Some cats and rats and elephants, but Lord, I'm so forlorn

Some days, the news is just too ridiculous to not comment about it. First up are some cool cats who might be a bit too cool for their own good:

More than 10 blinking electronic devices planted at bridges and other spots in Boston threw a scare into the city Wednesday in what turned out to be a publicity campaign for a late-night cable cartoon. The devices depict a character giving the finger...

Highways, bridges and a section of the Charles River were shut down and bomb squads were sent in before authorities declared the devices were harmless.

Turner Broadcasting, a division of Time Warner Inc. and parent of Cartoon Network, said the devices were part of a promotion for the TV show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," a surreal series about a talking milkshake, a box of fries and a meatball.

From the category of rats, we've got the kind screwing up the war we've been fighting in Iraq:

Tens of millions of U.S. dollars have been wasted in Iraq reconstruction aid, some of it on an Olympic-size swimming pool ordered up by Iraqi officials for a police academy that has yet to be used, investigators say. [ed. note: try hundreds of millions, not tens]...

According to the report, the State Department paid $43.8 million to contractor DynCorp International for the residential camp for police training personnel outside of Baghdad's Adnan Palace grounds that has stood empty for months. About $4.2 million of the money was improperly spent on 20 VIP trailers and an Olympic-size pool, all ordered by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior but never authorized by the U.S.

U.S. officials spent another $36.4 million for weapons such as armored vehicles, body armor and communications equipment that can't be accounted for. DynCorp also may have prematurely billed $18 million in other potentially unjustified costs, the report said.

Responding, the State Department said in the report that it was working to improve controls

Needless to say, next time perhaps they can try tracking how they spend BILLIONS of dollars before they just hand it out. Just suggesting...

Anyway, our other rats are those trying to get us into our next war:

Investigators say they believe that attackers who used American-style uniforms and weapons to infiltrate a secure compound and kill five American soldiers in Karbala on Jan. 20 may have been trained and financed by Iranian agents, according to American and Iraqi officials knowledgeable about the inquiry.

The officials said the sophistication of the attack astonished investigators, who doubt that Iraqis could have carried it out on their own — one reason a connection to Iran is being closely examined. Officials cautioned that no firm conclusions had been drawn and did not reveal any direct evidence of a connection.

You'll note that there is not a single shred of evidence that the Iranians were involved, except for the fact that the attackers were "sophisticated". So help me, if the attack had been "intricate", we might be at war already. WTF is wrong with people to believe this crap?

On to elephants. First the kind in the New York State Senate who truly have their priorities straight with regard to who needs to be looked out for in next year's state budget:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer will propose a budget of more than $120 billion Wednesday that would increase overall spending by more than 6.3 percent, a larger increase than his predecessor, George E. Pataki, proposed last year but significantly lower than the budget enacted by the Legislature, people briefed on the plan said.

After talking for months about the need to rein in spending, the governor had to reconcile his campaign promises to substantially increase funds for education and lower property taxes, while also moving to make health insurance available to all of the state’s children and increase aid to distressed municipalities.

The governor’s plan for property tax cuts is aimed at the middle class, adding $6 billion over three years to the existing School Tax Relief program, known by the acronym STAR. Benefits under the plan decrease for upstate households with incomes exceeding $60,000 and households in New York City and its suburbs with incomes exceeding $80,000.

Some Senate Republicans criticized his proposal for not doing enough to help constituents with higher incomes.

It's always a shame when politicians fail to look out for the interests of those with higher incomes. We may see riots all the way down Wall Street, if they weren't so busy taking advantage of all their federal tax cuts that Republicans in Washington have been handing out for the past few years.

Finally, the best news story of the day, about elephants...as in pachyderms. The military has blacklisted them, but with an important caveat. From Too Hot for TNR:

According to a recently-issued Special Forces manual, while certain pack animals are acceptable to use for spec-ops purposes (donkeys, mules), elephants "should not be used by U.S. military personnel." In the assessment of the manual's authors, "Elephants are not the easygoing, kind, loving creatures that people believe them to be. They are, of course, not evil either."

There you have it. The military has concluded that elephants aren't actually evil. Giraffes, on the other hand, are either with us or against us, and we must fight them there so we don't have to fight them here.

Jacked up and our wheels in slush and orange crush

We just got back from the Illinois-Michigan State basketball game, a somewhat ugly 57-50 victory for the home team over the visiting Spartans. If nothing else, sports are a window into society, admittedly a cloudy window that frequently has cracks in the glass. Still, some random observations and photos.

First of all, I should note that attending the game in no way makes me a hypocrite in spite of my disdain for the team's racist mascot. Our tickets were given away at my wife's workplace, so we didn't even contribute to the team directly except to cover up a couple of empty seats. Our Illini t-shirts say "Illinois", not "Chief", the latter of which has to be perhaps the stupidest thing I've seen in a while to put on a shirt to support the team. Who puts the name of the mascot on a t-shirt?

In our seats in the upper level, we were surrounded by a bunch of white people, most of whom were in their 50's and 60's. I have no idea, frankly, who these people are. They aren't university professors, seem a bit too old to be students, and I didn't think a huge number of alumni really stay in town. My guess is that they are primarily the non-university population of Champaign (we have 100,000 people here, of whom no more then 10-20,000 work for the university, if that). They are scarily devoted to the team, picking apart the team's offensive failures, primarily the poor practice habits of our starting point guard, who did lead the team in points tonight on 6 of 8 shooting from the field for 17 points. They were extremely unhappy with the refs, who did seem to let every 50/50 call go the way of the visitors. More than anything else, though, the fans seemed to be there to kvetch about the team. The Illini led the entire game, by as many as 15 points early in the second half, yet we heard much more bitching than excitement. Admittedly, the game was ugly (more on this in a second), but c'mon gang, have some fun! This is entertainment, not a job.

My wife was getting driven nuts by a habit that Midwesterners seem to share: they refer to athletes by their first names exclusively (even though two different Illini are named "Brian"). She points out that our country-club-esque, extremely white neighbors in our row would almost certainly never talk to a random young 6'8" black man if they met him on the street, and certainly wouldn't address him on a first name basis, but do so exclusively from their vantage point 100 feet from the floor. It is a bit weird, really, being on a first name basis with a bunch of people that virtually anyone around us has ever met.

In the top of this shot, you see part of the Orange Crush, the Illini student fan section, who can also be viewed above my wife's left shoulder in the previous shot. These kids do really make it a crazy fun atmosphere in Assembly Hall, making noise constantly throughout a game, most of which time they spend jumping up and down while either needling the other team or cheering for the home team. To the left on the floor, we have the cheerleading team. I need not say anything about the cheerdudes, other than to point out that the current president was a cheerdude at Yale. The female cheerleaders are the kind of peppy obnoxious types who do that bouncy foot-switching thing when they walk down the street, and are always chipper. I hate those people. Thankfully, there is enough going on at a basketball game that they can generally be ignored. On the right hand side, in blue and white, is the Illini dance team, an entirely different set of cheerleaders. They do the more choreographed routines but skip the aerial maneuvers. Essentially, their routines would be extremely suggestive if performed at about 1/4 the speed, with lots of hip rocking and chest thrusting, but at their hyperkinetic speed they come off instead like someone tweaking out while trying to get rid of a wedgie.

You'll notice in this shot that exactly one player from each team is moving. This was kind of a theme for the night. Neither team has what you would want to call a dynamic offense. Michigan spent the first half turning the ball over on their way to 17 points in 20 minutes (16 turnovers vs. 21 shots, if I heard it correctly), missing a variety of midrange jumpshots because they could neither find an open 3 nor get the ball to the rim. The Illini played pretty average, but just by generating a shot on most possessions were able to run out to an 11 point lead. Staggeringly, Michigan State had the Illini in early foul trouble, so they would be shooting free throws after every Illini foul from the 7-minute mark on in the first half, yet never got the ball inside to induce fouls. Both teams basically spent most of their time wandering around the perimeter taking low percentage shots that they missed about 2/3 of the time.

In the second half, the Illini offense really started to sputter, except for their point guard, who would hold the ball forever, start to drive the lane like Allen Iverson, realize he wasn't The Answer, and pull up and drain a jumper from 15 feet. Let's just suggest he's not a huge fan of passing the ball, ever. Michigan State figured out that passing to the 6'10" guy standing three feet from the basket was a good idea long enough to close within 4 points, but then he fouled out and they resumed taking ridiculously long jumpers. If there were more than one or two fast break opportunities in the entire game, I must have blinked and missed them. Heck, there were no more than a handful of layups, something like 15 total assists by the two teams combined for the entire game, and not single recognizable screen-and-roll. Basically, this is the kind of victory that makes you worry about the likely success of your team in the conference tournament, much less the Big Dance in March. Still, it was fun, and you realize things at a game that you just don't get on TV, like the fact that a bucket-and-a-foul, because of the timing of the thing, is vastly more exciting in person than on TV, whereas a dunk just doesn't seem as exciting when viewed too far from above. I'd do it again in a heartbeat, though I have to say I prefer the downhome charm of the Illini club Ice hockey team. More on that soon, once I catch another game.

