"people tend to misbehave"

Bush speaks! On Thanksgiving! With a message of America's universal compassion and general awseomness. NYT:

this year, the White House hoped to show a more contemplative side of Mr. Bush, who, his aides say, has been struck by the goodness of the many ordinary Americans he meets during his travels

Of course, only to a closed group of prescreened supporters.

Menwhile, USA Today writes about an initiative designed to keep all such events off of college campuses. The Soapbox Alliance wants to preserve the traditions of the founders and encourage presidential connection with the all the people. Some responses:

"[L]etting in radicals that just want to make a mess of their event — what good would that do?" [David Horowitz... guess you know how radicals behave, right you old hack?]

"Do you want to cut off that revenue stream?" [Democratic operative]

...and the classic statement of Bushian fascism:
"It's a nice concept, but people tend to misbehave," says Trent Duffy, former deputy press secretary for President Bush.

Talk to the stormtroopers, buddy.

Carpetbagger Report here.

steampunk

Interesting video from WSJ Online about a custom-maker of steampunk style computers. He calls himself Datamancer and his site is here (scanner example). So sweet!!

Assassins!

Kevin Drum asks whether assassins really succeed in their goals, or whether they set them back. I had always assumed the latter... my historical studies have shown that violence begets violence.

But Henry Farrell chimes in with a link to a new study "Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War" (pdf here) that says "on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy". Interesting.

HF also links to another study (Zaryab Iqbal and Christopher Zorn, "The Political Consequences of Assassination,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming) whose findings

support the existence of an interactive relationship among assassination, leadership succession, and political turmoil: in particular, we find that assassinations’ effects on political instability are greatest in systems in which the process of leadership succession is informal and unregulated

Interesting pair of articles.

why we hate... or think we do

Article online (In-Mind.org) by social psychologist Alex Gunz summarizing some useful research into authoritarian politics. Interesting critique of the Frankfurt School:

Psychologists have long noted people's over-fondness (at least in the western world) for explaining actions in terms of the personalities of the actors involved. We tend to neglect the possibility that a person who falls, for example, might have been tripped, and that they aren't just clumsy. This bias is so commonplace that psychologists have named it the fundamental attribution error. Perhaps it isn't surprising, then, that the first attempt to explain prejudice chalked it up to an authoritarian personality.

Goes on to talk about Altemeyer, recent takes on this issue. Pretty good intro usable for students.

and then there were five...

BBC reports on five remaining British veterans of WWI. Includes video interviews with Harry Patch, Claude Choules, William Stone, Syd Lucas, and Henry Allingham -- the last one 111 years old!! Tough old bastards, all of em.

BBC One will air a special program this Sunday (Remembrance Sunday, the 11th).

telecom complicity confirmed

Mark Klein's story hits the NYT today. Story isn't that great compared to his Countdown performance an hour ago.

The difference in coverage is telling: NYT focuses on the congressional implications at the expense of the details. They don't even mention the specifics: that he knew the setup and all the equipment, had to maintain it and had a schematic. And on that are splitters copying all internet and phone traffic. Keith kept repeating "Room 614A" as it it were Room 101. (Go Keith!) NYT didn't even name it.

But hopefully this will shake things up.

wingnut welfare wars!

FDL chuckles at how Regency's authors are suing them for not sharing enough of the "profits". I never knew the bloggers were in on the welfare. From an earlier FDL post on it:

When the wingnuts chant their talking points like a bunch of tambourine-beaters at the airport, they want to be paid for their efforts. And Pajamas Media was set up to do just that. They received by some accounts $7 million dollars to subsidize 70 right wing bloggers, and if you look at their sites there are no ads, many don’t even identify their affiliation with a logo. Look at some full-on loon like the Confederate Yankee who earns his/her 800 hits a day by having seizures over Google’s attempts to mock Christmas with Jesus butt plugs. The General will easily draw twenty times the traffic with his rapier-witted takedown, but the Confederate Yankee probably earns a lot more money than the General. These illiterate zeros are being paid out of principal, not out of any ad revenues. They are all Armstrong Williams.

Ha. But it's an interesting point on how successful they've been spreading their message. I guess they have more money than we do :(

EDIT: Regnery. All this time and I just read it right for the first time. Not Regency, Regnery. Lol.

nazi news

All from the SPCL's Hatewatch:

IHT reports on a Texan's address to Russian neo-nazis:

"I'm taking my hat off as a sign of respect for your strong identity in ethnicity, nation and race," he said, exposing his close-cropped head to a freezing drizzle.

"Glory to Russia," Wiginton, 43, said in broken Russian, as the crowd of mostly young Russian men raised their right hands in a Nazi salute and chanted "white power!" in English.

Racist nationalism on the rise. Ethnic cleansing to follow. The Jews are definitely in trouble, as are any ethnic minorities in south.

And the Modesto Bee (cute!) reports that a white supremacist has just been convicted of robbery and murder. But in an interesting twist,

Two words scrawled over Milam's eyebrows, "Aryan Honor," never were mentioned during his two-week trial because his white supremacist beliefs did not have a direct connection with his crimes.

Fair trial and all! God bless America!

more writing tips from Left Behind

Slacktivist's continuing evisceration of LB brings us to an interesting problem for writers of fiction: when you describe your characters as superlative, you'd better be able to back that up with your own prose. He offers three rules to avoid this trap (abridged):

1. Don't write about great poets....

2. If you're not writing a fairy tale, avoid superlative characters....

3. Be very careful about big scenes in which your preternaturally talented character wins over the crowd with an awe-inspiring display of his/her art/skill/cleverness/humor/charm. Such scenes are less likely to inspire awe than they are to result in anticlimax, with readers losing respect for you, your character and your character's audience, in that order.

Same problem with Studio 60 -- the show was supposed to be teh funniest evah, but the writers couldn't reproduce teh funny. So in practice you saw very little of what should've been the center of the show.

smoking gun on rendition

ABC news reports on the system:

In this secret facility known to prisoners as "The Hangar" and believed to be at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul, al Libi told fellow "ghost prisoners," one recalled to me for a PBS "Frontline" to be broadcast tonight, an incredible story of his treatment over the previous two years: of how questioned at first by Americans, by the FBI and then CIA, of how he was threatened with torture. And then how he was rendered to a jail cell in Egypt where the threats became a reality.

In his book, officially cleared for publication, Tenet confirms how the CIA outsourced al Libi's interrogation. He said he was sent to a third country (inadvertently named in another part of the book as Egypt) for "further debriefing."

Torture of people and of the English language. Brought to you by the people who were upset at Clinton's parsing of the "definition of 'is'" and promised to restore honor and dignity to the White House. Fuck you all.

Vonnegut's rules

Eight rules for writing fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

-- Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1999), 9-10.

adventures of Mary Sue

Learned a new term today: the Mary Sue story.

Mary Sue literary theory has changed my professional life. Before, when discussing manuscripts with my colleagues, I had to say things “You know, one of those books that keeps telling you how wonderful and talented and perfect the main character is and how much everyone loves her, but aside from that there’s nothing at stake and nothing really happens? No logic, no causality, no narrative development, just that character being wonderful every barfy step of the way?”

Generally they knew what I meant; we see a lot of books like that. But those conversations have gotten much easier now that I can say things like ... “I sent it back. The agent was all excited about how the author’s ‘expanding into a new genre’, but it’s just a Mary Sue with jousting scenes pasted in.”

Teh funny. Also includes link to cartoon showing the inevitable effects on Hogwarts when all these Marys show up at the same time.

