Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
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I'm underemployed (historically particularly as an editor in book and magazine publishing), recurringly housebound with insanely painful now-sporadic (when I have meds) gout, an enlarged heart, and other health problems, particularly including lifelong recurring severe clinical depression. See here for a major crisis. I'm also sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer or researcher. This is a previous update on my situation & this -- and this from December 19th, 2005 update.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such
temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the
opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction;
that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their
ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty,
because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of
judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square
with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil
government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts
against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if
left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has
nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her
natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is
permitted freely to contradict them.
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their "tendency" is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
"Being evil is not a full-time job."
-- James Lileks
Gary Farber is now a licensed Double Super-Secret Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
Did he mention he was presently single?
The lutefisk is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left
or I'll shoot this gefilte fish.
No, really, I seriously need the help at present. And I hate asking.
Current Total # of Donations Since Blog Began: 606
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And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
Farber's First Fundamental of Blogging:
If your idea of making an insightful point is to make fun of people's
names, or refer to them by rilly clever labels such as "The Big Me" or "The Shrub,"
chances are high that I'm not reading your blog. The same applies if you refer
to a group of people by disparaging terms such as "the Donks" or "the pals." (Note: I have to say I don't give that much of a damn any more.)
Farber's Second Fundamental of Blogging:
The more interested you are in scoring a "point" for a political "team," a "side," than in exploring the validity or value of an idea, the less interested I am in what you're saying.
(Note: Partially suspended for the Duration. Later note: forget I ever said this.)
Farber's Third Fundamental of Blogging:
If you see a link on another blog, and use it, credit the blog.
Some places I go:
[weblogs, sites, and columns]
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, George Alec Effinger,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Jay Haldeman, Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start.
And She of whom I must write someday.
You Like Me, You Really Like Me
...Darn: I saw that Gary had commented on this thread, and thought: oh. my. god. Perfect storm. Unstoppable cannonball, immovable object.
-- Hilzoy
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
Where would the blogosphere be without the Guardian? Guardian fish-barreling is now a venerable tradition. Yet even within this tradition, I don't believe there has ever been a more extensive and thorough essay than this one, from Gary Farber's fine blog. Gary appears to have examined every single thing that Guardian/Observer columnist Mary Ridell has ever written. He ties it all together, reaches inevitable conclusion. An archive can be a weapon.
-- Dr. Frank
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
I look at it almost every day. I can't follow all the links, but I read most of your pieces. The blog format really seems to suit you. It also suits me; I am not a news junkie, so having smart people like you ferret out the interesting stuff and leave it where I can find it is wonderful.
-- Lydia Nickerson
Gary is certainly a non-idiotarian 'liberal'...
-- Perry deHaviland
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
Gary Farber is a principled liberal....
-- Bill Quick, The Daily Pundit
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber! Jeez, the guy is practically a blogging legend, and I'm always surprised at the breadth of what he writes about.
-- PZ Meyers, Pharyngula
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
Read The Rest Scale: only if curious. I've also written quite a few blog posts mentioning or linking to Roger (hmm, Blogger says 37 so far), so I'll only also mention this one on Roger and sf fandom.
THE WAR WE CAN'T WIN. As you know, a new set of Nixon tapes came out two weeks ago, and I wrote then about doing a new post analyzing the more interesting bits, which for me is all about the Vietnam War.
I've done a number of posts looking at past tape transcripts. Here on some of his racist themes. Here on how stupid Nixon thought J. Fred Thompson was.
And the last on the theme I'll continue in this post, here a long post on how Nixon and Kissinger knew the Vietnam War couldn't be won, and simply wanted to punt the issue until after the 1972 elections, after which they expected South Vietnam to collapse.
I bring this up, of course, because of the ever-ongoing rightwing mythology that we really "won" the Vietnam war, if not for those goshdarn liberals stabbing South Vietnam in the back with their aid cut-offs. Well, let's look at that yet again, shall we? But first, another post I did on that theme, looking back into the Johnson era, with quotes of Johnson tapes, and what Congress thought then. And a post on the history of Congressional ability to deal with war-funding.
The staggering story here is that it was Nixon himself who organized the threat of a Congressional cut-off of aid to South Vietnam, as a tool to beat President Thieu into signing onto the Paris Accords with the North Vietnamese that would enable the U.S. to withdraw its troops from South Vietnam.
And now, the new Nixon tapes and memos. On November 24th, 1972, Henry Kissinger dictated a memo to our allies on his latest meeting in Paris with the North Vietnamese:
Unfortunately, the text selection option for Scribed pastes out one word per line, which makes transcribing them, save by hand, impossibly time-consuming, as does retyping them. But you can read the threats to the South Vietnamese yourself.
And, as it happens, I've found that the blogger at Fatal Politics has saved me ten tons of trouble by doing most of the same analysis I was going to do, and putting a lot of transcripts into text form, as well as on YouTube, himself.
I have checked today [the President's cable said] as to the attitude of the leading Democrats and Republicans who support us in the Senate on Vietnam. In preparing them for the consultation which must take place once agreement is reached we have informed them of the key elements of the October 8 agreement: the return of our POWs, a ceasefire, and a formula under which [South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van] Thieu remains in power and all South Vietnamese have an opportunity to participate in a free election to determine what government they want for the future.
The result of this check indicates that they were not only unanimous but vehement in stating their conclusions that if Saigon is the only roadblock for reaching agreement on this basis they will personally lead the fight when the new Congress reconvenes on January 3 to cut off all military and economic assistance to Saigon. My evaluation is that the cut-off would be February 1. They further believe that under such circumstances we have no choice but to go it alone and to make a separate deal with North Vietnam for the return of our POWs and for our withdrawal.
Ken's emphasis correctly added.
Nixon was using this threat of Congressional cut-off of aid to force Thieu's acquiescence. As we'll see, this is a threat Nixon himself organized.
As Ken at Fatal Politics observes:
[...] The Saigon government simply could not continue to exist without U.S. military and economic assistance. (A point Nixon himself made directly to Special Assistant Duc five days later: "Without U.S. aid, Saigon could not survive . . . without U.S. funds Saigon would be through."
Who was making these threats? Again quoting Ken's post:
Goldwater and Stennis Tell Saigon Not to Balk By David E. Rosenbaum Special to The New York Times
WASHINGTON, Jan. 18[, 1973]. Two of the Saigon government’s strongest supporters in the United States Senate--Barry Goldwater and John C. Stennis . . . warned that South Vietnam would lose support in the United States for further economic and military assistance if President Nguyen Van Thieu blocked a settlement of the war.
[...]
The warnings addressed to the Saigon government by Senator Stennis, who spoke in the Senate, and by Senator Goldwater, who issued a statement, were markedly similar. . . .
That's right: the most conservative Senators in the Senate, Nixon's closest allies.
Ken:
[...] Stennis told the Senate:
“I do not think this is the time for the Government of South Vietnam to be an obstacle to peace. The South Vietnamese Government must realize that there are limits to what the American people are willing to do.
“The South Vietnamese will need economic and military aid in the coming years. However, the South Vietnamese can jeopardize American support for such programs if they emerge now as the obstacle to peace in Southeast Asia.”
Nixon wrote a letter to Thieu:
It is obvious that we face a situation of most extreme gravity when long-time friends of South Viet-Nam such as Senators Goldwater and Stennis, on whom we have relied for four years to carry our programs of assistance through the Congress, make public declarations that a refusal by your Government of reasonable peace terms would make it impossible to continue aid. ("Nixon to Thieu," 19 January 1973, quoted by Jussi M. Hanhimäki and Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, pp. 234-235. Or you can read the letter itself here.)
On January 17, 1973, over three months after the North had agreed to Nixon’s “decent interval” terms, the South still had not. Nixon thought it time to send South Vietnam’s President a particularly threatening letter:
President Nixon: . . . I would make the letter this time very tough in substance and I would smooth off the edges in its content -- you know what I mean.
Kissinger: Exactly. Absolutely.
President Nixon: So that it is one that -- so that he doesn’t look as if we are -- it must have the veiled threat -- one that can be clearly seen. We know what is beneath the veil -- there is no other choice but that the Congress and I will not be able to resist it under these circumstances -- that the aid will be cut off. This is what is at stake. . . . Your going along with the settlement and going along enthusiastically, as I will, would have an enormous effect on American public opinion and provide the continued support which we so desperately need in our Congress for a military and economic aid to South Vietnam.
Kissinger: Absolutely. Exactly.
(17 January 1973, 9:44 AM, KA09292
How did Nixon proceed to organize the threat?
A public statement by "Mr. Conservative," Senator Barry M. Goldwater, R-Arizona:
President Nixon: . . . the only thing I wonder, would it be useful to have Goldwater take a little -- say, "Look, come along boy?"
Kissinger: I think that might do some good.
. . .
President Nixon: I think if Goldwater could just come out and say it’s time to quit this nonsense, stop all this jabbering . . .
. . .
President Nixon: I don’t want one of the left to do it, but somebody like Goldwater from the right should say it.
Kissinger: Exactly.
President Nixon: And maybe [Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John C.] Stennis will say it if he won’t. Stennis should be another good one.
Kissinger: Right.
(18 January 1973, 9:40 AM, KA09303
What followed?
To further veil the threat, Nixon and Kissinger would hide their own hands in it:
Kissinger: None of them would say they talked to me, they keep their--
President Nixon: Yeah, well, you can tell them that it’s very important that this not appear to come from the White House.
(18 January 1973, 9:40 AM, KA09303, subscription)
Goldwater didn't hesitate:
Kissinger: Barry, what I called you about is this: I was wondering whether you would consider making a statement today in effect saying to Thieu, what’s important now isn’t this or that comma or word or clause; what’s important now is to maintain unity between us.
Goldwater: This is directed to President Thieu.
Kissinger: That’s right. Because we are at a point now where if they keep nitpicking around in Saigon on these abstruse theological points, they are going to get so much opposition to themselves triggered here.
Goldwater: Yes.
Kissinger: The difference is between them and us. I mean, we shouldn’t say that, but just for your information -- cannot be explained to the American people.
Goldwater: No, that’s for sure.
(18 January 1973, 11:13 AM, KA09307, subscription)
Thieu wanted any settlement to include the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from the South -- hardly an "abstruse theological" point.
Stennis was even more amenable to Kissinger:
Kissinger: I was wondering whether I could make a suggestion to you.
Stennis: Yes, sir, always.
Kissinger: We think given your long-term commitment to defense and so forth, that if you made a statement saying that you thought that this would be -- that this was now the time for Thieu and us to close ranks and that there shouldn’t be legal quibbles, that to restore the unity between our two governments, or something like that that puts a little pressure on Thieu, so that he doesn’t think that the conservative element in this country is behind him.
[...] Nixon realized that the Communists were going to win in Vietnam. “I look at the tide of history out there,” he said in the Oval Office, “South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway.”
[...] The 55 mice used in the University of South Florida study had been bred to develop symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.
[...]
The mice were given the equivalent of five 8 oz (227 grams) cups of coffee a day - about 500 milligrams of caffeine.
The researchers say this is the same as is found in two cups of "specialty" coffees such as lattes or cappuccinos from coffee shops, 14 cups of tea, or 20 soft drinks.
When the mice were tested again after two months, those who were given the caffeine performed much better on tests measuring their memory and thinking skills and performed as well as mice of the same age without dementia.
Those drinking plain water continued to do poorly on the tests.
In addition, the brains of the mice given caffeine showed nearly a 50% reduction in levels of the beta amyloid protein, which forms destructive clumps in the brains of dementia patients.
Further tests suggested caffeine affects the production of both the enzymes needed to produce beta amyloid.
The researchers also suggest that caffeine suppresses inflammatory changes in the brain that lead to an overabundance of the protein.
Earlier research by the same team had shown younger mice, who had also been bred to develop Alzheimer's but who were given caffeine in their early adulthood, were protected against the onset of memory problems.
Now, if I can just manage to remember to make coffee....
WHY YOU'RE READING THIS. Because the internet was invented! And a year ago, Vanity Fairpublished a spiffy oral history (with audio) from many of those present at the creation of crucial moments. Some excerpts I found hilarious or cool coming up. But the first thing to remember is that the internet was created by government funding and initiative:
Paul Baran: It was necessary to have a strategic system that could withstand a first attack and then be able to return the favor in kind. The problem was that we didn’t have a survivable communications system, and so Soviet missiles aimed at U.S. missiles would take out the entire telephone-communication system.
[...]
Bob Taylor: Sputnik in 1957 surprised a lot of people, and Eisenhower asked the Defense Department to set up a special agency, so that we would not get caught with our pants down again.
[...]
Bob Taylor: There were individual instances of interactive computing through time-sharing, sponsored by ARPA, scattered around the country. In my office in the Pentagon I had one terminal that connected to a time-sharing system at M.I.T. I had another one that connected to a time-sharing system at U.C. Berkeley. I had one that connected to a time-sharing system at the System Development Corporation, in Santa Monica. There was another terminal that connected to the Rand Corporation.
And for me to use any of these systems, I would have to move from one terminal to the other. So the obvious idea came to me: Wait a minute. Why not just have one terminal, and it connects to anything you want it to be connected to? And, hence, the Arpanet was born.
This is how fast government can move:
When I had this idea about building a network—this was in 1966—it was kind of an “Aha” idea, a “Eureka!” idea. I went over to Charlie Herzfeld’s office and told him about it. And he pretty much instantly made a budget change within his agency and took a million dollars away from one of his other offices and gave it to me to get started. It took about 20 minutes.
But the monopoly of AT&T -- that so-called innovator of tech, private enterprise, tried to destroy it:
[...] Paul Baran: The one hurdle packet switching faced was AT&T. They fought it tooth and nail at the beginning. They tried all sorts of things to stop it. They pretty much had a monopoly in all communications. And somebody from outside saying that there’s a better way to do it of course doesn’t make sense. They automatically assumed that we didn’t know what we were doing.
Bob Taylor: Working with AT&T would be like working with Cro-Magnon man. I asked them if they wanted to be early members so they could learn technology as we went along. They said no. I said, Well, why not? And they said, Because packet switching won’t work. They were adamant. As a result, AT&T missed out on the whole early networking experience.
[...]
Bob Kahn: Let me put it into perspective. So here we are when there are very few time-sharing systems anywhere in the world. AT&T probably said, Look, maybe we would have 50 or a hundred organizations, maybe a few hundred organizations, that could possibly partake of this in any reasonable time frame. Remember, the personal computer hadn’t been invented yet. So, you had to have these big expensive mainframes in order to do anything. They said, There’s no business there, and why should we waste our time until we can see that there’s a business opportunity? That’s why a place like ARPA is so important.
Government did it:
[...] Stewart Brand: This was a time which was pretty much ARPA-derived, in the sense that the money for computers and for networking computers was coming from the government, and from pretty enlightened leadership there. The idea of Arpanet was that it was going to basically join up computational resources. It was not set up primarily to do e-mail—but the computational-resource connection turned out to be not so important, and the e-mail turned out to be the killer app.
[...]
Bob Metcalfe: Imagine a bearded grad student being handed a dozen AT&T executives, all in pin-striped suits and quite a bit older and cooler. And I’m giving them a tour. And when I say a tour, they’re standing behind me while I’m typing on one of these terminals. I’m traveling around the Arpanet showing them: Ooh, look. You can do this. And I’m in U.C.L.A. in Los Angeles now. And now I’m in San Francisco. And now I’m in Chicago. And now I’m in Cambridge, Massachusetts—isn’t this cool? And as I’m giving my demo, the damned thing crashed.
And I turned around to look at these 10, 12 AT&T suits, and they were all laughing. And it was in that moment that AT&T became my bête noire, because I realized in that moment that these sons of bitches were rooting against me.
To this day, I still cringe at the mention of AT&T. That’s why my cell phone is a T-Mobile. The rest of my family uses AT&T, but I refuse.
[...]
Robert Cailliau: [...] At one point CERN was toying with patenting the World Wide Web. I was talking about that with Tim one day, and he looked at me, and I could see that he wasn’t enthusiastic. He said, Robert, do you want to be rich? I thought, Well, it helps, no? He apparently didn’t care about that. What he cared about was to make sure that the thing would work, that it would just be there for everybody. He convinced me of that, and then I worked for about six months, very hard with the legal service, to make sure that CERN put the whole thing in the public domain.
Marc Andreessen: Mosaic was built at the University of Illinois. I was an undergrad student, but I was also a staff member at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which is basically a federally funded research institute. When Al Gore says that he created the Internet, he means that he funded these four national supercomputing centers. Federal funding was critical. I tease my libertarian friends—they all think the Internet is the greatest thing. And I’m like, Yeah, thanks to government funding.
Here's a part I love:
Sky Dayton founded EarthLink, an Internet-service provider, in 1994.
Sky Dayton: I owned a couple of coffeehouses in L.A., and I had a computer-graphics company that I co-owned. And I heard about this thing called the Internet. I thought, That sounds kind of interesting. The first thing I did is I actually picked up the phone and dialed 411, and I said, I’d like the number for the Internet, please. And the operator is like, What? I said, Just search any company with the word Internet in the name. Blank. Nothing. I thought, Wow, this is interesting. What is this thing anyway?
Another:
[...] Thomas Reardon was 21 years old when Bill Gates offered him a senior position at Microsoft, in 1991. Reardon became a program manager for Internet Explorer.
Thomas Reardon: I was the first at Microsoft to know about Netscape. I remember calling down there and saying, Hey, I’m with Microsoft, and I’m looking around at all these people who started Web browsers because I think we’re going to do one inside of Windows and we want to know if we might look at your technology as a source for this, do a license deal, or we buy your technology. And they told me basically to go fuck off.
How did Microsoft respond?
[...] Thomas Reardon: Andreessen said that Windows was just a piece of shit. Well, that became a call to arms for us. We had this famous meeting called the Pearl Harbor Day meeting that year. Bill was going from talking about the Internet to: O.K., now we need a battle plan. The Internet Explorer team went from 5 people to 300.
Hadi Partovi: I personally printed out the strongest quotes from the Netscape people, with their faces, so if you walked down the hallway of the Internet Explorer team, you’d see the faces of one of these Netscape executives and what they said.
Jim Clark: Microsoft was making it very clear that they were going to kill us. We were trying to negotiate deals where Compaq and Gateway and all these P.C. manufacturers would bundle our Web browser. And Microsoft threatened them. Microsoft threatened them that if they did they would revoke their license to Windows. So, needless to say, everyone backed off.
Later, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon:
When we launched, we launched with over a million titles. There were countless snags. One of my friends figured out that you could order a negative quantity of books. And we would credit your credit card and then, I guess, wait for you to deliver the books to us. We fixed that one very quickly.
[...]
When we started out, we were packing on our hands and knees on these cement floors. One of the software engineers that I was packing next to was saying, You know, this is really killing my knees and my back. And I said to this person, I just had a great idea. We should get kneepads. And he looked at me like I was from Mars. And he said, Jeff, we should get packing tables.
We got packing tables the next day, and it doubled our productivity.
Michael Kinsley on how Slate got started:
[...] The only thing we were up against was Salon. They were our only competition. Oh, but dealing with Microsoft was—Microsoft was great in the sense that they did the key thing, which is pay for it. But getting them acquainted with a writer’s contract! They originally wanted us to make every writer sign three different documents which warranted the accuracy of everything they said and indemnified Microsoft. They even wanted us to get anyone interviewed to sign a release indemnifying Microsoft.
So there were 18 different ways that they just didn’t get it.
The early days of eBay:
[...] Pierre Omidyar: I remember clearly in the early days when there was a community of Barbie-doll collectors. They found eBay sort of all at once. And I’ll never forget, we had an early focus group in late ’96, and one of the guys who came to our focus group was a truckdriver—he actually did long-haul truckdriving across the country—and when people were introducing themselves, going around the room, he says, I’m a truckdriver and I collect Barbies.
And then later there were Beanie Babies. Around the time that we went public we disclosed in our filing that Beanie Babies accounted for 8 percent of the inventory on the site.
The Smoking Gun:
[...] We launched the site on April 17, 1997. I didn’t have an e-mail address. I remember actually faxing out like 40 press releases on paper. Boy, what a retard: I’m sending you a fax to let you know about this Web site that we just started.
Pets.com:
[...] Jeff Bezos: I think the only thing I ended up with out of that investment is a sock puppet. An expensive sock puppet.
There's a bunch more there. Meanwhile, Scott Rosenberg has a new book, Say Everything, a history of blogging, I'll have to get some day. Here's the insightfuly Chapter 9, Journalists vs. Bloggers.
And Apt 11Dlooks back at how blogging has changed for many.
Who knows all the reasons — Todd and Sarah Palin, presumably fully understand.
Where would we be without professional pundits' insights such as this?
Rich Lowrey also not as wingnutty as he might be! At 07/03 04:58 PM:
I think I have pretty well-established credentials when it comes to being charmed by Sarah Palin, but that statement, as a statement, was simply terrible. Rambling and not at all persuasive as an argument for her decision. More Gibson/Couric than GOP convention speech. She shouldn't have said a thing without getting Matt Scully—or some similarly talented speechwriter—on the case first.
Because who doesn't want a president or governor who can't put togther on her own the simplest explanation of what she's doing? Oh, right, these folks adored the last Republican president. My bad.
The latest piece of genius, as I write this, comes from Dana Perino at 07/03 07:45 PM:
[...] On the other hand, the great 2012 GOP nominee chess match has already started, and this ensures that her name will be in the mix, even if she has no plans to launch a campaign.
Right, because before she resigned, no Republicans had considered her as a candidate.
God bless The Corner, and all their fellow kooks.
Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5 if you enjoy laughing your ass off at this sort of thing.
ADDENDUM: A thought I just wrote about at Obsidian Wings: "...but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out."
[...] Alaska's mission - to contribute to America. [...] Alaska would be part of America's great destiny. [...] because I know in my soul that Alaska is of such import [....]
The other forty-nine states? Nothing to contribute! No import!
Truly, who wouldn't want to base a national candidacy on this -- and the Alaskan Independence Party?
More seriously, I'm wondering if it's possible that this part might, actually, be the key?
[...] And so as I thought about this announcement that I wouldn't run for re-election and what it means for Alaska, I thought about how much fun some governors have as lame ducks... travel around the state, to the Lower 48 (maybe), overseas on international trade - as so many politicians do.
This was a really rambly, unthought-out -- it's not even fair to call it a "speech" -- set of strung-together sorta-thoughts.
Maybe it's actually just this simple: Palin decided to not run for election, possibly to set up a 2012 presidential campaign, possibly for some more obscure reason -- and then really did just have the thought occur to her:
Well, golly gee, if I stay on as Governor until the next election, I'll be all bored and doing things that won't personally benefit me at all! And people will keep picking on me! And gee whillikers, that's just no fun!
I know! I'll quit right now!
And I'm going to run out now and announce that, because thinking about things is hard! Let's go talk to the press, Todd!
I'm not saying that's how it went. But the thought does occur to me to wonder about the possibility.
Video of her bizarre ramble here among many other places.
This is, after all, the woman who shortly after this weirdness tweeted:
We'll soon attach info on decision to not seek re-election... this is in Alaska's best interest, my family's happy... it is good, stay tuned
And in the middle of her ramble, she goes from saying "So I choose, for my State and my family, more 'freedom' to progress, all the way around... so that Alaska may progress... I will not seek re-election as Governor" to seque directly into "And so as I thought about this announcement." Similarly, she says "With this announcement that I am not seeking re-election... I've determined it's best to transfer the authority of governor to Lieutenant Governor Parnell...."
It certainly does sound as if she pretty much just had the idea of quitting practically on the fly. Notice her shift in that last into present tense. And is it that hard to believe that she's just that impulsive and shallow?
Oh, and the one point where I agreed with her?
[...] I cannot stand here as your Governor and allow millions upon millions of our dollars go to waste just so I can hold the title of Governor.
I didn't want that either!
ADDENDUM, 9:35 p.m.: Sarah Palin quoted Douglas MacArthur: "In the words of General MacArthur said, 'We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.'"
2) This was one of the biggest military retreats in American history. (More here.)
ADDENDUM, 7/06/09: Extra-special science fantasy lunacy via Robert Farley: Erick Erickson on Palin:
I’ve had this running thought all day, perhaps because I was watching it on TV in HD for the first time, that this is kind of like Ben Kenobi letting Darth Vader strike him down.
A rare and valuable copy of the US Declaration of Independence has been discovered in the National Archives.
An American antiquarian bookseller carrying out research at the archives in Richmond, Surrey, stumbled upon the document among some files. It is believed to be one of only 200 printed.
Dating back to 4 July 1776, the manuscript is known as a "Dunlap", after the printer whose name appears at the bottom. Only 26 such prints are known to still exist. The last discovery of a Dunlap was at a flea market in 1989. It sold at auction for $8.1m (£5m).
The manuscript was hidden among correspondence from American colonists that the British had intercepted in the 18th century. The archives is now known to hold three copies but said it would not be selling the print.
"We will protect and preserve this copy," a spokeswoman said.
"The Americans are very excited by it. We do often loan out our key documents and I'm sure if an American institution wanted to borrow it, we would consider lending it to them."
Edward Hampshire, a diplomatic and colonial specialist at the archives, said: "This is an incredibly exciting find... uncovering a new document nearly 250 years [after they were printed] is extremely rare, especially one in such good condition."
I like the next part where they explain what the Declaration of Independence is.
WE HAVE TO DESTROY AMERICA IN ORDER TO SAVE IT. That has, of course, been the philosophy of so many on the right for so very long, but it's rare to hear it put this baldly:
Michael Scheuer, on Glenn Beck's show last night:
Scheuer: The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it's going to take a grass-roots, bottom-up pressure. Because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. It's an absurd situation again. Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.
Beck: Which is why, I was thinking this weekend, if I were him, that would be the last thing I would do right now.
Yes, in order to protect us, we'll have to be attacked; if we're not attacked, Obama won't be protecting us from being attacked.
Man, I've had acid that wasn't this good.
Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5 if you want to watch the video.
And always remember: the very best way to protect America, the only truly right way is with as much violence as necessary.
[...] The majority's decision in this regard also departs from another basic principle of the Fourth Amendment: that law enforcement officials can enforce with the same vigor all rules and regulations irrespective of the perceived importance of any of those rules. "In a long line of cases, we have said that when an officer has probable cause to believe a person committed even a minor crime in his presence, the balancing of private and public interests is not in doubt. The arrest is constitutionally reasonable." Virginia v. Moore, 553 U. S. ___, ___ (2008) (slip op., at 6).
The Fourth Amendment rule for searches is the same: Police officers are entitled to search regardless of the perceived triviality of the underlying law. As we have explained, requiring police to make "sensitive, case-by-case determinations of government need," Atwater v. Lago Vista, 532 U. S. 318, 347 (2001), for a particular prohibition before conducting a search would "place police in an almost impossible spot," id., at 350.
[...]
In determining whether the search's scope was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment, it is therefore irrelevant whether officials suspected Redding of possessing prescription-strength Ibuprofen, nonprescription-strength Naproxen, or some harder street drug. Safford prohibited its possession on school property. Reasonable suspicion that Redding was in possession of drugs in violation of these policies, therefore, justified a search extending to any area where small pills could be concealed. The search did not violate the Fourth Amendment.
[...]
By declaring the search unreasonable in this case, the majority has "`surrender[ed] control of the American public school system to public school students'" by invalidating school policies that treat all drugs equally and by second-guessing swift disciplinary decisions made by school officials.
[...]
In the end, the task of implementing and amending public school policies is beyond this Court's function. Parents, teachers, school administrators, local politicians, and state officials are all better suited than judges to determine the appropriate limits on searches conducted by school officials. Preservation of order, discipline, and safety in public schools is simply not the domain of the Constitution.
Neither in the domain of the Constitution are the rights of individuals to be free of unreasonable searches or seizures, if you're a minor, or for any other good reason Justice Thomas can come up with.
Let's hear it for not applying "empathy" or concepts of "freedoms of individuals" over the "rights" of authorities, in constitutional decisions.
MY SECOND LIFETIME MICHAEL JACKSON POST is about my first Michael Jackson post.
Huh. I was just startled by checking SiteMeter for my blog for the first time all day, not expecting to see anything beyond the abysmally small number of hits I get these days absent a link from a major blog, and was staggered to see hundreds of hits per hour for the last few hours, hitting over 240 hits per hour a couple of hours ago.
ADDENDUM, 6:22 p.m.: What I saw on my server logs were just an eddy of the internet:
How many people does it take to break the Internet? On June 25, we found out it's just one -- if that one is Michael Jackson.
The biggest showbiz story of the year saw the troubled star take a good slice of the Internet with him, as the ripples caused by the news of his death swept around the globe.
"Between approximately 2:40 p.m. PDT and 3:15 p.m. PDT today, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson," a Google spokesman told CNET, which also reported that Google News users complained that the service was inaccessible for a time. At its peak, Google Trends rated the Jackson story as "volcanic."
As sites fell, users raced to other sites: TechCrunch reported that TMZ, which broke the story, had several outages; users then switched to Perez Hilton's blog, which also struggled to deal with the requests it received.
CNN reported a fivefold rise in traffic and visitors in just over an hour, receiving 20 million page views in the hour the story broke.
Twitter crashed as users saw multiple "fail whales" -- the illustrations the site uses as error messages -- user FoieGrasie posting, "Irony: The protesters in Iran using Twitter as com are unable to get online because of all the posts of 'Michael Jackson RIP.' Well done." The site's status blog said that Twitter had had to temporarily disable its search results, saved searches and trend topics.
Wikipedia saw a flurry of activity, with close to 500 edits made to Jackson's entry in less than 24 hours. CNET reported that by 3:15 p.m. PT, Wikipedia seemed to be "temporarily overloaded."
The Los Angeles Times, the first news organization to confirm Jackson's death, suffered outages. The site also reported that AOL's instant messenger service had been hit, quoting an AOL statement that said, "AIM was down for approximately 40 minutes this afternoon." The statement said, "Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We've never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth."
Etc., etc. So my seeing a few hundred hits for an old photo and mention was just a ghost of all this.
NEW NIXON TAPES OUT TODAY! I'll be busy reading transcripts, and in some cases, listening to audio.
I'll get back to you on this.
Meanwhile, relatedly, who knew that Chris Crawford had a new sort-of version of Balance of Power out? I spent a lot of time with it last night, doing things like declining to make deals with China to ask North Korea to test a nuclear weapon. I think Nixon would have done the same!
1977! Or, an example of why I have a little trouble identifying with the state I presently live in:
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- North Carolina recalled a regrettable side of its history on Monday by unveiling a roadside marker remembering poor people, mental patients and prisoners who were sterilized against their will by state officials.
The cast aluminum sign in downtown Raleigh provides a permanent remembrance of the program intended to keep thousands of people considered mentally disabled or otherwise genetically inferior from having children.
[...]
More than 7,600 people were sterilized by ''choice or coercion'' under the state's so-called eugenics program between 1933 and 1973, according to the marker's text. North Carolina was one of more than two dozen states [SEE BELOW: THE NUMBER IS ACTUALLY 32 STATES] that ran such programs after social reformers began advocating for the approach a century ago.
[...]
North Carolina's program targeted the poor and people living in prisons and state institutions, among others. While officials obtained written consent from patients or their guardians, many didn't know what they were signing and were essentially coerced, state historians said.
Riddick, for example, was a rape victim who was sterilized soon after delivering a baby at age 14. She has said she couldn't have given consent because she was so young.
The state Eugenics Commission was abolished in 1977 after the Legislature transferred responsibility of the mentally ill to the court system.
There was a "Eugenics Commission" until 1977!
They're still just talking about compensation:
[...] A state House panel has recommended that the state give $20,000 to victims of the eugenics program, but the measure is unlikely to pass this year. The House bill that would begin payments now seeks $18.6 million -- a difficult amount to obtain in a year in which lawmakers are facing a $4.6 billion budget gap.
But, hey, a marker should make up for it all.
Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5. There's no coverage of this in the News & Observer, by the way, other than the same AP story. There's just that much caring.
ADDENDUM, June 23rd, 7:44 p.m.: Thanks to a pointer from reader Maven giving me the clue to go looking, here is the whole huge detailed series of articles that the Winston Salem Journal did in 2002, which shined a bright light on this awful program. Really, this is what you should go read!
Incidentally, although the article I initially quoted says "more than two dozen" states had such programs, it was thirty-two states.
ADDENDUM, June 26th, 12:26 p.m.: Thanks, Batocchio, at Crooks and Liars!
JEWS IN SPACE. Okay, only in difficult-to-get-to rural Peru. Those wacky Jews turn up everywhere!
[...] The history of Jews in Iquitos, dating from the late-19th-century rubber boom that transformed this far-flung Amazonian outpost into a once thriving city of imported Italian marble and a theater designed by Gustave Eiffel, was almost forgotten.
But Mr. Reátegui Levy and a handful of others began organizing the descendants of dozens of Jews from places as varied as Morocco, Gibraltar, Malta, England and France who had settled here and deeper in the jungle, opening trading houses and following their star in search of riches and adventure.
The rubber trade collapsed, and fortunes here and upriver in the Brazilian city of Manaus vanished. Some Jewish immigrants perished young, succumbing to diseases like cholera. A few stayed, marrying local women and raising families. Others returned home, leaving behind descendants who clung to a belief that they were Jews.
[...]
“We were isolated for so many decades, living on the jungle’s edge in a Catholic society without rabbis or a synagogue, in which all we had were some vague notions of what it meant to be Jewish,” Mr. Reátegui Levy said.
“But when I was a child, my mother told me something that forever burned into my mind,” he said. “She told me, ‘You are a Jew, and you are never to forget that.’ ”
Iquitos lies four degrees south of the Equator, reachable only by boat or plane.
The one thing that makes me doubt their Jewishness is that the reporter makes no mention of constant arguing among them. Probably just a reportorial oversight, though.
Homosexual behavior seems pointedly un-Darwinian. An animal that doesn't pass along genes by mating with the opposite sex at every, well, conceivable opportunity, seems to be at an evolutionary disadvantage. So what’s in it for the 450-plus species that go for same-sex sex?
Two evolutionary biologists from University of California, Riverside, set out to answer that question in a paper published today in Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
[...]
After studying dozens of published articles on the topic, Bailey and his colleague Marlene Zuk concluded that, in addition to being an adaptational strategy, "these behaviors can be a force," Bailey said. "They create a context in which selection can occur [differently] within a population."
In the Laysan albatross, for example, previous research has shown that a third of all bonded pairs in a Hawaii colony are two females. This behavior helps the birds, whose colony has far more females than males, by allowing them to share parenting responsibilities. It also gives more stability to the offspring of males, already bonded to a female, who mate opportunistically with females in a same-sex couple. Such a dynamic, then may force gradual changes in behavior and even physical appearance of the birds, the authors note.
Next on the Nature Channel: Queer Eye For the Straight Albatross. On a stick.
Read The Rest Scale: 1.5 out of 5. Really, I just told you the news.
All right, there's just no satisfying you people. More here.
[...] Comedy Central will begin showing the new installments beginning mid-2010. An interesting note in the press release states, "Twentieth Century Fox Television retains the option to license the original runs of the new episodes to a broadcast network," seemingly implying there is a chance a network (though come on, it would be FOX, right?) could potentially air the new episodes first, before Comedy Central.
Says co-creator Matt Groening, "We're thrilled Futurama is coming back. We now have only 25,766 episodes to make before we catch up with Bender and Fry in the year 3000." Added his fellow Futurama creator, David X. Cohen, "We're excited and amazed that the show is coming back, perhaps due to some sort of mysterious time loop. We look forward to working with Comedy Central and 20th Television to make this the best iteration of the loop yet!"
And "on your DVD player" is a pretty good time slot.
Incidentally, did you know that, like almost all Hollywood productions, Return of The Jedi has never gone into profit?
[...] Everyone says having your show cancelled is like a death but I've been dead before and at least when you're dead you don't get thrown off the Warner Bros. lot for haunting your old parking space. They probably mean it's like the death of a friend or a family member but that shit only hurts when it's YOUR friend or family member and even then it's mitigated by age, lifestyle and whether that person was a Hollywood friend or a real one and whether that family member left you money.
Losing your show is more like a surprise divorce where you get served papers in the morning and your (ex)wife is fucking Human Target by three in the afternoon using the same time slot your child was conceived in and also where she did that one thing that one time on your birthday.
People say the bright side to losing your show is gaining time to spend with your family but I'm pretty sure that waking up next to your ex-showrunner spouse whom you haven't seen for two and a half years is pretty close to waking up next to that special someone you met the night before at Carlos n' Charlie's in Cancun on Spring Break.
There's a bunch more. Because, y'know, now he has time to write on his blog.
I really liked Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles; it was good sf, with fine acting by Lena Headey and Summer Glau, and its main problem was that it had too many words in its title, and really that's not a very big problem. Sorry you were cancelled, Josh!
There were foreshadowings:
[...] I guess there were signs that the show was in trouble (other than the 1.3 rating and the four share). First there was the day I was in my office and looked up to see Chuck Lorre and a Warner Bros. facilities manager standing in my doorway pointing to various features and using their hands to take "air measurements." (Chuck tried to play it off like waving to me God Bless him, but I know an air measurement when I see it.)
Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5 or killer robots will come kill us all.
M. Edward Whelan III is the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He directs EPPC’s program on The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture. His areas of expertise include constitutional law and the judicial confirmation process.
[...]
Mr. Whelan, a lawyer and a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, has served in positions of responsibility in all three branches of the federal government. From just before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, until joining EPPC in 2004, Mr. Whelan was the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. In that capacity, he advised the White House Counsel’s Office, the Attorney General and other senior DOJ officials, and Departments and agencies throughout the executive branch on difficult and sensitive legal questions. Mr. Whelan previously served on Capitol Hill as General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. In addition to clerking for Justice Scalia, he was a law clerk to Judge J. Clifford Wallace of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Since you doubtless haven't figured this out, Mr. Whelan, outing a pseudonymous blogger for no better reason than that you don't like what the blogger is saying has long been established as the act of someone who has no better argument.
It's a revealingly pathetic act. It's the act of an angry child.
[...]
What I left unstated above is that the most moronically dense aspect of the-reply-by-outing is that it turns a post that would otherwise be paid little attention to by the blogosphere, and almost entirely forgotten within a few days, into a pointer to a post, the one that the outer is "defending," that becomes infamous to countless readers throughout the blogosphere, who wonder what on earth could have stung the outer into such desperate outrage, and said poster and poster become widely famous for their violation of blogospheric etiquette and blinding stupidity.
Someday, someone is going to make a million by writing a book on what so far is largely unwritten; the rules and etiquette of blogging.
When that happens, we won’t have internet ignorant philistines like Ed Whelan running around destroying the anonymity of bloggers who choose to remain unknown. Or maybe we will, if they prove as unable to control their anger as Mr. Whelan has demonstrated.
[...]
Responding point by point to Publius’s piquing of Whelan’s demonstrably thin skin, the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center couldn’t leave it at that. Instead, he decided to act rather unethically and dig unto Publius’s personal life in order to discover who this mosquito nibbling on his backside might be.
Sounding for all the world as if he had solved the mystery of Area 51, Whelan wrote triumphantly [...]
I am very happy Ed has enjoyed his Captain Queeg moment and solved the mystery of the missing strawberries. Such sleuthing no doubt builds up an appetite to which Whelan might consider eating the plate of slightly overdone crow that is sitting in front of him.
[...]
If not, Whalen’s fit of personal pique looks low, tawdry, childish, and vengeful.
[...] Even so, I think "you a lawprof" is a pretty lame argument, normally wielded by opponents who don't want to bother making substantive points. It's about on the level of proclaiming you're a moron.
Ed Whelan of the National Review outed the once pseudonymous "Publius" of Obsidian Wings due to what looks like nothing more than pique. Not cool at all.
[...] There seem to be mixed feelings as to whether what Whelan did is “ethical” or not. In terms of ethics, we’re essentially talking about right and wrong. Is it right or wrong to reveal the name of an anonymous blogger?
And the answer?
Well, it depends. It depends on what action by the anonymous blogger might drive such a decision by another blogger. I’m sure if I thought long and hard enough I could come up with a few that I think would justify doing so. But one of them wouldn’t be because some blogger had been “biting at my ankles in recent months.”
I’m sorry but that comes with the territory of blogging.
Heat. Kitchen. Either grow a thick skin or quit blogging.
[...]
I find Whelan’s outing of Publius to be very bad form -unethical- especially for the reason given. If I had a nickel for every anonymous ankle biter I’ve endured for years, I’d be retired. The trick in dealing with them is not to do something as juvenile and “ethics challenged” as violating their privacy, but instead by making tight and considered arguments which leave them little room for rational criticism. At that point they usually do one of two things - go irrational and begin the inevitable descent into ad hominum attacks or go away.
What Whelan just did instead was create a martyr and become the bad guy. And his poor judgment in this case ends up hurting his own credibility while adding at least sympathetic weight to his antagonists arguments.
Too many people on the internet want anonymity for a variety of reasons. Certainly some abuse it. But the unspoken rule of netiquete is you don’t reveal another’s private information publicly over some silly disagreement - ever. Whelan did exactly that and for that act, deserves all the condemnation he’s now receiving.
[...] Here, however, there is no public benefit achieved. Whelan is simply annoyed that Publius had been “biting at my ankles in recent months” and critiquing his blog posts.
Jeopardizing a man’s career and family relationships over something so petty is simply shameful.
[...] That a writer at a site like NRO would stoop to outing an anonymous liberal blogger is, hopefully, far more a discredit to Whelan and NRO, than it is trouble for said blogger. Were it up to me, Whelan would be gone as an NRO blogger. I think it somewhat revealing when so called professionals start looking like the children out here, as opposed to the more traditional amateur bloggers.
And so on and so forth.
And now the previously almost unknown Ed Whelan has achieved fame.
People who do it brand themselves.
Read The Rest Scale: as interested. What's really amusing are the supporters of Whalan who show up in the ObWi comments to denounce the "cowardice" of anyone who would attack someone else anonymously (setting aside the complete confusion of "pseudonymousness" with "anonymousness") and post with a pseudonym.
ADDENDUM, 8:45 p.m.: Hilzoy spells out the obvious. The former Juan Non-Volokh comments.
ADDENDUM, June 8th, 4:11 p.m.: Simon Owens adds more background by interviewing both publius and Ed Whelan about Whelan's actions.
ADDENDUM, June 8th, 4:45 p.m.: Also, Whelan offers yet more justification here. Another blogger at "Bench Memos" chimes in, and manages to point out a major historical error of Whelan's, while also declaring that "a blogging law professor who argues irresponsibly about legal matters doesn't have much of a claim on our attention when he wants to stay pseudonymous."
So that's the new NRO rule. "Irresponsible," of course, means "you disagree with me."
Wendy Long here calls publius "dishonorable," without bothering to state why. Disagreeing with Whelan, I guess.
ADDENDUM, June 8th, 2009: This is currently a front page story, top of the site, at the NY Times website: The Outing of Publius.
OBAMA: WRONG. Isikoff here provides no encouraging words.
[...] According to three sources who attended the meeting, Obama reiterated his intention to retain a version of the military-tribunal system established to try terror detainees and said his administration will likely end up adopting some form of "indefinite detention" policy to justify holding some selected suspects without trial. Still, Obama brusquely rejected suggestions by some of those present that, in doing so, he was adopting key tenets of Bush-era policies considered unacceptable by his liberal supporters.
[...]
The sources, all of whom asked not to be identified because of the White House insistence that the meeting was private, also said Attorney General Eric Holder sat by silently while the president curtly dismissed the idea that his Justice Department should criminally prosecute at least one Bush administration official for torture, if only as a symbolic move to demonstrate that actions such as waterboarding will never be tolerated again.
[...]
It was at that point, toward the end of the meeting, that one attendee raised the idea of criminal prosecution of at least one Bush-era official, if only as a symbolic gesture. Obama dismissed the idea, several of those in attendance said, making it clear that he had no interest in such an investigation. Holder—whose department is supposed to make the call on criminal prosecutions—reportedly said nothing.
Jack Goldsmith is correct here, and not in a good way:
[...] The main difference between the Obama and Bush administrations concerns not the substance of terrorism policy, but rather its packaging.
YOU HAVE TO BE RICH TO BE POOR. Excellent story in the Washington Post explaining the facts of life of being poor to those who have no clue. (Single page version, though missing the accompanying photos.)
[...] Poverty 101: We'll start with the basics.
Like food: You don't have a car to get to a supermarket, much less to Costco or Trader Joe's, where the middle class goes to save money. You don't have three hours to take the bus. So you buy groceries at the corner store, where a gallon of milk costs an extra dollar.
A loaf of bread there costs you $2.99 for white. For wheat, it's $3.79. The clerk behind the counter tells you the gallon of leaking milk in the bottom of the back cooler is $4.99. She holds up four fingers to clarify. The milk is beneath the shelf that holds beef bologna for $3.79. A pound of butter sells for $4.49. In the back of the store are fruits and vegetables. The green peppers are shriveled, the bananas are more brown than yellow, the oranges are picked over.
(At a Safeway on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, the wheat bread costs $1.19, and white bread is on sale for $1. A gallon of milk costs $3.49 -- $2.99 if you buy two gallons. A pound of butter is $2.49. Beef bologna is on sale, two packages for $5.)
Prices in urban corner stores are almost always higher, economists say. And sometimes, prices in supermarkets in poorer neighborhoods are higher.
[...]
According to the Census Bureau, more than 37 million people in the country live below the poverty line. The poor know these facts of life. These facts become their lives.
Time is money, they say, and the poor pay more in time, too.
When you are poor, you don't have the luxury of throwing a load into the washing machine and then taking your morning jog while it cycles. You wait until Monday afternoon, when the laundromat is most likely to be empty, and you put all of that laundry from four kids into four heaps, bundle it in sheets, load a cart and drag it to the corner.
"If I had my choice, I would have a washer and a dryer," says Nya Oti, 37, a food-service worker who lives in Brightwood. She stands on her toes to reach the top of a washer in the laundromat on Georgia Avenue NW and pours in detergent. The four loads of laundry will take her about two hours. A soap opera is playing loudly on the television hanging from the ceiling. A man comes in talking to himself. He drags his loads of dirty sheets and mattress pads and dumps them one by one into the machines next to Oti.
She does not seem to notice. She is talking about other costs of poverty. "My car broke down this weekend, and it took a lot of time getting on the bus, standing on the bus stop. It was a waste of a whole lot of times. Waiting. The transfer to the different bus."
[...]
"When you are poor, you substitute time for money," says Randy Albelda, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. "You have to work a lot of hours and still not make a lot of money. You get squeezed, and your money is squeezed."
The poor pay more in hassle: the calls from the bill collectors, the landlord, the utility company. So they spend money to avoid the hassle. The poor pay for caller identification because it gives them peace of mind to weed out calls from bill collectors.
[...]
Then there's credit. The poor don't have it. What they had was a place like First Cash Advance in D.C.'s Manor Park neighborhood, where a neon sign once flashed "PAYDAY ADVANCE." Through the bulletproof glass, a cashier in white eyeliner and long white nails explained what you needed to get an advance on your paycheck -- a pay stub, a legitimate ID, a checkbook. This meant you're doing well enough to have a checking account, but you're still poor.
And if you qualify, the fee for borrowing $300 is $46.50.
[...]
"You pay rent that might be more than a mortgage," Reed says. "But you don't have the credit or the down payment to buy a house. Apartments are not going down. They are going up. They say houses are better, cheaper. But how are you going to get in a house if you don't have any money for a down payment?"
There is also an economic cost to living in low-income neighborhoods.
"The cheaper housing is in more-dangerous areas," says Reed, who lives in Southeast Washington. "I moved out of my old apartment. I hate that area. They be walking up and down the street. Couldn't take the dog out at night because strangers walking up and down the street. They will knock on your door. Either they rob you, kill or ask for money. If you're not there, they will steal air conditioners and copper. They will sell your copper [pipes] for money."
[...]
Money and time. "I ride the bus to get to work," Nicholas says. It takes an hour. "If I could drive, it would take me 10 minutes. I have to catch two buses." She gets to the bus stop at 6:30 a.m. The bus is supposed to come every 10 or 15 minutes. Sometimes, she says, it comes every 30 minutes.
[...]
When you are poor, you wait.
Word.
In Raleigh, the buses are mostly once an hour, go only to a very limited number of places, and if you have to take two buses, as you almost always have to do, and sometimes you even have to take three -- both ways -- you wind up having to wait 45 minutes for both the second and third bus, and a trip that's twenty minutes each way by car becomes literally an expedition you have to start at 8:15 and won't get home from until 6 p.m.
And let's not neglect this:
[...] All these costs can lead the poor to a collective depression. Douglas J. Besharov, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says: "There are social costs of being poor, though it is not clear where the cause and effect is. We know for a fact that on certain measures, people who are poor are often more depressed than people who are not. I don't know if poverty made them depressed or the depression made them poor. I think the cause and effect is an open question. Some people are so depressed they are not functional. 'I live in a crummy neighborhood. My kids go to a crummy school.' That is not the kind of scenario that would make them happy." Another effect of all this, he says: "Would you want to hire someone like that?"
Alas that ABC News doesn't believe in video you can embed. Version with text.
But the damn duck did the same thing last year:
What's not in last year's version is either the video of Joel catching the baby ducks as they jumped to what would otherwise have been their death, or the video of momma duck leading her ducklings to water.
JAVAID IQBAL. I wrote about Javaid Iqbal, and what happened to him in the Brooklyn then-INS detention center, in 2004, here.
Since few folks will remember this case, let's look back:
Before the World Trade Center attack, Javaid Iqbal was a Pakistani immigrant proud to be known as "the cable guy" to customers on Long Island, where he had lived for a decade and married an American. Ehab Elmaghraby, an Egyptian, had a weekend flea market stand at Aqueduct Raceway and a restaurant near Times Square where friendly police officers would joke, "Where's my shish kebab?"
But within weeks of Sept. 11, 2001, both had been picked up by federal agents in an anti-terror sweep. For 23 hours a day, they were locked in solitary confinement in the harsh maximum-security unit of a federal detention center in Brooklyn - the one cited by the Justice Department's inspector general last year for widespread physical abuse of its detainees.
[...]
The accusations are similar to those now being made against military officers guarding prisoners in Iraq.
The lawsuit charges that the men were repeatedly slammed into walls and dragged across the floor while shackled and manacled, kicked and punched until they bled, cursed as "terrorists" and "Muslim bastards," and subjected to multiple unnecessary body-cavity searches, including one during which correction officers inserted a flashlight into Mr. Elmaghraby's rectum, making him bleed.
At that point, the papers charge, he was confined without blankets, mattress or toilet paper to a tiny cell kept lighted 24 hours a day, and was denied adequate medical care or communication with his public defender. He said his attempts to pray or sleep were disrupted by guards banging on his door.
Elmaghraby spent almost a year in that detention center. Iqbal for nine months. Why? What was the evidence against them?
This:
[...] Mr. Elmaghraby was picked up on Sept. 30, 2001, in his apartment in Maspeth, Queens, when federal agents were investigating his Muslim landlord, apparently because years earlier the landlord had applied for pilot training. Mr. Iqbal was arrested in his Long Island apartment on Nov. 2 by agents who were apparently following a tip about false identification cards. In his apartment they found a Time magazine showing the trade towers in flames and paperwork showing that he had been in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, picking up a work permit from immigration services. He was detained for nine months before the F.B.I. cleared him of any terrorist link.
Yes, Iqbal had a Time magazine! Lock everyone up who read about September 11th in Time!
Who is from a Muslim-majority country. And has some trivial offense to investigate.
That's what we were doing then.
One might defend temporarily picking up people on such suspicion for a brief time, in the wake of September 11th. One might. But defending the way such people, who were picked up in such widespread sweeps, were treated with such brutality, is something else again. Holding them for most of a year, is something else again.
It's clear that guards at the detention center were treating prisoners with brutality purely because they were Muslim foreigners, and thus could be scapegoated for the attack on our country.
As the New York Times wrote:
[...] Though the lawsuit is not being filed as a class action, it is about more than redress for the mistreatment of two individuals singled out because of their race, religion and national origin, said Alexander Reinert, a lawyer for Koob & Magoolaghan, which joined with the Urban Justice Center, an advocacy organization, to prepare the papers.
"The case is about ensuring that in times of crisis we stand by the principles that are most important to our country, and those are principles of fairness and equality embodied in the Constitution," he said.
And what of Javaid Iqbal?
[...] Mr. Iqbal, 37, who lost 40 pounds in detention, said he suffers from chronic digestive problems, pain and depression and is still struggling to reconcile the two sides of America he experienced.
In a telephone interview from Faisalabad, Pakistan, he spoke wistfully of his early, around-the-clock jobs as a 7-Eleven clerk and as a gas station attendant in Huntington, N.Y., where customers brought him Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas gifts. But he is so haunted by memories of the terror, pain and humiliation that the federal officers inflicted on him, he said, that he starts to shake at the sight of his own brother, a policeman, in uniform.
"Before I go to prison, the America that I know is a beautiful country and Americans are such beautiful, kind, humble people," he said. "When I go to prison, I see there a different face of the United States of America."
What was that different face we showed him?
[...] Unlike Mr. Elmaghraby, who spent his whole detention in the maximum-security unit, Mr. Iqbal was housed with the general inmate population for the first two months after his arrest. But on the evening of Jan. 8, 2002, he was told that he had a "legal visit" in a room on another floor.
Instead of a lawyer, he found more than a dozen federal officers waiting for him. As he and the lawsuit tell it, several officers picked him up and threw him against the wall. He said he heard one ask a senior person, "He's the one?" and when the reply was affirmative, an officer pressing Mr. Iqbal's head into the wall turned it around, looked him in the face and said, "Welcome to hell, buddy."
At that, he was dragged to the floor, kicked in the stomach with steel-toed shoes and punched in the face, he said, and the officers screamed death threats and curses as they beat him up. "Then the senior person said, 'Just take him out of my sight.' "
Hatred seemed to determine the rules on the unit in ways large and small, the men said. On cold days when it rained, Mr. Iqbal was left outside for hours without jacket or shoes. When he was returned to his cell drenched, officers turned on the air-conditioning, he said. At one point, the lawsuit said, Mr. Elmaghraby was mockingly displayed naked to a female staff member.
What's this got to do with John Ashcroft, then Attorney General?
[...] The inspector general's report said last June that Mr. Ashcroft's policy was to hold detainees on any legal pretext until the F.B.I. cleared them, even though such clearances turned out to take months, not days, because they were given low priority. It said little effort was made to distinguish between legitimate terrorism suspects and the many people picked up by chance during the investigation.
Why, after all, bother? They're all dark-skinned Muslims, and thus pretty much terrorists, or at least terrorist-lovers.
Why do I bring all this up again? Because today the Supreme Court rejected their lawsuit.
[...] Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in the 5-to-4 decision, said a lawsuit filed by the man, Javaid Iqbal, must be dismissed at a preliminary stage because he failed to allege a plausible link between the officials’ conduct and the abuses he said he had suffered.
All that Mr. Iqbal’s suit plausibly suggested, Justice Kennedy wrote, “is that the nation’s top law enforcement officers, in the aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack, sought to keep suspected terrorists in the most secure conditions available until the suspects could be cleared of terrorist activity.”
This is what our country has finally said to Javaid Iqbal, and Ehab Elmaghraby, and their families, and their fellow Pakistanis, Eqyptians, and people of the Muslim world.
This is our American justice.
This is our American justice:
[...] “It should come as no surprise,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “that a legitimate policy directing law enforcement to arrest and detain individuals because of their suspected link to the attacks should produce a disparate, incidental impact on Arab Muslims, even though the purpose of the policy was to target neither Arabs nor Muslims.”
No surprise!
Indeed.
Why will we miss David Souter? This is why:
[...] “Iqbal does not say merely that Ashcroft was the architect of some amorphous discrimination, or that Mueller was instrumental in some ill-defined constitutional violation; he alleges that they helped to create the discriminatory policy he has described,” Justice Souter wrote.
Justice Souter added that the majority had engaged in a sort of legal sleight of hand, ignoring a concession from the government that Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Mueller would be liable were Mr. Iqbal able to prove they actually knew of unconstitutional discrimination by their subordinates and were deliberately indifferent to it.
Instead of accepting that concession, Justice Souter continued, the majority decided that even proof of such knowledge was insufficient.
[...]
In his dissent, Justice Souter wrote that the assertions in Mr. Iqbal’s lawsuit, coupled with the government’s concession, should have been enough to allow it to proceed. At the early stages of a suit, Justice Souter added, such assertions need merely be plausible.
“The sole exception to this rule lies with allegations that are sufficiently fantastic to defy reality as we know it: claims about little green men, or the plaintiff’s recent trip to Pluto, or experiences in time travel,” Justice Souter wrote. “That is not what we have here.”
This is our American justice.
One might as well be making claims about little green men taking trips to Pluto via time travel, if trying to hold our highest officials responsible for their actions.
That is our American justice.
The one small spot of hope here is that this denial of justice isn't the last chance for Iqbal and Elmaghraby (and all the others who were so detained and treated):
[...] Justice Kennedy, who was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., wrote that Mr. Iqbal’s “account of his prison ordeal could, if proved, demonstrate unconstitutional misconduct” by officials other than Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Mueller. Justice Kennedy added that the lower courts may yet decide to allow Mr. Iqbal to amend his lawsuit to make more specific allegations about the complicity of the two men.
I again wrote more about this case in 2006. Here's what Iqbal thought then:
[...] "I am not afraid," Mr. Iqbal wrote last week in an e-mail message about his return. "I am also sure that justice will be served because peoples of U.S.A. are justice-loving people regardless of race and religion."
Way to let him, and all of us, down.
I'd like to hope these men will finally see true justice in an American courtroom. (Although justice a decade or so delayed is not true justice.)
But if it doesn't happen, and that's the way I'd bet, it'll be, in the words of Justice Kennedy, no surprise.
Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5. Text of the SCOTUS opinion.
One reason this case strikes home for me is that, as a born and bred Brooklynite, it truly strikes home for me that this took place in Brooklyn. As I wrote in 2006:
[...] I once lived on Ocean Parkway, by the way, with plenty of similar Arab neighbors. I grew up in Midwood, Brooklyn, which was once largely Jewish, Italian, Greek, a bit of Irish, and other largely European-descended immigrants. In later decades, when I returned to live there for a time, it had becoming increasingly Jewish, but also considerably Pakistani, South Asian, and Arab, as well.
All very nice people. My neighbors. These guys could have been my neighbors.
