speak for yourself

(photo via Yahoo News/AP)
The Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, a few blocks from the photo op he was doing with other Republican lawmakers to 'protest' high gasoline prices, switches from a hydrogen-powered zero emissions vehicle to a big ol' gas-guzzling SUV.

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campari contra heteronormativity

My favorite new ad that I have seen this year is from Campari, the Italian cordial. An attractive guy stands at a bar staring at a beautiful woman as she ascends a flight of stairs. At the top, she turns to return his gaze. He follows, grabbing his drink and breaks into a run, almost colliding with the woman as she turns around. The Campari goes all down the front of her dress. Unperturbed, she unhooks her dress and pulls it down to reveal her mannish pecs and smearing her lipstick. The man smiles coyly and rips open his jacket to reveal the surgical tape binding his breasts together and loosens her hair. We end with a nice bit of framing.

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Koninginnedag!

Queen's Day today in the Netherlands, a truly excellent national holiday involving beer, block parties, funny hats and free-market capitalism. And no you don't need to be a queen or even Dutch to join...although it helps. My favorite queen story: Prior to the outbreak of the First World War, a young Wilhelmina visited the powerful Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany who boasted to the Queen of a tiny country that "my guards are seven feet tall and yours are only shoulder high to them." Wilhelmina smiled politely and replied: "Quite true, Your Majesty, your guards are seven feet tall. But when we open our dikes, the water is ten feet deep!"

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pardon?

You know, I have to admit to more than a passing fascination with speculation and conspiracy theories, especially when they deal with real people. I usually think well so-and-so isn't smart enough to pull something like this off; but then I think, well that just means that they are stupid enough to try and rich enough to pay something smarter to get it done.

Sounds reasonable enough, but that's only to assuage my guilt at possibly being duped by some crackpot idea. I remember once falling for that old chestnut about 'gullible' not being in the dictionary, something I reflect upon when I hear the latest conspiracy theory about why oil companies might want political turmoil in the Gulf or how gay people have some sort of collective compulsory agenda. Nevertheless, I find this theory from FDL very accurate:

The spin, as I have before theorized, is to keep the country from believing that Rove is beyond a doubt, without a question, guilty. The spin is not aimed at Fitzgerald, but at you (and me and every other citizen) via the media “news/commentariat.” Like you say, “Who cares if it doesn’t effect legal outcome?”

Well, if this can be put off just about six more months, then the President (post-election) will be able to issue pardons. If the Republicans retain control of Congress, then the current spin will help them go out and support the pardons:

“This is an investigation that has gone on too long and produced very few results. We know less now than we did when the entire issue arose. I applaud the President in putting an end to this costly and unproductive process.” And as we all know, that is the civil version.

If Dems take control of one or both houses, the current spin and confusion still allows the President (who will be the lamest of lame ducks in history) to still make that same argument and the vast majority of people will agree. They will know something is fishy, but they will be happy to have that investigation — which is just so darn confusing — behind them.

So, the spin is for the Winter 2006 pardon strategy. Hence, Comstock’s involvement at every turn.

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more horrific headlines and ghoulish grafs

From the Phoenix New Times:

Plural marriage, which the mainstream Mormon Church abandoned in 1890 as a condition for Utah to gain statehood, is what drives the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The church requires men to obtain at least three wives to reach the "celestial kingdom," where it is believed that they and their harems will live as gods and goddesses forever. The FLDS prophet is the only person who can arrange and perform multiple marriages.

As prophet, Warren Jeffs expanded his power to include stripping men of their wives and children and tossing them out of the church if they questioned anything he said or did. He permits no appeals and never explains his actions. In the past two years, Jeffs has excommunicated dozens of men, reassigning their wives and children to men he considers worthy.

Most of the time, women go along with his edicts because they believe their salvation is dependent on their marriage to a man in Jeffs' priesthood.

The fanaticism instilled by Warren Jeffs into FLDS members cannot be overstated. Jeffs has so much power over the men that even when he kicks them out of the church, many continue to "tithe" tens of thousands of dollars a year to him in the faint hope of reinstatement. With no check on his power, Jeffs appears to be inching closer to reinstituting some of the most radical aspects of early 19th-century Mormon doctrine, including "blood atonement," or ritualistic human sacrifice.

A former FLDS member who left the church in April tells New Times he believes Jeffs is building a blood-atonement room in the Texas temple where sinners' throats would be slit and their bodies burned in a DNA-incinerating crematory. It is believed by strict constructionists of FLDS doctrine that this last-gasp ritual is sometimes necessary to ensure a sinner's eternal salvation.

Robert Richter says he left the church in April while he was working on a "secret project" to build computer controls for an extremely high-temperature thermostat that he now fears could be used to operate such a crematory at the temple to dispose of the remains of blood-atonement victims.

Richter says he was told to design controls to operate a thermostat that could handle temperatures up to 2,700 degrees. At that heat level, DNA is destroyed. Richter says he felt unqualified to handle such a project and wondered why YFZ officials did not hire a licensed specialist to do the work.

Richter says he was deeply troubled when he was told his work on the thermostat controls was to be kept secret. Richter, who was working in Colorado City, says he knew the thermostat was to be used in conjunction with a furnace, but he was not allowed to speak to other FLDS technicians working in Texas about the project.

The secrecy disturbed him to the point that he decided to leave the FLDS. It was a monumental decision, especially since he had a young wife and an infant to support.

Quitting the FLDS meant he must leave his church-controlled city job that paid $31,000 a year -- a relatively high salary in Colorado City.

"When a religion goes wrong, you have to get out," Richter explains.

Soon after leaving the church, Richter says he started reflecting on Jeffs' numerous sermons calling for a return to blood atonement.

"Warren has been teaching for a long time that those who are guilty of adultery must be blood-atoned," he says. "Warren's even made comments that we have got to figure out a way that we can start doing blood atonement so we can take care of these people who have committed adultery so they can be saved."

Richter says he knows of at least three FLDS men seeking on their own to be blood-atoned so they can gain entrance to heaven.

"They have asked Warren, 'When are we able to get blood-atoned so we can be saved?'" says Richter, one of the few FLDS men to earn a college degree, in his case a bachelor of science in electrical engineering from the University of Utah.

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tease

From SFBayTimes(4/20/2006):

Maupin read passages from his newest, yet to be published book, Michael Tolliver Lives, where we discover what the central gay character in Tales is up to these days, now that he’s 55 years old. We learned that Michael is dealing with arthritis and with HIV by taking the AIDS cocktail, not to mention Viagra. He is still a close friend with his old tranny pal Anna Madrigal, who is now in her eighties. Michael is still cruising men in the Castro, “our beloved Gayberry.”

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On the revelatory ratios

Although much of the language it is couched in is relentlessly opaque, the idea of the anxiety of influence is fairly common-sense now. It says that since the time of Shakespeare, all artists in the literal tradition fight against the influence of those who have come before them in that tradition. So even Shakespeare felt the pressure, or anxiety of influence, to compete with Christopher Marlowe, to take what he made and outdo it.

