6 September 2010

http://whoknew.news.yahoo.com/?vid=21719543

They leave out the part about how Grover Cleveland also brutally supressed striking Pullman workers, and wanted to burnish his image. Also left out: that the US doesn't celebrate labor day on May 1st because "May Day" came to have socialist connotations for some. Of course nobody pays me to be so pedantic in real life, but I can be so here.

Robert Greenwald vs. the History Channel

www.stopkennedysmears.com -A petition telling the History Channel that until they stop running politically motivated fiction as historical "fact," you will refuse to watch their programming.

Robert Greenwald: "Joel Surnow, a hard-right activist and former Fox News producer who supported Rick Santorum and is close friends with Rush Limbaugh, is the executive producer of an upcoming mini-series on the Kennedys that is character assassination of the most disgusting kind.

Unfortunately, in its desperate quest for ratings, The History Channel has decided to let fiction pass for historical scholarship. The History Channel has decided to push Surnows sleaze, degrading the accomplishments and trashing the memory of one of our nations most beloved families."

Nixon and the HMO debate

via Ed Richey and Sean O'Neill.

a reminder:when abortion was illegal

Watch When Abortion Was Illegal: Untold Stories in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

I saw this at the internet archive(here), but I find their embed protocol is a bit buggy when you re-write the html to prevent it from going into auto-play, so here it is via Veoh instead. Then again it may just be my html skills are the problem.

Anyway, the disgusting murder of George Tiller (while attending church) barely two weeks ago reminded me that I've been meaning to post this.

[cross-posted at Dead Horse.]

Bad For Democracy- Dana D. Nelson

Dana Nelson is a professor at Vanderbilt, and I believe Bad for democracy is her second book. Her publisher sent me a copy some time back, and unfortunately I've been busy with other matters, so I've just started on it. It does look promising, discussing the history of popular representations of the role of the president in US society, which she regards as generally anti-republican, in the classical sense, and far more often geared towards representing the president as the prime mover of government upon whose shoulders all power and responsibility lie, a phenomenon she terms presidentialism.

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Day of Empire-Amy chua

Empires, race and power: Yale prof Amy Chua on "strategic tolerance"

from the UC Berkley youtube channel.

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Various items 15 Mar 09

from Dead Horse[Reuters video] Turkey: Skull found at suspected mass grave.


Foreign Policy, March 2009, "The Worst Kind of Stimulus: why a global weapons boom is the last thing we need" by
Travis Sharp

from Fora TV[video]: Does the US Spend Too Much on Foreign Aid? - Peter Singer(longer version here).

??AIDS and Germ warfare [video]

Two items from 2007; I never posted them and they merit being noted:

Gary Farber discusses the reputation of Gregg Easterbrook, which he deems inflated.

CNN's Arwa Damon on prostitution in Iraq

finally, from Slate, Feb. 2003: "who's for the war, who's against it"

The 1st Formula One race

Devotees of the sport will know what I mean by calling the 1950 British Grand Prix the first formula one race, even though it was by no means the first Grand Prix. GP races date back to the Edwardian era, the first Grand Prix, appropriately enough, being the 1906 French GP. There was also an occasional US GP event, held on Long Island(!) and called the Vanderbilt Cup(!!)).

The FIA formally codified a set of rules, for formula one, formula two, and formula three in the late 1940s, so that a still devastated European economy could have a formal, unified world championship(i.e. a European championship, but we'll call it a world championship) in which the regulations for fuel capacity, engine size, etc, were codified and made comparatively uniform-- and the premier series was called formula one, with the championship race at Silverstone, England, on May 13th, 1950, inaugurating the first season.

Election 1960-- more from the internet archive

The original link is here.

1492 v2.0

and here is part 2, and part 3.

It's True, you know*

photo copyright Brendan I. Koerner

Who, you may ask, is Brendan I. Koerner? Mr K. writes periodically for Slate, and Hugozoom's (two or three) regular readers may recall I posted this arresting image* from his website from last fall. He informs me he has a book out, Now the Hell Will Start, which he describes as a "non-fiction account of an American G.I. who married into a tribe of Indo-Burmese headhunters, circa 1944." The book's website is here, and he has an article, "The Greatest Manhunt of WW II" referencing it in Slate this week. Oh, and congratulations Brendan, on your new little one.

photo cropped from original for proper formatting.

