Truth in Typesetting Department:
Ordinarily, the first sentence of this Talking Points Memo article—
We already told you how True the Vote, the anti-voter fraud effort launched by a Texas Tea Party group, had lined up two of the biggest stars on the anti-voter fraud circuit for their upcoming national convention.
—would spawn a mini-rant on the proper use of hyphens and en-dashes when hyphenating an adjectival phrase whose components are themselves hyphenates: “anti-voter–fraud circuit,” it should be.
But, as most right-wing allegations of voter fraud are themselves fraudulent, and as the steps they take to remediate this non-existent fraud are overwhelmingly anti-voter? —Well. In this particular instance, I have no complaints.
Mission accomplished.
“So the new laws are inconveniencing law-abiding people who want to treat cold and allergy symptoms, have had either zero or a positive effect on meth use, have lured new people into the meth trade, and have created a bigger market for smuggling meth and meth ingredients into the country from Mexico.” —Radley Balko
Extispicy.
From various browser tabs, left open after a morning’s desultory surf—
The American Society of Magazine Editors has this yearly conference where they all get together and jerk off and talk about where they are and where the culture is. So they invited me down a few years ago and asked me to talk about the Esquire covers and tell everybody to stop doing terrible covers, or something like that. I was like, “So you want me to come down and bust balls? Okay.” Just about every editor and publisher in America was there, and I just ripped their eyeballs out. Every magazine except maybe Vanity Fair and the New Yorker was complicit in the Iraq war. I gave them the whole thing about weapons of mass destruction and said, “Every one of you sons of bitches is complicit in what’s going on over there.” They were all, “Oooohhhh.” Ten minutes later I did a little bit more of it [mimes clapping his hands together to demonstrate their applause], and then half an hour later I really ripped into them about the war and I got a standing ovation. All the while I’m talking about why they can’t do good covers, and I’m showing mine at the same time.
And in the end?
Afterward there was a line—about 200 of them—waiting to talk to me. I’m signing stuff, and it’s all bullshit! They all keep doing the same crap. They’re not even trying. It’s so ignorant. Why would you want your magazine to look like the other guys’ magazines? It doesn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t you want to run a cover image that rips your lungs out?
—Vice, the George Lois interview
Reader Gary P sent me an e-mail about a Planet Money list of “must read” economics books. I had toyed with posting on it, held off because I have a wee conflict of interest as an an author of a book decidedly critical of mainstream economics, but the biases evident in the NPR piece have been nagging at me.
If nothing else, this tally should dispel any idea that NPR is left-leaning.
—Yves Smith, “NPR’s ‘Must Read,’ As in Orthodoxy-Promoting, Economics Books”
Lewis’ need to anchor his tale in personalities results in a skewed misreading of the subprime crisis and why and how it got as bad as it did. The group of short sellers he celebrates were minor-leaguers compared to the likes of Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and John Paulson. But no one on the short side of these trades, large or small, should be seen as any kind of a stalwart hero and defender of capitalism. Circumstances converged to create a perfect storm of folly on the buy side, beginning with essentially fraudulent mortgage originations at ground level, which the short-sellers—whether trading at the multimillion or multibillion dollars level—took advantage of. That they walked away with large profits may be enviable, but there was nothing valiant about it. In the end, Main Street, having been desolated by a mortgage-driven housing bust, now found itself the buyer of last resort of Wall Street’s garbage.
—Yves Smith, “Debunking Michael Smith’s Subprime Short Hagiography”
The last week has seen an endless discussion, within the political blogosphere, about the meaning of rhetoric, extremism, and what is acceptable discourse. I’m on break now, so I’ve been more attentive than usual. I find I can barely express what a profound failure, on balance, the conversation has been. Bloggers fail to have this conversation honestly because they are incapable of seeing or unwilling to admit that the political discourse, in our punditry, lacks a left wing.
—Freddie deBoer, “the blindspot”
When the police start killing random citizens out of spite, and then a newly revolutionary army goes a head and deputizes everyone with a knife or stick, it really brings out the worst and best in people.
There was one drunken fat man, whose breath smelled of liquor who was wielding dual butcher knives. He kept threatening other volunteers and vandalizing things and eventually people made him leave.
Most of the people were extremely inspirational and there were some people who took it upon themselves to be sort of leaders or messengers and ran from corner to corner, letting people know what was up. In my neighborhood the people who were doing this were two old men, and (implausibly) one young woman.
The young woman, named Leila spoke some English. She said “you are in our country, in our revolution” I started to say “I just don’t want anyone taking my shit or shooting at my house” but she cut me off “you should get citizenship here, like Che in Cuba.”
My motives are far from revolutionary, and she was totally busting my balls, but it still felt nice.
—methalif, “Next Morning”
For the media dissemination of the uprising, yes, the Internet has replaced the media. The Tunisians have become the reporters on the social networks. Five years ago, without Facebook and Twitter, the same uprising would have been smothered.
The demands of the people: down with Internet censorship, freedom of expression… down with the corrupt regime.
—S, from Karin Kosina vka kyrah’s “The role of the Internet in the revolutionary uprising in Tunisia: a conversation with someone who was there”
As with most nationalist parties resisting colonial rule in the Middle East, the leadership of the Neo-Destour was initially comprised of a small section of the intelligentsia, university graduates who resented the colonial jackboot and the Tunis-based grand familles who connived with the colonists. These educated elites were offspring of the emerging Sahel bourgeoisie, who needed to mobilise the peasantry and the emerging proletariat, without fundamentally altering the relations of subjection and exploitation in which the latter were held. As usual, there was an emphasis on regenerating national culture, and modernising the better to resist colonial domination. But, there was also the particular element of hatred for the crusading policy of the French Catholic church under Cardinal Lavigerie, the French empire’s supernal advocate. Thus, the Neo-Destours emphasised the protection of Islamic traditions, attempting to mobilise them as elements of the national identity they sought to “restore.”
—lenin, “The rise and fall of Tunisia’s Ceauşescu”
“Tastemakers beware,” the subhead warns, “the audience is no longer interested in your opinion.”
What? Say it ain’t so! Mr. Gabler begins with the assertion that, “as anyone who has ever wiggled in his seat at a classical music concert or stared in disbelief at a work of conceptual art can attest, culture in America has usually been imposed from the top down.” And what about the vastly larger segment of the population who avoid such egghead pastimes altogether? They are the heroes of Mr. Gabler’s article, which is about how an anonymous band of “democrats” overthrew the forces of “official” culture as embodied by “media executives, academics, elite tastemakers and of course critics.”
These people, also characterized as “cultural imperialists” and “commissars,” have conducted a long and tireless campaign to force everyone else to look at conceptual art and go to classical music. “For over 200 years,” Mr. Gabler writes, “normal Americans have longed to exercise their independence and free themselves form the tyranny of the elitists.” And now, apparently, that nightmare of oppression is over.
—A.O. Scott, “Defy the Elite! Wait, Which Elite?”
They can’t be human, but they look so human.
—Christopher Higgs, “Notes on Frans Zwatjes’s Living (1971)”
According to the Inglipnomicon, the rise of Inglip and his faith began on January 8th, 2011, with the following events.
—Susana Polo, “Praise Lord Inglip, From Whom All Blessings Flow”
Leave Sarah alone!
One of the more frustrating things about the “blood libel” furore was seeing so many people knock Sarah Palin and her speechwriters for the ghastly misuse. She just read it from a teleprompter, people. —C.W. Anderson does the legwork for you.
Wer doin it worng.
A particularly powerful Glenn Greenwald column commended to your attention.
Fuck a bunch a God.
Cindy Jacobs is a snake-oil huckster with a stack of unsold books to move who’s decided to tell us all that the blackbirds of Beebe were slaughtered by God because we went against His will and repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
To which I can only say, God? Next time You want to send a message? —Try Western Union. The only moral, ethical, righteous, human response to a God that is this cruel and this petty and this smarmily vain, this pathetic, is to turn and walk away.
“In a just universe, you burn in Hell. Forever.” —If so, dear God, fuck You. You made us better than You knew.
Testify.
Chairperson
Mr. Slackmeyer, wouldn’t you agree that the most indefensible aspect of your tax cut proposals is the unconscionable way in which they favor the rich?
Phil Slackmeyer
No, sir, I certainly would not. If we’re going to avoid an economic Anzio, then we have to move boldly. We can’t afford to engage in a fiscal Battle of Midway without our captains of industry! From past experience, we know that the well-heeled are the only class that can be depended on to put their tax cuts into savings and investments.
Chairperson
And the poor?
Slackmeyer
Studies show they tend to blow it all at the track.
On a clear day you can see forever.
Julian Assange : Tim Berners-Lee :: Martin Luther : Johannes Gutenberg
Signs and portents.
Driving down Hawthorne this morning I saw that at some point over the holiday weekend someone had spraypainted “Wiki-Leakes” in red across the windows of the Bank of America branch by the Fred Meyer. This poor schlub in corporate mufti was out trying to scrape it clean. —It's gonna be a year, 2011.
Victorious.
There is, of course, a limit to how much Assange can win. In the US, officials are finding that while there were certainly structural reasons like expanded technology and overclassification behind the theft of the leaked documents, practical reasons were equally important. Thanks to an imperative from then commander of the U.S. Central Command David Petraeus and others to share information with allies on improvised explosive devices and other threats, the Central Command allowed the downloading of data from its secret in-house network, SIPRNet, to removable storage devices, officials tell TIME. The information was then carried to computers linked to secret networks used by allies and uploaded. The process was derisively called “sneaker net,” because it was so inefficient, although it replaced the prior need to manually retype all information into the allied computers.
New restrictions on downloading media have been imposed over the past six months, restoring the restrictions that existed before the leaks. That may be one victory for the US.
—Massimo Calabresi, “Why WikiLeaks is Winning its Info War”
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.
Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.
—Julian Assange, “The non linear effects of leaks on unjust systems of governance“
Molester, pervert, disgusting, an embarrassment, creep.
The hard hard work of increasing US and decreasing THEM is never ever done.
Why SF doesn’t work any more.
On the one hand, there’s earnest little think-pieces like this, that limn lively ideas whose time’s long since come, whose time’s been settled for a good long while now in the chair over there by the door, tapping its toe, looking at its watch; basic, simple ideas, easy to communicate, desperately necessary, more than able to carry us through the state in which we seem to have stuck ourselves:
As productivity increases, we seem faced with a choice between environmental disaster or massive unemployment. Unless, of course, we slow down by reducing working hours and sharing the work. Half a century of economic growth has not increased our happiness. More free time might well do so. It will certainly improve our health.
And on the other, there’s a couple of septaugenarian billionaires who’ve decided in their wisdom to poison the none-too-healthy political discourse of the United States, skirting genocidal levels of ethnic hatred; to pillage and loot the remnants of the vibrant middle class that was this country’s finest achievement, the whole point of all that hullabaloo of freedom and liberty; to repeat until we all can’t help but say ourselves: we can no longer afford to take care of the things we’ve built, the schools we need, the art we love, the friends and relations too old, too ill, unlucky at just the wrong time; they’ve coldly plotted, these two, the murder of millions if not billions of people yet to come, just as any supervillain might; they decree that my daughter and your son must live lives so much smaller than they possibly could have been, so much meaner than they potentially could be—and all because these two men in some abstract sense feel they are not making enough money, here and now; in some abstract sense (which no doubt they could explain to you at some length, with charts and diagrams), they feel they pay too much in taxes.
(Meanwhile? The nominally leftist party in this country, on the verge of historic midterm defeats, is standing up for unpopular tax cuts for the rich and quietly working to gut the last vestiges of its former triumphs.)
And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
(Yes, Papa. We know. They have more money. —Watch how big that more becomes, you let it grow unchecked a bit.)
And I will spit on your grave.
In 2006, my attention (such as it is) was captured by the story of one David H. Brooks, who hired 50 Cent and Don Henley and Stevie Nicks and Ærosmith to play his daughter’s bat mitzvah with the profits he made from a sweetheart deal selling inadequate supplies of substandard body armor to our sub-minimum-wage soldiers in Iraq. —How inadequate and substandard? Studies demonstrated that 80% of Marine casualties with upper body wounds could have survived with better (or any) armor. —How sweet? When that study was leaked, soldiers who’d scrimped and saved to buy their own superior armor were suddenly ordered to leave it home, to avoid any possible hurt feelings on the part of a certain David H. Brooks.
And then it receded into the mists of who the fuck can possibly do a damn thing about it? —Why, even today, when a progressive regime has finally triumphed over the forces of evil to take both cameras and the White House itself, a two-year investigation by one of our preëminent journalistic organs that demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt the staggering waste and corruption endemic to the shadow cabinets that are tasked with keeping us safe inspires little more than yawns. —How much worse our apathy and despair in the deeps of the Bushian aught-naughts! What chance had any of us then against such a banal kernel of evil as this David H. Brooks?
And so I let it go. What more was there to say?
—Today, I followed a cryptic link from William Gibson’s Twitter feed, and I read this article with a mounting sense of—well, I’m not sure what the word is. But:
Several years ago, David H. Brooks, the chief executive and chairman of a body-armor company enriched by United States military contracts, became fixated on the idea of a memory-erasing pill.
It was not just fanciful curiosity. A veterinarian who cared for his stable of racehorses said Mr. Brooks continually talked about the subject, pressing him repeatedly to supply the pill. According to Dr. Seth Fishman, the veterinarian, Mr. Brooks said he had a specific recipient in mind: Dawn Schlegel, the former chief financial officer of the company he led until 2006, DHB Industries.
There is no memory-erasing pill. And so Mr. Brooks sat and listened this year as Ms. Schlegel, her memory apparently intact and keen, spent 23 days testifying against him in a highly unusual trial in United States District Court on Long Island that has been highlighted by sweeping accusations of fraud, insider trading, and company-financed personal extravagance.
DHB, which specialized in making body armor used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, paid for more than $6 million in personal expenses on behalf of Mr. Brooks, covering items as expensive as luxury cars and as prosaic as party invitations, Ms. Schlegel testified.
Also included were university textbooks for his daughter, pornographic videos for his son, plastic surgery for his wife, a burial plot for his mother, prostitutes for his employees, and, for him, a $100,000 American-flag belt buckle encrusted with rubies, sapphires and diamonds.
And—it isn’t schadenfreude, no; this is something colder, older; a little frightening, really: I went and poured myself a shot of bourbon to dull the edge a bit, but then I went and read it again:
Mr. Brooks, who his lawyers have said is in a “tenuous emotional state,” has watched much of the proceedings with glassy eyes and a nervous demeanor.
They straight up just lost nine billion dollars of our money in saran-wrapped bundles dropped in the dust of Iraq.
They’re coming for Social Security, the one thing the Republicans couldn’t wreck when they were running the show, because we just can’t afford it anymore.
It may not be enough compensation to one day use the last of the money in my pocket to hie myself to some Long Island cemetery, there to spit on the grave of this particular David H. Brooks.
It’ll probably have to do.
Ichorous, squamous, and rugose.
“I would have given a lot to be at Rush Limbaugh’s wedding last night, where Elton John (his fee a reported 1 million bucks) performed for America’s leading homophobe, and not only because I would have enjoyed that moral dichotomy. I imagine the event to have been more rite than celebration, a frog on a throne, something darker than blood flowing from the champagne fountain, some tincture of BP spill mingled with something more Lovecraftian, a conjunction of Bacchanalian and Bactrian purposes and flavors. I’m certain it was just the usual bad taste scenario, overweight men flirting with women half their age, a toga party for grown ups, as we’ve seen before with certain corporate entertainments; but you can’t completely disassociate the idea of ancient evil from Limbaugh’s buffoonish act. He’s the clown at the party of the damned, dressed in a froggy zipskin suit and playing with a string of mummified human hearts, flicking out his whiplike tongue to snag Viagra from a crystal bowl.” —Lucius Shepard
“You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”
So, right: the default response to a post from John C. Wright, then, turns out to be exactly the same as the default punchline to a New Yorker cartoon. (—And I have to keep reminding myself: this is from the intellectual end of the rump.)
Important events, and important ideas.
Oodles of channels of 24-hour news, moldering reams of newspapers that will not die, 127 goddamn feeds in my goddamn Google newsreader, and I’m only now finding out that Utah Phillips died sometime last year? —Somebody’s priorities are way the hell out of whack.