Hat tip Slavkivist, whose post in his AWESOME Left Behind series brought here here.

slouching toward fascism, part whatever

Firedoglake spikes my alarmism.

Jim Hightower wonders whether a coup has already taken place.

Daniel Ellsberg is concerned as well.

Ron Rosenbaum wonders why the White House is hiding its disaster plans from Congress.

USA Today reports that the terrorist watch list is expanding by 200,000 names a year.

Blackwater's e-newsletter whips up its readers' paranoia (Assassinations! Threat to small planes!! Peak oil CIVILIZATION IS ENDING!!!)

And Frank Rich calls us the Good Germans.

Can I just move back to Germany before we need permission to travel??

blogofascism

Dunno if Lee Siegel would count fascism from, oh, the right... but here's some scary intimidation and stalking of a lefty blogger -- all the way past HIS DEATH. Fuckers. Original post at DU:

What followed was a coordinated effort to block Andy’s medical care or his benefit from the medical care we could secure for him. In specific, the Bush right had its agents make small donations so they could then call Paypal with allegations of fraud that froze Andy’s account. They also called Paypal, misrepresenting themselves as the hospital to “verify” that this effort was a scam.

And it got more vicious from there. Due to the frozen funds and the confusion it caused us all, Andy’s surgery date was cancelled by Johns Hopkins. It was with great difficulty that we were able to persuade the doctor to be put Andy back into the surgical rotation. That cost him two weeks while he suffered from the most aggressive, invasive form of cancer.

And after he eventually died, they still kept up the harassment. Fuckers!!

mirror neurons

Neuroscientists have discovered "gandhi neurons" that mirror the emotions of others. Cool find of possible use for first week evo psych, or week eight hinduism stuff. (Salon)

Like many of science's great accomplishments, mirror neurons were discovered by accident. In the early 1990s, neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his research team at the University of Parma were studying motor neurons in the frontal cortex of macaques and had attached tiny electrodes to individual cells in the monkeys so they could watch how very specific hand movements were initiated in the brain. When a wired-up monkey picked up a peanut, the neuron fired. But to Rizzolatti's surprise, the same motor neuron also fired when a perfectly still monkey was watching a lab assistant pick up the peanut.

Why would a motor neuron fire when there was no motor action? They not only fired when the macaques tore a piece of paper and saw a piece of paper torn by another macaque, but also when the monkeys merely heard the sound of paper being torn, without any visual stimulus at all. Many tests and retests later revealed the whole new class of brain cells, mirror neurons, located in the parts of the macaques' brain that process both sensory information and kindle emotions.

Pretty cool.

maleblogging

Some good sources to use for militant masculinity, all based on the most recent popping up of the (in)famous "Pussification of the American Male".

"D" over at Lawyers, Guns and Money discusses this classic rant in relation to TR and 1900-era masculinity. (Cites Gail Bederman's Manliness and Civilization, 1995) The "Pussification" is of course hilarious. But then:

But my students and I noticed something interesting. Speaking in April 1899 -- just a few months after the Spanish-American war ended -- Roosevelt condemned the "pussification" of American men while calling upon them to suppress the Philippine insurrection; over the next few years, thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Filipinos would die as the country learned what "the strenuous life" was all about. Writing in November 2003 -- just a few months after the Iraq War had supposedly ended -- du Toit similarly condemned the "pussification" of American men while calling upon them to drive fast, get drunk, and emulate Donald Rumsfeld (who, he insisted at the time, could have laid nearly every woman in the country over the age of 50); over the past few years, thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, in large part so that men like Donald Rumsfeld would not have to wake up in the morning and see a "pussy" staring back at them in the mirror. Kim du Toit, I suppose, should be so fortunate.

Possible assignment.

WWI blogger

This takes milblogging to a whole 'nother level. Posts letters of a WWI vet 90 years to the day after they were written. Sweet!

Dracula the vampire

Sadly No brings teh funny with some Seinfeldian pokes at the Washington Times' spicing up of anti-Democratic press releases. The writer wants to paint Charles Rangel as a vampire, leading to:

Like Dracula the vampire, Count Rangula is cagey about his intentions, luring his victims (us) with promises of “reforming” the tax code.

I mean, Dracula the vampire… does he really need “the vampire” in his title, as vampire? Dracula, “the” vampire? Are we going to confuse him with Dracula the district attorney? Dracula the pope? There’s no other Dracula…

In the original Seinfeld ("The Fire"):

JERRY: I mean, Bozo the Clown...does he really need "the clown" in his title, as clown? Bozo, "the" clown? Are we going to confuse him with Bozo the district attorney? Bozo the pope? There's no other Bozo...

Use this in student writing materials.

fake news

One of the legacies of this era in American history will be how fake news became established. Not Daily Show/Colbert fake... but government-produced propaganda masking itself as objective news.

On the heels of the FEMA "press conference" comes this reminder from Tbogg about the fake news segments produced by the Bush administration. From the NYT story quoted:

Karen Ryan cringes at the phrase "covert propaganda." These are words for dictators and spies, and yet they have attached themselves to her like a pair of handcuffs.

Poor dear. Stop crying and grow some professional ethics.

sad state of discourse

Orcinus complains that a new Carnegie Mellon study ranking blogs lists so many conservative ones as the 'must-read' top 100 of the blogosphere. The #2-ranked blog (which I had NEVER heard of! - guess I'm an out-of-touch moonbat), Don Surber, contained stunningly ignorant discussion of hate crimes laws.

Gives Dave an excuse to collect many of his posts on hate crimes. So follow the link above for useful summary discussion.

propagandists always land on their feet

FEMA director of external affairs John "Pat" Philbin stages a fake press conference where FEMA employees posed as reporters.

FEMA hack gets caught.

FEMA hack issues insincere apology.

FEMA hack rewarded with new job as new public affairs chief for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Army colonel goes Beau-bonkers

Glen Greenwald wrote on the Army's selective leaking of documents to right-wing bloggers (while they at the same time withheld them from TNR's FOIA request), a move right out of the Bush administration playbook. Glen fears that the Army under Petraeus is getting as politicized as everything else under Bush's influence.

A few days later Glen received "a bizzare, unsolicited email" from Petraeus' spokesman. (He's posted the full text here.)

Col. Boylan does not deny the central point of my post, because he cannot: namely, throughout the Beauchamp matter, the U.S. Army has copied almost exactly the standard model used by the Republican Party's political arm in trying to manage news for domestic consumption: namely, they deny access to the relevant information only they possess while selectively leaking it to the most extremist and partisan elements of the right-wing noise machine: in this case, the Drudge Report, Weekly Standard, and right-wing blogs.

Another aspect of the story is the military's cooperation with right-wing bloggers in the persecution of Jamil Hussein, who is still being held without charges 1.5 years after the Malkin flying monkey brigade first fingered him as a terrorist-sympathizing reporter.

More links to both stories inside Glen's always-well-linked posts. He concludes:

I would think Col. Boylan would have more important matters to attend to than writing me emails about how Alan Colmes is the "real talent" and how I lack the balls to go visit him in Iraq -- beginning with finding out who has been working secretly with right-wing outlets in the Beauchamp and Bilal Hussein matters, if he does not already know. The linchpin of a republic under civilian rule -- as well as faith in the armed services by a cross-section of Americans -- is an apolitical military. Like all other branches of the government intended to be apolitical, this linchpin is eroding under this administration, and that ought to be of far greater concern to Boylan and Petraeus than hurling petty insults.

