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fair and balanced So, what is it with this "fair and balanced" meme that is sweeping blogopolis? To Fox, 'Fair and Balanced' Doesn't Describe Al Franken In the dry corner of business law called trademark litigation, Fox v. Franken is an unusually lively document. Along with mundane accusations of unfair competition, the lawsuit includes some especially derisive remarks about the defendant, Al Franken, the political satirist. The court papers were filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan and became public yesterday. In the lawsuit, a judge is being asked to decide an important question: who has the right to use the word "fair" and the word "balanced" together, connected by the word "and"? Lawyers for Fox News Network, part of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, News Corporation, contend that Mr. Franken should not be allowed to use those words in the title of his new book due in stores next month, "Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right" (Penguin). They argue that Fox has trademarked "Fair and Balanced" to describe its news coverage and that Mr. Franken's use of the phrase would "blur and tarnish" it.
"Franken is neither a journalist nor a television news personality," according to the complaint. "He is not a well-respected voice in American politics; rather, he appears to be shrill and unstable. His views lack any serious depth or insight." thanks to Drudge Report Hmmmm. I would have used the same words to describe Faux News. When did serious depth and insight ever happen at Faux?
Neal Pollack has given the Fair and Balanced Blogger Army a call to arms. Friday is Fair and Balanced Day. It shall be our solemn duty...nay, our solemn Fair and Balanced Duty, to use the phrase Fair and Balanced in as many Fair and Balanced ways as we can. Preferably while mocking the shit out of the Fair and Balanced Fox News Network in as many viciously funny ways as we can think of.
 thanks to Whiskey Bar
conservatism
The Conscience of an (ex-)Conservative Leaving an organization can be hard. Leaving a movement, harder. And leaving an idea — unless you realize that the movement has deserted the idea, and that it’s time to say so — traumatic. The proximate cause of my recent departure from Discovery Institute, Seattle’s main conservative think tank, was my opposition to President Bush’s Iraq war. But I also left because I could no longer abide the purposes of the movement. Over the last several years, I’ve become sadly convinced that American conservatism has grown, for lack of a better word, malign. Not exactly a congenial conclusion for someone who started out with Goldwater in ’64 and ended up writing defense memos for Steve Forbes in 2000. But this farewell is not about the Republican Party, which forms merely one symbiotic half of a larger entity, the Republocrats, dedicated über alles to the perpetuation of their power, their perks, their own prosperity and to treating the American people as passive, malleable consumers and servants of government. It’s about American conservatism in general — a 50-year movement that did some good, especially in taking down the Soviet Union, but ultimately splintered into several factions, each in its own way pernicious. No, not splintered. Metastasized. American conservatism, Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy” guff notwithstanding, was always a fractious affair. “No Friends on the Right” too often seemed its credo. A conservative philanthropist once told me that he found the task of getting conservatives to talk with, let alone support each other, akin to herding cats. Christian paleocons, the Bill Buckley/National Review crowd, didn’t always coexist peaceably or productively with Jewish former-Marxist neocons, or urbane Easterners with polyester Sun Belt self-satisfieds whose reading consisted of the Bible and the Neiman-Marcus catalogue, not necessarily in that order. And there was always a darker side to this particular force — segregationists, Birchers, militias, homophobes and male supremacists (words I do not use lightly), plus the “Christ died so we could tell you what to do” brigades. But there were a few core principles, still worthy of regard.
What were they? Where are they now? thanks to wood s lot
calligraphy The Idea In the Brush and the Brush In the Idea Calligraphy not only was the most important art to the ancient Chinese, it was the chief and most fundamental branch of every art. To the connoisseur, the contemplation of a beautifully executed piece of calligraphy is the most delectable of pleasures. The calligraphy of a great master is not a symmetrical arrangement of conventional shapes but an adventure in movement similar to a beautiful dance. A favorite story of scholars is how the calligraphy of Chang Hsu of the Yang period greatly improved after he had watched Lady Kung-sun perform the dance of the two-edged sword. Another master, Wen Yung, found new inspiration after watching two snakes fighting. Huia-su (whose work is reproduced on the reverse side) realized new varieties of form while watching wind-blown clouds. The essence of beauty in calligraphy is movement — the brush strokes stretch and sweep, crouch and spring, ink tones swell and diminish, shapes expand and contract. "Line after line should have a way of giving life, character after character should seek for life-movement," an anonymous calligrapher once wrote.
 [more] thanks to wood s lot
economy The Perils of Cutbacks in Higher Education The combination makes public higher education a pillar of the nation's competitive advantage. That is as it should be. How else can bright young people from lower-income families afford a first-rate education? Tuition is usually too high for them at private colleges, and now it is shooting up at the state schools as they struggle to get by with smaller subsidies in a weak economy. Higher education, it turns out, comes under the rubric of discretionary spending, easier to cut than outlays for kindergarten through 12th grade or programs like Medicaid. And states are taking this easier path, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. During most of the 1990's, outlays for higher education in the 50 states rose substantially. They even inched up 0.7 percent, to $58.2 billion, in the 2003 fiscal year, which ended on June 30, although that was the first year of drastic cutbacks in many states.