Al Nakba at 60

So many words have already been written about the Palistinian-Israeli conflict I'm not sure what I can add. Earlier this week I had a discussion in the comments thread at Karmalised with Diane Warth about a one state versus a two-state solution, which you can see here, apropos of an LA Times op-ed she linked to. Our discussion was and is for naught of course, because neither scenario is anywhere around the corner.

May 15th is commemorated as the anniversary of the Nakba, "the catastrophe", or the forced expulsion of the Palistinians by the nascent Jewish state in 1948. Last week, of course, was the celebration of the 60th birthday of Israel, the other face of the same coin.

Even though 1948 is not exactly ancient history, there is already dispute about the historical record and what really happened. The events at Der Yessin in April of '48 are one example. (More recently the events at Jenin in 2002 are another.)

Here are links to two short films about Deir Yassin, the first[here] is a somewhat impressionistic documentary told from the P.O.V. of an elderly lady who was there, the second["Deir Yassin- what really happened?"] has a more conventional narrative that minimizes the massacre, although it also acknowledges that civilians were killed and the town was attacked by Jewish forces.


As I told Diane, a friend once asked me if I thought there would ever be peace in the middle east, and I told him it would happen when they ran out of oil and the US no longer felt the desire to meddle, although we may well go broke first and find ourselves simply unable to meddle when our Chinese I.O.U.'s get called in. I suppose I'm not exactly objective.

My impression is most Americans really believe our government does care about peace in the middle east, or at least want this to be the case, and hope our apparent missteps in fumbling for peace are just due to our bumbling Western ways being ill-suited for dealing with the inscrutable East, rather than some darker truth. Like-- for instance-- that maybe American exceptionalism and the Israeli myth of the chosen people are schizophrenically complimentary myths that have helped bind the US and Israel together, two nations both invested in denying how their existence came to be at the expense of other people who were already there.



Wikipedia, "The 1948 Palistinan Exodus",
Glenn Greenwald, Salon, "Finding Obama guilty of insufficient devotion to Israel"

a Prescott Bush interview

I posted this at roughly 70% of the standard youtube size to improve the so-so image resolution, but if you want the rest or the "full-size", it's here( part one), and part 2 is here.

Both are via a channel called "BBC propaganda news", which, presumably, is not related to the BBC. As most of you already know, Prescott Bush was a US senator and the current president's grandfather.

Some things to read

1. Helena Cobban: "Israel terrified of Gazans' nonviolent mass actions"

2. Chris Floyd's recent meditation on Woodrow Wilson, whom he doesn't care for so much: "Hundred-Year Hangover: Betrayal and Blindness in the Making of the Modern World"

3.Think Progress:Pentagon pushes for more contractor immunity in Iraq.

4. Scalia fails to see what the big deal is about torture in a bbc interview.

SOTU 2008: Twilight in America

Howard: I don't see it that way, Geoff. Let me tell you what we're dealing with here. A potentially positive learning experience that can—

Grim Reaper: SHUT UP! Shut up, you American! You always talk, you Americans. You talk, and you talk, and say "let me tell you something" and "I just wanna say this". Well, you're dead now, so shut up!

from "Death" in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life


1. As I write this I'm guessing Mr preznit is saying all sorts of swell stuff about what an honor it's been, blah blah, and somewhere out there some lame-ass pro-Obama blogger is counting his guy's closeups vs HRCs to detect media bias, and another lame-ass pro-HRC blogger's doing the same.

And nobody on TV will say anything about how America has long-term problems that both Bush and the democrats are only likely to make deeper. You'd have to mention the war, and how it's going-for-broke, off-the books spending helped get us into this mess and in fact helps keep us in it, but this is inconvenient because of how it doesn't jibe so well with the narrative of how it's disloyal to defund the troops, and it reminds us that the democrats are just the enabling, other bad guys, and there's no white-hatted Gary Cooper in sight.

And even though his wife is running for president, you can't talk about how the last recession was dealt with by a president who was denied a "stimulus package" (mostly on political grounds) and subsequently raised taxes, on gasoline and higher incomes, and put some brakes on expenditures-- like the military base closing commission.(Remember that?). Didn't they call Bill Clinton's 1990s the largest economic expansion in postwar history? But even the Clintons are reluctant to talk about that any more, as it might reinforce the sturdy and simple lesson of raising taxes on those who can afford it(including their huge new rolodex of friends acquired since 1992), and undercut her Iron Lady schtick.

On the other hand, it's o.k. to talk about being "addicted to oil", but less o.k. to talk about any practical short-term strategies for actually starting the transition to a post-petroleum economy. Big vague ideas, hydrogen, The Car of the Future, goals for where we'll be in twenty years without a sliver of a plan to get there-- much better.

It's also o.k. to label that ex-president as bigotted, or at least as too-willing to engage with race-baiting, but not so o.k. to talk about the collective racism that took America to war with Iraq.

GWB: We have other work to do on taxes. Unless Congress acts, most of the tax relief we've delivered over the past seven years will be taken away. Some in Washington argue that letting tax relief expire is not a tax increase. Try explaining that to 116 million American taxpayers who would see their taxes rise by an average of $1,800. Others have said they would personally be happy to pay higher taxes. I welcome their enthusiasm. I'm pleased to report that the IRS accepts both checks and money orders. (Laughter and applause.)

Most Americans think their taxes are high enough. With all the other pressures on their finances, American families should not have to worry about their federal government taking a bigger bite out of their paychecks. There's only one way to eliminate this uncertainty: Make the tax relief permanent. (Applause.) And members of Congress should know: If any bill raises taxes reaches my desk, I will veto it. (Applause.)

Nobody calls him out for being a bloody, psychopathic loonie. Kansas republican governor Sibelius "responds",talking about bipartisanship: code for we're going to screw you too, and protect wealthy democratic donors in an election year.

GWB:"the armies of compassion continue the march to a new day in the Gulf Coast."

Eric Alterman: Here's what [that] new day looks like: residents in 40,000 trailers, provided by FEMA, that contain potentially dangerous levels of formaldehyde.
[also here.]

(Junior didn't even mention Katrina reconstruction in SOTU 2007, perhaps because it didn't involve explosions and he was bored with it at that point.)

The idea of an "army of compassion" is an odd one, and strikes me as another indicator that George, Jr is a warped, demented character who, whether by his own fault or others', never quite managed a regular route to adult character development. As far as I know he's never spoken about it, but time and again I imagine this metaphor of a coked or boozed up Dubya watching Patton over an over again at a second-run theater in the early 70s on his off days in the Texas Guard, fantasizing about a powerful future when the old man would never, never lord it over him, ever again.

They say he's stupid. Who knows if he is-- either way he's been remarkably successful in getting a nation of 300 million to go along with his numerous crazy schemes, and hastening her collapse. But I guess we can't talk about that either. Sometimes it puzzles me why there weren't more evil but sane capitalists who were smart enough to see the writing on the wall and be alarmed by the portents enough to do something about it, er, him. (If they thought Kerry was the answer, obviously the evil but sane capitalists aren't much smarter than the rest of us.)

Then again, maybe the evil but sane types decided to just ride 2004-2008 out, recognizing it would help to further cow the democratic party, possibly as part of a long-term project designed to convert tomorrow's democratic leadership into yesterday's pre-evangelized Nixonian republicans, since the speaking-in-tongue crazies who had increasingly taken control of the GOP had probably begun to embarrass the industrialists, and even started to get a bit uppity. You're going to put the kibosh on public funding of research that benefits the private sector, you bible-thumping little shits? Oh, hell no!

Certainly if you look at pretty much any democrat who has risen to any level of national prominence in the last 8 years, their voting records, and increasingly even their rhetoric sound pretty GOP. If Hillary Clinton didn't exist the funders of such a project would have had to pour her out of a test tube, while Barach Obama seems to channel MLK and Reagan with equal facility. Against such a discouraging background it's difficult to tell if Chris Dodd's crusade against the odious FISA legislation is the real deal or not, and certainly if it is he deserves to be commended-- especially given how tough his road has been made by unfortunate characters like Harry Reid. Maybe Dodd is an exception who helps demonstrate just what a hidebound, reactionary body the Senate has become, on both sides of the aisle.

2. Going back to Mark Twain and James Fenimore Cooper and maybe even earlier, Americans have been stirred by the twin myths of innocence and exceptionalism. These were probably pretty easy to nourish and keep functional for quite some time, as white settlers expanded from New England and the Old South and obliterated the people they encountered with weaponry and diseases that the natives never had to face before. And oh yeah, slavery, a few hundred years of it. Maybe the only choice for a society that builds itself with such underpinnings was between racist denial or insanity, and naturally we human beings try to avoid the latter.

One of the best bloggers most of you have never heard of, Jay Taber, calls his site "a journal of the American psyche in transition." I don't know what we're transitioning to, but from my vantage point Old America looks pretty much dead. A walking corpse with eye-sockets stuffed with reality-TV and celebrities, and a surfeit of nuclear weapons dangling precariously out of the pockets. We have the greatest concentration of wealth on the continent, while Cuba, the little runt of a country we've embargoed for 40 plus years, has lower infant mortality rates and universal healthcare.

And we're functionally bankrupt, our appearance of solvency dependent on furiously buying and selling foreign-made trinkets from one another, often with money borrowed from the banks of the trinket-makers. You think your country is alive?




[A late night addendum: see also "Twilight of Empire" by Rob Payne, and

Barbara O'Brien's "When 'bipartisan' means we're screwed." Sometimes when you can't sleep its because you forgot something. I'm no Shakespeare, but like old Will I try to only borrow good stuff. G'night.]

The only one of you characters who has any balls is Dennis Kucinich, and you sorry sons-of-bitches had to run him out of the race

I have a lengthy post about the SOTU which will be up Wednesday night. In the meantime, here a 2 parts(out of 7) of a Real News interview with Gore Vidal from last year.

1.Gore Vidal on FDR: "he smiled benignly on the oil wells."




2.Gore Vidal on Truman:"Hiroshima was the end of the American republic"



3.Vidal on McCarthyism and the Military Comissions Act of 2006


4.Vidal on the US media: "the people have no voice because they have no information."

5.Vidal on the dems and religion.

If you want the other items they're at their site. I found the 1st two plus the one on the media the most interesting, the others less so.

Freud never would have asked, "now why do you think your leaders are bunch of paternalistic pricks?"

Freud's famous sofa. photo: Konstantin Binder

Bernhard at Moon of Alabama: Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton called for an independent, international investigation into the death of one million Iraqis — perhaps by the United Nations — saying Friday there was "no reason to trust the U.S. government." [link]

He goes on: Yes - I misquoted that bit of hypocrisy. It was originally aimed at Pakistan. But there is more of her lunacy: "[W]e need to help them understand what is in their interest and that of course includes President Musharraf."

A Monday night miscellany

The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about animal testing (vivisection) that raged in Edwardian England from 1903 until 1910. It involved the infiltration of London University medical lectures by Swedish women activists, pitched battles between medical students and the police, police protection for the statue of a dog, a libel trial at the Royal Courts of Justice, and the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the use of animals in experiments. The affair became a cause célèbre that reportedly divided the country.
[...]
Anti-vivisectionists commissioned a bronze statue of the dog as a memorial, unveiled in Battersea in 1906, but medical students were angered by its provocative plaque — "Men and women of England, how long shall these things be?" — leading to frequent vandalism of the memorial and the need for a 24-hour police guard against the so-called "anti-doggers". On 10 December 1907, 1,000 anti-doggers marched through central London, clashing with suffragettes, trade unionists, and 400 police officers in Trafalgar Square, one of a series of battles that became known as the Brown Dog riots.

Tired of the controversy, Battersea Council removed the statue in 1910 under cover of darkness, after which it was allegedly destroyed by the council's blacksmith, despite a 20,000-strong petition in its favour. A new statue of the brown dog was commissioned by anti-vivisection groups over 70 years later, and was erected in Battersea Park in 1985.

the BBC on how to boil an egg(!).

Justin Raimondo, American Conservative magazine(2006):
Hillary the Hawk: the Democrats’ Athena only differs from Bush on the details.

John Caruso:
"The one thing that Democrat-hugging progressives must never forget"

Here's former Democratic operative and current MSNBC political analyst Lawrence O'Donnell, speaking in An Unreasonable Man:

If you want to pull the party--the major party that is closest to the way you're thinking--to what you're thinking, YOU MUST, YOU MUST show them that you're capable of not voting for them. If you don't show them you're capable of not voting for them, they don't...have...to listen to you. I promise you that. I worked within the Democratic Party. I didn't listen, or have to listen, to anything on the left while I was working in the Democratic Party, because the left had nowhere to go.

v. primitive

this is the second version of my first video. I tried to make some of the transitions less abrupt, and added a couple of items, and the length went from 2:37 to 3:00. Constructive comments are welcome, even if you don't care for it. It's mainly an editing exercise, as I noted before, but I tried to impart a narrative as well.

Monaco 1936-37