Update: Hilarious denials from the Colonel that he sent the email. Snotty, dismissive tone that

stands in stark contrast to the extremely eager and cooperative conduct in which they engage when passing on information to the right-wing blogs and pundits whose political views are apparently aligned with theirs. That takes us back to the first and most important point -- the U.S. military, which has an obligation to conduct itself apolitically and professionally, appears in many cases to be doing exactly the opposite.

John Cole posts here on the issue, highlighting the long-term danger to our democracy that this implies. Politics is being outsourced to veterans and officers who cannot be criticized, and a significant segment of the officer corps seems likely to go along with the brewing Dolchstosslegende.

Update II: "Leo Strauss" adds: Where's Charlie Moskos on how detached and politicized the military has gotten in the last six years? Harsh words all around here.

Beauchamp update

This is still going on? Yesiree. No links to the right-wing rampage (at Drudge, Ace of Spades, etc) but they've been claiming SB recanted. Of course in the end it turns out that it's the Army's manipulation of information, selective leaking of documents, and Big Brother monitoring of his conversations. TNR report here.

daily roundup

Article from The Nation about how all those right-wing emails are born and spread.

From the beginning, the vast majority of these Internet-disseminated rumors have come from the right. (Snopes lists about fifty e-mails about George W. Bush, split evenly between adulatory accounts of him saluting wounded soldiers or witnessing to a wayward teenager, and accounts of real and invented malapropisms. In contrast, every single one of the twenty-two e-mails about John Kerry is negative.) For conservatives, these e-mails neatly reinforce preconceptions, bending the facts of the world in line with their ideological framework: liberals, immigrants, hippies and celebrities are always the enemy; soldiers and conservatives, the besieged heroes. The stories of the former's perfidy and the latter's heroism are, of course, never told by the liberal media. So it's left to the conservative underground to get the truth out. And since the general story and the roles stay the same, often the actual characters are interchangeable.

more when i find them again... should've added right away and now i have to go back and look...

Nietzsche on 21st cemntury American Christianity

Via AS, in response to a video of a christian smashing his computer because an ad for a porn site popped up. It begins with the FN quote:

The church fights passion with excision in every sense: its practice, its "cure," is castratism. It never asks: "How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a craving?" It has at all times laid the stress of discipline on extirpation (of sensuality, of pride, of the lust to rule, of avarice, of vengefulness). But an attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life: the practice of the church is hostile to life.

And ends with the reader's comment:

Viewed through this lens, the entire current era of American cultural politics -- the Christianist era -- could be seen and understood as a squeal of weakness: weakness reflected in the overwhelming urge to deprive others of choices and options, the weakness reflected in political bullying and in the impulse to create an all-powerful executive, the weakness reflected in the recourse to torture, the weakness reflected in refusal to engage in the unglamorous arm-twisting of diplomacy.

Watching the Watchmen

Dave Neiwert posts at Campaign for America's Future concerning a recent rally by the Watchmen on the Walls - the scary new group of Russian/Ukrainian immigrant fascist homophobes.

I don't feel up to commenting on this right now, and in any case Dave's said things in his usual superlative way. His post is a description of the phenomenon, an account of the protest, and a contextualization of this movement in the larger world of the modern radical right.

Panties for Peace

Apparently the Burmese junta thinks women's panties rob them of their power. So women are sending them by mail, and flinging them over embassy walls.

"Not only are they brutal, but they are also very superstitious," Jackie Pollack, a member of the Lanna Action for Burma Committee, told the Guardian Unlimited. "Condemnation by the United Nations and governments around the world have had no impact on the Burmese regime. This is a way of trying to reach them where they will feel it."

double dose of Dave

Two essential posts from Dave "Orcinus" Neiwert today (or at least, I saw them today):

First one on the right's new fascination with fascism - specifically, accusations against liberals of being Nazis.

The evil genius of the Nazi regime is that it created, and imposed on its world, a social regime in which the worst traits of humanity -- greed, selfishness, mendacity, betrayal, cowardice -- become the supreme social traits, not just in the camps (though there especially) but throughout Nazi society, because it was precisely those traits which insured one's survival.

And isn't this exactly the regime the right is trying to create here? No insurance for you! Ramp up the fear factor! Set everyone against each other and let the most vicious win!

Second one on a forthcoming book on the Japanese internment. (Eric Muller's American Inquisition) DN's got an internment book of his own, obviously, but this one focuses on the process of how Japanese-American citizens had their loyalties evaluated to determine who should be interned and who could be let go. Sounds great. Should assign.

Liberal Fascism v3.0

Goldberg's back with a new title for his never-to-be-released steaming load of feces book "Liberal Fascism". From Shakesville:

the new new re-re-title is to be Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Well, he's dropped the "totalitarian temptation" thing, but now of course he faces a new problem. Even if you think Mussolini was a member of the "left" (and he wasn't), he was certainly and unambiguously never a member of the American left, or the American anything. But who cares? Mussolini's back in, which means I get to throw this in Goldberg's face repeatedly, just as I'd hoped to:

Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political and economic sphere. -- Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism

PWNED!!

Use or Abuse?

Looks like we're trying to piss off the Turks. (Reuters: "Turkey Withdraws Ambassador to the US")

AS, quoting an Armenian-American historian, on why this is misguided:

I am insulted by that sticker. That Congress “finds” the genocide to be a fact makes the tragedy no more real than its refusal, so far, has made it unreal. Truth does not need a permission slip from the state.

While I'm obviously one of those who thinks that this was genocide, what's the point of Congress putting its official stamp of approval on it. A nonbinding resolution. Yay.

And it brings to mind -- for the second time tonight -- Nietzsche's admonishment in Use and Abuse of History, that it takes more strength to forget than to remember. History should be a constructive, not destructive force. Why is our Congress raising an entirely symbolic issue whose only effect is to needlessly piss off an ally who neighbors our current war zone? It's asinine.

UPDATE I: Excellent Harpers' review of Use and Abuse in context of Bush's recent embarrassing speech referencing The Quiet American. And another on the essay in its context of the 19th century Germans' fascination with ancient Greece.

UPDATE: And just look what story Daily Show does as I'm typing this... Funny. Night of synchronicity in deed. But... Um, looks like I'm on Bush's side on this -- NOOOOOOO!!

warriors?

Was reminded recently of how popular this term has gotten in current American parlance. It - like 'homeland' - seems to me a recent import. Need to look into this more.

Quick find here: reclaiming the term 'warrior' in the Jungian sense to help mobilize against war. In this example (Commondreams.org article "Calling all warriors for peace") it's Cindy Sheehan who's the warrior archetype.

undercover with the KC Klan

Brave reporter from the Kansas City alt-newsweekly The Pitch goes undercover with the Klan and the NSM. (Peter Rugg, My Secret Life in the Klan) Seems like the group's been stuffing copies of the paper with their own propaganda flyers, which then makes people think the paper's allowing racist advertising, etc. Funny bits in the story, but also scary of course, and very much playing up the element that these guys think they're normal, loving Christians, good neighbors, etc.

The story includes a sound file of the phone call in which the reporter informs his source of what's really going on. It's riveting to hear how this guy reacts - "I have a family; I'm just trying to raise my kids." "I didn't think the Pitch was gonna get that pissed about it." He's also paranoid about the Klan/NSM finding out he talked... "I guess I'm just SOL."

Found this through the invaluable Dave Neiwert, whose post on it includes some links to recent neo-Nazi gatherings (which have no always been well-attended).

Who Hates Whom

It's an interesting primer on current ethnic/sectarian conflicts, AND it contains a grammar lesson in its title! What's not to like?