This year, the downward pressure is unmistakable. So far, 43 states have approved budgets for the 2004 fiscal year, the National Conference reports, and higher-education outlays have dropped by 2.8 percent, to a total of $37.7 billion, from $38.8 billion last year. The final tally for all 50 states may be slightly higher than last year's, but by a minuscule amount. "In all the cutting, higher education is suffering a disproportionate amount," said Arturo Perez, a policy specialist at the National Conference. When such cuts are made, quality inevitably suffers, along with affordability and access, not to mention global competitiveness. Many factors determine national winners in the complex global struggle, but education is undoubtedly one, and it is clearly being hurt in America as the gains of the 1990's are whittled away.
We are not, for example, making high-speed Maglev trains, the magnetic-levitation system that the Chinese are buying to serve as a commuter system for towns around Shanghai. Knowledge workers at Siemens and ThyssenKrupp are bringing Germany $5 billion from that sale. The industry does not exist in the United States and the technology is not high on the agenda, if it is there at all, at the nation's shrinking public universities.
archeology The Vindolanda writing tablets, written in ink on post-card sized sheets of wood, have been excavated at the fort of Vindolanda, immediately south of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England. Dating to the the late first and early second centuries AD, the formative period of Roman Britain’s northern frontier, they were written by and for soldiers, merchants, women and slaves. Through their contents, life in one community on the edge of the Roman world can be reconstructed in detail.
 "7 March sent with Marcus, the medical orderly, to build the residence, builders, number 30 to burn stone, number 19 (?) to produce clay for the wattle fences of the camp ..." [more] thanks to wood s lot
iraq Atrios had this to say. I couldn't agree more. I Have a Problem When suicide bombings in Israel get front page (web page) attention in the NYT but the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq do not. Note this isn't a comment on the media paying too much attention to Israel - it's about them not paying enough attention to our own goddamn dead.
Baghdad Blogger I went to a press conference where our new one-month-president [the coalition provisional authority has a rotating chairman] was telling us about what they were up to. The press guy, at the request of the conference, was telling journalists that the instantaneous translation thingy has two channels; channel one for Arabic, channel two for English. I would like to add another channel: channel three for the truth. It keeps repeating one phrase: "We have no power, we have to get it approved by the Americans, we are puppets and the strings are too tight." I feel sorry for the guys on the council, some of them are actually very good and honest people and they have been put in a very difficult situation.
As usual, getting into these press bashes is an event in itself. You have to be there an hour early, you get searched a thousand times and, of course, as an Iraqi I get treated like shit. I have no idea why the American soldiers at the entrance to the convention centre [where the CPA press operation is] are so offensive towards Iraqis while they can be so nice to anyone with a foreign passport. I have to be the Zen master when the soldier at the gate gets condescending. The reporters of Iraq Today were not allowed to get to the press conference and they went ballistic. "This is my friggin' government, what do you mean I can't get in?" My sentiments exactly. Keep this image in your head: an American officer stopping you, an Iraqi, from attending the press conference your government is holding.
In Basra, Worst May Be Ahead
Bring us home': GIs flood US with war-weary emails
Is Iraqi Intel Still Being Manipulated?
The conquest of this country, in the military equivalent of a hostile takeover, reached its flood tide with the triumphant tour of occupied Iraq by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the war's policy theorist, and the (over)killing of Saddam Hussein's two mad sons, Uday and Qusay, by Special Operations forces and units of the 101st Airborne Division. Only when their father himself is killed will the coalition warriors be more exultant. "Among Iraqis," said Sa'ad Al-Izzi, an experienced interpreter who once reluctantly translated American movies for Uday, "that is when you'll see even more grieving and rejoicing." Third soldier in a week dies in sleep From the Unted States Central Command website: Soldier dies in sleep (August 12, 2003), 1st Armored Division soldier found dead (August 10, 2003), and Soldier dies in sleep (August 8, 2003). That's three soldiers dead in their sleep in four days. What the hell is going on over there? Throw in another loss from heat stress, and another two lost in combat, and that's six dead in four days.
But you wouldn't know it from the news, would you?
fractals
 [more] thanks to dublog
how others see us In the Western democracies in the last fifty years, we have grown accustomed to governments whose policies on specific issues may be good or bad, but which essentially institute incremental changes to the status quo. The major exceptions have been Thatcher and Reagan, but even their programs of dismantling systems of social welfare seem, in retrospect, mild compared to what is happening in the United States under George Bush-- or more exactly, the ruling junta that tells Bush what to do and say. It is unquestionably the most radical government in modern American history, one whose ideology and actions have become so pervasive, and are so unquestionably mirrored by the mass media here, that the population seems to have forgotten what "normal" is. George Bush is the first unelected President of the United States, installed by a right-wing Supreme Court in a kind of judicial coup d'etat. He is the first to actively subvert one of the pillars of American democracy: the separation of church and state. There are now daily prayer meetings and Bible study groups in every branch of the government, and religious organizations are being given funds to take over educational and welfare programs that have always been the domain of the state. Bush is the first president to invoke the specific "Jesus Christ" rather than an ecumenical "God," and he has surrounded himself with evangelical Christians, including his Attorney General, who attends a church where he talks in tongues.
It is the first administration to openly declare a policy of unilateral aggression, a "Pax Americana" where the presence of allies (whether England or Bulgaria) is agreeable but unimportant; where international treaties no longer apply to the United States; and where-- for the first time in history-- this country reserves the right to non-defensive, "pre-emptive" strikes against any nation on earth, for whatever reason it declares. thanks to Badattitudes Journal
women
Threads of Gold
My mother used to say, 'you must howl with the wolves when you are with the wolves,' and so I made the best of things up there. Many times my heart did bump. I was so frightened but I pretended I was just the bravest thing in the world, and I got through it all right. And now as an old woman, if I were young instead with no one to depend on me, I would certainly go back to that Yukon country and prospect and make myself independently rich. Threads of Gold explores the wide range of experiences of both Alaska Native and pioneer women during the Alaska-Klondike gold rush era. Women played many important roles in the dramatic development of the north which was a result of the gold rush. Women were willing to risk life changes in order to seek new opportunities for themselves and their children. Single and married, American and immigrants, black and white, they came to look for gold in the ground and in businesses providing supplies, meals, and entertainment for the miners.
 Discovery City on Otter Creek was built in a couple of months. Men hauled in logs, lumber, and windows to make a row of stores and boardwalks. Many women took advantage of these new towns, including these two women who started a café, bakery, and lodging business. [more] thanks to plep
Who Will Save Abu-Mazen? Abu-Mazen will fall before the end of October--this conviction is gaining ground in leading Palestinian circles. This forecast is based on the belief that Abu-Mazen will not get anything, neither from the Americans nor from Sharon. No release for most of the prisoners, no complete removal of the checkpoints inside the Palestinian territories, no stop to the building of the wall, no total withdrawal of the army from Palestinian towns, no lifting of the blockade on President Arafat, no freeze of the settlements, no dismantling of the settlement outposts that were put up in the last two and a half years (as stipulated by the Road Map). If they had wanted to "help Abu-Mazen", to quote the formula current in Washington, they would have fulfilled at least some of these demands. But nothing of the sort has happened. The well publicized release of a handful of prisoners, most of whom where due to be released anyhow, only highlighted the absence of goodwill and increased the anger.
Abu-Mazen became Prime Minister because the Americans demanded it. The Palestinians hoped that the Americans would give him things that they were unwilling to grant Yasser Arafat. This would have meant the US exerting real pressure on Sharon in order to compel him to deliver the goods. This has not happened. The terrible conditions of life in the occupied
another roadside attraction Sad Days for Mermaids of the Sequined Sort Barbara Wynns has never stopped thinking about the days she spent in an enormous water tank here, somersaulting and backflipping in a sequined tail fin while sucking air from a rubber hose. It was the late 1960's, when young women from as far away as Tokyo auditioned for the privilege of being a mermaid at Weeki Wachee Springs, doing shows for half a million people a year. These days, the mermaids at this aging water park are locals who are tired of waitressing and retail jobs, and their celebrity does not extend much past Hernando County, all scrub pine and suburban sprawl on Florida's west coast. Attendance at Weeki Wachee has dwindled, and the park has a long list of problems, not least an excess of algae in the mermaid tank. "It's sad," said Mrs. Wynns, 54 and dainty, who quells her nostalgia by filling her home with hundreds of mermaid figurines and passes out business cards with a tiny portrait of her mermaid self, circa 1968. "To me, this 27-acre park is a universe that I love more than breathing. But not everybody gets it anymore."
 [more]
korea N. Korea Next to Hear U.S. War Drum A senior Pentagon adviser has given details of a war strategy for invading North Korea and toppling its regime within 30 to 60 days, adding muscle to a lobbying campaign by U.S. hawks urging a pre-emptive military strike against Pyongyang's nuclear facilities. Less than four months after the end of the Iraq war, the war drums in Washington have begun pounding again. A growing number of influential U.S. leaders are talking openly of military action against North Korea to destroy its nuclear-weapons program, and even those who prefer negotiations are warning of the mounting danger of war. Some analysts predict that North Korea could test a nuclear warhead by the end of this year - an event that could cross the "red line" that would provoke a U.S. attack. The tensions were heightened by a recent exchange of gunfire across the border between North Korean and South Korean soldiers. Talks between U.S. and North Korean officials are expected to be held in Beijing soon, but nobody is predicting an imminent diplomatic agreement, especially after North Korea denounced a U.S. negotiator as a "bloodsucker" and "human scum."
Military conflict in the Korean peninsula could trigger a catastrophe, not only because of the suspected presence of nuclear bombs in North Korea, but also because of the 11,000 North Korean artillery weapons along the border that could inflict death and destruction on millions of people in the South Korean capital, Seoul, which is within artillery range of the North's guns. William, my son-in-law, is stationed at Camp Howze. It's 14 miles north of Seoul.
music This is an article about the way music should be. It's about a band of young musicians, calling themselves Old Crow Medicine Show, playing old-fashioned music the old-fashioned way. They first showed up on my doorstep in November, 1998, for TestingTesting #15. This article appeared in the Oxford American, which seems to have ceased publication again. I reprinted it on the TestingTesting site because it was just too good to let disappear. It also mentions my name.
Hardcore Troubadores The morning after the Old Crow Medicine Show made their rousing debut at the Grand Ole Opry two years ago, I drove Ketch Secor, the fiddle player, who was twenty-two, to an auto auction. It was a one-day temp job: He would drive the used cars slowly around a dirt track while people bid on them. Ketch had not showered, and his thick nest of dark hair shined. He had the unshaven beginnings of a mustache, a bottom lip full of chewing tobacco, and some unkind things to say about Nashville. "This town is shitty," he told me. This town is everything that the mountain is not. This town is full of money. This town has no kinship. This town has no brotherly love." He spit into a clear bottle part-filled with brown, and shrugged, "But this town is where we are, and we have never been in the wrong place." It's not what most young musicians would think to say in the afterglow of a professional breakthrough. On the face of it, he had little to be bitter about. They'd lived in Nashville only four months, and Marty Stuart, the president of the Grand Ole Opry, who met them at a music festival, had helped them land some high profile gigs. They had opened for Dolly Parton at the Ryman Auditorium, and had performed at the Opry's 75th-anniversary celebration. No, they hadn't landed a record deal, despite some big label flirtations (one crafty agent showed up on their muddy doorstep with pizza and a case of beer; and yes, Ketch was working at an auto auction to make ends meet. But listening to him talk that Sunday morning, you might think he had a lot of nerve.
 That's certainly true. But Old Crow's sass has served them well, as has their homesickness for the past. Their old-time repertoire—the pre-Depression banjo ballads, Appalachian Fiddle tunes, and jug-band blues that the five young men (all but one are under twenty-five) thrash out on well-worn string instruments—is matched bv a reactionary founding philosophy that has prompted boldly archaic career moves: The two years before Nashville were spent hoboing quixotically across Canada and back, then living in self-imposed squalor in the mountains of North Carolina. They brought music nobody really played anymore to towns where no other touring performer would stop to use the bathroom, and people embraced them, fed them, sheltered them. This, in turn, fueled their sense of cosmic destiny. They had come now to Nashville not to go glitzy, but hoping that perhaps some space might remain for what once was country music—hoping, they might say, that their medicine might sell in the sickest place of all.
"At some point music went from being something people played to being something that lives in a box in the corner of the room, like a toaster. It's gone from being something from within to something that's given to you. forced on you," Ketch explained that morning. "I feel like when we play, people can feel the timelessness. They can feel that they're rooted in something. Like we're able to play for a collective feeling that's lost, that used to be a big part of everything."
missle defense
Shooting Down Missile Defense If the generals in charge of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency followed the wispiest trail of logic, they would have slashed the program and moved on to more promising pursuits long ago. This month brings yet another bit of news (for earlier bits, click here and here) indicating not only that the program has scant chance of producing a workable missile-defense system, but that its managers know of its dim prospects. The latest flash, from the Aug. 1 edition of the trade journal Defense News, is that the agency has suspended one of the program's most crucial components on the grounds that the technology it involves is "not mature enough" to fund.
The component is called the space-based kinetic-energy boost-phase interceptor, a name that sounds too esoteric to deserve notice (and, indeed, no mainstream paper seems to have picked up on the report of its suspension), but in fact the news is a bombshell. thanks to follow me here...
comics I was delighted that my copy of Chris Ware’s book Quimby the Mouse arrived yesterday. I ordered it a couple of months ago, after having read the appeal for help from his publishers, the estimable Fantagraphics Books, who at that time were suffering an acute cashflow crisis, thankfully since resolved.
 [more]
napalm “Ah. They destroyed all the napalm in 2001, you see,” writes Jill Walker. “What they dropped on Iraq wasn’t napalm, it was Mark 77. Well, yes, it does has the same effect but the chemical structure is slightly different. Really!”
Reading Jill’s entry—after I’d read the Sydney Morning Herald article to which she refers—and knowing that Jill is a hypertext theorist, I couldn’t help reflecting on the connection between hypertext and napalm, via Vannevar Bush, whose seminal essay As We May Think was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945. In the ABC radio documentary, Tokyo’s Burning, B-29 pilot Chester Marshall recalled the experience of bombing Tokyo that night:
You know, you didn’t know whether you were killing a lot of women and children or what. But I do know one thing, you could at 5,000 feet you could smell the flesh burning. I couldn’t eat anything for two or three days. You know it was nauseating, really. We just said “What is that I smell?” And it’s a kind of a sweet smell, and somebody said, “Well that’s flesh burning, had to be.” As for Vannevar Bush, “the father of hypertext,” it seems he never forgot either napalm or Tokyo. In his biography of Bush, G. Pascal Zachary writes that Merle Tuve, whose team developed the proximity fuze under Bush’s direction, believed
that Bush suffered from war guilt. Not from the atomic bomb, but from his role in aiding the ghastly firebomb raids against Japan. “For years after the war Van Bush would wake up screaming in the night because… he burned Tokyo,” Tuve later recalled. “The proximity fuze didn’t bother him badly… even the atomic bomb didn’t bother him as much as jellied gasoline [napalm].” [more]
hand signal art
 [more] thanks to The J-Walk Weblog
privatization
Thanks for the M.R.E.'s A few days ago I talked to a soldier just back from Iraq. He'd been in a relatively calm area; his main complaint was about food. Four months after the fall of Baghdad, his unit was still eating the dreaded M.R.E.'s: meals ready to eat. When Italian troops moved into the area, their food was "way more realistic" — and American troops were soon trading whatever they could for some of that Italian food. Other stories are far worse. Letters published in Stars and Stripes and e-mail published on the Web site of Col. David Hackworth (a decorated veteran and Pentagon critic) describe shortages of water. One writer reported that in his unit, "each soldier is limited to two 1.5-liter bottles a day," and that inadequate water rations were leading to "heat casualties." An American soldier died of heat stroke on Saturday; are poor supply and living conditions one reason why U.S. troops in Iraq are suffering such a high rate of noncombat deaths?
The U.S. military has always had superb logistics. What happened? The answer is a mix of penny-pinching and privatization — which makes our soldiers' discomfort a symptom of something more general. Privatization — providing the least amount of service for the maximun amount of profit. Our service people deserve better. If soldiers are dying because of privatization, then privatization equals murder. What are the odds that the people responsible for this will never be charged?
criss-crossing america
The Road Diary, Part I The road is an education, especially when you have to pass through fifteen airport security checkpoints with a laptop festooned with campaign stickers from every Democratic candidate for President in 2004. You learn to read faces, and places, and when it is wise to wear the t-shirt that reads “I’m sorry my President is a moron” in seven languages, and when to leave it in the bag. I haven’t left it in the bag yet, but when that metal detection wand took an extra-hard pass across my privates as the security agent read about George’s idiocy in Farsi and French, I must confess to having had some second thoughts.
I spoke in Phoenix about Iraq, about the Patriot Act, about the September 11 report, about getting people motivated, about hope, about the fact that George is raising sixty zillion dollars for his unopposed 2004 Presidential campaign because he knows, and the fellows in his crew know, that he is beatable, and that he is going to need every dime of that campaign money to hang onto the job he has so thoroughly despoiled.
photography
Weegee's World
"The Critic" is probably Weegee's most famous image, and certainly his most widely published. The opening night of the Metropolitan Opera in 1943 was advertised as a Diamond Jubilee to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the company. In a recent interview, Louie Liotta, a photographer who acted as Weegee's assistant, recalled that Weegee has been planning this photograph for a while. Liotta, at Weegee's request, picked up one of the regular women customers at Sammy's on the Bowery at about 6:30 p.m. With a sufficient amount of cheap wine for the woman, they proceeded to the opera house. When they arrived, the limousines owned by the members of high society were just beginning to discharge their passengers. Weegee asked Liotta to hold the now intoxicated woman near the curb as he stood about twenty feet away from the front doors of the opera house. With a signal worked out in advance, Weegee gave the sign to Liotta, who releasd the woman, hoping all the while that she could keep her balance long enough for Weegee to expose several plates. The moment had finally arrived: Mrs. George Washington Kavenaugh and Lady Decies were spotted getting out of a limousine. Both women were generous benefactors to numerous cultural institutions in New York and Philadelphia, and Weegee knew that they were known to every newspaper in New York. Liotta recalled the moment he released the disheveled woman: "It was like an explosion. I thought I went blind from the three or four flash exposures which Weegee made within a very few seconds." For his part, Weegee told the story that he "discovered" the woman viewing the opera patrons after the negative had been developed, never revealing the prank, saying it was as much a surprise to him as anyone.
thanks to Iconomy
iraq Walker's World:Running out of time in Iraq Quite apart from issues of Arab resentment, religion and the remaining bands of Saddam Hussein loyalists, there is one simple reason why the stabilization of Iraq is proving so frustratingly difficult. By comparison with other similar peacekeeping missions in recent years, the place is very seriously under-policed.
Consider the Balkans. In proportion to their populations, three times as many troops were deployed in Kosovo as in Iraq, and in Bosnia twice as many. By Kosovo standards, there ought to be more than half a million troops in Iraq. But maintaining 180,000 British and American troops in Iraq is putting intense strain on the military manpower of both countries. There is no serious prospect of their deploying any more. Reinforcement will have to come from other countries -- and in far greater numbers than the 70 Ukrainian soldiers who flew in Sunday. So of all the grim questions now hanging like so many vultures over Iraq, the most urgent is whether the Bush administration is prepared to swallow its pride and go back to the United Nations for a new resolution on the reconstruction of Iraq. The price to be paid for this would be considerable, and not just in loss of American face. Any hopes of a favored role for British and American oil companies would have to be reconsidered, and France and Russia might even see the honoring of those oilfield development contracts they negotiated with Saddam's regime.
Above all, Washington would lose its current power to determine the political future of Iraq. The initial hopes that Iraq could become a prosperous pro-Western democracy, a catalyst for modernization throughout the Middle East, would become highly problematic. A political process supervised by the United Nations is likely to strengthen the hand of the Shiite majority, and may well help those Shiite religious leaders who take their cue (and their funds) from neighboring Iran. It would be hard for the United Nations to turn down the friendly offer from Iran of welfare missions and an accompanying 25,000 peacekeeping troops. thanks to Talking Points Memo Anita Roddick has two dispatches from Baghdad written by a friend of hers. I hope there will be more. Sunday, 3 August I'm in Baghdad and it's Sunday night. Today was perhaps the most bizarre, terrifying (although my traveling companions and I were never in any immediate danger), and mind-blowing day of my life. We left lovely Amman at 4 a.m. and were in Baghdad by about 3 p.m. The landscape, physical, climatological, and cultural, changed so much that the night bore no resemblance to the morning. I can't possibly catalog it all, but I can give some impressions.
We crossed the border and headed into Iraq at about 10 a.m. A GMC Suburban, the choice of foreign travelers, at $500 cash for the trip. perhaps 100km into the western desert, and burned out cars appear by the roadside. A scorched Ferrari said to have belonged to Uday Hussein, missiled to oblivion as one of his lieutenants tried to escape. Saddam's majestic 6-lane highway from Jordan to Baghdad, probably better than any U.S. desert interstate, marked by scores of burn marks. A highway overpass with a gaping hole caused by a bomb, which we are told was aimed at a passenger bus. A few hundred yards later, the bus itself, utterly destroyed, the only visual comparison to one suicide-bombed in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. thanks to the bitter shack of resentment Dispatch From Baghdad, Part II
Thursday, 7 August
We found the smoke coming from the flattened skeleton of a U.S. Humvee, burning pathetically in the street. There were two other vehicles in the convoy, another Humvee and a 2-1/2-ton truck. The soldiers in those vehicles were taking cover behind their rides and waiting for reinforcements. We hustled up just behind them and took cover on the sidewalk. An al-Jazeera cameraman and a couple of others came in behind us. thanks to the bitter shack of resentment
'Bring us home': GIs flood US with war-weary emails
'We don't feel like heroes anymore' thanks to Truthout US admits it used napalm bombs in Iraq
Family shot dead by panicking US troops Eruption of violence in Basra angers army
British troops battle to control mobs in Basra
Curiouser and Curiouser
deserter action figures Elite Force Aviator: George W. Bush - U.S. President and Naval Aviator - 12" Action Figure
 [more] thanks to This Modern World Words fail me.
big pharma
Pfizer puts squeeze on price cutters Pfizer, the maker of Viagra and anti-cholesterol drug Lipitor, has written to Canadian pharmacists saying it will no longer supply wholesalers there. Instead, Pfizer has told pharmacists they must buy direct from the company and it will not supply re-exporters.
US drug firms are angry that Canadian wholesalers and online pharmacies are re-exporting medicines back to the US to meet huge demand from elderly US citizens who prefer to pay cheaper Canadian prices. thanks to Magpie
"Canadian internet pharmacies can sell medicines at as little as 30% of the US price because Canada has price controls on drugs." Are we getting screwed? It's more than getting screwed. It's extortion. It's murder. The reality is that if you can't afford the medicine, you die. That's America. A country for the rich. The poor need not apply.
photography Don Hong-Oai studied with the famous 104-year-old master, Long Chin-San in Taiwan. Here he learned to work in a Chinese "pictorial" style, using several negatives to compose a picture and perfecting his landscape work. He was honored by Kodak, Ilford and at Fotokina in West Germany and is a member of the International Federation of Photographic Art in Switzerland and the Chinatown Photographic Society. Only in the last few years has his unique and purely Chinese style of printmaking been "discovered" by a wider public and he has been busy in his small darkroom making his prints for collectors across the U.S. and elsewhere.