Harold Bloom argued first in 1972 that "the poet in a poet" is inspired to write by reading another poet's poetry and will tend to produce work that is derivative of existing poetry, and, therefore, weak. Because a poet must forge an original poetic vision in order to guarantee his survival into posterity (i.e., to guarantee that future readers will not allow him to be forgotten), the influence of precursor poets inspires a sense of anxiety in living poets. Just copying masterpieces adds nothing new to be remembered, nothing to make one distinct. So Bloom says that true artists willfully twist themes and ideas from this overloaded prior art, making something new based on a creative misinterpretation.

Nevertheless, a minority of strong poets must have a way of overcoming this anxiety. This leads to Bloom's 'revisionary ratios', or literary devices based on Freudian mechanisms by which authors use to navigate between the anxiety of influence and plagarism:

1. Clinamen, which is poetic misreading or misprison proper...This appears as a corrective movement in his own poem, which implies that the precursor poem went accurately up to a certain point, but then should have swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poem moves.

2. Tessera, which is the completion and antithesis...A poet antithetically "completes" his precursor, by so reading the parent poem as to retain its terms but to mean to them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough.

3. Kenosis , which is a breaking device similar to the defense mechanisms our psyches employ against repetition compulsions; kenosis then is a movement towards discontinuity with the precursor. The later poet, apparently emptying himself of his own afflatus, his imaginative godhood, seems to humble himself as though he were ceasing to be a poet, but this ebbing is so performed in relation to a precursor's poem-of-ebbing that the precursor is emptied out also, and so the later poem of deflation is not as absolute as it seems.

4. Daemonization, or a movement towards a personalized Counter-Sublime, in reaction to the precursor's Sublime...The later poet opens himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent-poem that does not belong to the parent proper, but to a range of being just beyond that precursor. He does this, in his poem, by so stationing its relation to the parent-poem as to generalize away the uniqueness of the earlier work.

5. Askesis, or a movement of self-purgation...The later poet does not, as in kenosis, undergo a revisionary movement of emptying, but of curtailing; he yields up part of his own human and imaginative endowment, so as to separate himself from others, including the precursor, and he does this in his poem by so stationing it in regard to the parent-poem as to make that poem undergo an askesis too; the precursor's endowment is also truncated.

6. Apophrades, or the return of the dead...The later poet, in his own final phase, already burdened by an imaginative solitude that is almost a solipsism, holds his own poem so open again to the precursor's work that at first we might believe the wheel has come full circle, and that we are back in the later poet's flooded apprenticeship, before his strength began to assert itself in the revisionary ratios. But the poem is now held open to the precursor, where once it was open, and the uncanny effect is that the new poem's achievement makes it seem to us, not as though the precursor were writing it, but as though the later poet himself had written the precursor's characteristic work.

More opaqueness, but we can relate each in a shorter version using examples. Each of these can be seen in the area of fan-created fiction which surrounds media properties with highly devoted audiences, like Star Trek or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is by nature derivative art, but much of it consciously misinterprets characters, plotlines and dialogue from the original work in order to align with the new writer's revised vision.

Clinamen is the basic ratio and it takes the view that the original poem started good but went wrong, and that the new poem avoids that error by doing the opposite. So we could think of a story in which Luke joins the Dark Side after his confrontation with Vader in Cloud City or in which Spock becomes captain of the Enterprise.

Tessera is a the second ratio and is a more specific version of clinamen, in that it implies the mistake made was a premature ending, by which the new poem. This, in its gross sense, encompasses fanfiction where the unresolved sexual tension between two otherwise heterosexual characters explodes into gay melodrama.

Kenosis is the deconstruction or emptying of influence, through an explicit purging of affliation. perhaps we can see this reaction in the differences between Coppola and Scorcese in depicting LCN in film. With Goodfellas he knew he was going to get Godfather comparisons, so the story is about a guy who isn't even really in the mafia, and end up in Witness Protection.

Daemonization is perhaps the most recognizable and the best described: taking something assumed to exist within the original poem and giving it an expanded power. this reminds me of a great series of science fiction stories that Cory Doctorow has been doing, each of which is based on assumptions in other great science fiction stories: like having a single design monopoly on robot's in Asimov's I, Robot series or the patriarchal warmongering pseudo-morality of Ender's Game)

Askesis, a method of cutting away from the influence of the earlier work by sacrificing its ideals. Perhaps this is the most ascetic as it involves a complete break with anything having to do with the original work. Any work which is so committed to denying the themes of its predecessor that it explicitly mentions it would edge towards this category. I would put Dune, a master piece on its own merits into this category, because it was a science fiction novel which eschewed any sort of artificial intelligence, any robots common to space operas of the past.

Apophrades, return of the dead, describes how one artist so throughly transcend the artist he was originally inspired by, as to seem as if he wrote the original work. A real-life case, could be the relative difference in modern-day fame of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Or take this anecdote: California is named after the island of California, home of Queen Calafia, her beautiful black amazons and their man-eating griffins, as all detailed in Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo's Las Sergas de Esplandian, which was a highly unauthorized but popular sequel to the much more highly respected Amadis de Gaul, more The Lord of the Rings of its day. Las Sergas de Esplandian was the pulp novel the conquistadores had on board when they sailed around and encountered the Baja peninsula. What's more, when the Portola party went up the coast, thinking the descriptions in LSdE were based on actual travelers' tales, they thought the California condors were Queen Calafia's big black man-eating griffins.

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i guess you have to cheat to get into Harvard

Schadenfreude fills the literary world as yet another child writing prodigy is revealed as an unrepentant plagarist(via 1st Post):

Sloppy Firsts by Megan F. McCafferty reads:

"Finally, four major department stores and 170 specialty shops later, we were done"

From How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life by Kaayva Viswanathan:

"Five department stores, and 170 specialty shops later, I was sick of listening to her hum along to Alicia Keys."

Informed of the similarities, Viswanathan said, "No comment. I have no idea what you are talking about."

The Harvard response, via Prof. Werner Sollors of the Engish Lit dept:

"Three department stores and 169 specialty shops later, it looks as though some strong version of anxiety of influence can clearly be detected in How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life."

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Parapolitics update: monetary hegemony

Mmmm...love that word. So I have been thinking alot about the rush to confront Iran over its nuclear aspirations and how it comes a decade before they would have operational nukes. Something about the premature timing of this seemed to about more than the mid-term elections. Then I had another tangential even that made me wonder what is really going on.

I read an interesting theory today about this: Iran has a free-trade zone on the island of Kish in the Persian Gulf. Since 2003, they have been planning to build an International Oil Bourse in this free trade zone, to open around March 2006. But security and the appointment of a new oil minister for the new Iranian president delayed its opening it seems. Due to "technical glitches", according to the Ministry of Petroleum, the launch was postponed, with no new date set. What makes the IOB controversial to US interests is its stated goal to be used as an international marker for the trading of petroleum in euros, not dollars.The three current oil markers (pricing mechanism for oil) are US dollar denominated, which include the West Texas Intermediate crude (WTI), North Sea Brent Crude, and the UAE Dubai Crude. The two major oil bourses are the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYME) in New York City and the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) in London. The Iranian Oil Bourse would establish a fourth 'oil marker', denominated by the euro. The major countries holding petroleum reserves since the decline of US production are dominated by OPEC, and hence, OPEC may choose dollars, euros, yen, or any currency providing perceived advantage, politically or economically. As of 2005, OPEC continues to trade in petrodollars, but some OPEC members (such as Iran and Venezuela) have been pushing for a switch to the euro.

This would be a nightmare for the Federal Reserve because: international buyers will have a choice of buying a barrel of oil for 60 dollars on the NYMEX and IPE-- or purchase a barrel of oil for 45-50 euros via the Iranian Bourse. This assumes the euro maintains its current 20-25% appreciated value relative to the dollar-- and assumes that some sort of US "intervention" is not launched against Iran. The upcoming bourse will introduce petrodollar versus petroeuro currency hedging, and fundamentally new dynamics to the biggest market in the world-- global oil and gas trades. In essence, the U.S. will no longer be able to effortlessly expand credit via U.S. Treasury bills, and the dollar's demand/liquidity value will fall. This, combined with the Fed's decision to discontinue publication of the monetary aggregate M3, make alot of people suspicious. parapolitics at work...

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this makes me queasy

British experts at Human Rights Watch and the British Transplantation Society suggest that China may be executing its prisoners to sell their organs. This has been widely hinted for years, and denied as rare but some facts have begun to leak out: China executes more people than any other country (3,400 last year) and of them has harvested as many as 3,000 organs last year, often involving corrupt officials dispensing the rights of families of the deceased. Suspiciously timed executions/transplants further suggest scenarios in which a sick patient in the West can buy the organs and have them put down for them, are more common than we want to admit. This raises so many questions about how the pre-lifers are going on about life beginning at conception, while other countries are vivisecting its political prisoners. If embryonic stem cell technology could be used to stop this ghoulish need, then there is a moral obligation to do so and I would say that a billion blastocysts are not more important one healthy human being. Will someone please tell me how this is morally preferable to cloning these organs? or even something more outrageous like hybrid animal-human organs? or organs developed in an acephalic clone(basically a human without a head, hence cannot feel or think or live independently)? As creepy as that may sound, I would take it any day over the current sorry state of organ politics.

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Luxury Lounge

A good episode of the Sopranos, a bit of a change in gears: the big gay drama of Vito is put on the back burner to focus on the business trainwreck that is Arthur Bucco. This is another character often used as comic relief or a literal punching bag for the characters' frustrations. But, similar to Agent Kellerman on Prison Break, John Ventimiglia gives a performance masterful in embodying that bastard orphan of emotions, passive-aggressiveness. His anger at Tony is (perhaps reasonably) displaced onto Benny. Artie walks a very fine line having so many violent psychopaths in his clientele, leaving him frequently cursing under his breath only to explode, ripping off tablecloths and shooting cute woodland creatures. I liked this episode because it was tense. I had no idea what was going to happen, when, and why.The whole evolve-or-die/dinosaur theme comes up alot here. I think Artie is just another example of how everyone's "business" is changing.Also there was a major focus on people's fixation on undeserved material gain: the hit men and their souvenirs; Chris and the luxury lounge; Bacall's goody bag; and underlying it all, the mstery of the credit-card scam. All of this fits in the larger theme of the limitations of the characters involved coming from their lack of self-knowledge.

Vito's still missing, but Tony wants to take a break from the search, which is good news for Chris who wants to take time off for a trip to LA with Little Carmine-they want to attach Ben Kingsley to "Cleaver." Tony balks, but lets him go. One of the hidden themes of this episode was carried over from the last episode: the inability of anyone to keep a secret. Tony had the same look on his face when he realized Johnny Sack told Phil about the hit as when Artie told him he heard about Tony's trip to the rival restaurant.A major theme in this episode is pride, much of which was Artie's, just like his pride in being a comforting host being trashed by everyone or Martina cruelly calling him out on his interest in her. I was glad to see him at the end, rediscovering his sense of pride in his cooking, through the late Mr. Hoppy and one of his dad's recipes.

Nuova Vesuvio (Artie's restaurant) has fallen behind ("40% since last year" Artie moans) due to the hot new restaurant Giovanni's drawing away the crowd and a scandal involving a sexy Albanian immigrant and stolen credit card numbers.Tony draws the comparison between his business and the restaurant business early on. It's up to him to rein in both Artie and Benny when their feud gets out of hand: first Artie beats up Benny (shock! is Vinnie getting soft?); and then when he can't keep his mouth shut about his fling with his Albanian 'Martina' crack, Artie gets his hand boiled in a pot of tomato sauce. He should take Tony's advice and go visit Melfi. And stop talking to the guests.The credit card scheme allows us to track an unlikely path from the devout Hasidic motel owner from Season 1 through to our crypto-terrorist friends, Ahmed and Muhammad in their seats at the Bing. What this connection means we have only broad speculation. Likewise, speculation on the junkie, Corky, that Chris used to get guns for the Rusty hit, leads some people to think he might be an undercover Fed. That seems a bit too smart for the Feds on this show, but what else could it be?

Christopher also had a great plot (which was nicely related to the main plotline by Tony) involving his Saw/Godfather movie and a pitch to Sir Ben Kingsley. Chris realizes, after coldcocking Lauren Bacall, that he'll never have people giving him stuff like in the luxury lounge so he plays the Adrianna card. Watching Ben squirm as a bit uncomfortable, but the Neapolitan hit men were cute enough to make up for it.Guest stars Ben Kingsley and Lauren Bacall inspire both the title and some hilarious lines. Well lines including a long drawn-out "Fuuuuuuck' as he see them on the plane. Lauren Bacall, I don't think was acting though. She's exactly the type of person to be that haughty and rough. I was waiting for her to knock him out. And he got the idea from Ben Kingsley! "Hopefully we can spread some that around..."Even Wilmer Valderamma appears (although he should have gotten mugged) and Lindsay Lohan gets a mention as a hot piece of ass.

All in all, not too much plot development means some people will be disappointed, although we do know now that Chris is off the wagon. And this serves as a nice goodbye feature for Artie, with his peace and creativity in the kitchen contrasted with the bloody work of his criminal contemporaries. This episode reminded me of Sentimental Education from Season 5, which was also written by Matthew Weiner. It was quality but there was way too much emphasis on Artie. It was also interesting to juxtapose how Christopher got used by Hollywood the first time in "D-Girl" but this time he gets an acting legend's swag basket.In other developments, Rusty Milio ("the Munchkin King") got shot in his Caddy in his driveway in Ozone Park, Brooklyn. No glad was particularly broken up, especially given Frankie Valli's acting. Phil seemed especially gleeful over the news, which Tony denied having a hand in, only to persist with calling for his brother-in-law's balls. Did you catch the over-loaded plate Ginny Sack was carrying at Da Giovanni? I loved when Phil said it was nice to be around men and then one of the new made guys said "you know how wine gets you worked up" like a sterotypical nagging wife. Vito's wife Marie appears for a second, weary from trying to stop all the other children from beating up Vito, Jr. for having a gay dad. Carlo is also still gung-ho for Vito's head, a plot point leading directly into next week's much-anticipated "Johnny Cakes".(Update: removed duplicate posts and added some purty pitchurs)

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freedom for the people on the roof of the world

Can I just say that I support fully the Nepalese call for democracy. There is no reason for a monarchy in the 21st century, not even in the mountains of the Himalaya. While not all of the groups which are supporting protests against the king are full supporters of democracy, the ability to protest your government and not be shot on site by government officials is what underpins freedom.

"These are not protests any more. This is a revolution," said Harish Dhal, a demonstrator. "We don't want a monarchy. We want real democracy."

Even the police are beginning to see the limits of such draconian measures and the West is starting to get it.
Gyanendra is a tyrant, having seized absolute power last year when his nephew Dipendra purportedly staged a murder suicide, killing most of the family, including King Birendra (Dipendra's father, and Gyanendra's brother), Gyanendra became king but the killings by the late crown prince Dipendra has remained a controversy. The entire royal family was together on Friday night, and there was an argument between Dipendra and Queen Aiswarya (his mother) over Dipendra's choice of bride. Dipendra wanted to marry Devyani, but because of her family lineage, her mother did not accept a marriage between the two. It was rumored that King Birendra (Dipendra's father) threatened to take away Dipendra's right to heir if he married Devyani. Devyani has since gone into hiding in India.

The official investigation report says that Dipendra returned intoxicated and unable to control himself and yet it claims that within less than half an hour he fired three separate weapons (a submachine gun (MP-5), an M16, and a Glock pistol) indiscriminantly. Moreover, Dipendra was right handed and the entry wound was found on the left temple. All these issues have made people suspect that it was not Dipendra who killed the royal family but somebody else. Consider that all of the other heirs to the throne with claims superseding Gyanendra's died that night. Gyanendra, conveniently, was in the jungle of Chitwan at the time. According to the Nepali constitution, he, as a brother to the King, could only take the throne if there were no sons of the King available to take his position. Given these circumstances, some Nepalese have lost the faith they had in the monarch as an incarnation of a god.The most prominent evidence supporting a government cover-up is the fact that the government changed its story of the events. The first story, which was absolutely not accepted by the general public whatsoever, was that an automatic rifle accidentally went off on June 1st, shooting fourteen separate people, killing ten. This is ludicrous and was not a story the Nepali government could get away with.

There is evidence that leads to certain questions being raised. In Dipendra's glock pistol, there were two bullets fired from that night. Generally, when someone shoots himself in the temple they only really have the ability to shoot the gun once. There were several reports claiming that Dipendra not only drank plenty of alcohol that night, but also smoked a cigarette laced with hashish and an unknown black substance. Paradoxically, the doctor that worked on Dipendra while he was comatose claimed that there was no trace of alcohol or psychotropic substances in his blood with the exception of nicotine. Normally a situation like this could be cleared up by a simple autopsy to determine his actual toxicology screen and if he had two bullets in his body. Instead of investigating the matter, Dipendra was promptly cremated the same day that he was taken off life support and passed away.

Gyanendra took control once again on February 1, 2005, accusing prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba's government of failing to make arrangements for parliamentary elections and of being unable to restore peace in the country, which currently suffers from widespread terrorism and insurgency from Maoists. Gyanendra promised that peace and democratic institutions would be restored within three years, but the insurgents' threat of "a massive bloodbath" if elections were announced dissuaded Deuba from doing so, and their opposition will likely continue in the face of whoever leads the government under Gyanendra (who for the time being appears to be serving as his own prime minister).

The period of direct rule has been accompanied by what critics claim is repression of dissent. International organisations have expressed grave concerns about the safety of journalists and human rights activists, following the king's decision to restrict civil liberties, including freedom of the press, the constitutional protection against censorship and the right against preventive detention seen by Gyanendra, claiming "democracy and progress contradict one another", as a necessary step in restoring peace to the country. After Gyanendra took power and began his assault on the Maoist Party, India, Britain, and the United States came to the aid of Nepal with counter-revolutionary tactics.

Security may have caused the coup d'etat: the People's War may be initiated by Maoist rebels, but this pro-democratic, pro-education, pro-women's rights movement within Nepal enjoys widespread appeal because of the centuries of repression under which these people have lived. And yet modern democratic powers support such vicious corruption? This will be another black eye for the idea that democracy is spreading unless we get on the right side of history again.

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can't hear the diplomacy over the rattling of those sabers

I have decided to write this post to be more relevant to current events, namely the illusory crisis over Iran. Part of me feels that while yes, this is a deadly serious matter, it is so obviously on the horizon and not an eminent threat. Many have pointed out by now that Iran has only enriched uranium (in other words, processed large amounts of uranium to extract the more useful isotopes). Still Iran currently has a few hundred centifuges capable of being chained to extract uranium and potential to make the thousands more necessary to produce an arsenal, much less a single bomb. About a decade seems to be the average window in which a nuclear Iran is a credible threat.

But the Barney Fife 'nip-it-in-the-bud' inventionist school of thought demands IMMEDIATE ACTION, which would require the total destruction of at least 300 separate installations in a country. The complete eradication of hardened underground sites leading to the use of tactical nuclear weapons. But calls for pre-emptive action are presumptous and smokescreen from the more pressing security issue of the day. In fact I would argue that even the mullahs of Iran must be rational enough to understand how its options to retaliate have consequences limited their effect

I hope these are just wargaming exercises and not something you think Americans will stand by and take? Then again, we have the unitary executive theory, where the president during wartime is infalliable in all of his actions. Presumably the AUMF will be used to justify military action and claim that we are rhetorically at war and this is in effect, whereas in a legal sense only Congress can declare war and the AUMF isn't a blank check. And the 'spreading freedom and democracy' meme will not justify pre-emptive bombing.

Of course, much has been remarked about how the invasion of Iraq and its non-existent nuclear weapons program contrasts with NoKorea's more successful efforts. Saddam and Kim were both clowns in the rogues gallery of world figures, but Saddam proved to be the paper tiger, not even aware of all the sycophants around him. Kim, the decadent dynast, used the nation enslaved by his father to build something everyone will fear them for. The inchoate rage at all of these threats can drive some people into slavering desire to make the world a nuclear desert. Presumably, when arguing for the irradiation of the Muslim world there is no global weather events and these wouldn't effect people in Peoria.

Well then you have to think (if you are Rummy) you and what army? The one about to mutiny and waiting to toss you off the ship? The one trying to establish civic order in two of the nations surrounding the area your thinking to destroy? Ahh yes, the 'modern' and unconventional one in your mind which struggles to balance that objective atop their overflowing plate. Then again, the divinely inspired Decider would make this decision, as all decisions are made. Throw in a political director who wants to cement his faltering legacy as Republican kingmaker in time for this year's elections and an unbelievably villainous second-in-command who has no regard for just why Vice President is not a very specified or useful job in our system of government.

Still as I think the more people know about this plan and compare it to Iraq, the more impossible it becomes politically. This scenario has been credible since the Clinton years according to Richard Clarke, and the military options we are discussing now were created then. But they gave up when they could find no favorable conclusion to any Iran nuclear scenario. Of course, this could be both a way to boost the administration and a bluff.

The three major thrusts of an Iranian counterattack considered in the media are: disruption of the oil trade in the Persian Gulf; sponsorship of terrorist actions in the US; and terrorist actions in southern Iraq.

Controlling the Persian Gulf's oil would be economic war on all the Gulf nations, isolating Iran regionally and raising the price of oil for emerging consumer nations like China. Of course, you can still get some oil from Nigeria or Venezuela, but Kuwait and the UAE are would be stuck by a blockade of the Straits of Hormuz, provoking more international support for further action to contain the Iranian navy. And in the post 9-11 consciousness of the world community, a terrorist response would evaporate sympathy received as the victim of unilateral action. As for Hezbolah, its connection with Iran and its unwillingness to disarm causes friction inside Lebanon already, making the Lebanese quite unwilling to make their nation a proxy battleground for the Iranians, Like the Lebanese, most Iraqis don't want to be tools of Tehran and would disapprove of their countrymen who do.

This leaves me wondering just how different the Middle East will be in that decade, and whether we won't have more pressing things to worry about then, as now.

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excuses, excuses

I have wanted to write the Great American Novel since I was in elementary school. Over time, I have had far more practice writing papers about optimality theory than about postmodern existentialism. Fiction writing becomes harder when you are consciously trying to avoid cliche. So it appears that I know what not to write about and how not to write it.

The same siutation happens to my blogging at times. I can think of so many things that deserve a more extended comment when they pass through my day. However, time only allows for a full analysis of select things. One thought percolating in my head today was how standard and cliched excuses are, such that we all knw how to quickly verify most of them and most of us can convince ourself to the point of actual belief that they are legitimate when used.

Sure you can think of 'the dog ate my homework' and 'got a flat' as so rote that when they actually occur their usage as an excuse furthers suspicion. But it is because they are such a common and irritating timewasters that they are overused; their utility derives from their believability. OTOH, there is the whole so-unbelievable-and-unique-it-must-be-true factor of original yet plausible excuses. Deception and forming opionions as to the thought processes of others turns out to be an interesting way of looking at how consciousness may have evolved: as a cognitive arms race.

These days, the stunning heights of government incompetence in tandem with a instant media society have shown the limitations of professional apologists like White House Press Secretaries. Andrew Sullivan mentioned this a few weeks ago based on a clip from the BBC show Yes, Minister; in which the senior bureaucrat give the five standard excuses for everything:

1. The Anthony Blunt excuse: "that there are good reasons for what happened, but national security prevents their public release." Blunt was the most aristocratic member of the Cambridge spy ring recuited by the KGB to spy in the UK. He cut a secret deal for immunity which ended when PM Thatcher was forced into releasing his identity after a public uproar in 1979.
2. The 'comprehensive schools' excuse: "things went wrong because of cuts to the operating budget and staff which stretched supervisory resources past their limits." Sort of like Head Start or NCLB this was an expanasive and expensive education proposal which was underfunded and failed to meet its goals.
3. The Concorde excuse: "it was a worthwhile experiment, now abandoned, but not before it had provided much valuable data and considerable employment." The Concorde was a supersonic aircraft which proved to be incredibly expensive and whose abandonment has left faster-than-sound travel in limbo to this day.
4. The Munich agreement excuse: "it happened before certain facts were known and could never happen again." The Munich agreement was between PM Chamberlain and Hitler and the fact (not known by the Foreign Office) was that Hitler wanted to conquer Europe.
5. The Charge of the Light Brigade excuse: "It was an unfortunate lapse by an individual which has now been dealt with under internal disciplinary procedures." The CLB was an ill-advised cavalry charge, led by Lord Cardigan, which occurred during the Battle of Balaclava on October 25, 1854 during the Crimean War. It is best remembered as the subject of a famous poem entitled The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose lines "Theirs not to reason why / Theirs but to do and die" have made the charge a symbol of warfare at its most reckless.

Note how each of these excuses is part of the toolbox of the modern apologist, but partisan warfare has added so many more arrows to that quiver. Yet they keep firing the same dusty flechettes, hoping that the dull points of at least some will stick.

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Ennis of Troy

Notable gay author Andrew Holleran writes an excellent essay on Brokeback Mountain, now that the jokes have dulled. Among his many keen observations, he notes that author of the original story, E. Annie Proulx has said that the only men who would not go to this movie were those “insecure about themselves and their own sexuality.” In other words: “Jack and Ennis would have trouble with this movie.”

The “urban critics,” Proulx writes, dubbed this movie a tale of two gay cowboys. No. It is a story of destructive rural homophobia. Although there are many places in Wyoming where gay men did and do live together in harmony with the community, it should not be forgotten that a year after this story was published Matthew Shepard was tied to a buck fence outside the most enlightened town in the state, Laramie, home of the University of Wyoming.

Brokeback Mountain indicts both kinds of homophobia: the external and the internal. As awful as the homophobes are who litter the film (from their first boss, to the rodeo clown who rebuffs Jack’s offer to buy him a drink, to his father in the final scene), it’s equally about gay men’s self-censorship, their internalization of what is expected of a man. That’s why Heath Ledger’s character dominates the movie. One reason Ledger’s performance has been praised so much more than Gyllenhaal’s (though the latter’s is just as good) is that we’re with him at the end, and it’s his moment of self-recognition that provides the traditional climax of Greek tragedy—when the hero finally learns what his failure to see and understand has cost him and others.

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Live Free or Die

Wow, that episode of the Sopranos was everything I expected from last week and more. I have always liked the state motto of New Hampshire, because its a simple plainspoken English imperative, shockingly libertarian for such a seemingly conservative place. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, OTOH has a tongue-twisting Latin motto, about peace under a sword, very ominous and neoclassical. So I had high expectations that we would not only go to NH, but also see the state logo on a license plate...which were brillantly met in the final scene of this episode.

I was a bit concerned because when we first see Vito, he's with his putative goomah in a house on the Jersey shore. She is a rather bitchy Latina, although justifiably as he won't even step outside to get a tan with her. Upon meeting associates willing to take him in to Tony, Vito ends up running away to the Granite State (to find a cousin). After a call from his brother-in-law Phil Leotardo, he tosses his phone out the window. And when his Caddy breaks down in the middle of the night, he happens upon the most picturesque New England village. Here you can wake the owner of a bed-and-breakfast in the middle of the night and she will be all smiles. At the local diner, a gay couple walks in and is casually accepted. The park he walks through looks exactly like this one in Concord. It seemed pretty real, but just a little too gay to be anywhere in NH other than Ogonquit Beach or maybe Portsmouth.

Also Carm had some minor developments in her story, but which look equally as portentous. Her crumbling real estate dreams contrast with Angie Bompensiero's thriving body shop, where she is doing backroom deals with Benny Fazio and Patsy Parisi for cut-rate airbags (and as Ro reveals, loansharking). In fact, the wives serve as almost this mirror chorus of their husbands, like Gab Dante lives up to her name by spreading the Vito rumor. Angie rubs it in how inconsequential their lives are compared to her wheeling and dealing. I'll bet Carm rats Angie out to Tony for not kicking up to him.

Can I just say how much I loved Melfi gently wearing away the edges of Tony's homophobia when he brings it up to her: first he brings up his favorite argument, that he thinks gays 'go around in pity for themselves'; Melfi returns that she doesn't think they see this as a flaw; Tony then argues they were born that way but not in his neighborhood. Melfi then asks for his personal thoughts on homosexuality: he goes from its digusting to getting hot at the thought of a lesbian scene involving Jennifer Beals. Then he rationalizes with a paean about 'consenting adults' but gives it a slippery slope twist:

Don't forget, I'm a strict Catholic. I agree with that Senator Sanatorium. He said if we let this stuff go too far and pretty soon we'll be fucking dogs.

Melfi then calls him out on his ambivalence and he returns with the effect this will have on business deals. Melfi ever so gently points out that with many of his associates having served time, surely a few committed sodomy in prison. Then she chuckles when he says they get a pass for that. Soon the hypocrisy causes him to express a live and let live philosophy ('part of me says: God Bless! Ah Salud! who gives a shit') and contemplate second chances. Personally I love how guys who always greet each other with kisses on the cheek can be so homophobic. Oh and Tony's 'good boy' comment about his mother while Carm was rubbing Vitamin E on his belly...*sniffle*.

And then how he turns around all of this internalized criticism from her and uses it to defang an ambitious colleague looking to whack Vito for the 'family honor' with a scoff about high drama and a knowing mention of 'this ain't the first time'. The mobster's reactions were all horrifically absurd, like Paulie complaining that he's been betrayed. And how it all changes when Finn reveals Vito was the one giving head. "I feel like I been stabbed in the heart!' And when Tony suggests they consider things before they whack him, Paulie stands up and yells 'what is there to think about!' (Bobby, notably agrees immediately and doesn't laugh at Christofuh's joke about 'greasing the union'.) Tony yells back 'you gonna take care of his kids, when he's gone!'Later, when redistributing Vito's construction business, he defends Vito again as his best earner.

Christofuh also had a great moment when Tony asks him if he thinks Ahmed and Mohammed were 'al-qaedas': they can't be terrorists because one of them owns a 'springer spaniel'. The logic being they are Americanized to keep dogs as pets, unlike back in the Middle East. And then the extra long take as he contemplates the logic of this. His slide into stupid may be chemical: without Ade, who would keep him from the smack?

Meadow is still whiny, although Finn became infinitely more sympathetic when he called her on her 'poverty of the mezzogiorno' bullshit. Johnny Macaroni. heh. After all, his teifying before the intimidating panel of wiseguys in the back of Satriale's, was a direct result of Meadow shooting off her mouth to her mother about something Finn told her in the strictest of confidence. The overhead shot with him all isolated was priceless. He was fully surrounded at the table and, unlike Princess Bing, he knows what these guys are capable of. "It'll be okay, get him to pay for some therapy" Riiiight. And then Tony dismisses him like a little child with some money for candy. He was in an uncomfortable position, but it was good that they displayed some conflict and awareness of the consequences of ratting out Vito.

The construction worker who found Vito's phone was hilarious, mostly because he didn't do what every other show would do and use him to speed the plotline along. Nope, instead he's as unhelpful as possible, due to Tony's attitude.

Well an upcoming episode is "Johnny Cakes"(s6#10), which given its appearance in this week's episode does not bode well for our favorite gay mobster. (edit: although next week's episode "Luxury Lounge" has in its Wikipedia synopsis:Vito finds home in a new world. :-) And the ep synopsis says something about Vito being wowed by an act of heroism. After the events last night, here's my prediction: Phil comes to NH in his usual hotheaded vengeance mode; he attempts to whack Vito; Vito begs for his life and a small-town New England cop or a state trooper (alot of this is wishful thinking) sees Phil being a murderous prick and blows him away. I cringe at the oily way he leans on Vito's wife, smoothly ignoring her protest about how Vito shouldn't be thrown out like garbage. And Vito opens an antique store with his new lover, muscling out the competition behind the scenes. Well, we can all dream can we?

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happy easter!

The bunny 'Thinker' statue on the Neude square in Utrecht. Quick story from the internets about this statue: it languished in storage for years, until the people of the city elected it by an overwhelming margin to fill a prominent spot in the square. Populism works in mysterious ways.

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a fanboy moment

I have being trying to organize both the project I'm working on for my thesis and future applications in my field after this degree. It's becoming a bit overwhelming, so I have less to blog about. Of course, maybe this is why I am awake at 6:30 AM local time. Even the subjects which come to mind are less then meaty....but here goes.

They are coming out with a third season of my favorite show nobody has ever seen: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. This season's episodes is supposd to take some elements from the manga GITS: Man-Machine Interface. The title is Solid State Society and I would post clips but they are in flash and copyright-questionable. Still, there are only a few things I an be a real fanboy on, and this gets me into full-on armchair philosopher mode.

The Ghost in the Shell series, which began as a manga and was later developed into an acclaimed movie (1995) and later a TV series is a postcyberpunk epic concerning a female counterterrorism agent with an advanced cyborg body, the unit she commands and their relation to a future society where almost everyone is biologically connected to the Internet.

Postcyberpunk (as shitty and faux-temporary a monker as post-modernism) is hard to understand, but has a few notable commonalities: it is reasonably free of nihilism (contra a subcurrent in much of Gibson) and less pessimistic about technology than cyberpunk, mostly by having characters working to improve social conditions or protect them from disintegration, rather than being exclusively alienated and disaffected loners in a high dystopia.

Postcyberpunk is concerned with the immediate, postulatable future and eschews space opera deep futures which attempt to see beyond the veil of the Singularity through melodramatic suspension of disbelief. Thus the terrestial effects of technology are of more interest than space travel, because a mantra of the postcyberpunk movement would be 'Technology IS society'. A common reaction from devotees of cyberpunk is to boff this optimism about technology as 'cyberprep', but this is a simplistic 80's high school cafeteria analogy.

Technology has potential to alienate, but much of cyberpunk is based on this romantic hacker myth, abetted by zealous feds in an era where things like P2P, email, blogging, podcasting, and VoIP would be difficult to understand. Yes, the possibilities have been limited compared to both traditional science fiction and cyberpunk, but this is a consequence of both. Star Wars killed off the space opera, much like the car chase is now dead as a filmic device (observation of John Rogers, not me, but I vigorously support this). Likewise, AOL killed off cyberpunk by showing how much more powerful and consumerist the non-alienating aspects of computers would/could be. More likely in a progressive and direct sense the WELL is responsible more than AOL: after professional sci-fi writers began using the Internet without the massive social fragmentation which was predicted by cyberpunk, speculative literature along those lines was impossible to support.

Now the man-machine interface is also a key and original postcyberpunk theme and this ties into the current field which make for good futurist fodder: genomics, nanotech and holography. The ubiquity of the near-future makes postcyberpunk often a trivial label, but works recognized as postcyberpunk all have another commonality in dealing with the biological effects of techonology, leading to alternate terms such as biopunk or ribofunk. Dystopic tendencies still percolate through from cyberpunk, often with more pro-active and empowering libertarian twists. There is a greater respect for the early industrial age, especially in the steampunk aesthetic of say, a Victorian England version of an iPod. Notable authors include Stephenson and Doctorow, but popular works which fall under the banner include Transmetropolitan, The Fifth Element, Deus Ex and the Invisibles. These are a loose conglomeration, which suggests that more development is truly necessary for such a tendency to even be considered a literary movement. Still, it is my hope that the third season of GITS will be such a development.

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utrecht photoblogging 3: ask

on the Amsterdamstraatweg
A'damstraatweg again
Centraal Station bus platform

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utrecht photoblogging 2: commerce

Frieze over the Grocery Store Museum

A sign on the Voorstraat in that particular Utrecht Art Deco-ish style


Poffertjes! (at Vrendenburg Square market this week)

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Utrecht photoblogging 1: Jeruzalemstraat in the city center

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the elixir of vitality

"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and as sweet as love."
--Turkish Proverb

I am a curious adopter of fashion. I confound easy labels like 'early adopter' by coming to some things too late and other things too early. Like how I waited all summer to see Jurassic Park when it came out. I guess I could make the facile statement about the difficulty of change, but really change is such a constant force that I feel we should complain less about change in itself when really what we are complaining about is the rate at which change is occuring. That, to me, is more valid, although it still skirts the issue of context, namely that change is not an unmitigated good or evil.

Thus while we fear disruption of our daily routine, an opportunity to speed its progress will not be rejected based on it being an alteration. I bring this up because of an experience with one of my favorite possessions: the Philips Senseo coffeemaker, which brews single cups of coffee from prepackaged filter 'pods'. Truly the life of a graduate student is incomplete without such a device. However, academic life has never been known as a profitable gig, and many grad students like myself resent paying extra for coffee we could grind ourselves just because it has been fitted into a filter. The ability to make plastic replacement pods is thus a boon to commerce and the environment. And plsu now I can make Blue Mountain or Sulawesi in my Senseo, rather than if I relied on the podmakers to serve up such exotica.

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professional interest

As a longtime maker of mixtapes and related compliations, I will admit to being fascinating by how this is done professionally. So I really enjoyed this article in the New Yorker on 'audio branding' at Muzak (emph all mine)

A business’s background music is like an aural pheromone. It attracts some customers and repels others, and it gives pedestrians walking past the front door an immediate clue about whether they belong inside. A chain like J. C. Penney, whose huge customer base includes all ages and income levels, needs a program that will make everyone feel welcome, so its soundtrack contains familiar and relatively unassertive popular songs like “Kind and Generous,” by Natalie Merchant. The Hard Rock Hotel in Orlando, which appeals to a more narrowly focussed audience, plays “Girls, Girls, Girls,” by Mötley Crüe, and cranks up the volume. (Imagine how teen-agers would perceive the jeans and t-shirts at Abercrombie & Fitch—not a Muzak client—if those stores played country-and-Western hits.) Audio architects have to keep all this in mind as they build their programs. They also have to be aware of certain broad truths about background music: bass solos are difficult to hear, extended electric-guitar solos annoy male sports-bar customers, drum solos annoy almost everyone, and Bob Dylan’s harmonica can make it hard for office workers to concentrate. Audio architects also have to screen lyrics carefully. They removed the INXS hit “Devil Inside” from many of the company’s playlists after a devout Christian complained, and they are ever vigilant for the word “funk,” which almost everyone mistakes for something else

Lest you think its only about keeping dirty words from the ears of the devout, devotees of audio architecture (which is a phrase I love) seem inspired with their own fervent passion for all types of music more than eager to amp up the smooth jazz and dull the senses. Their digital collection

"includes seven hundred and seventy-five tracks recorded by the Beatles, a hundred and thirty by Kanye West, three hundred and twenty-four by Led Zeppelin, eighty-four by Gwen Stefani, a hundred and ninety-one by 50 Cent, and nine hundred and eighty-three by Miles Davis."

The license every genre and bit of music they can find in order to supply some exacting customers, like: a French-owned chocolatier in New York City.

“They want the program to include music from everyplace in the world where cocoa grows,” McKelvey told me. “It’s a challenge, to say the least, but it’s fun.” Shortly before we talked, she had been listening to lounge and rhythmic music from Brazil and West Africa, and to a number of less exotic songs, including familiar jazz tunes that she felt conveyed a mood of chocolate-appropriate romance.

Also the technical side is both growing more sophisticated and precise:

One of the techniques used at Muzak is dynamic range compression, which consists of turning down the loudest parts of a signal and then turning up the entire signal; it’s the reason that television commercials often seem louder than the programs they interrupt even though the commercials and the programs are technically limited to the same sound level. In addition, audio architects frequently use tracks as bridges between music from different eras—say, placing a Verve remix of a jazz standard between an Ella Fitzgerald classic and a recent release by Macy Gray. Tracks in the Well are catalogued not only by artist and title but also by producer, label, and date. Recordings from particular studios in particular eras often share a characteristic sound—like wines from particular vineyards and vintages—and some juxtapositions work better than others.

But as always, the secret to a good compliation is in the syntax, not the phonology(to use a trivial linguistic metaphor):

Take Armani Exchange. Shoppers there are looking for clothes that are hip and chic and cool. They’re twenty-five to thirty-five years old, and they want something to wear to a party or a club, and as they shop they want to feel like they’re already there. So you make the store sound like the coolest bar in town. You think about that when you pick the songs, and you pay special attention to the sequencing, and then you cross-fade and beat-match and never break the momentum, because you want the program to sound like a d.j.’s mix.” She went on, “For Ann Taylor, you do something completely different. The Ann Taylor woman is conservative, not edgy, and she really couldn’t care less about segues. She wants everything bright and positive and optimistic and uplifting, so you avoid offensive themes and lyrics, and you think about Sting and Celine Dion, and you leave a tiny space between the songs or gradually fade out and fade in.”

How soon before our iPods and other media devices will talk to the store and tell them what we like to listen to?

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peace in our time

This is why I love Arianna:

Let's face it, it's not exactly left-wing to come out against a $40-billion-dollar-a-year War on Drugs that has unfairly targeted people of color, siphoned resources from the war on terror, and pitted the government against its own people.

Nor is it left-wing to want to put an end to a War on Drugs that has turned into a war on America's minority communities. While blacks make up 13 percent of drug users, they account for 35 percent of those arrested for drug possession, 55 percent of those convicted, and 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. And the average prison term for black drug offenders is 69% longer [pdf] than for whites.

It's not left-wing. It's not right-wing. It's common sense. And it's why people from all parts of the political spectrum are finally speaking out on the issue.

As I've said before, on how many issues do Jesse Jackson, George Soros, Walter Cronkite, the ACLU, Cato, Bill Buckley, George Shultz and the Heritage Foundation agree?

We saw this left/right realignment played out on the issue of drug treatment vs. incarceration for nonviolent offenders here in California back in 2000 when Prop. 36 passed despite being solidly opposed by the state's Democratic political establishment, including Diane Feinstein and Gray Davis. The measure was supported by Republican Tom Campbell, then a member of the House, who until recently served as Gov. Schwarzenegger's finance director.

Campbell's influence is likely one of the reasons the Governor has thankfully earmarked another $120 million to continue funding of Prop. 36 in his next budget.

The other reason, of course, is that treatment flat-out works -- as a new study from UCLA proves. According to the study, diverting nonviolent first and second time drug offenders from jail into rehab has saved the taxpayers of California $800 million over the last five years.

What could be more conservative than that?

The only ones who don't seem convinced are our political leaders, who continue to hide on the issue -- just as so many of them are hiding on the war in Iraq. And they're doing it for the same reason: they are terrified of being seen as soft on defense, soft on the military, soft on terror, and soft on crime and drugs.

No one else in the blogging class even notices how big a problem the Drug War is for America. How miltiarizing the police force makes us less safe and less free. Punishing private consentual behavior, yes even if it includes heroin use, is against the spirit of liberty. Consider the wasteful interdiction efforts by US forces in Afghanistan: destroying poppy fields destroys both the livelihood of farmers and their goodwill towards American reconstructors. If instead, pharmaceutical companies could legally extract and process morphine-like compounds for medical use and development this could be used to siphon off poppies from illegal manufacture and provide a safe, quality-controlled palliative to the world. The same situation is being tentatively done in Bolivia following their recent election of a former coca farmer. In the US, the DEA schedules substances considering their potential risks and benefits. The scheduling process is arbitrary and not open to any sort of public review and with the wide-ranging power to eliminate whole classes of chemicals from scientific research. Marijuana, is considered so dangerous as to have no medical use, as is MDMA (esctasy) and newer substances you might not have heard of, like 5-MeO-DiPT(known as Foxy). However, two of the hardest drugs have medical uses considered by the DEA to be valid: heroin (heroin is simply the acetylized version of morphine) and cocaine, which is used in the US by dentists and eye surgeons as anaesthesia. Even meth is the derivative of the legal cold medicine pseudoephidrine. I can remember wondering why, working in a Cumberland Farms in 1999, these greasy white-trash guys would come in and buy all of the Sudafed stocked in the tiny OTC section. It seems most of the illegal substances on the 'medically useless' side are just there because they have the potential for recreational use, outisde of any consideration for health or responsible use. I know it is easy to wish you could legislate away all of the behavior of others that you find disgusting, but the problem of substance abuse will be solved by doctors not judges, counselors not counsel for the defense.

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alternative politique*

I'm not sure what to think about the riots in Paris right now over the CPE. But I can agree wholeheartedly with this manifesto:

Alternative France

By EDOUARD FILLIAS and SABINE HEROLD
April 11, 2006

PARIS -- For once, the French government understands the obvious link between the overregulation of labor and unemployment. But, once again, the French government is neither courageous nor convinced enough to make the necessary changes. The French "social system" has to be profoundly rethought, not timidly tweaked. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin preferred a tiny, inefficient and discriminatory measure -- the much-criticized "first jobs contract," or CPE -- to a real reform of the whole system. After weeks of confusion, President Jacques Chirac yesterday chose his favorite way out: immobility.

Mr. de Villepin's proposal for the CPE sparked massive protests. For weeks, students and unions organized strikes and demonstrations all over France. The French people have watched a new kind of soap opera, starring Messrs. Chirac and de Villepin and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy as they try to escape their self-inflicted "CPE-gate" scandal. The law was finally enacted April 1, but President Chirac asked employers not to use it. Then for an entire week Mr. de Villepin insisted that his proposal remained intact, even though it essentially was already dead. Meanwhile, Mr. Sarkozy desperately tried to protect his candidacy for next year's presidential elections by dancing around the issue. After another week of demonstrations, strikes and blockades, Mr. Chirac finally withdrew the bill.

Such a cynical political show will not put an end to the students' demonstrations and strikes. How could it? One might protest illegal blockades in high schools and universities, lament that old-fashioned unions and Trotskyist groups manipulate the youth, and regret that France remains incapable of reform. Yet the claim from the youth must be heard and taken into account. The recent demonstrations and subsequent violence, as well as the riots in the banlieues in November, express the same pain: French youth are in despair, and their despair is turning into rage.

Who could begrudge them such anger? What future is now offered to a 20-year-old French student? The state, facing bankruptcy, will force this youngster to fund his pensions as well as his parents', to pay overwhelming amounts for his monopolistic health insurance while reimbursements dramatically decrease, and to swallow the huge public debt that has been rung up by older generations. His studies have been decoupled from the needs of the job market and might never help him to find employment. Because his country lacks the courage to reform itself, it does not create jobs anymore and will drive him directly to long-term unemployment. It's a wonder the youth aren't even more upset.

The French political class seems unable to face up to this challenge. That is far from surprising. How could those who have driven France so close to collapse help her out now? And no matter how fervently the French hope for a leader sent from the gods to show us the right way, no so such leader exists -- or ever will.

Alternative Libérale dares to answer the French youth. Alternative Libérale is a young political party, as young as its leaders -- 27 and 24, respectively, in our cases. We don't worry about whether we should be called "liberal," "libertarian" or "free market." We aim only to create a free society. Our project is to transform our state so that it serves French citizens, not vice versa. We believe in freedom of choice in any area of human life, whether it's the economy, social issues or values. In all respects, we want to give the French their freedom back: freedom to choose the school where they want their children to be taught, freedom to negotiate their working conditions, freedom to choose their health insurance, freedom of speech on any issue. France is dying from its lack of freedom.

Our country needs to find ways beyond those usually shown by the conservative and socialist parties. Our party embodies a new kind of politics. More than 1,000 people have joined us since we were created less than a year ago. Local chapters have been set up in more than 50 cities. Our values are as strong as our determination is deep. We will hold firmly our message and proposals in favor of freedom and responsibility in the political arena. We will offer the French a new path, authentically classically liberal: Alternative Libérale.

Mr. Fillias is president, and Ms. Herold spokeswoman, of Alternative Libérale.

I wish the Liberal Alternative wasn't so besmirched in the USA. Perhaps France can shift away from the facile left-right descriptors of political movements...
*please excuse the total lack of accenture and other egreious linguistic crimes

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bring out the GIMP

I love free software. After twice trying to reinstall Photoshop and being frustrated by some annoying activation service, I have installed the free and open source GNU Image Manipulation Program. Unlike Photoshop, GIMP has a very gentle learning curve. I've already done a few tests for a new logo prototype:As a proper linguist, I suppose I should think more carefully about branding and word style in the logo design, but GIMP turns out to be less prosumer and more end-user aking change easy to implement. However, I feel I have only scratched the service of what this can do.

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