And he's putting up bonus chapters for conflicts that couldn't make the book due to space considerations. Here's the first one, on Senegal. Funny/sad quote to end it:

Finally, Dakar residents also harbor a much more recent resentment -- toward George W. Bush, who made a televised speech from Gorée Island in 2003.

Other high-profile figures ranging from the Pope to President Clinton to Nelson Mandela have made similar stops with minimal incident. However, according to Reuters (in a widely-published article no longer on their own site), before Bush’s arrival, Senegal’s national capital was shut down, over 1000 residents were taken off the streets, and the roads in and out of the capital were closed. (More from a local witness here.) Then, on the morning of Bush’s speech, the residents of Gorée Island itself were rounded up and herded onto a soccer field, out of sight of the cameras, where they were forcibly held for six hours until the event was finished.

The US president then spoke of his deep belief in liberty and equality, with no hint of irony.

The Senegalese president was instructed not to speak.

Blackwater hijinks

More on Blackwater from Dailykos, including the fun little fact that they busted a corrupt Iraqi minister out of jail and spirited him to affluent exile in Chicago. Sweet!

Blackwater roundup

All from Salon:

Video from this week's Congressional hearing.

"Bush and Blackwater" details Blackwater's ties to a vast array of Republicans.

"The Dark Truth about Blackwater" describes the company's role in Iraq and the reasons the Bushies chose to use them.

Finally, "Blackwater by the Numbers" has screen shots (and a full pdf version here) of a Congressional memo on the eve of the hearings, which details Blackwater's contracts, role, (lack of) oversight, connections to Republicans, etc.

Godwin's Law overdrive

From Orcinus, reports on the recent right-wing surge in 'leftists are Nazis' rhetoric. Sara describes how this is a two-step process: first, sever fascism from its right-wing roots; second, redefine it as a phenomenon of the left.

If the right can pull off this semantic trick, they win in two ways. First, we will no longer be able to have serious conversations -- like the ones we've had here for the past four-plus years -- about the very real ways in which American conservatives are pulling us toward genuine fascism. They'll have stolen away the language that will allow us to convict them of their crimes against democracy. We won't be able to measure their deeds by holding them up against those of previous right-wing authoritarians -- the comparisons will be simply impossible, because the definitions of the terms will be too murky to be useful. Or worse: they'll now mean something else entirely.

And evidently Oprah is a Nazi, according to radio host Bryan Suits, because she supports someone of the same race for president. So I guess by that logic all white people throughout American history are racists too?

300 links

Showing portions in class today. Some links to include in a packet:

Ephraim Lytle. "Sparta? No. This is madness", Toronto Star, 2007-03-11

Ephialtes, who betrays the Greeks, is likewise changed from a local Malian of sound body into a Spartan outcast, a grotesquely disfigured troll who by Spartan custom should have been left exposed as an infant to die. Leonidas points out that his hunched back means Ephialtes cannot lift his shield high enough to fight in the phalanx. This is a transparent defence of Spartan eugenics, and laughably convenient given that infanticide could as easily have been precipitated by an ill-omened birthmark.

Touraj Daryaee. "Go tell the Spartans". iranian.com. He hates the history and politics of the film. Sees it in light of US sabre-rattling against Iran. But also criticizes uncritical acceptance of 'western freedom' motif:

In the “freedom”-loving and “democratic” Sparta, slaves called helots were owned communally and there was an annual festival during which young Spartan men were allowed to terrorize the slave population and even kill a few of them to remind the rest of their place. And Sparta was not a democracy. It was a militaristic monarchy with a council of elders which decided political matters, but it was not a democracy. It was constantly on the warpath and constantly attempting to control and enslave its neighboring Greek city-states. Likewise, “democratic” Athens did not behave any better after it became the Hegemon in the fifth century BCE and began enslaving its neighbors, taking their lands, and destroying their way of life. Democracy (literally, rule by the people, Greek demos) was but a brief experiment in Greek history. Some estimates suggest that even when Greek democracy was at its height in 431 BC, less than 14% of the members of this society were allowed to participate in this “government by the people.” Not only was the vast majority of the population, including women, excluded from policy making, but nearly 37% lived in actual slavery [See: " Decolonizing Persian history"]. In contrast those who joined the Persian army, which included many non-hunchbacked Greeks, were paid for their service!

Take that, fascists! (Post itself is minimal, but interesting comments discussion.)

Vietnam revisionism

"The Best Wars of their Lives" in The Nation.

Conservatism's cherished fantasy of American omnipotence has died once again, this time in the sands of Iraq, and the grieving process has begun. But conservatives mourn differently from you and me. They begin with denial, anger and bargaining, just like everyone else. And that's where they stay--forever paralyzed by a petulant refusal to acknowledge their fantasy's passing, a simple inability to process reality.

See also Spencer Ackerman's "War-niks" in TNR.

hoplite training

Looks like there's a guy in Atlanta (Allen Pittmann) who does physical training based on a variety of historical styles. Including Hoplites! Some good demonstrations of specific techniques: coordinated spear stabs, knee kicks to knock opponent off balance, shield pins that open up a kidney stab, etc. Cool site; useful for future supplemental links during hoplite lecture.

march on, brownshirts!

Second post of the day straight out of 1933... Father of a dead soldier is carrying a mock coffin with the son's picture on it during the most recent antiwar protest. Gathering of Eagles brownshirts snatch the photo and kick the crap out of him.

DailyKos diary here; photo from Crooks & Liars here.

Comment 87 sounds right out of the SA playbook:

Like most of you , I don’t agree with their tactics or their politics, but the GoE members, I believe, were only trying to restrain Carlos after what appeared to them an assault on their friend. If it were really that serious of a beatdown as this article implies, there would have been arrests, and charges filed.

Fortunately the other commentators aren't falling for it. Still sad though.

Update: turns out that the father involved was the one who set himself on fire when military representatives came to his house to deliver news of the son's death.

The Reichstag is burning!

Big surprise. Bush created false terror threat to scare Congress into giving him more unconstitutional power. KO's "Nexus of Politics and Terror" series continues.
According to Rep. Jane Harman

(D-CA), Chairwoman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Terrorism Risk Assessment, the Bush administration knowingly used bogus intelligence to make lawmakers believe there was the chance of an imminent attack on the U.S. Capitol, thus frightening them into passing the temporary expansion of his powers to spy on Americans under the FISA act.

Previous editions:

Bush plants scare stories to distract from his scandals.
Same theme, this time referencing the "plot" to blow up JFK airport.
Another about the UK plot that turns out to be bs.
And finally, here's the first in the series.

wtf?

Crazy Glen Beck: "Jesus and Hitler had a lot in common" (Crooks & Liars)

Actually his point isn't as crazy as it sounds -- he's trying to say that they were both charismatic and could capture people's loyalty by "looking them in the eyes". But it's still a mark of his authoritarian personality.

Bush's anti-intellectualism

From the Carpetbagger Report, after Bush's inane jokes at this week's press conference about getting a C in economics, but an A in keeping people's taxes low.

I remind people that, like when I’m with Condi I say, she’s the Ph.D. and I’m the C-student, and just look at who’s the President and who’s the advisor. (Laughter.)

Comes from his own insecurity and his bullying nature. What a great choice for pres he was.This week's performance was as bad as he's ever been... bullying anti-intellectualism, willful bellicosity, and planted softball questions on polarizing issues created to distract from his many failures. The archetypal Bush press conference. (See KO's Special Comment in link)

Liars for Jesus

Book exposing "The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History" in which the founders and the first Congress are made out to be super-Christians. And every event since is interpreted to paint the country as a primarily religious nation. Home page here, available on Amazon here.

more on our apocalyptic christian military

Daily Kos diarist troutfishing is all over this. A post from this week: Military Religious Freedom Foundation Lawsuit Alleges Mandatory Christianity in US Military.

