the return of epicfu (not in 3D)

An American graffitist

from Rocketboom.

from CNN ireports-1

Apparently if you have a web connection you can upload a "citizen journalist iReport" to CNN. This is one Bob Johnson from somewhere in Michigan. I haven't figured out how to get this page to load with the ireport embedded such that it doesn't autoplay, but you can pause it indefinitely, or at least until your connection to HZ refreshes.

[note: you have to hover over the video to make the controls appear.]

Here comes Panglish

"English as it is spoken today will have disappeared in 100 years and could be replaced by a global language called Panglish, researchers claim.

Children read gossip magazines over books

New words will form and meanings will change with the most dramatic changes being made by people learning English as a second language, says Dr Edwin Duncan, a historian of English at Towson University in Maryland, in the US."


from the Telegraph, via No Longer at Ease.

Time magazine guy on labor day

Ze Frank(?) on Labor Day and Socialism

not to be confused with-- oh, you know...

via Abdusalaam al-Hindi, who hasn't posted for a while.

Here Comes the New Boss

Stelios Varias,Reuters



A friend who knows my political views asked me: "you're not looking forward to tomorrow, are you?" Referring of course to the ascent of Obama to the presidential throne. Now to be honest, I don't know how I feel about Obama, expressed on a simple level of positive/negative, good/bad, what have you. Unlike Rob Payne, I'm willing to acknowledge that between Obama and McCain, Obama might be marginally preferable, notwithstanding the embarrassment evoked by the contingent who insist on treating him like he can part the sea and persuade the sun to shine.

That's not the same as saying I think he was a desirable choice for president per se, or even for the democratic nomination-- but I'll get to that. This April Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens will turn 89, later this year Ruth Bader Ginsberg will be 76, and in fact the youngest of the liberal members of the court, Stephen Breyer, will turn 70 in 2009. I would have preferred somebody like Dennis Kucinich or even John Edwards had been the president to appoint Stevens's and Ginsberg's replacements, but that was not to be. I note this because it's pretty likely they will retire soon, and with a certain unease I'll nevertheless assert that I prefer Obama rather than McCain(or Palin) be the person to appoint their replacements.

In spite of what I see as the broader reality of Obama's nature as a corporatist quisling, I imagine some modest benefits will emerge from Obama being president rather than McCain. Federal policy on stem-cell research may become sane again, and (possibly) his environmental policies will be better than McCain's would have been. But as far as foreign and economic policy go, I doubt we'll see anything that represents "hope" or "change", with or without ironic quotation marks.

I suppose the thing I find so maddening about the ascendancy of Obama is it comes along at precisely the moment that the broader public was probably readier than they have been in decades for a real liberal reformer in the white house, what with the many missteps of the second George Bush and his cronies. And instead we get Barack Obama, who seems intent on repackaging soak-the-poor and destroy-the-welfare-state politics as the new, new liberalism, the variety you didn't know you wanted until he came along and cleared things up. It seems so abundantly clear to me that he's a fraud, a speaker of pretty words that flatter the ill-informed, and that his bipartisan, "post-ideological" ethos is really just craven opportunism, the positioning of a product-- which in this case is also a person-- in the marketplace of politics so it looks its best in the available light.

And yet, on one side of our screwy political culture we have the Obamazoids who want to flash a victory sign and cheer their new messiah so they can stop thinking and just groove on a warm feeling, and on the other the talk-radio cretins who insist that he's a socialist(?!), possibly because he doesn't want to bomb Ahmedinejad without talking to him first, or because he's never hunted moose from an airplane. Or because he's black.

About that. Although the historical significance of our first black president has been over-sold, I think even people understandably leery of the hype and the cult of Obama need to allow that his election is a sign of social progress, even if you have to qualify it by also recognizing how strenuously Obama bent over backwards to reassure middle America that he was the nice, non-threatening type of black guy, the one that Hollywood leads us to believe will absolve us of our sins in the great shopping mall in the sky.

Another friend tells me to "give him a chance," as if my attitude makes the least bit of difference. While I don't think my attitude towards Obama is remotely relevant, I'm guessing my attitude towards his flock does matter. It's probably vanity to hope to personally change the political landscape for the better, at least in terms of measurable individual effort. But collective effort is the sum of the individuals who try to achieve.....thing x, whatever that thing is, whether it's through the march of a million people or the raising of a hundred million dollars for a cause.

