All Intensive Purposes

Madrid (3)
New York (2)
Rome (2)
Florence (2)
Houston
London
Paris
Colmar, France
The Hague
Basel
Syracuse, Sicily
Naples
Moscow
St. Petersburg
Cairo
Cape Town

// posted by t.s. @ 8:02 PM 1 Comments

The most corrupt and worthless pundits are those who never do anything other than spout the most conventional and recent partisan wisdom -- even if it directly contradicts what they had repeatedly said in the past -- and who always pretend that they possess the superior wisdom even when they have been so plainly wrong about everything. It's that dynamic that explains how hordes of Bush followers in the public sphere (such as Noonan) who spent years loyally defending his every step -- and demonizing those who opposed him ("criticizing the Commander-in-Chief during a time of war") -- are now posturing as hard-nosed critics who, all along, realized that Bush wasn't a "real conservative" and was too flawed for the job.

One thing that you can say about Bush is that, by and large, he doesn't change. Any basis for criticizing him has been glaringly apparent for quite some time. All that has changed is the fact that he is now wildly unpopular and that his failures are too glaring for most to deny. Because of that dramatic change -- and for no other reason -- these Bush-worshipping pundits are desperate to shed their Bush-following skin and pretend that they have been open-eyed realists and critics all along.

// posted by t.s. @ 7:27 PM 0 Comments

How, then, to explain the much more frequent patches of bad -- really bad -- writing in "Thirteen Moons"? This starts with the book's very first sentences, which are so awful that they beg to be read aloud: "There is no scatheless rapture. Love and time put me in this condition. I am leaving soon for the Nightland, where all the ghosts of men and animals yearn to travel." To be sure, there were plenty of passages like this in "Cold Mountain" -- of prose that somehow managed to be simultaneously potentous, folksy and cloying, like banjo music on the soundtrack of a Ken Burns documentary. But the volume in "Thirteen Moons" has been cranked up considerably.

The problem, I think, is that Frazier writes almost exclusively to create effects. He seems to be in love with the supposed gorgeousness of his own prose, a backdrop against which his characters emerge merely as dim figures, without consistent motivations or even personalities. Tolstoy and Virgil -- and, come to think of it, Margaret Mitchell -- credibly describe human beings driven by ambition, greed, drunkenness, and fickle lust. Frazier can't even get the drunkenness right. When Will is reunited with an old Cherokee buddy, "at a certain point of whiskey camaraderie, we contested to name all the colors the mountains and their foliage are able to take on. . . . We went on down the colors, even all the purples, including puce. And the yellows including cadmium." Now that's what I'd call a couple of tough old-timers, getting plastered and chitchatting about cadmium and puce! (Unfortunately, they run through the rest of the color spectrum, as well.)

// posted by t.s. @ 6:00 AM 0 Comments

[T]he Palestinian people . . . have not shown that they are yet capable of political reason . . . [and] are, in so far as reasonableness is concerned, as deficient as those who studied them as Arabs thought them to be.

// posted by t.s. @ 9:19 AM 3 Comments

Lady "was really perky, and happy, and generally excited to see you when you came in the door every day," recalls Andrew Mirsch.

But that was before the Mirsch family moved into a new house.

"We noticed Lady spending an awful lot of time down by the pond in our backyard," Laura Mirsch recalls.

Lady would wander the area, disoriented and withdrawn, soporific and glassy-eyed.

"Then, late one night after I'd put the dogs out, Lady wouldn't come in," Laura Mirsch says. "She finally staggered over to me from the cattails. She looked up at me, leaned her head over and opened her mouth like she was going to throw up, and out plopped this disgusting toad."

It turned out the toads were toxic -- and, if licked, the fluids on their skin provided a hallucinogenic effect.

What followed was the Mirsch family's quest to stop their cocker spaniel from indulging herself. But it wasn't easy. Lady was persistent, and resourceful.

The situation seemed to resolve itself when the toads went into hibernation for the winter.

But when they returned, so did Lady -- and with a vengeance.

"We couldn't keep our dog's addiction a secret any longer," Laura Mirsch says. "The neighbors all knew that Lady was a drug addict, and soon the other dogs weren't allowed to play with her."

In the end, Lady seems to have found a way to manage her problem.

"She seems to have outgrown the wild toad-obsessed years of her youth," Mirsch says, "and now only sucks on weekends."

// posted by t.s. @ 7:42 PM 0 Comments

--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl

--AZ-01: Rick Renzi

--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth

--CA-04: John Doolittle

--CA-11: Richard Pombo

--CA-50: Brian Bilbray

--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave

--CO-05: Doug Lamborn

--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell

--CT-04: Christopher Shays

--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan

--FL-16: Joe Negron

--FL-22: Clay Shaw

--ID-01: Bill Sali

--IL-06: Peter Roskam

--IL-10: Mark Kirk

--IL-14: Dennis Hastert

--IN-02: Chris Chocola

--IN-08: John Hostettler

--IA-01: Mike Whalen

--KS-02: Jim Ryun

--KY-03: Anne Northup

--KY-04: Geoff Davis

--MD-Sen: Michael Steele

--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht

--MN-06: Michele Bachmann

--MO-Sen: Jim Talent

--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns

--NV-03: Jon Porter

--NH-02: Charlie Bass

--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson

--NM-01: Heather Wilson

--NY-03: Peter King

--NY-20: John Sweeney

--NY-26: Tom Reynolds

--NY-29: Randy Kuhl

--NC-08: Robin Hayes

--NC-11: Charles Taylor

--OH-01: Steve Chabot

--OH-02: Jean Schmidt

--OH-15: Deborah Pryce

--OH-18: Joy Padgett

--PA-04: Melissa Hart

--PA-07: Curt Weldon

--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick

--PA-10: Don Sherwood

--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee

--TN-Sen: Bob Corker

--VA-Sen: George Allen

--VA-10: Frank Wolf

--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick

--WA-08: Dave Reichert

// posted by t.s. @ 5:48 PM 0 Comments

If one disregards the recent removal of three zeroes from the local currency and its 60 per cent devaluation, it takes less than 50p to turn one of Robert Mugabe's "comrades" into a local millionaire on the country's black market.

The latest "official" rate for the pound is Z$470, with the black market figure Z$2,300. This compares with an exchange rate of Z$2 to £1 in 1980, the year Mr Mugabe assumed office. With a current inflation rate of up to almost 4 per cent a day - 1,200 per cent a year - the octogenarian nationalist leader, who has cheated his way into power in at least two elections, has vowed to keep the money presses rolling.

This will not help the inflation rate; only the volume of paper currency that individuals need to carry around. Ahead of his zero-trimming wheeze, money was mostly handled in elastic-banded "bricks" of Z$20,000 and Z$50,000 notes (the Z$11m version was about three-inches thick). On current form, the bricks will be returning soon.

Yet while everyone complains, no one begs, people are generally well dressed and mobile phones deafen the smog-filled streets when petrol is available. It is more than puzzling. How, then, are people surviving? And why is conventional economic theory not working? First, about one-quarter of Zimbabwe's population has fledMr Mugabe's administration's loose grip, with about 3m in South Africa, 1m in the UK and many of the rest in the US. Of the Zimbabweans who stay, the unemployed (80 per cent) and those infected with HIV/Aids (at least 35 per cent) have become almost invisible, most having returned to their tribal homes to live and die inexpensively. For them, inflation is not a problem so long as they can grow their own food.

The relatively small political, professional and entrepreneurial classes subsist well, many of the former on huge government salaries, perks and corruption. Most professionals charge fees at South African rates while the businessmen trade, trade and trade again. So long as they can buy and sell quickly, they can keep ahead of inflation.

For the rest - the employee middle class - life is hard, with inflation constantly eating away at earnings and savings. Into this group fall the military and the police, to whom Mr Mugabe has given regular, inflation-linked increases to buy their loyalty. Meanwhile, a combination of unrelated factors keep the economy afloat.

First and foremost is the support of Zimbabwe's neighbour, South Africa, whose president, Thabo Mbeki, cannot bring himself to disapprove of a fellow nationalist revolutionary, whateverMr Mugabe's despotic behaviour or economic mismanagement.

Second, Mr Mugabe's 5m disaffected citizens working abroad send money back to their unemployed and starving relatives and friends, a sum thought to be worth US$100m a year.

Third, shopkeepers keep going through a system of "runners", who travel with mostly black marketforeign currency to neighbouring Zambia, Botswana, South Africa and Mozambique to buy both necessities and luxuries.

Fourth, Zimbabwe is not finding it too difficult to sell its deposits of chrome, gold, silver, platinum, copper and asbestos.

Finally, while tourism is dead on its feet, game-shooting is thriving. For almost every flight from abroad several 4x4s are waiting, with padlocked lockers containing high-powered guns. In attendance are bronzed, khaki-shorted former farmers holding up name cards of wealthy Americans, Britons, Russians and Germans who have paid big bucks to shoot elephant, lion, leopard, kudu, crocodile and rhinoceros.

// posted by t.s. @ 8:56 PM 0 Comments

"It was pine tar. It couldn't be anything else. Pitchers use pine tar, shaving cream and suntan lotion. Pitchers use them to help them grip the ball and make the ball move more. Bullpen guys sometimes keep suntan lotion in the ball bags. It's not for a tan. Pine tar works the best. It's been around the longest. But lately, more and more guys are using shaving cream and suntan lotion. There's no chance to be caught with shaving cream or suntan lotion. . . .

"I am guessing Rogers didn't really know how to use pine tar, because he put too much on. It probably spread from his glove to the palm of his hand.

"You have to try to be inconspicuous about it. He probably put the pine tar on the glove but it started to leak and build up on his hand. There was nothing he could do about it. It started to cake up too much. Pine tar also makes a stain on the ball. . . .

"He definitely was using pine tar. It can cake with pine tar and rosin. Maybe after the second inning, he went back to the shaving cream and added moisture. I'd say he was either hiding it better or he went back to the shaving cream or suntan lotion.

// posted by t.s. @ 7:29 PM 0 Comments

[W]hy are Western men so obsessed with Muslim women's attire? Even British government ministers Gordon Brown and John Reid have made disparaging remarks about the nikab -- and they hail from across the Scottish border, where men wear skirts.

When I converted to Islam and began wearing a headscarf, the repercussions were enormous. All I did was cover my head and hair -- but I instantly became a second-class citizen. I knew I'd hear from the odd Islamophobe, but I didn't expect so much open hostility from strangers. Cabs passed me by at night, their "for hire" lights glowing. One cabbie, after dropping off a white passenger right in front of me, glared at me when I rapped on his window, then drove off. Another said, "Don't leave a bomb in the back seat" and asked, "Where's bin Laden hiding?"

Yes, it is a religious obligation for Muslim women to dress modestly, but the majority of Muslim women I know like wearing the hijab, which leaves the face uncovered, though a few prefer the nikab. It is a personal statement: My dress tells you that I am a Muslim and that I expect to be treated respectfully, much as a Wall Street banker would say that a business suit defines him as an executive to be taken seriously. And, especially among converts to the faith like me, the attention of men who confront women with inappropriate, leering behavior is not tolerable.

I was a Western feminist for many years, but I've discovered that Muslim feminists are more radical than their secular counterparts. We hate those ghastly beauty pageants, and tried to stop laughing in 2003 when judges of the Miss Earth competition hailed the emergence of a bikini-clad Miss Afghanistan, Vida Samadzai, as a giant leap for women's liberation. They even gave Samadzai a special award for "representing the victory of women's rights."

Some young Muslim feminists consider the hijab and the nikab political symbols, too, a way of rejecting Western excesses such as binge drinking, casual sex and drug use. What is more liberating: being judged on the length of your skirt and the size of your surgically enhanced breasts, or being judged on your character and intelligence? In Islam, superiority is achieved through piety -- not beauty, wealth, power, position or sex.

[F]or those who are still trying to claim that Islam oppresses women, recall this 1992 statement from the Rev. Pat Robertson, offering his views on empowered women: Feminism is a "socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

Now you tell me who is civilized and who is not.

// posted by t.s. @ 7:38 PM 0 Comments

In “Steel Drivin’ Man,” Scott Reynolds Nelson argues that the John Henry story was no tall tale, and Henry himself no myth. Historians have long speculated that the John Henry ballads, which began circulating in the 1870’s, referred to a real railroad worker, but Mr. Nelson, with extensive documentation in hand, proposes a candidate. His John Henry is a former Union soldier, imprisoned for theft while on a work assignment in Richmond, Va., and leased out with other inmates to blast tunnels through the Allegheny Mountains for the new Chesapeake & Ohio Railway.

. . . Mr. Nelson . . . stumbled on his evidence while writing “Iron Confederacies,” a study of Southern railroads during Reconstruction. In the early 1870’s, he found, large numbers of convicts from the Virginia State Penitentiary died while working on the C&O Railway. Recalling a version of the John Henry ballad with the lines, “They took John Henry to the white house, and buried him in the san’,” he made a connection: the main building of the penitentiary was white. Nearby, in 1992, workers demolishing the prison had dug up about 300 skeletons. Mr. Nelson ransacked state archives and came up with the name of a prisoner: John William Henry.

The historical record is sketchy, but most of the verifiable facts about Mr. Nelson’s John Henry make him plausible as the real steel-driving man. First, of course, is the name. In addition, Henry worked on the team assigned to drill the Lewis Tunnel in West Virginia, where steam drills were put to the test against workers with hammers. By 1874 he has disappeared from prison records, with no mention of pardon, parole or release, strongly suggesting that he died while working on the railroads and not inside the prison, where his death would have been recorded.

So who was John Henry? Mr. Nelson can do no more than offer a tantalizingly incomplete biography. He was from New Jersey and, in some capacity, worked for the Union Army at City Point, a landing near Petersburg, Va., in 1866, when he was 18. In April of that year he was arrested for stealing from a grocery store and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was sent to the Virginia State Penitentiary, where the warden, desperate to raise revenue, had begun leasing prisoners to the railroad for 25 cents a day. John Henry was one.

. . . [T]unnel drilling involved . . . manual workers with hammer and chisel and . . . new steam drills that promised a cheaper, quicker way to bore the holes that workers filled with blasting material. The hammer man worked in partnership with a shaker, who would hold a chisel-like drill against mountain rock, while the hammer man struck a powerful blow with a sledgehammer. Then the shaker would begin rocking and rolling: wiggling and rotating the drill to optimize its bite. Work songs like the early John Henry ballads, often rhythmic chants with no melody, set the pace and synchronized the movements of hammer man and shaker.

As Mr. Nelson tells it, the contest between worker and machine was less than equal. A smoothly coordinated human team had an advantage over the early drills, which constantly broke down. The machines were highly efficient, however, at generating clouds of silicon dust. Contrary to the picture presented by the ballads, John Henry would have died not of exhaustion or a burst heart, but of silicosis, a fatal, fast-moving lung disease that took the lives of hundreds of railroad workers.

// posted by t.s. @ 8:59 PM 0 Comments

Don't condemn the entire G.O.P.

// posted by t.s. @ 4:34 PM 0 Comments

Sacred water, huckleberry juice, wolf teats—Thirteen Moons, you may have guessed, is a catalog of faux naive Americana. Much of the book is written in a "ye olde" diction: People go "a-roving," and get "a-plenty of oats," and "travel retrograde to [their] anger," whatever that means. It's a yokely-dokely pastiche, of Faulkner (by way of Toni Morrison) and of the King James Bible (by way of Jack Handy), and it is to the actual American idiom, past or present, roughly what the Rainforest Café is to the Amazon basin.

// posted by t.s. @ 7:30 PM 2 Comments

Sir,

Your report on Robert Putnam's research ("Harvard study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity", October 9), by focusing almost exclusively on the challenge posed by ethnic diversity, painted a distorted picture of his research, as reflected in his recent inaugural lecture at the University of Manchester. Prof Putnam spoke here on the topic "E Pluribus Unum: Immigration, diversity, and community", based on his September 30 2006 Skytte Prize lecture (soon to be published in Scandinavian Political Studies). The talk made three points: the first was that immigration and increasing ethnic diversity are both inevitable and beneficial in all modern societies. Immigrants comprise a vastly disproportionate share of America's Nobel Laureates, for example.

The second was that, in the short term, ethnic diversity challenges community cohesion.

The third was that, in the longer term, successful immigrant societies renew their cohesion by deconstructing lines of ethnic difference and constructing a new, more capacious sense of "we". Among the techniques for achieving this objective, Putnam said, are national symbolism, education, and popular culture. A generation ago, he reminded us, Americans spoke of "Jewish humour", but nowadays people think of Woody Allen as an American comedian, not a Jewish comedian. As the very title of the Putnam lecture indicated, he focused on creating "one out of many".

The FT article focused only on the second point.

Alistair Ulph,

Vice-President and Dean of
the Faculty of Humanities,
University of Manchester,
Manchester M13 9PL

// posted by t.s. @ 6:49 PM 0 Comments

His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone - from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.

This is a contentious finding in the current climate of concern about the benefits of immigration. Professor Putnam told the Financial Times he had delayed publishing his research until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it "would have been irresponsible to publish without that".

The core message of the research was that, "in the presence of diversity, we hunker down", he said. "We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don't trust people who do look like us."

Prof Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, "the most diverse human habitation in human history", but his findings also held for rural South Dakota, where "diversity means inviting Swedes to a Norwegians' picnic".

When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. "They don't trust the local mayor, they don't trust the local paper, they don't trust other people and they don't trust institutions," said Prof Putnam. "The only thing there's more of is protest marches and TV-watching."

// posted by t.s. @ 8:33 PM 3 Comments

Most Surreal Moment - Watching Marines arrive at my detention facility and unload a truck load of flex-cuffed midgets. 26 to be exact. I had put the word out earlier in the day to the Marines in Fallujah that we were looking for Bad Guy X, who was described as a midget. Little did I know that Fallujah was home to a small community of midgets, who banded together for support since they were considered as social outcasts. The Marines were anxious to get back to the midget colony to bring in the rest of the midget suspects, but I called off the search, figuring Bad Guy X was long gone on his short legs after seeing his companions rounded up by the giant infidels.

Most Profound Man in Iraq - an unidentified farmer in a fairly remote area who, after being asked by Reconnaissance Marines (searching for Syrians) if he had seen any foreign fighters in the area replied "Yes, you."

Coolest Insurgent Act - Stealing almost $7 million from the main bank in Ramadi in broad daylight, then, upon exiting, waving to the Marines in the combat outpost right next to the bank, who had no clue of what was going on. The Marines waved back. Too cool.

Biggest Outrage - Practically anything said by talking heads on TV about the war in Iraq, not that I get to watch much TV. Their thoughts are consistently both grossly simplistic and politically slanted. Biggest offender - Bill O'Reilly - what a buffoon.

Best Intel Work - Finding Jill Carroll's kidnappers - all of them. I was mighty proud of my guys that day. I figured we'd all get the Christian Science Monitor for free after this, but none have showed up yet. Talk about ingratitude.

// posted by t.s. @ 7:44 PM 0 Comments

One thing few people ever both to point out about the 1994 Republican takeover of the House of Representatives is that "the South" never lost control. Democrats still have a majority of non-southern seats in the House of Representatives, just as we had before the 1994 election. Although it happened to little fanfare, Democrats re-took their non-southern majority in the elections of 1998, and have never lost it since (although it was tied from January of 2003 until February of 2004). However, when the south switched to majority Republican control in 1994, Republicans took over Congress. Whatever transfer of power took place between the two parties in 1994, the majority of the south has remained in unbroken control of the House of Representatives since 1955, the year after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court.

// posted by t.s. @ 7:16 PM 0 Comments

In "The Hugoliad," a 1935 pamphlet against Victor Hugo, the playwright Eugene Ionesco, who was twenty-six and still living in Romania, wrote, "The characteristic of the biography of famous men is that they wanted to be famous. The characteristic of the biography of all men is that they did not want to be, or they never thought of being, famous men. . . . A famous man is disgusting."

Let us try to sharpen the terminology: a man becomes famous when the number of people who know him is markedly greater than the number he knows. The recognition enjoyed by a great surgeon is not fame: he is admired not by a public but by his patients, by his colleagues. He lives in equilibrium. Fame is a disequilibrium. There are professions that drag it along behind them necessarily, unavoidably: politicians, supermodels, athletes, artists.

// posted by t.s. @ 7:35 PM 0 Comments

I am growing tired of reading editorials complaining about a failure to take “Social Security’s long-term problem” seriously.

True, projections show a deficit of something like 1.5% of US GDP in Social Security starting around 2045. See Figure 1-3 in the CBO’s outlook. That of course assumes the US treasury doesn’t default on its obligations to the Social Security trust fund.

However, I don’t get why a 1.5% of GDP deficit after 2045 is a bigger problem than the current 3.5% of GDP gap (per the CBO – see the on-budget deficit in 2006 on p. 22) between the revenues of the government (excluding social security) and its current spending (excluding social security). The current on-budget deficit came even with more revenues from the tax on corporate profits than at any time since the 1970s. That may not last (even if the stock markets seems to think it will).

Deficits in the non-Social Security part of the government now, usually financed by borrowing from the central banks of non-democratic countries v. smaller deficits in Social Security after 2045. Which is the bigger problem?

// posted by t.s. @ 1:38 PM 0 Comments

On the issue of waterboarding, the United States charged Yukio Asano, a Japanese officer on May 1 to 28, 1947, with war crimes. The offenses were recounted by John Henry Burton, a civilian victim:

After taking me down into the hallway they laid me out on a stretcher and strapped me on. The stretcher was then stood on end with my head almost touching the floor and my feet in the air. They then began pouring water over my face and at times it was impossible for me to breathe without sucking in water. The torture continued and continued.

Yukio Asano was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. We punished people with fifteen years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II.

// posted by t.s. @ 7:47 AM 0 Comments

An ornamental cake is absolutely and totally essential to every wedding and to the years of marriage that follow. Even the modern Japanese have adopted the custom. Their cakes are just like the white three-tiered Anglo-American model, except that they are inedible, made of white wax (with a small zone of real cake to allow for the ceremonial cutting) and can be used again and again by the company from which they are rented.

// posted by t.s. @ 5:58 PM 0 Comments