Let me be quite blunt: one of the reasons that the Bush Administration can even contemplate attacking Iran, a move that many think might set the entire region ablaze and put US forces in Iraq at extreme risk, concerns the fact that the Administration has sufficient support in the US military - the support of fundamentalist Christians, especially in the military's leadership, who believe the US needs to engage in an apocalyptic conflict with Islam - to propose such a course of action.

The Pentagon's active promotion of apocalyptic Christianity, demonstrated recently in MRFF research, supports the Bush Administration's desire to implement the NeoConservative game plan (if one can give the honor of calling it a "plan") of toppling the current government of Iran and setting the entire Mideast on fire.

Bush, Petraeus, and the politicization of the military

Olberman's back! With a special comment on Bush's cowardly "hiding behind Gernal Petraeus's skirts". Video at C&L here.

But Mr. Bush, you have hidden behind the General’s skirts, and today you have hidden behind the skirts of ‘the planted last question’ at a news conference, to indicate once again that your presidency has been about the tilted playing field, about no rules for your party in terms of character assassination and changing the fabric of our nation, and no right for your opponents or critics to as much as respond.

That, sir, is not only un-American — it is dictatorial.

And in pimping General David Petraeus, sir, in violation of everything this country has been assiduously and vigilantly against for 220 years, you have tried to blur the gleaming radioactive demarcation between the military and the political, and to portray your party as the one associated with the military, and your opponents as the ones somehow antithetical to it.

You did it again today, sir, and you need to know how history will judge the line you just crossed.

Some good history in there too of various past politicizations (MacArthur, McClellan, LeMay, etc) A DailyKos diary also has video of Kieth's discussion of the issue with Dana Milbank, which is also pretty good.

Finally, this reminded me of a film I stumbled across recently about the Christianization of the Air Force Academy, which is of the same theme. The film, "Constantine's Sword," comes from the book of the same name, and focuses on Christianity's historical violence, especially against Jews. But it also talk about this issue: the re-making of the US military as a sectarian force. It's going to be trouble inside the country once we finally do pull out of Iraq. Oh, and here are some of the culprits: Force Ministries. (Warning: cheesy action-movie music)

two sets of morals

From the NYT:

In a series of recent articles and a book, “The Happiness Hypothesis,” Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, has been constructing a broad evolutionary view of morality that traces its connections both to religion and to politics.

Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) began his research career by probing the emotion of disgust. Testing people’s reactions to situations like that of a hungry family that cooked and ate its pet dog after it had become roadkill, he explored the phenomenon of moral dumbfounding — when people feel strongly that something is wrong but cannot explain why.

Dumbfounding led him to view morality as driven by two separate mental systems, one ancient and one modern, though the mind is scarcely aware of the difference. The ancient system, which he calls moral intuition, is based on the emotion-laden moral behaviors that evolved before the development of language. The modern system — he calls it moral judgment — came after language, when people became able to articulate why something was right or wrong.

The emotional responses of moral intuition occur instantaneously — they are primitive gut reactions that evolved to generate split-second decisions and enhance survival in a dangerous world. Moral judgment, on the other hand, comes later, as the conscious mind develops a plausible rationalization for the decision already arrived at through moral intuition.

Moral dumbfounding, in Dr. Haidt’s view, occurs when moral judgment fails to come up with a convincing explanation for what moral intuition has decided.

So why has evolution equipped the brain with two moral systems when just one might seem plenty?

“We have a complex animal mind that only recently evolved language and language-based reasoning,” Dr. Haidt said. “No way was control of the organism going to be handed over to this novel faculty.”

He likens the mind’s subterranean moral machinery to an elephant, and conscious moral reasoning to a small rider on the elephant’s back. Psychologists and philosophers have long taken a far too narrow view of morality, he believes, because they have focused on the rider and largely ignored the elephant.

Also includes link to morality test that shows where you lie on an opposition between four moral principles: harm / fairness / authority / purity.

Communist kitsch

Soviet poster of the day! NICE!

Also an essay discussing the attraction of authoritarian art, and what it means that Americans today like it.

1900 predicts the coming century

From awesome blog that is new to me, Paleo-Future:

Ladies Home Journal article from 1900 about how the next century will progress. A lot of it is amazingly accurate, conservative even. And of course some if off, but that's just the name of the game.

maps of Baghdad's sectarian violence

Really good tool to understand what's going on; very similar to a map you could make of German cities in 1929-1933.

From the Petraeus/Cocker pony show this week on the Hill. Shows "ethno-sectarian violence" in neighborhoods - but also the ethnic composition of neighborhoods. And so as Matthew Yglesias writes, this actually means that violence is going down because the neighborhoods are becoming less mixed. Put that together with the fact that violence dropped *before* the surge and you have your explanation - not American troops, but the success of ethnic intimidation in getting people to re-locate into clan neighborhoods.

bird brains

Alex the super-smart parrot just died. (Obsidian Wings) (NYT) He could tell shapes and colors, answer questions, and express frustration and boredom at tedious science experiments on him. LOL.

Good assignment for early intelligence week -- pair it up with this study of chimp brains and the differences between them and toddlers. (AS) (CogNews has the full report) The findings appear in the Sept. 7, 2007 issue of the journal of Science.

and I was there for the start of it all...

Via Wired's Campus blog:

Disease control specialists are looking at the WoW plague that broke out two years ago because it apparently modeled how real diseases spread.

One thing I thought of was that it was transmitted through animals to human(oids) - those hunter pets!?!#$#*! As if they're not OP enough already!!1!1eleven

The article from TimesOnline is pretty much info-free, unfortunately. It's just a teaser for the real study to be released next month in Lancet.

But call me provisionally skeptical that you could learn anything of use. People's WoW behavior doesn't model their real-world behavior because real world death isn't overcome by a simple corpse run. When the plague broke out I flew into Ironforge to try and cleanse as many people as I could. I kept myself and people around me alive until my mana ran out, then we found ourselves making said corpse run.

Now that I think about it, I wonder if that was an accurate predictor of behavior - if I were a doctor in real life. If it's a given that I head some medical capacity maybe I would have tried to help. Then when resources ran out I'd have been in the infected zone with no defense, and then eventually dead.

Of course, even then I ran right back in the middle of things to laugh it up some more, and died a second time. Had I not been a pally I would have flown into IF just to see it happen. Which I would emphatically not do in rl. So we'll see what this study has to say, but for now I'm a skeptic.

Iraq for Sale

The depth of corruption and depravity the Bushies unleashed in Iraq knows no bounds. The whole war was basically an unsupervised giveaway to any corporation with Republican ties. These were then given millions - billions, total - of taxpayer money with no means of accounting for it. The waste and fraud have been document in the film Iraq for Sale. But new reports are coming out all the time, including a new Rolling Stone article that details the incompetence and contempt these people display:

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

OK, I'm gonna stop reading this morning because I'm getting really angry.

insane.

This is just insane. Madness. Evil. WHAT THE FUCK:

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted. Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

Pentagon creates campaign war room

From Talking Points Memo: the Pentagon is setting up a 24/7 news desk to control info coming out of Baghdad and develop rapid response to critics:

For the Pentagon, getting out Iraq information will now include a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week Iraq Communications Desk that will pump out data from Baghdad _ serving as what could be considered a campaign war room.

But you shouldn't think of this as a propaganda group, oh no!:

Less than a year ago, Smith developed plans for teams of people to "develop messages" for the 24-hour news cycle and "correct the record" when news agencies put out what the Pentagon considered inaccurate information.

At the time, he outlined an operation that resembled a political campaign _ such as that made famous by Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign war room _ calling for a "Rapid Response" section that quickly answers opponents' assertions.

It was set up to focus more resources on the Internet and blogs and book civilian and military guests on television and radio shows.

While portions of the plan were put in place, much of it was shelved when Donald H. Rumsfeld stepped down as defense secretary and Robert Gates took over. At the time, Rumsfeld was complaining bitterly that the news media were focusing too much on bad news coming out of Iraq and not enough on progress there.

Defense officials denied that the program was a propaganda tool or that it was set up to respond to the eroding public support for the war.

Army of Dude

Army of Dude - One of the few remaining milbloggers the army hasn't yet shut down. A recent post:

What has been bothering me this whole deployment is the brevity and formality in which the media handles the death of soldiers. It always goes, “PFC John Smith, Norman, Oklahoma, killed by enemy small arms fire in Baghdad. Assigned to 1/43 Engineers, Third Infantry Division.” What a crock to read that in a paper. It would be wholly appropriate to dedicate a full color photo and a real biography in every paper in America. The anonymity of dead soldiers would evaporate and the public would be forced to look at the faces of the fallen. Would it set in progress change? Perhaps. It certainly would go to show that we’re out here every day, dying for an ideal long forgotten. As for me, I started to sign these entries with my initials long ago to avoid detection by superiors. I could and still can get in trouble for what I’ve written. Lately this blog has been passed around to dudes of every rank, and those who would be punishing me have become readers. So it’s no longer necessary to be sneaky and secretive, another anonymous soldier. My name is Alex Horton, and I’m a 22 year old from Frisco, Texas. I can recite Pulp Fiction line by line and my favorite color is blue. I want to be a journalist when I grow up, and I want to see every part of the world. For the first time in my life I’m an avid reader. Fifteen months here has been fifteen months away from Lauren, the girl I’m crazy about. This wouldn’t be much of a blog without her, as she’s the inspiration for anything creative coming out of me, my beautiful muse.

In the future, I want my children to grow up with the belief that what I did here was wrong, in a society that doesn’t deem that idea unpatriotic.

Herbert Hoover said, "Older men declare war. But it is the youth who must fight and die." These are the young men we can’t afford to go without. Brian Chevalier and Jesse Williams, George Bush and Secretary Gates, we’re all flesh and blood. Every life is sacred. You probably don’t know the names of the first two. But you should.

Makes me cry. This guy and other like him are the Eric Maria Remarques of our time, and I can only hope that it's him and not the Ernst Jungers who influence how this war is interpreted here after it's over.

Another recent post describes the juxtaposition of meaning and meaninglessness experienced by a self-aware soldier with the soul of a writer:

This occupation, this money pit, this smorgasbord of superfluous aggression is getting more hopeless and dismal by the second. It’s maddening to think that more than a year’s worth of blood, sweat and tears will lead to little more than a pat on the back and a hideously redundant speech from someone who did none of the bleeding, sweating or crying.

Despite being in a meaningless situation, my life has never had this much meaning. I watch the backs of my friends and they do the same for me. I’ve killed to protect them, and they’ve killed to protect me. For friends and family, being deployed is like being pregnant or surviving a car wreck; everyone is nice to you all of a sudden. People I don’t even know send me kind words and packages from all over. They came out of the woodwork knowing my plight and shared with me heartfelt hope and luck. The fact that you’re reading this now, dear reader, is a testament to that. Would you have cared about what I thought, felt or did two years ago? This position I’m in, shared by less than one percent of the U.S. population, has given me the distinct privilege of sharing my experiences and ruminations of this war, observations undiluted by perpetually delirious officials like General Petreaus and mainstream media sirens. I have felt every extreme of the human condition, physically, morally and emotionally. I’ve never laughed so hard, cried so long or felt more ashamed of myself in all of my life. In a matter of weeks it’ll be over, and I’ll have just the memories of enduring 130 degree heat, and poker games lasting well into the night. I’ll look back on the hysterical laughter during fifteen hour Baghdad clears, the terror of being pinned down by machine gun fire, the sight of a Stryker on its side and the unfolding of a body bag under the flames of a nearby school, unzipped tenderly to fit the body of Chevy as RPGs screamed overhead. Soon this place will all be in the past.

We need to bring him and his brothers home for good. Now.

monkey baby talk

Two aspects of this story:

1. people can tell baby talk from regular talk even in languages not their own

2. monkeys (at least some kinds) use baby talk with their babys.

Interesting implications for universal grammar, language ability in other primates.

evolution of Brad Pitt

Semi-interesting article on the evolution of male facial features - "bulldog-like" the article describes, with pinched ratio between brow and chin compared to women. It evolved because women find it attractive, and hence propagated itself.

But the whole thing, at least as written up by this Yahoo news story (LiveScience.com actually) is a bit circular. Faces that have this ratio are 'more masculine' and therefore women are attracted to them. This attraction confirms its own premise. I dunno. And there could be other reasons for the ratio as well... who knows.

In any case it's interesting if the skulls show change over time that the feature did evolve, which seems to be the point.

Darmok?

Fascinating post at The Mahablog about how right-wing political use of myth can be understood through one of the best ST:TNG episodes of all time: Darmok.

The critical passage:

[W]hen righties talk about history, they are not talking about what actually happened in the past. Instead, they are evoking historical persons and events as archetype and allegory.

Thus, when they speak of Winston Churchill, they are not speaking of the real Winston Churchill. They are speaking of what Winston Churchill represents in their minds, which is the stubborn refusal to back down from a fight. In fact, the real Winston Churchill wrote a letter to Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1922 advising him that British troops should abandon Iraq.

I think we should now put definitely, not only to Feisal but to the Constituent Assembly, the position that unless they beg us to stay and to stay on our own terms in regard to efficient control, we shall actually evacuate before the close of the financial year. I would put this issue in the most brutal way, and if they are not prepared to urge us to stay and to co-operate in every manner I would actually clear out. That at any rate would be a solution. … At present we are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having.

But instead of actually studying the life and words of Churchill for understanding, righties simply evoke the man as an archetype of bulldog, never-give-up tenacity.

See also comment #5, which mentions the role played by the Tale of Genji in Japanese culture and haiku. Because haiku needs to pack as much meaning as possible into a form of limited length, poets use lines from the Tale in order to convey a much greater depth of meaning.

mercenaries in Iraq

Oh wait, we're supposed to call them 'private contractors.' Walter Pincus writes in the Washington Post on how

While U.S. contractors have provided personal security to officials in other conflict zones, those in Iraq are now being used in all aspects of the struggle because, as the CRS report says, doing otherwise would require policymakers "to contemplate an increase in the number of U.S. troops, perhaps increasing incentives to attract volunteers or re-instituting the draft."

This has a couple implications - obviously, the ways in which they can operate in a legal gray zone and the way in which these companies become a shadow enforcement arm of unaccountable elites are among the most severe. (Indypendant article of Aug 15 by Jeremy Scahill - of Blackwater fame) Also that it proves this war is, among other things, designed to funnel money to US corporations allied with Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc.

And it suggests that The Surge is actually more expansive than we've thought, because they can funnel Blackwater into the region without having to report it to anyone.

And also it upps the number of US casualties by at least 1,000.

And it promises the future expansion of warfare around the world -- with, as a bonus, extremist religious connotations. As Scahill says in his interview with Democracy Now:

You know, something happened last year that got no attention whatsoever. In October, President Bush lifted sanctions on Christian Southern Sudan, and there have been reports now that Blackwater has been negotiating directly with the Southern Sudanese regional government to come in and start training the Christian forces of the south of Sudan. Blackwater has been itching to get into Sudan, and Erik Prince is on the board of Christian Freedom International, which is an evangelical missionary organization that has been targeting Sudan for many years.

And finally that there's a good chance our own country is going to be fucked. up. when these people come back from their mercenary adventure. Within 10-20 years after our inevitable pull-out of Iraq, we are going to have to deal with our own home-grown warlords. Of course, they're already in charge now. So how much worse can it get? Scahill:

[W]hat’s really frightening is that you have a man in Erik Prince, who is a neo-crusader, a Christian supremacist, who has been given over a half a billion dollars in federal contracts, and that's not to mention his black contracts, his secret contracts, his contracts with foreign friendly governments like Jordan. This is a man who espouses Christian supremacy, and he has been given, essentially, allowed to create a private army to defend Christendom around the world against secularists and Muslims and others, and has really been brought into the fold. He refers to Blackwater as the sort of FedEx of the Pentagon. He says if you really want a package to get somewhere, do you go with the postal service or do you go with FedEx? This is how these people view themselves. And it embodies everything that President Eisenhower prophesied would happen with the rise of an unchecked military-industrial complex. You have it all in Blackwater.

So maybe that's the best argument for keeping these insane people fighting their happy colonial wars in other countries. Because if they ran out of those to fight they'd just set up their fiefdoms here. Of course, this might just upset people the slightest bit in the countries we choose as our playgrounds, but it's not like a couple dozen pissed off brown people with box cutters could ever attack us back in any way...

"Rally squads"

Republican stormtroopers are GO!!!

Portions of the Presidential Advance Memo have been released (pdf from ACLU):

Inside the event space, the manual advises, White House advance personnel should preposition “rally squads” that can swarm any protesters at the event and “use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform.” The rally squads can be formed using “college/young republican organizations, local athletic teams, and fraternities/sororities,” the manual notes.

Young aggressive jocks blocking political opponents from displaying their allegiance. Just how the SA got its start.

(In fairness, ABC article notes that the Kerry campaign blocked opposing t-shirts with its own cheerleaders too. But that's different than rooting through the crowd for silent opponents and having them arrested by the police. I the use of the word "swarm" here...)

(A second point in fairness is that the manual does mention that you can ignore protesters who are not disrupting the event. And that you should avoid physical confrontation, because that is what they want. But this was the case in SA policy as well. And also in both cases, your stormtroopers are never likely to be deliberative in their swarming given the pressures on them to protect The Leader from anything embarrassing - including the knowledge that not everyone agrees with him.)

(ABC reports available here)
(hat tip Pandagon)

dogs and cats, living together...

...mass domestication!! Some interesting links from the Reality-Based Community concerning the timing of domestication of dogs and cats.

This one cites a date of 100k-15k years ago for dogs (with the author thinking 13k), while this one supports the 15k. (100k is the date wolves and dogs diverged, which could have happened through normal natural selection.) As for cats, looks like it's about 12k years ago.

But RBC also includes a cool link to Kipling's "The Cat Who Walks By Himself", about how Woman domesticated all the animals (including Man), but the Cat was the only one able to bargain on its own terms and retain some independence. Could be a cute read to go with Diamond.

Vikings!

The reconstructed Viking ship from 1024 has just reached Dublin. Took them months, and it sounds like they never would have made it without modern tech help. Really makes you appreciate what people went through back then just to travel in one little corner of the world.

1800 change in human nature

Now only if we could have a change in the nature of the human at 1600 (rimshot)

But in seriousness, here's a new article from the NYT Science section on the emerging industrial culture of the 19th century. One of his keys is the counterintuitive concept of "downward social mobility":

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.

As the progeny of the rich pervaded all levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for wealth could have spread with them. He has documented that several aspects of what might now be called middle-class values changed significantly from the days of hunter gatherer societies to 1800. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped.

He has a lot about genetics that may take things a little too far. Doesn't seem like these values have to be encoded in genes for them to have the same effect. (And besides, evolution can't operate in that short a time period.) But it's an interesting thesis when read on the cultural / institutional level.

documentary on Prussian Blue

Nazi pop twin moppets sieg HEIL!!1!!eleven!! New documentary about them with many scary scenes. Via Orcinus and SPLC blog. Watch it via Dutch Google here.

Diamond refuted?

Looks like you can domesticate hippos after all! Jared Diamond turns over in his grave. (He's not dead? Oh, uhh..)

awesome!

Very well written (duh!) guide for student writing by Michael O'Hare. (pdf here)

Some of it is actually a bit pretentious (avoid Latin/French cognates as post-1066 invaders of the English language -- whaaa? you must be joking...) but most is useful and can be stolen adapted to my own guide to student writing.

updated human timeline

The timeline of human evolution just got more complicated, as it does every few years or so.

The old theory was that the first and oldest species in our family tree, Homo habilis, evolved into Homo erectus, which then became us, Homo sapiens. But those two earlier species lived side-by-side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years, Leakey and colleagues report in a paper published in Thursday's journal Nature.

Leakey's co-author notes that human evolution is a

"chaotic kind of looking evolutionary tree rather than this heroic march that you see with the cartoons of an early ancestor evolving into some intermediate and eventually unto us."

That's the point I'd want students to get out of this article. It's not a straight line, its many branches and dead ends.

Sherman on war

Amen, brother! It's the warriors themselves who are often the most antiwar.

our torture system

Trying to not spend too much time dicking around online so that I can actually finish my fracking dissertation. But this makes me cry:

"The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. 'It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,' an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. 'At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.'"

[...]

"A former member of a C.I.A. transport team has described the 'takeout' of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location. A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to 'sodomy.' He said, 'It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.' The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, 'because it’s demoralizing."

From jane Meyer in the New Yorker, hat tip Digby.

omfg cia rofl

Too good not to note for posterity:

Perhaps the most comical of all CIA clandestine activities — unfortunately all too typical of its covert operations over the last 60 years — was the spying it did in 1994 on the newly appointed American ambassador to Guatemala, Marilyn McAfee, who sought to promote policies of human rights and justice in that country. Loyal to the murderous Guatemalan intelligence service, the CIA had bugged her bedroom and picked up sounds that led their agents to conclude that the ambassador was having a lesbian love affair with her secretary, Carol Murphy. The CIA station chief "recorded her cooing endearments to Murphy." The agency spread the word in Washington that the liberal ambassador was a lesbian without realizing that "Murphy" was also the name of her two-year-old black standard poodle. The bug in her bedroom had recorded her petting her dog. She was actually a married woman from a conservative family.

From Chalmers Johnson's review of Legacy of Ashes.

'Shock Troop' supported

TNR did their investigation, the story held up.

I found the last bit rather revealing:

Although we place great weight on the corroborations we have received, we wished to know more. But, late last week, the Army began its own investigation, short-circuiting our efforts. Beauchamp had his cell-phone and computer taken away and is currently unable to speak to even his family. His fellow soldiers no longer feel comfortable communicating with reporters.

And this of course is the goal of the right-wing outrage machine: to silence real reports coming out of Iraq so that all we have to rely on is government propaganda. Like how they banned soldier blogs. That's their goal in all this.

Life after humanity

A British architectural site provides a look at London over the centuries after its abandonment by humans. (Originally published in 1996 by the New Scientist).

Makes good companion reading to The World Without Us, which I just ordered from Amazon.

totalitarian handbags?

Fascist chic reaches a whole 'nother level.

This just in: Fox lies

Well I sure don't remember hearing anything about this. Who knew that there's a legal basis for "news" companies just making shit up? Fox did!

more reaction "shocks"

More on the Shock Troops controversy. On the one hand, it's frustrating to go through the hyper-analysis exercise every time the right wing hears something it doesn't like (see Crooked Timber's "One Endless Rathergate", and Jon Swift's comprehensive roundup of winger crybabiness).

On another hand, such controversies occasion really interesting bits of writing, like this one from a semiotics professor who sees in "Thomas"s prose style a poseur type of wanna-be bad boy who evidently infests MFA programs.

And some of the comments on threads like these are just gold. It's an amazing new world when there is so much expertise on so many subjects available for exchange.

One former military guy expresses what's been my take all along (without the real-world cred to back it up, but hey, I read a lot):

Having spent 22 years in the Army, I can say with some emphasis that there is almost nothing that most privates, and NOTHING that some privates, won't do, including incredibly stupid, hitting-self-in-head-with-hammer type of things. So the idea that this stuff didn't happen because "they wouldn't do it"? don't make me laugh.

And remember, you're talking about a bunch of 19-year-old guys with guns in a pretty much broken down Third World country. If your squad leader/PSG/1SG are weak, bored, stupid or distracted? Let the fun begin!

Tillman's diary

Pat Tillman's death is still in the news.

But here's another interesting detail: He kept a diary. And his diary was destroyed after his death. That's evidence alone that something was fishy. And it almost gets you to believe the conspiracies that he was killed on purpose... if not by Bush's many minions (which I doubt), then by someone in his unit who did something he didn't want made known. We may never know, which is exactly how they wanted it.

For some reason this makes me feel even worse than when I heard of his death in the first place. I guess because I never would have met him, and so he as a person is somewhat disembodied. But a book he would have published, or had published after his death, is far more real to me. I've read so many war diaries, autobiographies, veterans' novels, etc ... so losing this one is like one of those never existed. Would this have been another All Quiet on the Western Front? A Jarhead? Catch 22? Slaughterhouse Five? Adventures of a Simpleton? The world will never know.

"Shock Troops", "Scott Thomas", and war reporting comtroversies

So TNR publishes a piece called "Shock Troops" by a "Scott Thomas", who writes about all the terrible things he and his buddies did over in Iraq. Another entry in the 'war is hell' genre, with a heavy dose of self-reflection on the implications for one's morality, sanity, etc. (Point #1: this is a great bit of soldier storytelling, whether fiction, semifiction, or nonfiction is hard to tell.)

Needless to say, the warbloggers are not pleased. They call it a made-up hack job whose purpose s to smear the troops. Now the "Thomas" has revealed himself as Scott Thomas Beauchamp, real soldier and aspiring writer, they find other ways to ignore reality. That's what they do best. (Point #2: the story is the latest exhibit of the right blogosphere's descent into cultural combat straight out of Weimar.)

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has the best piece I've read on the controversy surrounding the story. He connects it to a video he saw once of college students abusing baboons they were supposed to be experimenting on:

I saw not only cruelty to animals, but also a profound failure on the part of the professors who should have been there to prevent this sort of thing from happening. .... [A]nyone who puts a student in a morally dangerous situation like this has an obligation to try to see that they get out of it without moral injury. But no one did that for these students. They were left to find their way on their own. And that's just wrong.

(Point #3: the story itself, whether true or not, reflects the condition of the military as designed by Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Lack of leadership at the top creates atrocities at the bottom.)

(Link to the original story itself will have to wait until TNR gets its shit sorted out with my subscription. Starting to hate their customer service as much as their increasing illiberalism.)

primate sexual culture

First, an article about bonobos in the New Yorker. Are they really the swingin' orgy chimps they've become famous to be?

Second, Broadsheet entry on how some chimps have been eating black plums as a type of contraception. Or maybe not - can't really tell if they are eating them for other medicinal purposes, or as a planned strategy for limiting births.

Can assign both of these in reading packet week 1/2 - origins of primate culture.

China's "Manufactured Landscapes"

I saw a review of this a while ago but forgot to link. A new photography book and film survey China's landscapes of manufacturing: junk-yards of electronics goods, vast factories like human beehives. Could be a good last-week or China-week assignment. Digby reviews here.

Hitler art

Article from Die Zeit (bad translation here; or maybe it was just a clunkily written article) about current totalitarian chic in German art and letters.

Talks a lot about artist Jonathan Messe, who decorated an exhibit of his once with a photo of Adolf above his own, labeled "Vater". (current exhibition in Frankfurt's Schirn Kunsthalle here.) Not very impressive to my mind... it's like he saw "Seven" and decided to throw a bunch of shit together to shock people without actually meaning anything.

More interesting is Christian Kracht, whose new work of fiction Metan "deals with primates, the atom bomb, white people and a secret power." Some kind of centuries-spanning conspiracy theory about a force (metan) that wants to control the world. Could be interesting to check out... of course, many reviews have panned it. Parody at best, Quatsch at worst seems to be the consensus.

The Jock/Nerd Theory of History

Bryan Caplan at Econolog asks whether the welfare state is actually a device for preventing jocks from being left behind.

history of farting

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, this article explains farting (or, farting humor as a public performance) in the middle ages as a conversation about the limitations of the body. Neat:

[F]arts are a kind of language. They are inherently social in a way that defecation is not. They tend to take your companions by surprise. Furthermore, farts are an occasion for self-examination, for questioning the extent of our freedom and the nature of self-mastery. We can't help farting; it is a question of need. So part of what the Middle Ages wrestled with when people were talking about farts was this constant reminder of the needs of the body. Farting carries this reminder that the body behaves on its own, and there is nothing you can do about it. It reminds us that our bodily freedom is limited.

Hat tip Sullivan.

homo commie faggot not so faggoty after all

Their defection to the Soviets was explained by their homosexuality. But newly released info shows that they weren't gay after all. This story from Seattle Weekly ("The Worst Scandal in NSA History Was Blamed on Cold War Defectors' Homosexuality," July 18 2007) reveals the new background and gives a very interesting biography of the pair. The closing line is classic:

Ultimately, the queerest things about Martin and Mitchell were their political, not sexual, acts. "Were they living today," quips author Bamford, "[they] would probably defect all over again."

Seven New Wonders

OK, so the contest is over and they've announced. The list is pretty good I guess. But Brazil's stupid Jesus statue is one of them, instead of Stonehenge, which should by any definition be a "wonder" -- how it was made is one of the greatest mysteries of the world. I shouldn't be upset as it's all just a publicity stun anyway, but how a 35m statue built in the 1930s is anything special as opposed to TONS and TONS of stone moved hundreds of miles MILLENIA before it's thought possible to do so... well, that's a wonder.

are we really so illiterate?

I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this, but here we go:

1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.

42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.

80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

57 percent of new books are not read to completion.

70 percent of books published do not earn back their advance.

70 percent of the books published do not make a profit.

But no matter! It doesn't matter if only the 20 people in your specialty read it, as long as it gets published and gets you tenure...

Bismark's great-great- gay grandson dead

Obit from the Telegraph, money quote courtesy of Sullivan, who was a contemporary of his at Oxford:

The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany's Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.

When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women's clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings.