alleged civil rights violations in 1999 and only 84 in 2004. (I guess the world is getting better and better, huh?) Here's a blurb from the report:

Civil rights cases made up a tiny fraction of the Justice Department's total of 99,341 criminal prosecutions in 2003. The study found, however, that only civil rights and environmental prosecutions were down from 1999 to 2003 as the total caseload rose by about 10 percent.

By far the biggest criminal prosecution category is illegal drugs, at about 33,100 cases last year, followed by immigration, weapons violations, white-collar crime and others. Of the 84 civil rights cases brought in 2003, almost half involved allegations of violations by police officers, with 17 involving racial violence and nine others some form of slavery or involuntary servitude.