When I saw a news story in October about the Obama organization raising 150 million dollars in 30 days, roughly concurrent with the demise of Cursor, I couldn't help but think about that, about how the flesh is willing, the collective progressive impulse is there, but the collective mind is weak, misdirected by personality-oriented politics. The people at Cursor said all they need is about 75 grand to run for a year,a sum Obama could raise in less than half an hour. And Cursor did more to wake people up to the issues of the day than a hundred celebrity-penned Huffington Post op-eds. Not in terms of audience size, unfortunately, but in terms of the quality and relevance of the content.

But-- also unfortunately-- that clearly isn't enough. I thought about that ironic disconnect again today, when I saw the images of over one million-- and possibly close to two million-- people converging at the mall in D.C. to see Obama become president-- of how the collective progressive impulse is there, but that, functionally, Obama is an agent of (the co-option of) change.

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people," or so the old saying goes. It may well be true, but making fun of those millions who believe in Obama the savior of America rather than reaching out to them is willful and vain and stupid. Large numbers of them, black and white and otherwise, will experience a letdown when Obama emerges as just another politician, and to borrow from Barack himself, that will be a "teachable moment."

Remind yourself of 2003, and how unlikely George Bush's days with lower ratings than Nixon seemed when he was prancing around on that aircraft carrier. Obama undoubtedly has more sense than Bush Junior, at least as far as permitting himself such an unrestrained display of hubris, but even he has to realize that you can't get an 80 percent approval rating just for being the president-elect without an inevitable falling action being in store. And how much of his current approval is mere approval for his not-George-Bush quality? Even you and I and the cashier at Quiznos possess that same quality, and as far as I know nobody voted for us.

I could say, "naturally I hope I'm wrong about Obama...." largely out of a desire to seem like a reasonable person. Well sure, I do hope I'm wrong, but I think such a hope is insufficient, and the afore-mentioned letdown is coming. And I repeat: simply making fun of the millions who believe in him is unwise, insofar as large numbers of them WILL decide he isn't what they hoped he would be. And then what? Some of them are-- will be-- reachable.

(If anything, I'd guess that a lot of the newly politicized Obamazoids are among the more reachable, because their brains aren't as full of the accomodationist bullshit that so many regular rank-and-file democrats have crammed their craniums with, the kind of folks that Dennis Perrin regularly warns us about.)

In the meantime, liberalism is bleeding in the gutter where it was left by Reagan, and the Clintons, and Fox news, and by the democratic party leadership, and the faux-liberal putative left who eagerly swallow one "third way" capitulation after another, and by the rest of the news networks... and Obama.


cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Dead Horse Pt 2: or, are you a domesticated goat?

From wikisource, "The Goatherd and the wild goats"

A Goatherd, driving his flock from their pasture at eventide, found some Wild Goats mingled among them, and shut them up together with his own for the night. The next day it snowed very hard, so that he could not take the herd to their usual feeding places, but was obliged to keep them in the fold. He gave his own goats just sufficient food to keep them alive, but fed the strangers more abundantly in the hope of enticing them to stay with him and of making them his own. When the thaw set in, he led them all out to feed, and the Wild Goats scampered away as fast as they could to the mountains. The Goatherd scolded them for their ingratitude in leaving him, when during the storm he had taken more care of them than of his own herd. One of them, turning about, said to him: "That is the very reason why we are so cautious; for if you yesterday treated us better than the Goats you have had so long, it is plain also that if others came after us, you would in the same manner prefer them to ourselves."

Given that I've decided to call the new blog "Dead Horse", I probably should be careful about mixing my animal metaphors. Nevertheless I come back, time and again, to this story whenever I listen to practically anything that comes out of Obama's mouth, he of the silver tongue that makes lefty swooners swoon. I'm not so impressed with Obama myself, and I'm inclined to think his reluctance to define his politics will ultimately hurt him, even if he has more charisma than Kerry or Gore. (Of course most warm-blooded organisms have more charisma than Kerry or Gore, but that's another matter.)

All the same, even if Obama doesn't do anything for me, I recognize that millions of people do respond to him. And yet, he seems doggedly determined to squander his opportunity to help remake American politics at a time when we, the otherwise very conservative public, are more ready for meaningful liberalism and activist government, and yes, change, than we have been in a very long time. The economy appears to be teetering, government corruption and scandal, mostly republican, has soured people on incumbents and the "establishment" and we are mired in (at least one) costly and highly questionable war.

But we have Nancy Pelosi, the supposedly far left-wing democratic speaker of the house, loudly telling everybody who'll listen about her table, the one that will not allow impeachment of the most blatantly crooked president since Richard Nixon(who was pardoned 34 years ago tomorrow, on September 8th, 1974), and Obama and his running mate Joe Biden eagerly praising their opponents on Fox News and assuring anybody who'll still listen that they needn't be concerned about criminal charges being leveled against George Bush, jr.

What's wrong with this picture? Where do you even start?

This is why I'm starting "Dead Horse", which is meant to be a conversation about

1.the dysfunctional democratic party, and whether or not it can (or should) be saved.

2. our post 9-11, post-constitutional republic, a screwed up simulacrum where things are rarely as they seem, at least as far as I can see-- because

2b. It's not just the democrats "suddenly" having become dysfunctional, but a process of unraveling which seems to have been going on for a long time.

Or maybe I'm wrong(not 2b. Sorry, I can't resist...) That's why I want, from the get-go, for DH to be a group blog, for which I'm sending several invitations, both to bloggers who I feel are in approximately the same "camp" as I am, as well as a couple of others who might feel somewhat sunnier about the prospects for our future. I want to try to create the conditions and a venue for a useful conversation, not just an echo chamber. More soon, and hopefully not just from me.


cross-posted at "Dead Horse"

Marta and the Iowa State Fair Corndog Queen

Some recent items 8-17

Aziz in City of Brass, "Obama's Muslim Outreach Advisor Resigns":

Chalk up another victory for the scalp-hunting Islamophobe right: Mazen Asbahi, appointed as national coordinator for Muslim American affairs by the Obama campaign, has resigned from his volunteer position because of claims that he has "ties" to the Muslim Brotherhood, and served on the board of advisors for an Islamic fund at the same time (8 years ago) as another member, Jamal Said who is a fundamentalist imam. Asbahi actually resigned from that position after only a few weeks, once he learned of allegations against Said. In other words, Asbahi got the jihadi cooties, which are kind of like a mixture of anthrax and herpes.

Obama continues to disappoint on this score. He still remains unable to state publicly that "no, I am not a muslim but it would make no difference even if I were." It would have truly been a hope-inspiring change to see him defend Asbahi and take on the whisperers, because caving to them makes them all the stronger. That would be audacity I can believe in.

Yes, 12% of voters still think Obama is muslim (incidentally, 1% think he's Jewish). So whats the better strategy? Try to distance yourself from muslims at all costs to try and make that 12% think, "hmm. ok so he threw his volunteer outreach guy under the bus. I'm convinced!" ? Or to try and undermine the reasoning that says "if Obama is muslim, then I cannot vote for him, because muslims are not acceptable" ?

If any politician had the power or the pulpit to take on the ugly, dark side of American culture that Islamophobia represents, it's Obama. Given the confluence of events of war and energy and security, a sane outreach to Islam is in our collective best interest. Yet Obama runs away. Again.

This item from "Dr iRack" of Abu Muqawama very succinctly frames the issue of the fight regarding provincial elections in Iraq, which are tentatively scheduled for this fall:

Back on June 23, a guest poster on Abu Aardvark (now revealed to be Sam Parker at the United States Institute of Peace) usefully framed Iraq's central political cleavage as a clash between the "Powers That Be" (PTB: Dawa, ISCI/Badr, IIP, the Kurds) and the "Powers That Aren't" (PTA: Sahwa/tribes/SoIs, Sadrists, independents, secularists, etc.). This paradigm overlaps with, but greatly complicates, the standard Shia vs. Sunni and Arab vs. Kurd dichotomies typically used to define ongoing communal struggle in Iraq.
[...]

He goes on to recommend:

1. Reidar Visser's excellent discussion of the Kirkuk issue, provincial elections, and the PTB/PTA paradigm.

2. Michael Gordon's NYT Magazine article on the PTB/PTA clash within the Shia community.

3. A very good WaPo piece by Sudarsan Raghavan and Ernesto Londono on how the PTB/PTA conflict plays out regionally across Iraq.

The security improvements in Iraq are real but reversible. They cannot be sustained if the PTBs lock the PTAs out of politics. Period.

Joe Bageant quotes an anonymous political consultant regarding the Obama phenomenon in "Life in the Post Political Age"

Insofar as the style-over-substance post-political age we supposedly live in is a construct imposed on voters by elites, the degree to which people buy into it is debatable. Large numbers of people don't vote, and large numbers of the people who do vote do so in spite of lacking confidence in the basic health of the system, thinking they have no other choice. But it's worth reading-- an excerpt:

The underlying social change that led to the Obama victory is the unprecedented extent to which the narrative of popular consumer culture, and the media that drives it, has become the dominant influence on how Americans think, formulate their ideas and understand the world around them.

The most important result of this process has been the steady and consistent depoliticization of American society, to an extent that we can make the case that we are living at the dawn of the post political age.
The two primary features of the post political age are a politics completely drained of all its contents and ability or willingness to be used as an agent of change in social or economic policy, and its full integrations into the world of American popular, consumer and entertainment culture.[...]

It is a result of this dynamic that the two consistent winners in American politics over the last 30 years have been the cultural left and the economic right.

I'll miss this guy

George Carlin, May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008.

"There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad intentions," he said. Yet, out of 400,000 words in the English language, there are seven: "That will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war...."

Murder one

Melinda Henneberger writes in Slate:

On today's episode of "Hey, a Girl Can Dream", my man Benedict decides that as long as he's in the neighborhood, he should stroll on over to the Supreme Court and spend a couple of minutes protesting the death penalty, by lethal injection or otherwise. The high court is a short walk from the White House, where the president told the pope that Americans "need your message that all of life is sacred.'' And what better way to get that message out?

Maybe Il Papa didn't say anything because he knew the court was discussing capital punishment and child rape, the latter a sore point for the Catholic church. I have to believe ole JP2 would've spoken out, irrespective of the fallout. In a related article, "The Supreme Court jump-starts the machinery of death", Dahlia Lithwick writes:

Fisher says that if you look at the pair of recent cases that banned capital punishment for mentally retarded offenders (in 2002) and juvenile offenders (in 2005), it's clear the social consensus is trending away from the death penalty. Then, Roberts jumps in to argue that the "evolving standards of decency" test should not be a one-way ratchet. Does this trend "only work one way?" he asks. "How are you ever supposed to get consensus moving in the opposite direction? … Do 20 states have to get together and do it at the same time?"
[...]
Roberts says the clear trend that matters is not the one Fisher points to but rather that "more and more states are passing statutes imposing the death penalty in situations that do not result in death."
[...]
Roberts continues in this vein: The cases declining to allow capital punishment for minors or the mentally retarded, he says, are "qualitatively different" from the distinction here between child rape and murder, because they focus on the "culpability of the offender" as opposed to the nature of the offense. And Kennedy adds that "even the countries of Europe which have joined the European Convention on human rights" permit the death penalty for treason. He says that on the continent, "You can slaughter your fellow citizens, but if you offend the state, you can be put to death." Then, Scalia asks Fisher if he thinks "treason is worse than child rape." Fisher replies that all the professional sex-assault groups and social workers have lined up against making child rape a capital crime.

Why Kennedy and Scalia decided go down the nonsensical side road of comparing treason with child rape is beyond me. It makes me wonder if it's a gesture of contempt for the plaintiff(and the defense), suggesting their minds were made up. Lithwick's article is 1695 words, and not once does she mention anybody discussing the question of whether or not a mandatory death sentence for child rape makes rapists more likely to kill their victims. My sense is this is in fact the case, and it's a much more important than Scalia's asinine question about child rape and treason.

The court upheld the law regarding lethal injection, and although they discussed allowing child rape to be a capital crime that's not what this past week's decision(Baze v. Rees) was about, at least not principally.

I don't know if the death penalty is wrong in the abstract. Certainly most of the people sentenced to death are probably terrible characters, and there is some evidence it can have a deterrence effect. But I note the series of overturned convictions for capital crimes, and I believe that the death penalty as it's practiced certainly is wrong, and part of that is us. People lie, or hide rather than testify, or forget or conflate or confuse events. Zealous cops and prosecutors make mistakes, evidence gets lost, or even worse, "lost", juries decide based on prejudices, etc. There's no reason to believe that putting together some blue-ribbon panel of experts to "fix" the death penalty will fix human nature. The Dallas Morning News says that there have been 16 overturned cases in Dallas county alone :

The disturbing spate of DNA exonerations of Texas inmates is the most powerful argument for freezing Texas' machinery of death. Dallas County has the distinction of having more discredited cases than any county nationwide. Just this week, a 16th wrongful conviction was announced here. Thomas Clifford McGowan Jr. spent 23 years imprisoned by the state stemming from a rape in Richardson that he didn't commit.

How many people have been wrongly executed without getting that review of evidence after 6 or 10 or 17 years? We'll never know, but we can be pretty sure the number isn't zero.



The same problems exist with child rape convictions, although possibly to a lesser degree. But for a different practical reason, executing child rapists is a terrible idea. I'm flabbergasted that so many people think of it in terms of vengeance and don't seem to be concerned that a child rapist, having raped his victim and knowing he's liable to be executed if he's caught even if he lets her live, now has the perverse incentive to kill his victim and dispose of her to make sure she never talks. When the law encourages this, the law acts to protect the righteousness of the uninvolved.

Why don't people think about this? Do they see it as an irrelevant question?


see also Reuters: "The death penalty in the United States" and

Wall St. Journal Lawblog:"should the death penalty extend to non-homicides?"
[893-482]

Barzun at 100

And...today(11.30) is Jacques Barzun's 100th birthday. The TIME cover is from 1956, and the inset photo(courtesy incidentlights.com) is from 1997. Incidentally Barzun settled in my home town, San Antonio, when he retired in 1996. I used to know a guy whom I like to call Lothar Scruggs, who served as a research assistant for him not so long ago. (Barzun has continued(continues?) to crank out books well into his 90s, even though he retired from publishing and teaching.)

If you are reading this Lothar, you should look ole Barzun up and get him a cake or something, and maybe some Sprite. I mean, if you haven't already. I'll bet he'd like to hear from you.

Barzun was fully "alert to the irony of aging," commenting from experience that: "Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing."

Age of Reason by Arthur Krystal in The New Yorker, October 22, 2007, p. 103

via Wikipedia's Barzun entry.

and a Jacques Barzun interview on Charlie Rose, here.

meow.

I have finished my 1st movie. (No, this isn't it(above), but for some reason it came up as related content(?)* on youtube.) I uploaded it to Youtube, but I may fiddle with the editing some more. I sent the url off in an email to some persons I know who I hope might give me a sense of whether the edits are too fast or too slow.

(I have a very poor sense of this, as I tend to favor faster edits than what most people are accustomed to, at least for my generation. By contrast, young people these days, who knows-- they might think my edits are too slow.)

Anyway, I liked this video, even though I don't think it's really similar to mine. If you really want to see mine, it's here: "v. primitive".

*I have since replaced the "flying cats" video since I figured out that it just came up, not as related content, but as something they were promoting. So here's an interview with Claude Lévi Strauss(pt 1) Here's pt 2 and pt 3.

Incidentally, Lévi-Strauss will be 99 on Wednesday the 28th(!)(I guess I shouldn't refer to "young people these days" as I'm just a pup compared to him...)

Naomi n' Naomi

If you are a good liberal-- and naturally I hope you are-- then you probably (1) care about being able to tell Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf apart, and (2) occasionally have some difficulty doing so.

So as a public service and an excuse to post a picture of a couple of Naomis, I am offering this simple primer to help you tell these Naomis apart:

1.Naomi Klein(on the left), born in Montreal, is Canadian. Naomi Wolf, born in California, is American.

2.Naomi Klein is probably best known for No Logo, published in 2000. Naomi Wolf is probably best known for The Beauty Myth(1990).

2b.Unfortunately, Naomi Wolf is also known for a bit of righty/MSM misinformation: for supposedly having advised Al Gore to "wear more earth tones" when she was an advisor to him during the 2000 campaign. Although she was in fact an advisor to Gore, there is no actual evidence that she said this, and it was just another example of the idiotic big media narrative about how Gore was less authentic and out of touch when compared to the "authentic" George Bush, Jr. [...]

3. Naomi Klein is married, whereas Naomi Wolf is divorced.(Yes, I noticed the lack of a wedding ring in Naomi Klein's photo, above. But I wouldn't read too much into it-- she probably just doesn't want her new book to be jealous, since they probably spent a lot of time together.)


4. Speaking of new books, they each put out a new book in September of 2007, possibly out of a desire to confuse people. Klein's is The Shock Doctrine, and Naomi Wolf's is The End of America:a letter of warning to a young patriot.(This past summer Ms. Wolf had an article in the Guardian discussing the premise of her then-forthcoming book-- here: Fascist America in Ten Steps.


5. They're both very talented and smart and pretty and should send me free copies of their books to review. Don't you think so?


see also

Critical Thinkers: "Naomi Wolf resources"

Naomi Klein article in Harpers:Baghdad year zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia