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
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 30 sign-ups; 22 cancellations; Total= 8
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 7 sign-ups; 3 cancellation; Total= 4
Patron subscribers to date at $50/month: 10 sign-ups; 6 cancellations; Total= 4
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
Del Gallo's tiny memorial within a memorial is a concise, unadorned inscription, 24 inches wide and 10 inches tall:
I HAVE A DREAM
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON
FOR JOBS AND FREEDOM
AUGUST 28, 1963
The words are centered on a wide granite landing 18 steps from the top of the marble chamber. Park Service project manager Glenn DeMarr spent two weeks researching the spot, matching historical photos and video footage of the speech with the features of the exterior stone to "triangulate" a precise location. "We elected to preserve the stone where he stood, and just incise that stone," said DeMarr, 50.
DeMarr said the work, the first major commemorative addition to the memorial since a framed stone recognizing the statehood of Alaska and Hawaii was installed farther down the steps in 1984, did not require officials to close the steps, so tourists have been getting a rare chance to see history etched into stone. "It's pretty phenomenal," said Jean Ellis, 53, of Gainesville, Ga. "To know this is actually where he stood."
For Ellis and the Lincoln Memorial's roughly 4 million annual visitors, the $8,300 project puts an end to a frequent guessing game, as many sought to stand in the very spot where King gave one of the most famous speeches in American history but wondered if they were too low or too high. "I was going to stand on each step and face the direction where he gave his speech, so I knew I wouldn't miss a step," said Anderson, 34.
Good job. Now people won't have to wonder where, only how, and why did it take so long?
INTERNATIONAL MANDATES: AN OLD IDEA WITH USE: some observations, pros and cons.
I tend to see no solution in some places absent them. Yes, I'm a (within limits) Liberal Interventionist! A species rare since the J.F. Kennedy era, now, after breeding in captivity, slowly let loose in the wild to see if we can manage. Observe our absurd plumage!
For us, though, it's mostly a case of the inarticulate leading the indecisive on a quest to verbalize the inexpressible, the critical- and self-analysis equivalent of a Jerry Lewis movie where, say, the dog takes the steak and goes from room to room with it while the Jerry character chasing him keeps guessing wrong about the dog's next move, causing more and more chaos till the final scene where the love interest arrives to find him lying in the middle of the living room floor tangled up in the contents of the house, curtains, bedclothes, rugs, clothing, furniture, various foodstuffs, while the dog calmly eats the steak in the foreground. The girl gives him an exasperated, indulgent, demi-smile. Dissolve. (I don't think that's a real Jerry Lewis movie, but it would make a pretty good one. It might be called "She Runs Out when the Money Does.")
"Rockin'" is probably the most-used and least specific of those recording studio words, but there are many, many more. (Kevin Army's word of the day yesterday was "poopy.")
Many folks who have played and recorded with me have expressed mild surprise at my gormless, retarded way of describing my own stuff in terms of analogues to other stuff, often in crazy combinations. Plus, I have a tendency to use negative words as though they described desirable qualities. It's true that quite a few musicians feel that they should downplay or remain silent about the "borrowings" from other, more famous, people, but I've always figured that flagrant incestuous interpenetration (if f.i.i. is the phrase I want) of material and musical idiom is what makes rock and roll great. And even when it doesn't actually make it great, you might as well admit it and get on with your life. It's not "I hope no one notices who I am ripping off here." It's more like, "I hope everyone notices the extremely interesting and cool way I've figured out to rip off x while invoking y and stomping all over z." That said, it leads to some funny, eh, discourse in the control room.
"Hey, you know the Byrds part after the sweet home alabama bit, right before the lead in to the Husker Du-y section where I'm doing the Duane Eddy thing? I want it to have a kind of muted Swell Maps/Peechees effect, but an overall Eagles feel, especially during that Carpenters part because I'm planning to add some Funeral Oration-style reverb to the Styx guitar once we get the pictures of lily thing happening. It should have an overall unpleasant, claustrophic feel. That's what I'm shooting for, anyway. You know the kinda thing I mean?"
"Er, uh, yeah, I think so... But don't you think it should be more rockin'?"
IN THE nest of worker ants that peopled Erich Honecker's nasty regime there were living, loving humans who tried to make life bearable for each other. That is the focus of Wolfgang Becker's “Goodbye, Lenin!”, a film whose humour has succeeded in uniting east and west Germany in a way that no transfer of money or know-how has yet managed.
Alex's single parent, Mum, a staunch Honecker babe, has a heart attack and falls into a coma just before the collapse of the Berlin wall in 1989. When she wakes up eight months later, the doctor tells Alex and his sister that any outside shock could kill her. So they cocoon her in her familiar socialist world. They lovingly recreate her bedroom in Stalinist chic; they search rubbish heaps and empty apartments for once-cherished brands -- ersatz coffee, flickering light bulbs, a Russian cassette/radio, whose aerial Alex breaks to block out unwanted news.
When Mum gets more curious, sees Coca-Cola adverts outside her window, and wants to watch TV, Alex and his West German friend Dennis shoot dummy East German newscasts. The newsreader (Dennis in shiny synthetic suit) explains that Coca-Cola was a socialist invention; that the thousands of people seen crossing the border are West Germans, fed up with the capitalist rat-race and wanting homes in the East. “Idiocy,” Mum concludes.
She may have smelled a rat. But she plays along; they all do, including the neighbours and children, who are paid to dress as Marxist Pioneers and sing patriotic songs, because the trip into Ostalgie (nostalgia for the East) has become a common obsession.
The socialist world that Alex and his friends recreate is an idealised one, in which Sigmund J?hn, the country's only cosmonaut, and one of its few popular heroes, becomes head of state. Adversity is met with stoicism. Mum's response to a mass-produced pullover that would only fit a fat dwarf is a long-suffering: “We in the German Democratic Republic must endeavour to become smaller and squarer.”
Easy to laugh at now, but it is as laughworthy as it always was, while it's now a bit more distant in its tragedy. I'd like to see this movie.
The Host Committee of _______________ is pleased to
extend you a formal invitation to speak at our conference on ______________,
2003.
________________, in its fourth year, is the only writers' conference of its
kind, focusing specifically on the interests and developments in the world
of online journalling and blogging. We are expecting over 100 attendees,
all of whom are writers publishing online; many are renowned in the online
journalling and blogging communities.
And many are big in Japan.
I thought I'd share this nice email I just received, even though I haven't decided if I'm attending. Well, let's be serious. I'm not attending, unless I can somehow find an answer to the question "what am I supposed to say?", and the follow-up question, "who is supposed to care?" And, also, unless I can get someone to pay the fee I think I have to pay in order to show up and share my unique perspective. And unless my car comes back to life. And unless I suddenly like public speaking.
Anyway, this invite clearly marks my entry into the realm of elite webloggers, and clearly shows that the declining number of comments on this site are not due to a decline in readership, but rather because people who are intimidated by my dope commentary skills, and the simultaneous decline in my traffic stats is due to people hiding their presence by spoofing their IP address through the TCP/IP router server database, exactly as I suspected. But, now that it's official, things need to change. Firstly, everyone who used to read the weblog needs to stop reading, and start compaining about how my early stuff was so much better. Mom, this means you especially. Secondly, a higher class of reader needs to replace you, and begin leaving a higher class of comments, and a higher class of irate Scandanavian needs to begin sending me a higher class of endless hate mail about how it's people like me with my ignorance of the Norwegian climate who allowed and encouraged most if not all of history's greatest atrocities, such as Roxette. I hope this transition can all be achomplished with a minimum of acrimony and time-consuming recriminations, because I'm currently negotiating a very lucrative deal to host pop-up advertising for an online ammunition distributor, and I can't afford any distractions. Oh, and before I forget, I'd like to deliver a special message to that person who beat me up, stuffed me in my locker, knocked my books out of my hand, and made every second of my high school career a bruising, humiliating, tear-stained hell on Earth: I am being solicited to give my input on the future of New Media at a very important invitation-only conference attended by people who paid upwards of $45 just to show up. What are you doing with your life? Now I'm a big fucking success who everyone respects and listens to, and you're the big nobody who has to go to bed crying every night. Who's the loser now? Who's the big pathetic whining loser now? How do you fucking like the taste of that shit, Emily Rosenblatt!
JUST FOR THE RECORD: It certainly was a good thing to hear about the dear departed Uday and Quesay. The only downside might be the possible intel that perhaps could have been gotten from them. That, and the loss of an opportunity to put them in stocks and let every Iraqi get a chance to slap them.
By the middle of June, the French began using this authority to kick the gun-toting toughs who had made life hell for civilians in Bunia out of town and to seize weapons at checkpoints at town borders. By late June, most of the Hema militia, the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), had left the city limits.
But they will come back, since the supposedly tougher French mission is actually toothless in some respects. While they were loading a Toyota Land Cruiser with Kalashnikovs and driving out of Bunia, I asked one of the UPC members what they would do when the French leave. "What are we going to do after September 1?" he asked. "We are going to come right back into Bunia." And they will return with their guns. Demilitarizing the town, as the French have done, is not the same as disarming the militias. Under the current Bunia mission's directives, as long as they don't point their guns at anyone, the UPC and other militias are free to keep them. Indeed, the French commander, Brigadier General Jean-Paul Thonier, has made clear that his mission does not include disarmament. The problem, Western diplomats told me, is that the French-led force--now just more than 1,100--is not large enough to disarm the militias. The French are reluctant to add more troops, given that they are also policing a cease-fire in the Ivory Coast, and the United Nations has not authorized more foreign soldiers. So the French forces in Bunia have settled on a job they can accomplish.
And that job is to get as few French people killed as possible!
[...]
Lotsove Veneranda, a 53-year-old farmer, calmly explained to me how Lendu militiamen blitzed her village at 4 a.m. one day last month and hacked to death the sick and elderly. Her village, Katoto, lies twelve miles from Bunia--outside the French troops' mandate. And it's not alone. Katoto, Tchomia, Aveba, Nyoka, Mahagi, and other villages near Bunia have all been the subject of horrific violence since the French arrived: The expulsion of militiamen from the city limits has pushed them into these villages, where they pillage and murder, stoking tensions that could spark more violence. Indeed, the U.N. headquarters in Congo warned, in an official communication to New York in late May, that the French-led force could find itself "in the invidious position of maintaining a robust presence in only one part of a disaster zone." These fears have come to pass.
Here's that Kafkaesque best part:
Even as the violence moves outside of town and the armed militias wait for their return to Bunia, U.N. officials are trying to create an embryonic provincial government that will find a negotiated solution to Bunia's problems. Colonel Gerard Dubois, the French spokesmen, never tires of telling journalists, "Securing Bunia is intended to allow a relaunch of the political process." Much of the political negotiating takes place in a former Greek restaurant called Hellenique. Here, Congolese drawn from Ituri's various ethnic communities and overseen by U.N. staffers have created an "interim administration" that is supposed to assume the normal functions of a city: police, judiciary, and so on. The interim administration has even created a founding document and official-looking stamps. The United Nations has plowed $300,000 into making the interim administration work, and it pays participants a per diem of $10 to keep at it.
This interim administration, however, rests on the ludicrous assumption that the militias accept it as the province's legitimate authority. Yet the leader of the UPC has promised to dissolve the interim government when the French leave and his forces return.
So the UN is paying a bunch of guys to sit around a Greek restaurant playing role-playing games ("I want to be in charge of water and power!" "No, you are to be minister of sewers." "Close enough. Roll the dice again! How many hit points do I have left?"), and that's the Big Step the UN has taken.
Does one laugh, or weep, or do both?
Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5. Write your federal representatives urging their support for US support for a vigorous and powerful intervention in the Congo. Act soon, if not now.
BIG MEDIA'S PASS FROM THE FCC TO SWALLOW UP BROADCASTING IS IN DEEP DOO-DOO.
The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed legislation today to block a new rule supported by the Bush administration that would permit the nation's largest television networks to grow bigger by owning more stations.
The vote, which was 400 to 21, sets the stage for a rare confrontation between the Republican-controlled Congress and the White House, because there is strong support in the Senate for similar measures, which seek to roll back last month's decision by the Federal Communications Commission to raise the limit on the number of television stations a network can own. The F.C.C. has ruled that a single company can own television stations reaching 45 percent of the nation's households, but the House measure would return the ownership cap to 35 percent.
WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE KEEP CALLING HOWARD DEAN A "LIBERAL?"
It makes sense that Republicans would want to so paint this guy who balanced his state's budget when he was wasn't required to, who is pro-death-penalty in some cases, who calls for sending more troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, who supports attacking a state that presents an imminent threat (which is why he supported invading Afghanistan), who favors leaving funding flexibility in education to the states (which the unions hate), who doesn't rule out raising the retirement age to preserve Social Security (goodbye, AARPA), who opposes federal gun control laws, etc., etc., but why do so many other people buy this myth?
In 1996, they [the DLC] hailed the reelection of "centrist Governor Howard Dean" as evidence "of Democratic resurgence under New Democratic leadership."
How quickly they all forget.
Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5 if you're interested in US presidential politics.
THIS is the best explanation I've yet seen for why no significant evidence of WMD has yet been found. (Use "cypherpunk" as both ID and password to get past registration.)
It is the home to the souls of more than 2.5 million Japanese war dead. Included among these 2.5 million souls are fourteen convicted Class A war criminals, including Tojo Hideki who was the Japanese War Minister during World War II.
[...]
The actual physical structure of the Shrine is much like that of any other Shinto shrine. It has a torii gateway followed by a few different buildings that serve different religious or ceremonial purposes at the Shrine. The one significant difference at Yasukuni is the presence of Japan's only public modern military musuem, which opened in 1872. The museum contains many types of war vehicles, tanks, and weaponry. Those who support the Shrine believe this museum is a symbol of Japan's glorious military past. Those who oppose the Shrine say it is indeed a symbol of Japan's past, but it is a brutal and oppressive past.
There is no ambiquity about this. Love it or leave it, it is a symbol of Japanese militarism. No one argues this point.
The fourteen most famous and most controversial souls in Yasukuni are those of the World War II convicted Class A war criminals. These men were secretly enshrined at Yasukuni on April 21, 1979. The public did not find out until the next day when the press broke the story after investigating allegations. The war criminals were given a special designation at Yasukuni as "Martyrs of the Show[a] Era."
Charming, isn't it? But not quite up there with the sushi I love, the cherry blossoms, or endless other truly beautiful and deeply admirable aspects of Japanese culture I love, from the tea ceremony to the art (not to mention Akira Kurosawa).
It is no coincidence that Yasukuni was used as a rallying point for Japanese nationalism in World War II. In fact, Yasukuni was originally established not just as a religious place to pay homage to the dead, but also as a symbol of the newly united nation. It was in 1879 that the Shrine was named Yasukuni, which means "the Shrine for establishing the peace in the empire." The Satsuma rebellion had occurred just two years earlier and after victory the Emperor’s officials wanted some symbol to reunite the country. Yasukuni was that symbol. According to Tsubouchi Yuzo, author of Yasukuni, the Shrine was “a symbol of eradication of all local color under one national identity.” The Emperor and his officials used this Shrine not only as a symbol of the reunification, but also as a symbol of the Emperor’s legitimacy as ruler of the nation.
To establish a new sense of unity, all people in the nation were required to gather either at Yasukuni or one of its local branches and celebrate the Spring and Autumn festivals. At the celebration of these festivals the people would worship those who had died fighting for the Emperor. It is important to remember that only those who fought for the Emperor are enshrined at Yasukuni. Those who fought against the Emperor are not enshrined at there. So by worshiping the soldiers turned national deities at Yasukuni, the people were actually celebrating the legitimacy of the Emperor’s power. As time went on, the Shrine also became a rallying point for military action. After the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War the Shrine was the site of a celebration party.
It goes on. anyone who doesn't understand what Koizumi's annual worship visits mean isn't paying attention.
JAPANESE MILITARISM comes up again, as the movement towards it continues.
Not long ago, Nisohachi Hyodo, the author of a four-year plan for nuclear armament of Japan, was part of the lunatic fringe, his ideas so far from the pacifist mainstream that he was published only in obscure journals.
These days, though, he has his own program on a major Tokyo radio station and is a popular speaker on college campuses. With everyone from the academic establishment to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi advocating that Japan become more assertive militarily, Mr. Hyodo scarcely stands out.
The author takes this at face value, or, worse, slants it as worthy.
[...]
But even if Japanese are more comfortable with such assertiveness, their neighbors may not be. Many continue to harbor suspicion of a country that they feel has yet fully to acknowledge the damage done by its militarization last century, or to atone for its colonial past. Relations with China have been strained for two years by Mr. Koizumi's repeated visits to a controversial shrine to Japan's war veterans, including 14 people judged as Class A war criminals.
For completely justified reason. Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni shrine explicitly -- and this is entirely well-known and taken as such in Japan -- endorse Japan's WWII imperialist expansion, and gives its blessings to Japan's imperial aims of military domination of Asia and the Pacific. Americans who lack understanding of Japan's history are blind to this.
[...]
When Mr. Koizumi reasserted last month that he would continue his visits, in what has become a summer ritual, China's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Kong Quan, warned, "Without a correct view on history, there is no guarantee to healthy and stable ties between China and Japan."
The Chinese leadership, whom I have few kind words for, are correct in this.
[...]
While it is unclear precisely how much China spends on defense, Japan spent $47 billion on defense in 2002, according to the Center for Defense Information.
By almost any ranking China and Japan are among the world's top five military budgets, and some analysts warn of the dangers of an unmediated military competition in the region, which could include the unpredictable North Korea.
This is a major danger.
[...]
Groups within the governing Liberal Democratic Party have yearned for Japan's return to a "normal," militarized status since the 1950's. Today the signs of the change in thinking abound.
Precisely. The same Japanese fascist militarist groups that MacArthur chose to colloborate with, to ease the strain of occupation, rather than confront (much as Patton did the same with unreconciled Nazis in Bavaria during his stay as Military Governor); this was the entire tenor of MacArthur's rule; let off the ruler, and most of the militarists, while making fig-leaf gestures towards punishing scapegoats.
[...]
"I cannot conceive of a war in which North Korea, a far smaller, far poorer country, attacks Japan first," said Ryuichi Ozawa, a professor of constitutional studies at Shizuoka University.
"The point here is that there is no confidence that the people of Japan and their government can control a military," he said. "This is a contemporary concern, and not just an issue of our past history."
I can conceive of such an attack, because Kim Jong Il is nuts. But otherwise this is spot on.
But the American leadership, in and out of government, and in the media, will continue to applaud, and call for, Japanese military expansionism.
We never take the long view, whether backwards, or forwards.
RESPECTFULLY, I DISSENT. Also under the "words have meaning" category.
A number of my favorite bloggers, people whom I greatly respect and whose work I enjoy, as well as those whom I do neither, decided a while ago to refer to the Palestinian leadership, people, movement, whatever, as, lower case, "the pals."
I regret this. I regard it as a term of disrespect.
Putting it in the vernacular of modern culture, it is "dissing." It is borderline to a form of mockery.
It is no different than referring to the Nipponese people as "the nips."
This is unworthy.
This is unnecessary.
If one is referring to terrorists, one can call them "murderers." If one is referring to supporters of such, one can call them "supporters of murderers."
If you want to refer to "the crap Palestinian leadership," call them "the crap Palestinian leadership."
If you want to call Arafat a mass murderer, fair enough. It's called for, earned, and justified.
This lends no one any unearned respect.
But without disagreeing with the arguments about the lack of unitary culture of "Palestinian" circa prior to, say, 1967, or earlier date, a Palestinian culture and polity has been created in subsequent decades. To disregard and disrespect that is not a worthy or helpful contribution to present arguments or future solutions.
Dialogue calls for a minimum of politeness, even when discussing war, armistice, or peace. It requires reaching out. It requires careful use of words, which isn't the same as disregarding murderers as murderers or terrorists as terrorists.
But not all Palestinians are any of the above.
I wouldn't respect Arabs or Palestinians or sympathizers who refered to the "J's," "the kikes," "the always victims," or any other form of intentional disparagement.
It's equally harmful and unhelpful and unnecessary to refer to "the pals."
It's, worst of all, impolite.
No, even worse. It is unhelpful.
It is not an endorsement of terrorist murdering killers to refer to Palestinians as "Palestinians."
I'm from Brooklyn. Our culture isn't old, let alone ancient, nor particularly separate from that of our neighbors, and I don't endorse much of it.
We don't have an independent polity.
But you can call me a "Brooklynite."
We have something. We have a culture. Even if, a hundred years before, we didn't. (I'm not going to argue the history now.)
Don't call me a "brookie."
Fuhgeddaboutit.
I'm not the only Palestin--, er, Brooklynite, to so feel.
Rational argument, and discussion, and eventual agreement, requires at least a pretense of mutual politeness and respect.
HEH DEPT.Gizmodo 1983. I remember when all this stuff was cutting edge, and well before.
My parents spent a fortune (for us) to buy me one of the early Casio calculators when I was in high school; it could add, subtract, multiply and divide; amazing! (I knew then that it was an amazing waste of money, that the same and better tools would be available for a fraction of the price within a year or two, but didn't have the heart, and did have the sense, to not so inform them, and to instead profusely thank them, as I knew they meant the utmost well in this gift.)
Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5; it'll just take a few moments to set your Wayback Machine, Sherman.
RELAX, DON'T WORRY about terrorism, is a line I see on a number of blogs. Here's a thought for the day:
But according to terrorism experts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based policy group devoted largely to world security, the estimates run something like this: about 20,000 jihadic soldiers had graduated from Al Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan as of October 2001, when the American-led war began there. Up to 10,000 of those were inside Afghanistan at the time. Since then, the coalition campaign has killed or captured around 2,000. Ninety percent of bin Laden's forces, and more than half of his top commanders, remain free. And no one is quite sure where they are. Some of the Arabs among them have probably made their way back to the Middle East. Many of the rest seem to straddle the frontiers of Afghanistan, Pakistan and neighboring Iran. Al Qaeda is, the institute judges, ''more insidious and just as dangerous'' as before the 9/11 attacks.
Moreover, we're not winning many hearts and minds.
Here and across Afghanistan, the work of ''humint,'' as the Army calls human intelligence, has been badly frustrated. Christopher Langton, a retired British colonel and military attache in Central Asia, now with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, speaks of the attempts to befriend and the attempts to pay. The paying hasn't bought much in the way of trustworthy information, and a psychological operations officer on Vigilant Guardian tells me that the Army has mostly abandoned it. The befriending hasn't worked well either, because, Langton says, the Americans have failed ''to capture the virtual territory, the territory of the mind of the population.'' The troops on missions like Parker's, operations that set out from American bases every two weeks or so, should pick up the kinds of details that form the foundation of military intelligence. But the troops are handicapped, Langton explains, because the people sense a shortsighted American involvement, a powerful wish to be gone.
The Afghans feel that the Taliban, with Al Qaeda behind it, could take hold again in the country as soon as the Americans go home. For the villagers, survival when that happens could depend on keeping their mouths shut now.
And without the help of the people, Langton adds, the beaming from all the satellites and unmanned planes in the sky can be futile. The jagged terrain creates blind spots, and what the high-tech systems can photograph they can't interpret. They can't calibrate for local sympathies or even, as happened in the Shah-i-Kot Valley, determine sheer numbers of bunkered, armed enemy soldiers.
''I'm not optimistic,'' Captain Parker says, thinking forward five years. ''The smart terrorist in Afghanistan will simply wait us out, wait for us to lose interest, lose will.''
"Well, Spike and Harmony do have a history," Whedon said, referring to the vampire duo's steamy affair on Buffy. "But that doesn't mean they'll necessarily hook up. It just means we love Mercedes, and we want to see more of her."
As for how Marsters' character -- who met a fiery end in the Buffy series finale last May -- comes back, Whedon remained silent. "I can't really give you much of a hint [as to how Spike will be integrated into the show], except that badly would be the word," Whedon said. "Because he sticks out like a sore thumb, which is exactly what we always hire him to do. I see him not fitting in. And that's exactly what they need right now. Because, although they all have their separate agendas, to an extent, they're a team. And when you're a team, you need somebody to come in and f--k up the team."
In the coming fifth season, Angel will move out of its hotel set into a swanky, new set representing the Wolfram & Hart law firm, where Whedon said to look for West-Wing style camera movements. Whedon added that big changes are in store for the character of Charles Gunn, played by J. August Richards -- a transformation that was foreshadowed in last season's finale. "Yeah, he's going to go through some interesting changes," Whedon said. "And again, we'll find out early on what it is, but not exactly what it means. But, yeah, you know, Gunn is somebody that we felt was a little underutilized. J.'s an amazing actor. And we thought Wolfram & Hart would be the perfect venue to find a new side of him. So we're shaking it up."
I managed to miss most of the episodes of this past season, due to the network's having switched the show to being opposite West Wing and my continual inability to remember this. So I'm pretty much ignorant of most recent plot developments, for the time being.
Joss Whedon, creator of Fox's canceled SF western series Firefly, told SCI FI Wire that he is close to a deal to write and direct a feature film based on the short-lived show. "What's happening with that is that I'm writing a script," Whedon said in an interview. "And I have some interest. But I won't know really until I finish a draft whether or not it's genuine. ... We have a pretty decent shot. It's not a crazed pipe dream."
Whedon said that any deal for a Firefly movie would be contingent on getting the original cast back as the crew of the space transport ship Serenity.
[...]
Whedon added, "I couldn't go so far as to jinx [the deal] and say it's in the bag. It's not. I still have to write it really well [groans]. But there's no pressure."
In the meantime, Whedon said that the upcoming DVD of Firefly will include three unaired episodes, plus "the gag reel, interviews with everybody, commentaries on most of the episodes by cast members and writers and directors and me. ... It's a huge package. It's b-lls-out deluxe, which I'm really proud of."
Executives at Amazon.com are negotiating with several of the largest book publishers about an ambitious and expensive plan to assemble a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of nonfiction, according to several publishing executives involved.
Amazon plans to limit how much of any given book a user can read, and it is telling publishers that the plan will help sell more books while better serving its own online customers.
Together with little-publicized additions to Amazon's Web site, like listings of restaurants and movie showings, the plan appears to be part of a strategy to compete with online search services like Google and Yahoo for consumers' time and attention. Providing a searchable online database of the contents of books could make Amazon a more authoritative source of information, drawing additional traffic to its online retail store.
[...]
But Look Inside the Book II would let online browsers search by terms like "Caravaggio," "sans-culottes," or "Osama bin Laden," and then see a list of books mentioning the term along with the sentence that contains it. Browsers could then choose to see several pages around that citation.
But to see those pages Amazon would require users to register, and it plans to limit the amount of any single book a browser can view.
FANFICTION IS NOTICED by the Boston Globestarting with Harry Potter and the Internet, and proceeding backwards in vaguely clueful fashion.
Fan fiction, or "fanfic," didn't start with Harry Potter or the Internet, but that combination has brought it as close as it's ever been to the mainstream. On the way, fanfic is raising a host of legal, moral, and creative questions that only promise to become more entangled as the remainder of Rowling's Harry Potter books is released (seven are planned in all).
Volumes have already been written about real life, the most accessible and most widely accepted massively multiplayer online role-playing game to date. Featuring believable characters, plenty of lasting appeal, and a lot of challenge and variety, real life is absolutely recommendable to those who've grown weary of all the cookie-cutter games that have tried to emulate its popularity -- or to just about anyone, really.
Real life isn't above reproach. In one of the stranger design decisions in the game, for some reason you have no choice in determining your character's initial starting location, appearance, or gender, which are chosen for you seemingly at random. However, over the course of your character's life, you have tremendous opportunity to customize and define a truly unique appearance for yourself--not only can you fine-tune your hairstyle and hair color, but you can also purchase and wear a seemingly infinite variety of clothing and influence your body type using various in-game mechanisms. For example, if your character exercises frequently, you will appear fit and muscular. You may also choose from a huge variety of tattoos and body piercings, and later you can even pay for cosmetic surgery, though this is expensive and there's a small chance that the operation will backfire. At any rate, real life offers a truly remarkable amount of variety in determining your character's outward appearance, and this depth isn't only skin deep. The only problem is you're relegated to playing as a human character, though the game does randomly choose one of several different races for you (which have little bearing on gameplay and mostly just affect appearances and your standing with certain factions).
The gameplay itself is extremely open-ended, though it's structured in such a way that you'll have a fairly clear path to follow when you're just starting out. Real life features a great system whereby newbie players will automatically be guided along through the early levels by one or more "parent" characters who elect to take newbie characters under their wing. This is a great system, as these older, more-experienced characters reap their own benefits from doing a good job of guiding the newbie character along. The system does have some problems, though....
Read The Rest Scale: 3.75 out of 5; there's a lot more to say about this intriguing game system. Personally, I find far too many of the characters entirely unbelievable, and implausible plot situations abound, just to mention two of the many major flaws I've found while beta-testing the game.
7/21/2003 04:04:00 AM |permanent link| | Main Page |
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I LOVE THIS PICTURE:
Know who the guy in the center is? Or the guy just to his left?
Hint: they bear more than small historic relevancy to events of today.
THE BIOLOGICAL SOLUTION for Cuba. That evil left-wing rag, the Grauniad, has begun a three-part series on repression in Cuba, and the Cuban dissident movement.
The questions from the women - all wives of men arrested and jailed in what Amnesty International has denounced as the biggest crackdown against dissidence since the early years of Fidel Castro's revolution - fly backwards and forwards.
How do you tell a six-year-old they will not see their father for up to 20 years? Should you allow yourself to be strip-searched before visits? How can you get proper medical care for a sick husband?
Claudia Marquez Linares, wife of the Cuban Liberal Democratic Party leader, Osvaldo Alfonso Valdes, is still bemused by his public "confession" of guilt, later broadcast on state television, during the April trials.
"He told me they had threatened to arrest me too if he didn't do it. They wanted him to say the Americans gave him cash, but he told them that was crazy," she explained.
Claudia and the other women have come together at the house of Gisela Delgado "for some mutual support".
When police came for Gisela's husband, Hector Palacios, in March they blocked off the street and set up floodlights. "It was like a Hollywood film, as though they were coming for a group of terrorists rather than just one man," she said.
They took stacks of documents, computer equipment and several thousand books - part of a so-called "independent libraries" project which stocked the works of exiled authors such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Zoe Valdes. The books were, eventually, returned, but Mr Palacios, who had already spent two shorter periods in jail, never came back.
[...]
The jailing of the 75 coincided with another event that shocked people abroad and in Cuba. On April 2, a group of 10 armed people hijacked the Cuarto Congreso ferry as it crossed Havana Bay with 50 passengers. They set a course for Florida where, under US legislation for Cuban exiles, they could have expected a warm welcome. But they ran out of fuel.
They were placed before a Cuban court, and three of the hijackers were shot at dawn three days later. Their families were only told afterwards.
"This represents a return to extreme repressive measures in use decades ago which cannot be justified, and which, ultimately, harm the Cuban people," Amnesty said. It was not enough, however, to deter others. Last week three would-be boat-hijackers reportedly committed suicide after being cornered.
And here I thought that the only repression in Cuba was the American trade embargo or at Guantanamo Bay. Shucky-darn.
The boom in history programmes on television is undermining university study by encouraging students to believe that the subject is an exercise in storytelling rather than a rigorous intellectual discipline, academics complain today.
[...]
Rosemary O'Day, professor at the Open University, said the programmes had "the unfortunate effect of making students think that history is a narrative, descriptive subject".
Shocking.
Yes, they have a point. Yes, there is far more to the academic discipline of history than narrative. Yes, said discipline requires mastering many skills other than narrative, most particularly analytic skills.
But people are wired to learn things from narrative. It's an invaluable educational technique. As another quote puts it:
John Charmley, professor at the University of East Anglia, agreed. "One of the skills of the historian ought to be telling a story - not that you would know it looking at some history books. It is a little ungrateful of professional historians to bite a hand that is helping to feed them."
WHO REMEMBERS THE GOLDBERGS? I don't. What I remember is hearing about this Fifties tv show in my youth. I never even saw a rerun. Here is an interesting look back, provoked by a showing of seven episodes at the Jewish Museum in NYC.
We tend to think of this exercise in multicultural uplift as a latter-day phenomenon, but it actually dates to the very first days of television. You can see one early example on Thursday night, when seven episodes of "The Goldbergs" will be screened at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan as part of its exhibition "Entertaining America," a historical who's who of Jews-in-the-industry. Broadcast on radio from 1929 to 1945 and on television from 1949 to 1956, "The Goldbergs" was for the Jews of its era what "The Cosby Show" was for African-Americans in the 1980's and what "Ellen" was for gays in the 90's: proof that a once-undesirable minority was now admissible into the American mainstream.
America's weekly visit to a Jewish home was presided over by Mrs. Molly Goldberg, a zaftig everywoman who stood a little too close to everybody and dispensed Eastern European food and sage advice in a cholent of malapropism and Yiddish inflection (not dialect, which would have been too hard to understand -- just a sing-songy English with its verbs in the wrong place). For most of the show's duration she and her family -- her husband, Jake, an irritable but malleable man vaguely employed in the garment industry; her Uncle David, a small, kvetchy and rather effeminate old man; and Sammy and Rosalie, her two sweet and unbelievably well-adjusted kids -- lived and squabbled and loved in a rented apartment on East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. It was a homey, Old World place, with wallpaper and heavy furniture and a portrait of George Washington hung prominently, and where fellow housewives could be yoo-hooed from the kitchen window.
The universe it suggested, an insular and nurturing community of first-generation immigrants -- in which lemonade and birthday cake could settle a dispute and the worst crime a son could commit was to fail to go to shul with his father on Yom Kippur -- was already vanishing, if it ever really existed. (The show sputtered to an end after the Goldbergs moved to the "Leave It to Beaver"-esque suburb of Haverville, where Molly's warm-hearted intrusiveness seemed about as appetizing as a schmear of schmaltz on Wonderbread.)
One thing "The Goldbergs" was not, however, was funny, and the very lack of comic material makes this so-called comedy a fascinating artifact. It's hard to believe that back in the 1930's, when it was on the radio, "The Goldbergs" rivaled "Amos 'n' Andy" in popularity. Gertrude Berg, the accentless, Columbia University-educated granddaughter of immigrants who created, produced, wrote and starred in the show (she played Molly), became the Oprah Winfrey of her time, a widely beloved entrepreneur who eventually branched into cookbooks and fashion for the larger lady and whose brand was her ability to touch everyone's common humanity. "We certainly admire the ideals" this family stands for, wrote a listener in 1931, "and the way they reach the inner and higher feelings of us all."
And yet there's not a genuine joke or sight gag or comic dilemma in any of the seven episodes I watched.
[...]
Indeed, the best way to enliven a viewing of "The Goldbergs" is to try to imagine a young Philip Roth reacting to it. Some hint of how he might have done so can be found in his 1961 essay "Some New Jewish Stereotypes," where he writes with disgust: "There does seem to be fascination these days with the idea of Jewish emotionalism. People who have more sense than to go up to Negroes and engage them in conversation about `rhythm' have come up to me and asked about my 'warmth.' " Keep Roth's prototypical Jewish mother in mind, and you may start to feel chilled by that famous warmth of Molly's.
[...]
Berg deserves credit for refusing to submit to the "sha-sha" rule - the drama critic Harry Popkin's term for the post-Holocaust fear of making Jewish characters too Jewish, lest they bolster anti-Semitic stereotypes. Berg kept Molly Goldberg and all her brand extensions unabashedly Jewy even as other Jewish writers (Arthur Miller, for one) were bleaching all identifiably ethnic traits out of their characters.
In other cases, of course, it was network executives bleaching out identifiable traits, such as the notorious example of Carl Reiner creating a show based on himself, to be played in by himself, only to be told he was "too Jewish." The show was recast and thus "The Carl Reiner Show" became "The Dick Van Dyke" show. (Van Dyke -- a fine actor, to be sure -- showed no hint of Jewishness in his character. Unsurprisingly.)
HASSIDIC BLOGS, THE HASSIDIC REBEL, AND INVISIBLOGGING are looked at by the Village Voice.
Yeedel, as we'll call him, writes an anonymous weblog (or "blog"), a kind of online diary, under the pen name Hasidic Rebel. His comments, first posted in February, range from musings about the Hasidic lifestyle to stinging indictments of the community.
Anonymous blogs like Yeedel's are set to become a lot more secure -- and maybe a lot more common -- with the release in August of a new application called Invisiblog. Fusing existing privacy technologies with a tool for blogging, the software makes it far easier to broadcast in secret.
The Invisiblog software looks like a darn good thing; it may keep some bloggers in repressive states out of prison.
The government made an extraordinarily generous offer: if journalists could come up with a name, it would confirm it.
One hopeful journalist offered to run through a government telephone directory if his contact on the other end of the phone had enough patience. The contact declined.
The Guardian's Richard Norton-Taylor, a specialist in defence and intelligence, put a more realistic proposition to an MoD press officer in the early evening. He offered only three names. The press office rejected the first two. When Norton-Taylor produced the third, David Kelly, the MoD press office confirmed it.
Then the poor bloke went and so inconviently killed himself. Embarassing, that.
STALIN LOVED BOOTS. Not just jackboots, but all sorts of good boots.
Boots, by the way, are one of the few among Stalin's personal idiosyncrasies that are left by the author to future scholars. Stalin was a cobbler's son who had worked as an apprentice in a Tbilisi shoe factory. Whenever he met cobblers later in life, he spoke animatedly of footwear. In 1918 he commissioned a shoemaker in Tsaritsyn to construct a pair to his specification. He wanted to look the part of the macho commissar. Subsequently he went in for boots of softer leather. In middle age he was plagued by corns, and cut holes in footwear to relieve the pain. He did not smarten his appearance until the second world war, when meetings with Churchill required him to look the full part of a commander.)
A review by eminent Sovietologist Robert Service of Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore, a book that looks to be an important testament on Stalin and his court's inner circle, as I've previously discussed.
I very much look forward to adding this to the many works on Soviet history I've consumed over the years. Where else could you learn how Stalin felt about bananas?
From Montefiore we learn which fish Stalin liked, which wine and which fruit. (The dictator loved bananas: now there's a psychology dissertation for someone.) The sombre architecture of his dachas is described by an author who has visited most of them. The teachers, nannies and bodyguards are brought to life. Stalin's inclinations in literature, music and history are judiciously considered.
Okay, apparently on this blog, too.
Roy Hattersley also has a review here. From that, quoting Montefiore, here's another Fun Stalin Fact!:
'There is a myth that the only time Stalin ceased war against his people was during 1941 and 1942.' In those two years, 994,000 soldiers were condemned to death and 157,000 were shot.
The Justice Department Inspector General's report:
In the first report, which was made public on June 2, Mr. Fine, whose job is to act as the department's internal watchdog, found that hundreds of illegal immigrants had been mistreated after they were detained following the attacks.
That report found that many inmates languished in unduly harsh conditions for months, and that the department had made little effort to distinguish legitimate terrorist suspects from others picked up in roundups of illegal immigrants.
[...]
The report draws no broad conclusions about the extent of abuses by Justice Department employees, although it suggests that the relatively small staff of the inspector general's office has been overwhelmed by accusations of abuse, many filed by Muslim or Arab inmates in federal detention centers.
The inspector general said that from Dec. 16 through June 15, his office received 1,073 complaints "suggesting a Patriot Act-related" abuse of civil rights or civil liberties.
The report suggested that hundreds of the accusations were easily dismissed as not credible or impossible to prove. But of the remainder, 272 were determined to fall within the inspector general's jurisdiction, with 34 raising "credible Patriot Act violations on their face."
In those 34 cases, it said, the accusations "ranged in seriousness from alleged beatings of immigration detainees to B.O.P. correctional officers allegedly verbally abusing inmates."
On the other hand: he lived to be a nice happy 80 year old.
Which is disgusting. Murderous bastard (and this association insults murderous bastards as a category) should have rotted in hell decades ago.
Which fine country was nice enough, by the way, to give this cannibal sanctuary all these years? Yes, it's your buddy and mine, our wonderful ally, Saudi Arabia! Of course.
Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5. (Via A Small Victory; Michelle also points out that the best man at Amin's fifth wedding was that sterling "freedom fighter," Yasser Arafat.)
HOWARD DEAN'S BLOGGING as a guest blogger at Lawrence Lessig's (y'know, the law professor who argued the Supreme Court case against the copyright extension law) blog. There's also an official campaign blog. It would be nice, though, if Dean blogged a bit less pompously and formally. It would be humanizing to display some wit, verve, and at least a modicum of informality, and not stay so relentlessly On Message.
On the other hand, Dead did say in response to the question of, were he to become President, would there be a White House blog: "why not?"