 [more] thanks to dublog
the f-word
The downward path Look, these sentencing guidelines are awful. Everybody knows they're awful, so now anyone who stands up and says so gets subpoenaed? Do you realize how banana-republic this is? Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, one of the many ornaments we have exported to Washington, claims the seven-member Sentencing Commission is "systematically trying to lessen the drug penalties." I should hope bloody so. If showing evidence of elementary common sense is grounds for a subpoena, stick a fork in us, we're done. The "Watch on the Rhine" quality of our public life these days deserves serious attention. As one who studies the small, buried stories on the back pages of major newspapers, I am becoming increasingly uneasy. This is more than just, "Boy, do their policies suck." There's a creepy advance of something more menacing than bad policies.
I keep thinking of Mussolini's definition of fascism: "Fascism should more properly be called ‘corporatism,' since it is the marriage of government and corporate power." When was the last time we saw this administration do something that involved standing up to some corporate special interest in favor of the great majority of the people? thanks to Magpie
blogs I recently did a website for a local group called the Shifty Sailors. They are a male choral group that sings sea chantys and seafairing songs. Good stuff. They are currently on a tour of the Baltic counties. (A tour that they are paying for.) I suggested they do a blog of their tour and it's worked out quite well. Check out the pictures and stories on the Shifty Sailors' Sailor's Log. They're in Latvia today. The miracle of digital cameras and the Internet. (Buy one of their CDs.) The Latvian Womens chorus join the Shiftys for our final number, and cap an exciting performance.
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The day is not far off when Abu Mazen and his government will fall. It's only a matter of time. Then, Ariel Sharon will get Yasser Arafat back, and he will be relieved to be rid of Abu Mazen's moderation. Sharon always had huge difficulties speaking to moderate Palestinians, while he swims like a fish in a sea of Palestinian extremism. There's a problem with moderates. You have to encourage and strengthen them, offer them real proposals and make a real start on the famous "painful concessions." Sharon doesn't have any such intentions. All he wanted to do is get home from Washington in one piece. Sharon's behavior is not surprising to anyone who has known him for many years. The surprise is President Bush, who has evinced a strange passion for tall tales. It is completely unclear why the American president has decided to consume overflowing portions of complete lies served up to him by Ariel Sharon. Therefore, when Abu Mazen falls, and his government with him, the blame will fall on Sharon, but mainly on Bush, who maintains the pretension of an "honest broker." Does Bush know that Sharon is lying to him, or does he still believe him? Does Bush pretend to believe because of political convenience and domestic considerations?
It's a mystery and will remain a mystery that this particular president, who presents himself as one who you don't "get smart with," is prepared, for some reason, for the tail, Sharon, to wag him.
arachnidology
Oldest spider silk found It dates from the Early Cretaceous Period, more than 120 million years ago. This means it comes from about 80-90 million years further back in time than the previous oldest reported spider thread, found in Baltic amber. The specimen is described in the journal Nature by Swiss researcher Dr Samuel Zschokke, from the University of Basel. Small globules of glue that would have stuck down any insect unlucky to get caught up in the silk are still clearly visible on the thread.
 [more] thanks to plep
the saudis and 9-11 Saudi Secrets Are Safe With Bush At the nexus of diplomacy and secret intelligence, governments almost never speak forthrightly about their purposes. When ranking officials decide what can be revealed and what must be concealed, political expedience is at least as important as national security. And on the rare occasion when such an official publicly demands the disclosure of embarrassing information, as the Saudi foreign minister did last week, an ulterior motive should be assumed.
So regardless of any claims to the contrary, it seems prudent to remember that the White House and the House of Saud are likewise best served by keeping all the sensitive files locked away. Both houses would be unwise to risk speaking candidly about each other now—a caution that applies with special emphasis when the residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue bear the name of Bush.
thanks to Cursor
garden art The web site is dedicated to the gardens of Japan, and more specifically to the historic gardens of Kyoto and its environs. Although many of these gardens are located within Zen monasteries, this site will not explore the influence of Zen Buddhism on Japanese garden design, an influence that is often conjectural at best. Instead, the site is designed to provide the visitor with an opportunity to visit each garden, to move through or around it, to experience it through the medium of high-quality color images, and to learn something of its history.