You can't get what you want, you can't want what you get. Desire's a fire with big red eyes and it'll leave you hungry

One of the great mysteries in American life was answered today. In the case of Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for President Bush, was he an actual idiot in real life or did he just play one on TV? Apparently, it's the former. From Slate's coverage of the Libby trial:

Turns out Fleischer saw a story in the Washington Post suggesting that anyone who revealed Valerie Plame's identity might be subject to the death penalty. And he freaked.

Unfortunately, Swopa at the Needlenose blog thinks this might not be quite right, but it's still hilarious, in a "these bastards risked our national security to get revenge on one of the few honest people we had in government and his wife, who was helping to fight arms proliferation until said bastards outed her to the world, and ain't comeuppance quite the raging bitch" kind of way.

Fleischer's plight reminds me of another of life's great mysteries, or at least mysteries to me. Why would anyone want a job where they are basically an extremely prominent peon, a familiar face to millions at a job utterly devoid of actual power to do anything at all? When your superiors ask you to bend rules, the result is almost inevitably a felony, and those same superiors will make sure that when certain excremental products hit the fan, you are the one covered head to toe while they come out smelling like a rose (at least if someone other than Patrick Fitzgerald investigates the case). Why would anyone want a job like this? Sure, ambition can drive people up the job ladder, and the Peter Principle guarantees that everyone rises to the level of their own incompetence, as this administration has proven hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Still, who grows up wishing that they might someday become a felonious peon standing near the centers of actual power without ever being delegated any for themselves? It's not a problem unique to government, of course, as any number of corporate executives have proven over the years.

I blame the morality of large enterprises. Neither the government nor large businesses act in a way that individuals would consider "moral". It's not their job to do so, but we seem to pretend frequently that they will anyway. People are loyal to their employer, even though their employer will fire them the second that they no longer contribute sufficiently to make the shareholders and CFO happy. People are loyal to an administration, even though it's policies will generally fall vastly short of their lofty rhetoric and they will be expected as part of their daily duties to cover this fact up. Frankly, blind loyalty to inanimate entities makes idiots of us all, and what's worse, turns people who would otherwise be relatively harmless putzes into virulent schmucks. And in the end, for what? I know people can justify it, but I simply don't get it. What exactly is it that people need, anyway? Once you've got a significant other, family, and friends with whom to spend your time, a good personal library, a kickass TV with a 5+1 surround sound audio system, high speed internet, and enough cash to afford frequent seafood, periodic entertainment events (sports, theatre, movies, dancing, etc...), and the occasional trip somewhere exotic, what more could a person seriously ask for? I'm not even joking here. If you can get all those things by working no more than 10-11 hours a day, then what exactly is the point of all the extra time (for those who can pull it off in 8/day, my hat is off to you, unless you happened to inherit it...)? I just don't understand ambition.

They've both passed on, God rest 'em, but left me caught between, That awful color problem of the Orange and the Green.

Anyone who's spent any time around me at all generally becomes aware that I seem to be well-versed in Irish music for someone who's quite literally completely Jewish as far back as my roots can be traced. An Ahkenazi-Sephardic mix, true, but beyond occasional disputes over what is supposed to be avoided for Passover, it's Members of the Tribe all the way back. No, the story which I'll get the relevant party to explain properly some day is that I was raised on Irish music, particularly the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, from birth until it was too late to make a difference. As a result, I'll forever make the wholly misleading claim that I am indeed "one quarter almost-Irish", which is true, in a very strained way. Note that I didn't say "almost one quarter Irish", which is false. I'm almost Irish, not almost 1/4 anything.

Anyway, there is hopeful news out of Northern Ireland today. Remember, Ireland as a country is a generally peaceful place, the "Celtic Tiger" in Europe's economy, with a government more than willing to work things out with the UK. In Northern Ireland, where the IRA and loyalists waged a self-described "war" for most of the past century, things are looking much better. From the WaPo:

Northern Ireland's largest pro-Catholic political party voted overwhelmingly Sunday to cooperate with the predominantly Protestant police force, a remarkable reversal that was widely seen as a critical step toward cementing peace in a British province recovering from three decades of sectarian war....

The vote by Sinn Fein, the political affiliate of the Irish Republican Army, which waged a bloody struggle to free Northern Ireland from British rule, was a required step toward restoring a Catholic-Protestant power-sharing government in the province. The British government has given the bickering parties in Northern Ireland until March 26 to form a local government or see the province's affairs fully controlled by the central government in London.

I think this goes to the heart of one of the crucial issues in ending bloody conflicts: the best way to get people to stop killing each other is to have them stop killing each other. For at least a couple of years now, the IRA has basically gotten out of the business of killing Protestants (though certain members have been accused of killing Catholics in what are essentially gang-related killings). While some Protestant paramilitaries are still in the business of Sectarian murder, the death count is essentially down to under ten cases per year, vastly smaller than it used to be. Don't get me wrong, both sides still have plenty of hatred for the other, but once one side stops creating new martyrs for the other it's amazing how it can become a chain reaction. Even though the political process has been extremely rough for the past few years, it hasn't proven to be anywhere near the trigger point for further warfare. Even the deepest wounds heal over time, but not if you keep poking at them constantly.

The obvious parallel here is Israel and the Palestinians. I honestly can't say I have a true side in the conflict. I've never been to Israel, don't know more than a smattering of Israelis, and am something of a lapsed Reform Jew, if such a thing is possible. Israel has committed grave breaches of international law against the Palestinians, who have committed grave breaches of the same laws right back at them. Both sides have overseen the murders of thousands of innocents, and it is hard to name anyone in any position of leadership for either side without blood on their hands. Still, the Palestinian leadership is completely hopeless, and every break in the fighting with Israel turns within days to Fatah vs. Hamas civil war. It's pointless asking them to do anything as a nation-state, since they have no internal control over the population. The same cannot be said of Israel, which is an authentic country with working civic institutions. Even if it's not fair, and further Israelis will die at the hands of suicide bombers, the only real solution is for Israel to ratchet down the reprisals against Palestinians. It's not an issue of fairness at all, of course, just practicality. Even if eye-for-an-eye revenge seems more fair, it just guarantees more needless deaths for both sides. No, the biblical precept that would make a difference is the one about "turning the other cheek". It may not satisfy the animalistic need to spill the blood of those who have spilled blood, but it's the only path to peace out there. Many Jews out there would portray this as endorsing weakness, but the perception of strength has never been a valid long-term goal. Peace and prosperity are the long term goals, and it's about time that responsible adults (read: people out there not leading the American and Israeli governments) realize this. God willing, maybe someday the people fighting religious wars will actually bother to read their source material. I'd suggest the classic Proverbs 3:13-18

Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that obtaineth understanding.
For the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold.
She is more precious than rubies; and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her.
Length of days is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honour.
Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.
She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her, and happy is every one that holdest her fast.

I need a camera to my eye, to my eye reminding, which lies have I been hiding, which echoes belong

I just saw my second Oscar-nominated film for best picture today, and will have my brief take on it and the Oscars in general in a second, but first a couple of stories that go to the heart of how the picture we have about events in Iraq is woefully incomplete.

The past week has seen two examples of fine journalism that should be broadly commended. First was the story of the battle for Haifa Street, the main front of our attacks on Sunni insurgents/militias in Baghdad. According to a superb NYTimes article by Damien Cave and James Glanz, American troops are getting the usual help from the Iraqi army on joint American-Iraqi patrols, i.e., none whatsoever. Basically, we're cleaning out Sunni fighters, ostensibly for security, more practically so Shiite militias can trail behind our soldiers and clear out as much of the remaining Sunni population as possible. Second was the AP getting to the truth of the story behind four soldiers kidnapped in Karbala before they were executed 25 miles away (or "briefly kidnapped in raid", according to the FoxNews propaganda service). From the AP, which is an actual news source:

U.S. Confirms GIs Seized In Sneak Attack: Contrary To Previous Reports, It Now Says 4 Soldiers Were Abducted And Killed By Militants In Karbala

The U.S. command on Friday confirmed that four American soldiers were abducted during a sophisticated sneak attack last week in the Shiite holy city of Karbala. It said three were shot to death and a fourth was fatally wounded with a gunshot to the head when they were found in a neighboring province.

A week ago, the Defense Department lied to the AP, the people of America, and the entire world, further eroding their minuscule credibility, as follows:

"The group used percussion bombs and broke into the building, killed five Americans and kidnapped two others, then fled," the governor said, adding that Iraqi troops later found one of the SUVs with three bodies of uniformed men.

The U.S. military, which has said that five U.S. soldiers were killed and three were wounded while repelling the attack, denied that two U.S. troops were kidnapped.

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman, said all American forces "were accounted for after the action."

In the underreported bad news (again covered well by the AP), we turn to the story of just who was on the helicopter that crashed last weekend in Baghdad, killing 12 American troops:

Two colonels, one lieutenant colonel and two command sergeants major were among the 12 soldiers killed last weekend in a Black Hawk helicopter crash northeast of Baghdad, the Pentagon said. One of those killed on board was based in Fort Huachuca.

It appeared to be the largest number of key officers and command sergeants killed in a single incident during since the Iraq war started nearly four years ago.

The U.S. command has not said why so many key officers were aboard a single helicopter, which went down Saturday in Diyala province, one of the flashpoints of the Iraq conflict.

One of those Colonels was Brian Allgood, the Chief Army surgeon in Iraq. The crash happened either while new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was finishing up a tour of Baghdad, or soon thereafter. Let me suggest that the first successful shootdown of a military helicopter in months, taking out a shocking number of officers, was the result of militants being tipped off to the value of the target. This reeks of an inside job.

Now, on to the movies. Today, we finally saw The Departed, which was very good, and will almost certainly win Scorcese his first Best Director award, even though I suspect that Alejandro González Iñárritu probably deserves the prize for Babel (more on this in a second). The movie was very good, with fine acting performances all around (Nicholson as the crazy Mob Boss, DiCaprio and Damon as the respective police mole in the mob and vice versa, Wahlberg and Sheen as the police unit leaders, and Vera Farmiga as the woman caught in the middle) and great location shooting in Boston. I still can't get over the fact, though, that the movie is a remake of the Hong Kong flick Infernal Affairs, which was just as good if not better. Too much credit is often given to screenwriters who adapt novelists, as if the good lines belong to the guy who quoted the lines, rather than the one who write them in the first place, and a similar dynamic applies to remakes. Simply put, the original takes more vision than the remake. If you have to see one of the two, try the original first. Infernal Affairs is available in every video store in the known universe, and its worth the time.

At the movie theater, we entered the Oscar competition drawing they had, so here were my picks:

Film: I picked Babel, which I haven't seen since I've heard that it is phenomenally depressing (for similar reasons, I am wary of 9/11, Holocaust and war movies, and saw neither Flags of our Fathers nor Letter from Iwo Jima, the latter of which is nominated in this category). I think The Departed has an outside chance, better than Little Miss Sunshine, which I really liked, and The Queen, which I've yet to see.

Director: Scorcese takes this one over Eastwood and the directors of Babel, The Queen, and United 93 (missed it, see above).

Actor: Forest Whitaker was my pick, because I can't imagine the award going to Leo for Blood Diamond, Ryan Gosling, Peter O'Toole, or Will Smith. impressively, I've seen none of these.

Actress: Helen Mirren will win, as dignified mature British actresses always do, over the equally dignified and British but recently awarded Judi Dench, equally British Kate Winslet, equally dignified Meryl Streep, and Penélope Cruz, who was the best of all the actresses I've seen in these respective roles. She was also the only one i've seen in these respective roles.

Supporting Actor: Eddie Murphy takes the comeback lifetime achievement award over Honsou and Haley, who I haven't seen, as well as Arkin and Wahlberg, who I have. Arkin and Wahlberg were both very good, but neither role really struck me as Oscar material.

Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett was born to win Oscars, and has the fact she's from the British Commonwealth and approaching "dignified" working for her. No one knows who Barraza or Kikuchi are, Breslin hasn't even hit her teens, and Jennifer Hudson was previously seen on American idol. I've only seen Sunshine from this group.

Foreign Film: Pan's Labyrinth in a heartbeat. I'll be seeing it next weekend.

Oddly enough, Volver didn't get a nomination for Foreign Film, but Cruz is up for Best Actress. This is ridiculous. For one thing, I don't see why we have to pretend that foreign films qualify for all the other awards. If the Academy was serious about this, than English-speaking actors would only occasionally get a nomination for an acting prize, and rarely if ever win (same for the technical awards). America may have the second-largest film industry in the world after Bollywood, but the rest of the world makes many more films than we do, and the Academy just doesn't make the time to review them all, since their focus is, has been, and will be on English-language film. Instead, we get token nominations from the rest of the world when leaving them out would be too criminal, but these nominations are tokens all the same. In the end, few people really mind because most of the Americans reading Oscar recaps in People magazine and on Entertainment Tonight don't like to watch movies with subtitles anyway. So, kids, remember that on a night where we celebrate the best of Hollywood (or at least claim to do so), the best cinema is often lost in translation (unlike a few years ago, when it was Lost In Translation). Hopefully, more on this theme next week when I review Pan's Labyrinth.

Scientific Literature/The Boss/The Horse's Mouth (Friday Cat/Concert/Better Know a Blog Blogging #5)

Friday Catblogging

I gave a talk this past Wednesday, so Karina decided to help out by studying the journal articles I had printed out. For those with good eyesight, that's a map of the dark matter in the universe going back billions of lightyears on the computer screen.

Friday's Concert Clip

Two weeks ago, I suggested that Green Day was the conscience of my generation, as frightening as that sounds given that a decade ago they were primarily famous for pop-punk ditties about masturbation. With apologies to the Dixie Chicks, the musical conscience of our nation is the same guy it's been now for the better part of three decades. His friends probably call him Bruce, but here we'll refer to him as The Boss. his album from this past year, "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions" would easily top my chart for album of the year, managing an amazing mix of righteous anger and musical hilarity. Most of the songs here weren't written by Pete Seeger, and they're certainly not sung in the same way; rather, this album carries on the traditions of Pete Seeger trying to wake up a sleeping nation. Musically, the album is a tour of Americana, with large doses of New Orleans Dixieland, Irish-inflected fiddle tunes, and some more traditional roots and gospel numbers.

We'll start out with the most fun song on the album, "Pay me my money down", which comes as a 2-for-1, since this video also includes the band's rendition of a song I grew up singing in elementary school, "Erie Canal".

Next, moving into some politics, the haunting British anti-war ballad "Mrs. McGrath", a song about losing limbs in a war (it's a common theme, really, see also Johnny, I hardly knew ye and The band played Waltzing Matilda). The lyrics have been updated a bit for the modern era:
"All foreign wars I do proclaim
live on the blood and the mothers pain
I'd rather have my son as he used to be
Than the King of America and his whole navy"

Continuing on this theme, the best song not on the original album, whose title says it all: "Bring 'em home".

Lest we close on too depressing a note, someone seems to have put the prettiest song on the album, Shenandoah, to their own pictures of its scenery. Personally, I think the song is even more beautiful because of the gravel in his voice, lending it a melancholy counterpointed by the rising tone of the backing vocals. Some commenters apparently disagree over at youtube, but I believe it is because they are soulless morons who wouldn't know good music if it stuck a foot in their...well, you get the picture.

Better Know a Blog

One of my favorite blogs out there just switched home's moving from the borg-like liberal blog network at The American Prospect to the borg-like liberal blog network at Talking Points Memo. Today, we'll say a bit about The Horse's Mouth, a blog by Greg Sargent, which describes itself as "A blog about the repoting of politics -- and the politics of reporting". Some of you might have noticed I have a bit to say about these matters, so it should come as no surprise that I probably rank among his top 10 or 20 most frequent commenters. Greg's a cool guy, and very in tune with his audience, known to actually give thoughtful replies to many of his commenters, at least until you get tens or hundreds of them in a single thread and it's kinda hard to keep up.

The blog's focus is on how the media reports on politics: the unspoken assumptions that badly need to be clarified, how facts are molded to fit the current narratives (rather than the reverse), and how many leading pundits are often wrong about pretty much everything but in such a way that it never comes close to reducing their lucrative media appearances. If there is one thing I've learned from his blog and similar ones, it's that once a narrative is established (Gore thinks he invented the internet! Bush would be good to have a beer with! Democrats are effete and thus should not be listened to on matters of national security!), almost nothing can break it. Most of the reaction to Jim Webb's response to the state of the union involved how masculine he was, rather than the actual content of his criticisms! The media operates like this constantly. The little assumptions they make are everywhere, and it slants their reporting systematically. It's not that the slants are inherently left-leaning or right-leaning, just that it obscures the actual news under a cloud of trivial cow poop.

One of his current campaigns is an attack on the "centrist" label applied to anything that Senators Chuck Hagel or Joe Lieberman propose. Lieberman is near the median position for the Senate on domestic issues, but far to the right on foreign policy. Hagel is the exact reverse. On foreign policy, however, neither is anywhere near the center of the actual viewpoint of Americans, who are beginning to overwhelmingly turn on the war. The median position in the country is to pull all troops out within a year. With respect to that, a large majority of the Senate is out of the political mainstream, including the entirety of the Republican party. This is nothing new, they've been that way for a while. With regard to every item on the democrat's 100 hour agenda the public was strongly supportive, at least 60% in all cases. Thus, the liberal House of Representatives is "centrist" if the word has any meaning whatsoever. So long as the media has it's way, the word won't. Luckily, blogs like this are watching the gatekeepers, so there is still hope for positive change.

Yes, I love technology but not as much as you, you see.

It can amaze even me, something of a professional techie in the grand scheme of things and a daily Slashdot reader, just how philosophically committed people can get to their computers and the software they run. Most of the world mistakenly thinks Microsoft software is required to run a computer, or at least to do business on one. This is dead wrong, of course; I still try to argue occasionally that Microsoft anti-virus software would remove the entire operating system if it functioned properly. Anyway, no one can match the passion of the Free Software Foundation and their followers, and that is in many ways a good thing. Their mission:

The Free Software Foundation (FSF), established in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free software, particularly the GNU operating system, used widely in its GNU/Linux variant.

Basically, their goal is to allow people to control their own software, able to modify it and learn from it, rather than treat it like a black box of mystery. Their weapon of choice is known as the Gnu Public License, or GPL, which basically says you can modify a program, copy it, and even redistribute it to others, but that you have to pass on to them the same rights in turn. If you're familiar with the Linux operating system, this is the license that it is distributed under. I can give you a copy of the version we use at work, and it would be perfectly legal. Needless to say, neither Macintosh (the maker of the computer at which I type this) nor Microsoft buy into this model, though it should be noted that OS X is built upon an operating system developed in a comparable fashion. I like to think I've done my part in this: I've publicly released a scientific computer code under the GPL, and this blog is covered by a Creative Commons license that works in much the same way. Sharing is good, and should be encouraged.

In some cases, freedom of information is something of a mixed bag. There are campaigns underway to make scientific research freely available, both publications and the underlying data. Making articles available to as broad an audience as possible is certainly a good idea, especially given how much of the work is publicly funded (e.g., everything I work on). Some scientific journals are not so thrilled, and have actually been hiring expensive consultants with questionable track records (like supporting Exxon's campaigns against environmentalists), to argue that making scientific information freely available is somehow a form of government oppression (?!?). Thankfully, astronomers have made this issue moot for over a decade. Every paper I've ever published was released on the arXiv preprint server, which is completely free, whereas a journal subscription will run you thousands of dollars annually. Virtually every paper in physics is released this way, and it's fantastic. In a field where success is defined by how broad an impact you can make with your publications, you want as many readers as you can possibly get. This is not to say refereed journals don't have a place. Certainly, being able to get a paper approved by an independent peer review is still a certification of quality, and it reflects negatively on a paper if it doesn't eventually pass that standard, so the journals seem to be panicking over nothing. Access to data, on the other hand, can be a bit more problematic. More than anything else, it is really hard to train someone from the outside how to interpret the long strings of seemingly random numbers that most scientists produce. It doesn't even necessarily solve the problem of fudging results, since all it requires is for one to fudge the data files themselves, rather than just the plots. All in all, so long as scientific results are available to the broadest possible audience, I think it serves the public good; beyond that, we are starting to get into peripheral concerns.

The clearest cut case of freedom in the information technology world is the campaign being waged by the media corporations against their customers. The recording (RIAA) and film (MPAA) industry media conglomerate groups are among the most shortsighted businesses in the world, just after American car manufacturers. Simply put, they are suing their biggest fans because some of those fans have basic technological skills. Let's face it, it is painfully easy to copy a CD, and not much harder to do so for a movie (25 million Americans have managed to do it). The genie is out of the bottle, and it isn't going back in. Companies try to lock in content through all sorts of ridiculous Digital Rights Management (DRM) software, but it serves mostly to annoy. I bought what turned out to be my favorite album of the past year, Bruce Springsteen's "We Shall Overcome", but couldn't play it in my computer or DVD player (or iPod) because of the copy-protection. That CD was returned to the store double-quick. Nice move, idiots. Instead, I ended up buying the album from itunes, which itself has copy-protection issues that just got it banned in Norway. Of course, defeating Apple's copy protection, which limits replay devices to iPods only, is a piece of cake. You burn a CD with the songs, and read them back into the computer, making them free and clear in a completely legal fashion. DRM isn't being used to stop copying, it's being used to make it less convenient. Simply put, media companies hate you and think you are an idiot. They are correct often enough to keep trying their BS. In its newest incarnation, media companies have all sorts of protection schemes built into their new high definition next-generation DVDs, the competing formats known as HDDVD and BluRay (think Beta vs VHS videotapes). The systems they used were so impressive that the same guy cracked them both, within a week of each other. Nice job, guys. Just so we're all clear, this is definitely a project by the recoding industry, not the individual artists, who make more of their money from concert ticket sales. Unfortunately for the industry, the value of the albums themselves, measured by the cost to obtain them, is getting smaller because of modern technology. No CD is worth paying $20 for, especially when your local library has a copy (not that I am recommending you do anything legally questionable like make a copy, of course, since that would be wrong). To sell these overpriced albums, try adding some value. Throw in a DVD movie, or some really cool artwork to hang on a wall. Better yet, let's try joining the current century. DVDs are now widely available under subscription models, as are movies via On demand type services. The music industry can try the same kind of thing, or it can die. Then again, some artists can prove themselves to be visionaries, too, boosting their popularity by allowing their listeners to share music legally, as with last week's featured band, Jim's Big Ego, and their album They're Everywhere, released under a Creative Commons license. The future is here, and those that try to fight it (Microsoft, the RIAA) are going to get swept away if they're not careful. It can't happen a moment too soon if you ask me.

Ain't it hard when you find your hero ain't nothing but a hollow man

A little while ago, in listing my favorite candidates for the Democratic nomination, I had John Edwards at #1 and Barack Obama as #2. After events of the past week, let's move them into a tie. In doing so, we'll also see why so many Congresscritters are really blowhards when you come down to it, including some you would never suspect.

Here are some quotes by war critics:
1. Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN):

A troop surge in Baghdad would put more American troops at risk to address a problem that is not a military problem...That will put American soldiers in the cross-hairs of sectarian violence, create more targets. I just don't believe this makes sense.

2. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE):

"I have to say, Madam Secretary [of State Condoleezza Rice], that I think this speech given last night by this president represents the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam...I will resist it.”

3.Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE):

I believe the president's strategy is not a solution. I believe it's a tragic mistake, so Secretary Rice, to be very blunt, I can't in good conscience support the president's approach."

4. Sen. James Webb (D-VA):

"On both of these vital issues, our economy and our national security, it falls upon those of us in elected office to take action....Tonight we are calling on this President to take similar action, in both areas. If he does, we will join him. If he does not, we will be showing him the way."

Today, Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) submitted a bill that, in his words,

says that, prior to sending any more troops -- the 20,000 the president wants to put into Iraq, 17,000 of them into Baghdad, a city of 6 million people -- it would require a prior authorization by the Congress.

The bill got 6 votes from the 21-member committee, all from Democrats: Boxer, Dodd, Feingold, Kerry, Menendez, and Obama. Voting no were all 10 Republicans and 5 of the Democrats. These nay votes included:
1. Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN)
2. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE)
3. Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE)
4. Sen. James Webb (D-VA)

Way to hold the administration accountable there, gentlemen. No wonder everyone thinks politicians are all talk and never mean a goddamn word they say. Remember, this is an issue where 2/3 of the American public is against the escalation. It's practically political suicide not to support it.

Obama, who as we just noted was one of the votes for the Dodd bill, has one of his own (you are perfectly entitled to vote against the war in many different ways). He says:

That is why I not only favor capping the number U.S. troops in Iraq, but believe it’s imperative that we begin the phased redeployment I called for two months ago, and intend to introduce legislation that does just that.

Add to that his call for universal healthcare, and my support for him is certainly on the way up, though I'd feel better if he made a specific healthcare proposal with actual numbers and shit.

Edwards may or may not have made a mistake with respect to Iran. Here's the key quote:

Although Edwards has criticized the war in Iraq, and has urged bringing the troops home, the former senator firmly declared that "all options must remain on the table," in regards to dealing with Iran, whose nuclear ambition "threatens the security of Israel and the entire world."

"Let me be clear: Under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons," Edwards said.

If this is so much bluster to keep all options open as a philosophical point, so be it. What matters isn't so much what we threaten to do long down the road, but what we do in the near future. It should be to negotiate, and then negotiate more, and then to keep negotiating. Edwards might mean to do just that, but I wish he, or some other candidate for the US's highest office, would come out and say it. How hard is it to say that negotiation is preferable to a war with several thousand more casualties. Seriously, our politicians really, REALLY need to stop swinging their genitalia at foreign nations and to start proposing to act like adults. Until then, none of them are getting dessert (read: campaign contributions).

The complete song lyrics to the ditty in the post title, BTW:

Hollow Man, by Mark Erelli

They picked another one off the vine
Scooped out the seeds in the back of his mind
Filled up his head with half-truths and lies
And put the finishing touch on the perfect disguise

They rolled out a carpet and threw a parade
Convinced everyone he had something to say
They smiled as they watched from the two-way mirror
As he told all the people what they wanted to hear

(Chorus)
Hey, have you heard the story?
It's the same old song, same old dance
Hey, he's bound for glory
He ain't nothing but a hollow man

He basked in the glow of the fortune and fame
Even threw the first pitch at the World Series game
He always maintained he had nothing to hide
No one ever suspected he was empty inside

(Chorus)
Hey, he don't know what he's doing
They set him up so high, he never had a chance
Hey, you can see right through him
He ain't nothing but a hollow man

Then came the day his cover was blown
Their little Frankenstein monster got out of control
So he looked to the ones who had saved him before
Only to find that they'd changed all the locks on the doors

The press circled in with blood in their eyes
Each one wanting a piece of his shallow disguise
And they cast him aside when from glory he fell
Now he's just another bum with a story to tell

(Chorus)
Hey, he's less than zero
The greater the height, the harder you land
Ain't it hard when you find your hero
Ain't nothing but a hollow man

You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em

I suppose I could comment on the state of the Union, but honestly, why bother? Half of it will be lies, and the other half will be pauses in between lies. None of the proposals will be enacted by a Democratic Congress, thank god, so we don't have to worry about that at least. There will be a great bit of theatre in discussing the irrelevant speech, a process Josh Marshall termed "dingbat kabuki". No phrase sums up Washington politics and media coverage better. For a further example, Time Magazine has a new blog, Swampland, staffed by the former Wonkette, former democrat turned raving moron Joe Klein, and their Washington Bureau chief, Jay Carney. Today, Carney was talking about how Bush may try to resurrect his failing presidency, and said

In late 1994 and early 1995, President Clinton was in free fall. His aides despaired. They worried he might never recover from the shellacking the Democrats took in the 1994 mid-term elections. His approval ratings were mired in the 30's, and seemed unlikely to rise.

Atrios summarized the responses of a number of commenters who pointed out factual errors, the most prominent of which is that Clinton was never as unpopular as Bush is now, and his approval rating hit the 30's once before stabilizing in the low 40's during 1994, whereas Bush just hit 28. Carney's response:

Amazingly, some Swampland readers seem to think my earlier post about President Bush's State of the Union address was too sympathetic to Bush, which proves nothing but that the left is as full of unthinking Ditto-heads as Limbaugh-land.

No, this proves nothing more than the fact that the Washington Bureau chief of Time Magazine is a frickin' moron who can't be bothered to use a search engine and check some facts, nor correct mistakes after they are pointed out to him. Someday, this man could be President....

Anyway, tonight's piece is about the proposed privatization of the Illinois State Lottery:

The state of Illinois yesterday took the first steps in selling its state lottery system, hoping to attract as much as $10 billion from investors who, in return, would own a monopoly that could turn out to be the biggest jackpot yet.

The sale, which may occur as early as the spring, would not be the first privatization of public property — both Chicago and Indiana have recently earned billions of dollars by signing long-term leases with private companies to run toll roads. But the proposed lottery sale is almost certain be one of the largest privatizations of a state-run program, and it raises concerns that states, some of them critically short of cash, are selling valuable assets that could otherwise provide consistent streams of revenue.

Under the proposed sale, Illinois would receive a multibillion-dollar one-time payment, and the lottery’s new owners would receive all revenue and profit for 75 years.

This is fantastically dumb. No company in their right mind will bid more than the lottery is worth over 75 years, nor anything more than pennies on the dollar, given the uncertainties present in 3/4 of a century worth of business. The state, on the other hand, will likely be around for the entire time period, and can actually make approximately 100 cents on the dollar. If they can't handle the marketing duties, then hire a frickin' marketing agency! It's not like other aspects of the government don't. Essentially, the state is falling for a simple annuity buyout scam, only they tricked themselves into thinking it's a good idea to make a quick buck. If the state really needs the money now (I don't see what's so different about now compared to a couple years ago or a few into the future, personally), sell some frickin' bonds! It's bad enough that lotteries are horrifically regressive sources of public revenue, but to steal from the poor to give to corporations is best left to the current Federal administration (thank god for those capital gains tax cuts!).

One further problem with the lottery, as with any gambling institution, is that people are vastly hypocritical about it. For the same reasons that states that don't allow casinos on dry land will allow them on "riverboats" affixed to docks (which can then be absolutely destroyed in large Hurricanes when the river surges), Illinois apparently doesn't allow just anyone to sell lottery tickets:

“Right now, states don’t sell lottery tickets in adult book stores, or next door to welfare offices, because lottery directors know that they can be fired by politicians,” said I. Nelson Rose, a professor at Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa, Calif., who studies gambling, and has advised the Illinois Gaming Board on other matters. “You’ll won’t see such hesitation among private companies. Those are great places to sell.”

I understand the welfare office part, since you really gain nothing as a state by trying to soak the poor, but who gives a squat about adult bookstores? Why can't they sell lottery tickets? This actually makes sense, all things considered. Why is it wrong to combine one vice which is legal but looked down upon (pornography) with one that the state itself pimps (lotteries)? Seriously, what we need is to encourage lottery sales at Starbucks, Brookstones, and fancy upscale mall stores. Remember, we want to soak the rich to give to the poor...

Truth twenty-four times a second

As a Netflix subscriber, I don't have the time to review every movie I see, nor could I reasonably expect anybody out there to give a flying one about what I thought about Harold and Kumar go to White Castle (it's fantastic, BTW). Still, there are some movies out there worthy of mention, so look for this to become an occasional series. Ironically enough, the post title comes from Jean-Luc Godard, none of whose films I've ever come close to enjoying. Oh well.

Last night, we caught Volver, by Pedro Almadóvar at our local art theatre. I'm rather a big fan of his, having seen just about everything he's done except for a few of the 1980's madcap gender-confused semi-erotic farces that I can never entirely keep straight. The first NC-17 movie I ever saw was Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, back when I was a 15-year-old college freshman. Suffice it to say, the movie really deserved a run of the mill R-rating, but I gained a love for Spanish cinema that lasts to this day. More recently, Almadóvar has taken to more focused but equally as bizarre stories, mostly focusing on strange relationships and love polygons, most recently with the paralyzed (Live Flesh), comatose (Talk to Her) or the transgendered (Bad Education). This film, like All About My Mother, is about as straightforward as he gets as a director because it features what he does better than just about any director in the world: write and film movies that give actresses a chance to shine. By reputation Almadóvar, who is gay, does a better job in directing women than men, and this is especially true when it comes to relationships. His men often come off either as caricature or farce, whereas the women are strong and multi-dimensional. Here, his primary muses are Penélope Cruz, who, as many people on the internet have noted, is a vastly better actress in Spanish than in English (just compare Abre Los Ojos and Vanilla Sky), and the wonderful Carmen Maura, who last acted for Almadóvar in his best film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. This is clearly a film of and about women; there are four male speaking roles as best I could count, with at most 10 lines of dialogue in the entire film.

Instead, this is a story about the lives of families, the secrets that are kept and sometimes repressed, and the ways in which experiences are passed on down the generations. Throughout, he makes the interesting choice to let the audience see the twists before the characters themselves; in many ways the plot twists are not important in and of themselves, but as events to which the characters must react. Impressively, Cruz is given a somewhat unsympathetic part to play, up until we learn the role played by her past. As a result, her part manages to achieve nuance without the mawkishness demanded by the standard American dramatic formula. Maura, as her mother, is given the lead role for much of the comedy, but always with a bittersweet edge. Still, as films go, this one is a true pleasure to watch, an underrated factor in movie-watching. Too often, I can't bring myself to watch a great film because I know it will be godawful depressing (Babel fits this category), occasionally missing out on a movie that I had misjudged before seeing it. City of God, the most engaging story of death and poverty in the slums of Brazil ever filmed, thankfully avoided the latter fate. Volver is not a 'happy" film, and touches on any number of truly dark subjects, but it manages to treat its actresses and their daily troubles with a great deal of respect while allowing its audience an enjoyable two hours of cinema. It's worth going out and seeing if it plays near you. Otherwise, rent Women On The Verge and All About My Mother and wait for it to come out on DVD.

les bons temps

I was in NOLA not so long ago, and despite a veneer of normalcy for the tourists on Bourbon street, there is a permeating feeling that the city is fucked. And, as my co-blogger noted, tonight it has lost one of its last vestiges of pride. Whether a distraction for the proles and or a wonderous illustration of atheletic grace, the Saints billboards and signs were everywhere - "Who Dat?" is their (new?) slogan - and clearly this gave people some joy.

New Orleans is complex. It's heart-breakingly beautiful, and tropically cruel. It resembles a banana republic - and not just because the fancy mall with the Banana Republic and the Brooks Brothers stores is right across the street from the casino and the liquor store. The locals speak a different language - I saw a lot of folks speaking (I think) Creole French - and work to serve the tourists from northern lands. The Times-Picayune is full of murders that nobody seems to care enough to solve. Bourbon street is well protected, though - cops are on every corner, 'cause of course the tourists are more important.

I don't know what will happen, but it seems that the city is reduced to less than half of its population and is unlikely to grow much in the near future. It's clearly the city that America forgot - and for a visitor from the Upper Midwest, it hardly seems like the same country anymore.

I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans, I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

For those of you with an adverse reaction to football discussion, please skip down to the next paragraph, in which we use sports as a vehicle to make a broader comment on society. Everybody else, today's game can't help but make me a bit sad, not so much because I hate the Chicago Bears, but because it is bad from the perspective of being a general football fan and an American. As to the first, I am a New York Giants fan, and can't really claim a preference either way between Chicago and New Orleans. We lost to both this season by substantial margins, but don't have a huge history in my viewing lifetime to consider either much of a direct rival. Having seen just about every Bears game this season, on the other hand, I can tell you they are one of the ugliest teams in the NFL to watch, whereas New Orleans can be one of the best. The Bears have an awful quarterback who occasionally manages to hit his speed receiver, Bernard Berrian, for a 40-yard pass, but generally misses everyone else most of the time. Most of their scoring comes directly from the defense, the best in the league at forcing opposing fumbles. Watching their games involves long periods of utter boredom punctuated by turnovers resulting in scores, followed by more boredom. New Orleans had an exciting attack, mixing running and passing, and were actually fun to watch. This may sound like a strange complaint coming from a Giants fan, as our great teams were known for superb defense and capable offense, but the comparison doesn't hold up. Our Super Bowl winning defenses were sack monsters, not fumble inducers, leading to highlight film hits (and occasional ends to careers in a famous case). Moreover, Phil Simms may not have been all that exciting, but he was an accurate passer capable of driving the offense when necessary, famously connecting on 22 of 25 passes to set the Super Bowl standard for accuracy in 1987. The Bears' only forerunner in all of Super Bowl history, combining a pretty poor offense with an insane turnover-oriented defense, are the Baltimore Ravens of Super Bowl XXXV, who beat my Giants. God, I hated the Ravens then (still do, in fact), and wish I didn't have to watch their onfield doppelgängers play in two weeks.

The more important story for this Super Bowl, however, is that it represents a lost opportunity to bring New Orleans back to the forefront of America's attention, breaking through our cultural ADHD. If Bush is the worst president we've ever had, reason #1 is starting a preventive war of choice against a vastly outmanned opponent and still managing to lose, all while we forgot to finish yet another war that was extremely winnable at first but is growing less so as our troops our sucked away, in both cases failing utterly at providing the humanitarian assistance that was our clear moral obligation. Reason #2, however, is that Bush managed, through his own inaction and the inaction of his incompetent cronies, to lose an entire American city!?! Dkon can comment more on the state of things there, but suffice it to say the Big Easy will never be the same, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, suffered because of the direct incompetence of our government. How this isn't a bigger issue still, less than a year and a half later, mystifies me. New Orleans appearing in the Super Bowl wouldn't have directly solved any of the city's problems, but it would have focused the media spotlight back on the city where it belongs. Admittedly, we would have heard a nearly endless succession of heartwarming pieces about the gritty families who have returned and the troubles they've overcome, but we would have also heard the occasional bit on the greatest diaspora America has seen since we decided to move most of our Native American tribes two time zones to the West. Thank God John Edwards seems to have noticed we as a nation still have a huge, completely morally unacceptable problem here, and hopefully the media will wake up again sometime before the election to ask if our candidates plan to do jack to improve the situation there. The Saints in the Super Bowl would have provided an immediate opportunity to start the process, but unfortunately the Monsters of the Midway were too strong on defense. Look for either the Pats or Colts (it's currently 7-zip Pats, eight minutes into the game) to make them pay for their disservice to America and the displaced residents of what was once The City that Care Forgot.

Movin' on up, to the east side; we finally got a piece of the pie

For some reason, Michigan is always at the center of the affirmative action debate in the country. In 2003, the Supreme Court struck down the University of Michigan's affirmative action framework, while approving the Law School's framework. This past November, voters approved a referendum ending any affirmative action policies enacted by the state government, ironically titled the "Michigan Civil Rights Initiative.

Now, the affirmative action debate is much like the abortion debate. Neither represents an ideal situation, but both are an attempt to forge an acceptable compromise in the real world. It's easy enough to call for them to be eliminated, but it doesn't really begin to solve the underlying problems (unwanted pregnancies and institutional racial discrimination in America) that they were put in place to solve. As far as affirmative action goes, it serves a vital interest for or society to have diverse college and university student bodies. During one's formative years, it's good to meet people different than you, and it makes you a better person. I swear that most of the stupidity present in our day to day lives involves people not being able to empathize with their fellow men sufficiently to act like decent human beings. This is as central to the mission of a college as the actual classes. I don't remember most of the details I once regurgitated for tests, but I certainly remember meeting people and broadening my horizons a bit. Now, the process is being short-circuited by a bunch of whiny white people, which drives me nuts. I swear, nothing in the world is more pathetic than whiny white people. If ever anyone needed to be played a symphony of the world's smallest violins, it is my whiny brethren who feel that after being given every possible advantage a society can give a person, they still need more.

The saddest thing about the whole kerfuffle is that it makes it almost certain that some kids won't get to go to college at all so that others have a better chance to go to the school of their choice (a choice made during their teenage years, no less). As noted by Megan at her place, people place way, way too much emphasis on which school they get into. In physics, for example, there are a few schools that going to for grad school can influence the rest of your entire career (the science-heavy Ivies, MIT, Chicago, Berkeley, Cal Tech, etc.). Simply put, if you want to teach at one of these it helps to have experienced them from the other side. For literally every other career goal in physics, to say nothing of a career in any other field, it doesn't really matter so much. I can't name the similar groups of schools for professions (Law, Business, etc.), but it works pretty much the same way. Notice I'm talking grad school, for chrissakes. I started at a 300-student college and ended up at MIT, after all. Simply put, it doesn't matter which college you start at, because there are so many transitions you'll hit later that it eventually washes out. Life takes so many twists and turns that the place you start from is basically insignificant.

This is why it is absolutely crucial that schools make sure to maximize the number of students who get to go to college, not the number of kids who get their top choice. Having to settle for #2, instead of a top choice, is a couple days worth of moping and then in some cases a lasting grudge (bite me, Harvard). The choice between going to school and not is life-changing. Angry white people, it's called a "safety school". Apply to a couple, and everything else will work out ok, and everyone will get the chance to meet people who look a little different and hopefully not be racist assholes for the rest of their lives.

There are still ways in which the University of Michigan may still be able to salvage affairs. Remember, affirmative action isn't even a particularly graceful way of achieving its goals, and using a different method with the same results shouldn't bother anyone. In fact, Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly points us to a study put out by The Century Foundation. According to him:

The study found that if it's implemented well, (a) income-based affirmative action produces nearly as much racial diversity as race-based affirmative action, (b) it promotes economic diversity as well, and (c) it actually produces higher graduation rates than either a pure merit-based system (test scores and high school GPAs) or a traditional affirmative action program. What's more, it's an approach that most of the public finds inherently fair.

This is utterly brilliant. While residual racism makes it easy to take away a program aimed at minorities, justifying it based on economic grounds doesn't have the same taint in today's culture. The argument in favor is very, very easy. The richer the students, the more money spent on their elementary and secondary education. We can eliminate economic-based college admission policies, but we could also pool all property-tax supported education dollars, and redistribute them equally to all school districts in a state I don't think that many suburban school districts really want to make that trade. Hopefully, Michigan comes up with a solution like this. Given their track record, I feel pretty optimistic that they will.

Catblogger/Jim's Big Ego/Too Hot for TNR (Friday Cat/Concert/Better Know a Blog Blogging #4)

Friday Catblogging

Karina is tuckered out from a long evening spent editing all my spelling errors and grammatical mistakes as I post another blog entry.

Friday's Concert Clip

Today, we'll go with a favorite from my grad school days in Boston. The band is Jim's Big Ego, one of the bands I saw live upward of twenty times. Jim is a cool guy, a great songwriter, and something of a visionary. Their last album was released under a Creative Commons license, allowing listeners to do basically what they like with it, including redistribute it, use it to make videos, or sample it into other forms. You can buy either the CD version or the downloadable e-album here. Back in the day, he used to post the band's songs to Napster, before the big fish decided to kill it off, and he also designs websites.

In honor of my very busy week, here's a youtube video for Stress, his ode to caffeine, more caffeine, and getting away from it all, set to video with clips from the anime series Cowboy Bebop. I cannot begin to tell you how funny the song is. Listen to it right now.

Also hilarious, especially as a historical document, is the flash animation he himself made for Y2K Hooray, his song about the end of the world. Little did we know that armageddon would skip January 1, 2000 and hit us instead on November 7 that year.

Finally, for those who want an extended sample, check out this free concert recording from archive.org, and check out the free stuff at his website.

Better Know a Blog

Today we'll go with the first of several bloggers who also write for The American Prospect, America's finest liberal political magazine. He is Spencer Ackerman, and his blog is called Too Hot for TNR, in honor of The New Republic, which canned him because he's not a crazy neoconservative Likudnik hawk. Rather, he is one of the finest journalists we have in the country on matters of Middle East foreign policy. I particularly recommend the first story he wrote after joining the staff at TAP, in which he argues that we should make human rights the centerpiece of American foreign policy, rather than democracy promotion (see Iraq for an example of the latter not working so well just yet). See also why he predicts that the current escalation "surge" "augmentation" will fail.

Lest anyone think he is just another boring reporter, I should relate the story that he once tried to prove to the yahoos at TNR that one could be against the Iraq war but still hate terrorists by volunteering to “skullfuck” the corpse of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to establish his anti-terrorist bona fides. He's also a courageous guy, who signed up for an embedded tour of Iraq for stories that will appear at some point in TAP, The Nation, or a similar as yet undetermined source. Basically, he's a foul-mouthed guy with a fantastic grasp of Iraqi policy, and he's more than proving that at least in the case of The New Republic, age does not bring the slightest drop of wisdom. Check out his blog and you will learn some shit.

Boy, the way Glenn Miller played. Songs that made the Hit Parade. Guys like us, we had it made. Those were the days.

Friends, parents, people who stumble upon this blog because of random blog searches, lend me your ears. Well, actually eyes, come to think of it. I come not to bury television, but to praise it. I'd like to put forward an opinion that, while certainly not unique, cuts against the standard story that nearly everything gets worse over time. There are a string of writers and thinkers who have claimed that each generation is inferior to the prior one dating back roughly 3,000 years or so, and to them I say "Bite me". No, I'll try to argue that television, one of my other true loves after my wife, selected other family members, physics, and baseball, is better today than it ever has been before. Well, better in a way. Like many aspects of modern media, there is simply more of it, and the average show on TV is almost certainly worse than the average show from years ago. Let's face it, the average show is a crappy reality show where a group of strangers on a deserted island build a house for a needy family while being taunted by a B-list celebrity who wants them to eat some animal's internal organs for the chance to answer a trivia question that may earn them some large amount of cash, since those shows make up a majority of modern television. If we look at the cream of the crop, though, it really does have a great deal to offer.

Tonight, we'll examine comedies. Some people look down their noses at all network comedies, assuming them to be nothing but a series of fart jokes and cheesy double entendres. First of all, there is nothing wrong with fart jokes and cheesy double entendres, when done right. They are juvenile, but given the choice between laughing at something and not being amused, why do we even have to think for a second as to which choice is better? It's really an easy one, all things considered.

Still, there are any number of comedies on TV that really push the envelope for what a 30-minute comedy can be, and better yet, they're available on DVD if you haven't seen them before. We'll ignore some of the more formulaic dreck out there, and lord knows there's plenty of it. In the 80's, we had harmless nuclear family comedies where twice a season they'd discuss An Important Issue and give some good advice their Teenager In Trouble. Now, we have Twentysomethings Who Hang in a Coffeeshop, or harmless family sitcoms with or without children, because, lets face it, what can be more fun than watching two DINKs snipe at each other but remain in love?

Tonight had two of the finest examples of sitcoms redefining the genre. Importantly, neither is a 4-camera sitcom, the genre done to death by safe comedies like Raymond, King of Queens, and virtually every other "living room" oriented show on TV. The Office may be the finest remake of a British comedy of all time, not that there's really that much competition. If you've somehow managed to miss both versions to date, it's filmed in mockumentary style, detailing the lives of a group of paper supplier employees toiling away under their hapless boss. The original attempted to be as excruciating as humanly possible, limiting its lifetime but making sure that every single moment was utterly embarrassing for everyone involved, up until the slightly more heartwarming finale. The American version, on the other hand, is designed to have more legs, giving it's characters enough redeeming features that you can see how they've managed to all plausibly keep their jobs. In style, the show owes some stylistic nods to mockumentary movies (Christopher Guest comes to mind), and perhaps to Arrested Development, which admittedly tilted slightly more toward farce and less toward comedy.

Both versions were visionary in being true ensemble pieces, with a lead cast of four or five actors but a good number of meaty parts for the supporting cast, especially in the American version (it doesn't hurt that many of the side actors are the show's writers, who can insert themselves into any bit they want). More than anything else, it makes its characters seem more real by giving them a world in which they interact, rather than just a living room full of canned laughter. Also, if you think about it, it would take weeks for a small family to crack enough jokes to fill up 22 minutes. An office with 15 people in it, on the other hand, is a comic goldmine. If I had to assign a single influence, though, it has to be All in the Family. The Office does everything it can to be as offensive as possible on network television, and Archie Bunker will forever be the archetype. We need not even get into a discussion of political correctness; it's simply true that many of the finest comedians of all times have been able to skewer society by pushing it's buttons: George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, etc. In Steve Carrell's character's flaws are all our flaws reflected, and it's hilarious.

I somehow missed out on Scrubs for its first five seasons, and I don't know what I was smoking. Tonight's episode, a musical written by the team that wrote Avenue Q, was brilliant, the defining episode on TV since the Season 2 finale of Deadwood (which still takes the title for the entire decade, hands down). Making fantastic use of a the directorial control allowed by a single-camera setup, the show also maximizes it's ensemble cast of 11 or 12 regulars. Ironically, it's inspiration seems to be I Love Lucy, the first multi-camera show on television, as well as the Honeymooners; they toe the line between farce and comedy, they love to employ physical humor, and they all know how to harness a character's anger for comedic purposes. If anything, the show can be seen as a post-modern update of it's 50's forbears, adding a self-referential and self-aware narrator on top of a similar style of humor. By letting it's voiceovers go omniscient, it picks up the ability to mock pretty much whatever it chooses, including other TV shows and even it's own actors.

If TV is better today, it is not in spite of its past, it is because of it. Every medium has its visionaries, but it also has it's interpreters, who can take the ideas of previous greats and resynthesize them for the modern day. So long as new rules are being broken and new situations explored, comedy will always stay fresh, in spite of network executives' attempts to Raymond us into brain death. I haven't even gotten into the network vs. basic cable vs. pay cable divide, so I'll do that some other time, and manage to work Weeds into the discussion (who wouldn't love a sitcom about a suburban mom growing marijuana). Until then, get reacquainted with your television. Remember, for most of us, it raised us from our childhoods into adulthood and beyond, teaching us important life lessons, and never even asked us to take out the trash or make our beds.

Money, it's a crime; Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie.

I've been known to complain that much of modern journamalism is either committed by idiots, or written assuming their readers are idiots. I'm not the only one who thinks so, Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong has a running series entitled "Why Oh Why can't we have a better press corps", in which he argues the Washington Post should pay its readers, rather than the reverse, if all was fair in the world (warning: my link goes to the Google search result. If you click on the first link, it returns a VERY big page).

Anyway, in light of my scorn, I was blown away today by the superb job the New York Times did in explaining the cost of the war versus any number of possible other efforts. To summarize the chart contained within the piece, here is the annual cost of some various projects:

• Iraq War: $200 Billion


• Universal Health care: $100 Billion


• Universal preschool: $35 Billion


• Fulfilling the 9/11 Commission recommendations: $10 Billion


• Cancer Research budget: $6 Billion


• Immunizing all the world's children: $600 million (that's million, not billion)

For completeness, I could add to this list the budgets of NASA, $16 Billion, the National Science Foundation, $6 Billion, and the National Institutes of Health, $28 Billion. Needless to say, besides the fact the war was begun on immoral grounds, has killed over 3,000 US troops and many hundred thousand Iraqis, and has dramatically eroded goodwill toward the US in the rest of the world, it is a terrible waste of resources. Hint to the Democrats: we know you want to spend money on things besides the war, but don't want to be labelled "tax and spend liberals". Try the following: say the war is a failure and bankrupting the government, and propose instead to eradicate a disease. It's been done before, for smallpox! We've almost eradicated polio, with under 2,000 cases per year remaining. Experts estimate it would cost $3 billion per year to stop malaria. Americans may be parochial about having to use tax dollars for anything that benefits the rest of the world, but I think this one has some legs. There's a side benefit, too, one that all-too-often goes unmentioned, inexplicably missing from most discussions of the cost of war.

Money spent fighting malaria goes to scientists, makers of mosquito nets, and the local workers on the ground in the affected countries. Much of this money will eventually end up in people's pockets, and they can then spend it in turn, boosting in some small way the economies of several countries in the developing world. This is the good thing about many forms of government spending: it gets used to build things that add to the net value of the world's infrastructure. War, on the other hand, blows shit up. Shit like roads, buildings, and factories (and, of course, people). Every time we bomb those things, we decrease the value of the world's infrastructure, which in its own way hurts us all. Add to that the environmental devastation, the lost productivity because people are dead, too afraid to go to work, unable to work because the factory at which they work was part of the shit we blew up, or unable to work because they have no electricity, because the generating plant was also amongst the shit we blew up, and you start to see just how bad an investment a war is. It's really not a good idea to boost the economy by building things like Humvees that are also going to get blown up, when you can invest in infrastructure that might have a lifetime of more than a few years, like roads, schools, hospitals, and International Space Stations (actually that last one is a $5 Billion per year boondoggle, I just wanted to see if you were paying attention).

Remember, next time someone quotes a cost for the war, that they are only counting the cost to the US now, ignoring the benefits that said money could have been used for, to say nothing of the wreckage we are creating elsewhere. Any war, no matter how justified, spends money that could be used to end malaria, or even to fund small businesses in the developing world, like the Rooted Cosmopolitans Charity of the Month, Kiva, to which you can donate by clicking on the link at the top right of the page. I'll leave for later the explicit argument of just how immoral we are in not spending more on these things (and yes, I should be taxed more to pay for them, especially if they really soak the rich in the process), but it should be there in the back of everyone's mind, every time they hear about the costs of anything the government undertakes, even more so when the price tag creeps into the eight figure range.

You're bound to lose, you fascists, you're bound to lose

Having devoted yesterday's post to possibly the greatest American of the 20th century (and make sure to check out dkon's post immediately beneath this one for more on why he was a great liberal), we'll now turn our attention to some of the world's worst, people for whom Godwin's Law does not even apply (it states that an argument is over when you compare your opponent to Hitler or the Nazis). Our inspiration, such as it is, comes from a truly disagreeable quote from Martin Peretz, the looney-tune sewing-machine-heir-marrying owner of the New Republic. He writes, in smearing an interesting editorial by James Carroll about Martin Luther King, Jr. (if you really want to see the Peretz post, then google it; I wouldn't link to him if you paid me):

And on another clumsily related point by Carroll: "Expect the mantra of 'Socialism!' chanted last week in Venezuela to grow louder... Socialism, compared with possible anarchy, is benign." This was the identical apology to the one made for Stalin and Mao, Pol Pot and Castro. And what about Hugo Chavez's friends, Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il? Are their regimes better than anarchy?

Holy category mixing, Batman! This list includes four deeply evil men (Ra-di-cal-ly E-e-e-vil, for those who know Leon Botstein and his cadences), one minor league dictator, one wannabe badass with a bark much worse than his bite, and one deeply troubling but morally ambiguous leader. Let's consider them in turn.

1. Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Kim Jong Il: Mao killed tens of millions, through violence, repression, and forced famine. Stalin claims a comparable total, by many of the same methods. Pol Pot only rings up 1.5 million deaths or so, but not for lack of effort; Cambodia only had roughly ten million people to kill. Finally, Kim Jong Il has overseen the forced starvation of a couple million people, and takes his rightful spot among the infamous.

2. Castro is a guy that some people on the right think all liberals like. Here's an example from National Review:

But...you know what? Fidel Castro is going to die sooner rather than later. And when that happens, you're going to hear crickets chirping in certain quarters of the left before you hear similar denunciations of Castro, who remains more of a tyrant than Pinochet was. And, you can be sure, conservatives will suddenly sound universal and idealistic in their condemnations of human rights abuses under Fidel.

Umm, no. Castro is in many ways a very bad man. Cuba imprisons dissidents, bans free speech, and represses gays and lesbians. There are numerous reports of mistreatment and beatings/torture in Cuban jails, although it can now be easily argued, thanks to our wonderful administracion and Presidente, that the most infamous prison on Cuban soil is the one at Guantanamo Bay. Pinochet, on the other hand, had a thing for attaching electrodes to people's testicles, and then dumping their bodies out of helicopters into the sea after they were dead, or in some cases, before they were dead. I could give a shit about what you or he thought about the free market; he was a deeply evil man and it's a good thing that he's dead. I don't know what you have to be smoking to defend Pinochet, or Castro for that matter, but if there are levels in Hell, look for Pinochet to be a couple of extra floors down from his Cuban fellow traveler.

3. Ahmadinejad is an anti-Semite and a holocaust denier, even if he claims he is not. He is famous for saying that Israel should be wiped off the map, though some have questioned the translation. In any case, if he had one tenth the power that people attribute to him, he might actually be dangerous. Thankfully, this is not the case. Foreign policy in Iran, including the nuclear program, is controlled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is the true Iranian figure about whom you should worry. Ahmadinejad talks a big game, but he's something of a figurehead, without the power to do a goddamn thing to Israel other than to make ridiculously offensive speeches. He's also largely a problem that we had a hand in creating. His predecessor, Mohammed Khatami, was a true reformer and moderate. Just today Khatami has a measured, thoughtful piece in the Washington Post about the Iraq war, criticizing the "great nation of America" (yes, he says that and it's not sarcasm) but calling for increased dialogue and a drive for peace. Washington treated Iran with nothing but hostility once Bush came into office, dooming Khatami's government and giving rise to the movement that brought Ahmadinejad to power. The "Axis of Evil" speech has seen our problems with all three nations get worse, in at least two cases due in no small part to our own actions (the North Koreans are crazy, who knows what they want).

4. Chavez isn't even demonstrably evil. He's undemocratic, and again not a big fan of free speech, but that doesn't boost you into the ranks of "evil". What's more, our government has taken to referring to him as a huge threat, by which they mean that he has oil and we want it but don't like him. I have never seen any evidence that he regards the US as an inevitable enemy; rather, it seems as if he and the Bush administration have mutually decide to be antagonistic, benefiting his status personally but very few people else in either country. Lost on our neocon brethren is the distinction between "people who control oil and don't have right wing views" and "evil men". Chavez, until he does something significantly worse, is in the former category. I'll happily admit that I think his repressive tendencies cannot be morally justified by his actions on behalf of the poor, but the latter do serve as a moral counterweight of sorts, and we shouldn't forget it. Ideally, if we elect some grown-ups, we could actually try talking to him and, gasp!, to some of our antagonists in the Middle East, and see if we actually have some common interests, rather than rattling sabres at them constantly. Until 2009, I'm not holding my breath.

conservative compassion

A little late to post, but as I was listening to some MLK speeches that were played on student radio yesterday, I was reminded that despite his current universal canonization he was a political leader as well as a civil rights leader, and took some pretty strong "leftist" views, from opposition to the Vietnam war to active agitation for labor rights (he was supporting a garbage workers' strike when he was assassinated in Memphis).

Like duh, dude. But that's why it's galling to me when contemporary conservatives appropriate him. I mean, weren't they screaming that Rev. King was a dirty commie not so long ago? Weren't they the ones yelling about states' rights being more important than human beings? Who was supporting apartheid until its collapse? Liberals?

I have my problems with leftists. They can hold naive dualistic views, sometimes also leading them to support dictators for ideological reasons. But dammit, like they say in Latin America, the heart is on the left. If you care about human beings suffering, you act, maybe through naive government intervention or inefficient labor unions, rather than saying that tax cuts and the free market will cure all ills. Conservatives can be useful as a counterweight sometimes, but damn, they never missed an opportunity to oppose morally imperative changes.

Dr. King was a conservative, in the same land where Iraq is a shiny happy place, and global warming is caused by liberals hating America.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere

From Letter From Birmingham Jail:

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I. compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place In Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

...

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant 'Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

In honor of the holiday, it seemed appropriate to recap our trip this past summer to the National Civil Rights Museum, in Memphis, TN.

It takes up the building formerly known as the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, as well as the boarding house across the street from which he was shot. Opened 15 years ago, the museum is an absolute treasure, whose relevance today is unquestionable. Much like the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC, it serves to illuminate the vast brutality in our very recent history, brutality that continues today in Iraq, Darfur, and numerous other countries.

Touring the museum, it is hard not to be impressed by the pioneers of the civil rights era, whose vision of a better society endangered their own lives but ultimately erased many, but not all, of the grossest injustices that defined American society a mere 40 years ago. King and his brethren fought not just for the rights of Blacks, but for the rights of the oppressed, a focus sadly lacking in today's all-too-narrow discussions of just how appropriate it is to marginalize certain fellow Americans. In fact, my wife and I were struck, repeatedly, by how little the rhetorical devices of the intolerant have changed in four decades. We still hear of how outsiders threaten our way of life (immigrants), our families (gays), and our very existence (Muslims), how they walk amongst us, how our traditions and status justify forcing them to the dark corners of American society. If you will, Muslims, gays, and Blacks are the new Blacks. The Reverend King would be ashamed of us, and would never stand for it, nor should we.

How to keep his legacy alive? First, remember that if you are either White, middle-class, male, or American, or some combination of them, your fortunate birth put you instantly into the luckiest human beings ever to walk the planet. If I seem at ease with life at times, it is probably because my troubles are vastly insignificant with regard to just about everyone else in the entire world. honestly, if you think you have troubles, suck it up and stop complaining. People around the world and in this country go hungry, lack medical care, and truly struggle to make it from day to day. Do something to help them. This means ever so much more than money, but if you do have some spare funds, try the following in honor of the holiday:

• Kiva.org: If you want to donate, leave a comment to this post, and I'll match it too.
  
  
  


• NAACP: if anyone here becomes a member, I promise to do it too. Special note: madpoet, you have to buy one for yourself and a gift membership for someone else.


• United Negro College Fund: If you give a donation, I match it.


• National Urban League: You know the drill, people.
  

Remember, just because life is ducky for you, it doesn't mean it's quite so nice for your fellow man.

Don't cry yourself a river, just do something!

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!