 [more] thanks to plep
the arab mind
A window on the world Nine years ago I wrote an afterword for Orientalism which, in trying to clarify what I believed I had and had not said, stressed not only the many discussions that had opened up since my book appeared in 1978, but the ways in which a work about representations of "the orient" lent itself to increasing misinterpretation. That I find myself feeling more ironic than irritated about that very same thing today is a sign of how much my age has crept up on me. The recent deaths of my two main intellectual, political and personal mentors, the writers and activists Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, has brought sadness and loss, as well as resignation and a certain stubborn will to go on. In my memoir Out of Place (1999) I described the strange and contradictory worlds in which I grew up, providing for myself and my readers a detailed account of the settings that I think formed me in Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon. But that was a very personal account which stopped short of all the years of my own political engagement that started after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
Orientalism is very much a book tied to the tumultuous dynamics of contemporary history. Its first page opens with a description of the Lebanese civil war that ended in 1990, but the violence and the ugly shedding of human blood continues up to this minute. We have had the failure of the Oslo peace process, the outbreak of the second intifada, and the awful suffering of the Palestinians on the reinvaded West Bank and Gaza. The suicide bombing phenomenon has appeared with all its hideous damage, none more lurid and apocalyptic of course than the events of September 11 2001 and their aftermath in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. As I write these lines, the illegal occupation of Iraq by Britain and the United States proceeds. Its aftermath is truly awful to contemplate. This is all part of what is supposed to be a clash of civilisations, unending, implacable, irremediable. Nevertheless, I think not. thanks to American Samizdat
photography
The Unbearable Heaviness of Industry
 [more] thanks to wood s lot
environment
Salt of the Earth Since we're stuck in Iraq indefinitely, we may as well try to learn something. But I suspect that our current leaders won't be receptive to the most important lesson of the land where cities and writing were invented: that manmade environmental damage can destroy a civilization. When archaeologists excavated the cities of ancient Mesopotamia, they were amazed not just by what they found but by where they found it: in the middle of an unpopulated desert. In "Ur of the Chaldees," Leonard Woolley asked: "Why, if Ur was an empire's capital, if Sumer was once a vast granary, has the population dwindled to nothing, the very soil lost its virtue?"
The answer — the reason "the very soil lost its virtue" — is that heavy irrigation in a hot, dry climate leads to a gradual accumulation of salt in the soil. Rising salinity first forced the Sumerians to switch from wheat to barley, which can tolerate more salt; by about 1800 B.C. even barley could no longer be grown in southern Iraq, and Sumerian civilization collapsed. Later "salinity crises" took place further north. In the 19th century, when Europeans began to visit Iraq, it probably had a population less than a tenth the size of the one in the age of Gilgamesh. The point is that when it comes to evidence of danger from emissions — as opposed to, say, Iraqi nukes — the people now running our country won't take yes for an answer. Meanwhile, news reports say, President Bush will spend much of this month buffing his environmental image. No doubt he'll repeatedly be photographed amid scenes of great natural beauty, uttering stirring words about his commitment to conservation. His handlers hope that the images will protect him from awkward questions about his actual polluter-friendly policies and, most important, his refusal to face up to politically inconvenient environmental dangers.
So here's the question: will we avoid the fate of past civilizations that destroyed their environments, and hence themselves? And the answer is: not if Mr. Bush can help it. Heat threatens safety of nuclear reactors as France girds for electricity rationing Rivers dry up as Europe's heat wave drags on thanks to Politics in the Zeros
poster art The Swiss Poster Collection: 1971 to present The Swiss Poster Collection at Carnegie Mellon University is a critical selection of more than 300 works representing the Swiss Posters of the Year competition and other Swiss posters from 1971 to the present. The collection is for students, teachers, scholars, and the general viewer to explore the art of the poster and its leading expression in Swiss graphic design.
 [more] thanks to Iconomy
the forces of good are being marshaled
Liberals Form Fund To Defeat President Labor, environmental and women's organizations, with strong backing from international financier George Soros, have joined forces behind a new political group that plans to spend an unprecedented $75 million to mobilize voters to defeat President Bush in 2004. The organization, Americans Coming Together (ACT), will conduct "a massive get-out-the-vote operation that we think will defeat George W. Bush in 2004," said Ellen Malcolm, the president of EMILY's List, who will become ACT's president.
ACT already has commitments for more than $30 million, Malcolm and others said, including $10 million from Soros, $12 million from six other philanthropists, and about $8 million from unions, including the Service Employees International Union. thanks to daily KOS Let the games begin. The 2004 presidential election should be very interesting. Now, if only Hunter Thompson will do a Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '04.
it's a birthday!
 I started this blog three years ago, August 10, 2000. I used to lead a happy and normal life.
testingtesting
Tonight is the Monday night that I do TestingTesting, an Internet wecast, from my living room. The same reality surges that have kept me from this blog kept us from getting a special guest for tonight's show. We have decided, in recognition of TestingTesting's 5th birthday (TT #1 was August 3, 1998), to go into the TT Wayback Machine™ and re-webcast the TT show that pointed the way for us. It was TestingTesting #15 on 11-9-98 with Old Crow Medicine Show as our special guests. Steve Showell, Joanne Rouse, and Derek Parrott were the TT House Band. It remains one of the most exciting shows we have done. Old Crow Medicine Show consisted of 6 young musicians, traveling the country with friends, playing old music with a passion rarely seen in today's music world. Click on in for some great music.
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