Priorities

While the American news media go into paroxyms of ecstatic glee over this week's Republican sex scandal and the shocking (shocking!) news that a Hollywood celebrity is self-destructive, the BBC reports that the Bush Administration continues to ramp up the saber-rattling war rhetoric toward Iran.

"I have authorised our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran's murderous activities," he said.

The BBC's Justin Webb, in Washington, says this looks like a conscious effort by the White House to elevate the tension between Washington and Tehran to a new level.

Such an effort might be designed to avoid the need for armed conflict or might equally be an effort to bring that conflict about, our correspondent says.

To the Bush Administration, disastrous wars in the Middle East are just like peanuts. Betcha can't eat just one. (And besides, they're so profitable! Especially when it's so easy to offload the costs onto somebody else.)

Recent reads

Shrub, by Molly Ivins. If more people had paid attention to Ms. Ivin's wryly-funny-but-dead-serious dismemberment of George W. Bush's erratic track record before the 2000 election, we might not have ended up in the mess we're in. She is sorely missed, but Jim Hightower, Bill Moyers, and other carry on in their own styles.

Friday Bad-News Dump

From the Associated Press, by way of that notorious vehicle for liberal political propaganda, Forbes magazine, comes this account of harassment, intimidation, imprisonment and torture of American military personnel.... by the U.S. military.

Their crime? Trying to report and stop the black-market sale of US-supplied weapons to the Iraqi insurgents, who then use them to kill US troops. That's right. The US military, at the behest of the Bush Administration, is imprisoning and torturing US military personnel in order to protect Al Qaeda's black-market weapons sources.

Cui bono? Who benefits from pumping up the level of violence in Iraq, so that a stable government cannot be formed in the absence of the mailed fist of US troops? And who recieves the lucrative payoffs, not to mention the $8.8 billion in US funds that has inexplicably disappeared into someone's pockets en route to the so-called Iraq reconstruction effort?

Further discussion, along with further information about the utter corruption of the Bush Administration's war racket, available here and, no doubt, elsewhere.

Belated Poetry Thursday

An old friend posted a discussion about outlining fiction to her weblog last week, prompting thoughts of Robert Graves' immortal poem:

The Devil's Advice to Story-Tellers

Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue,
Keep probability—some say—in view.
But my advice to story-tellers is:
Weigh out no gross of probabilities,
Nor yet make diligent transcriptions of
Known instances of virtue, crime or love.
To forge a picture that will pass for true,
Do conscientiously what liars do—
Born liars, not the lesser sort that raid
The mouths of others for their stock-in-trade:
Assemble, first, all casual bits and scraps
That may shake down into a world perhaps;
People this world, by chance created so,
With random persons whom you do not know—
The teashop sort, or travelers in a train
Seen once, guessed idly at, not seen again;
Let the erratic course they steer surprise
Their own and your own and your readers' eyes;
Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair)
Motive and end and moral in the air;
Nice contradiction between fact and fact
Will make the whole read human and exact.

--Robert Graves, Collected Poems, 1975

Secrets of the British Library

After reading this article, I'm prepared to believe that the British Library might really have giant secret vaults like the ones shown in Read Or Die.

And what kind of classification scheme assigns items to the "Cupboard" collection?

A temporary victory?

An update on the BP/Lake Michigan situation.

Recent viewings

The Cold Equations (1996). This television adaptation of Tom Godwin's well-known and controversial short story is competently produced on a low budget. Unfortunately, the scriptwriter has overlaid Godwin's starkly simple plot with a framing story about a court-martial, a pennypinching corporate government, and labor issues. This has the unfortunate effect of reducing Godwin's short story, which in its original form is as terse and compact as a diamond, into a kind of extended flashback sequence supporting the scriptwriter's story.

The problem is understandable. The short story, strictly adapted, would barely stretch to make an hour-long television show. In fact, IMDB and Wikipedia indicate that the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone did just that. Perhaps the makers of this extended version would have been well advised to let the Twilight Zone version of the story be the final and definitive audio-visual adaptation. Unfortunately, neither Netflix nor any local library deign to acknowledge the third season of the 1985-1988 revival of The Twilight Zone, so the question will remain forever a mystery to me.

Recent reads

Son of Man, by Robert Silverberg. I actually only skimmed this one after the first few pages, in which the hero, without any obvious explanation, suddenly wakes up in some kind of future world inhabited by utopian, pansexual, polymorphously shapeshifting descendants of humanity and begins exploring all its weird possibilities. It's far off the mark of SilverBob's best work, in my judgement. But then again I've never been a fan of most of the trippy so-called "New Wave" of science fiction that came out in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In throwing off the the rational rules of hard SF as well as the restrictions of realistic or historically-inspired fiction, it seems to me that it leaves the reader with no objective reference point from which to understand the story. At its best, it could be invigoratingly experimental, but at its worst, much of the "New Wave" simply collapsed into purely subjective authorial self-indulgence.

Sailing to Byzantium, another story by Silverberg which addresses a similar theme, strikes me as a far superior work. Perhaps this is because the far-future humanoids in that story, by re-creating historical settings for their decadence, also give the reader a more congenial frame of reference.

Recent viewings in brief

The Saint (1997). Val Kilmer and Elisabeth Shue are attractive and appealing actors in this adaptation of the 1960s television series and the long-running series of books by Leslie Charteris. Unfortunately, that can't save the movie from being slow-moving and ultimately uninvolving. It goes something like this: Dickensian prequel to explain and excuse the hero's behavior. Cold fusion mumbo-jumbo, talktalktalk, pretty people tumbling into bed, more cold fusion mumbo-jumbo, talktalktalk, ugly people shooting at the pretty people. Deathtraps. Exploding cars. Startling last-minute revelations. Meh.

Jason and the Argonauts (2000). Ugh. Pretty people and pretty scenery, but I stopped watching it when it became clear that not only was the acting inept, the actors had not even been coached to pronounce the name of the goddess Hera consistently, let alone correctly. You say Heh-ra, I say Hay-ra, let's turn the movie off.

Local govt. in Florida blocks $10 million payoff to Republican campaign contributor

An update to a situation I mentioned a few months ago.

Are bears carnivorous?

It appears the art of satirical commentary is still known to ursine collegians in central Texas.

Humans vs. computers

Huzzah for Netflix and their radical idea of having real live human beings in the United States answer their customer-service phones. Hopefully this will help counter the unpleasant effects of Blockbuster's belated but hefty entry into their market.

The end of an era

The Poe Toaster is no longer a mystery.

I still don't know who beat me to W.C. Brann's grave on the 100th anniversary of his death and decorated it with white flowers before I could offer his restless shade a small toast and a 100-proof libation, though.

Sometimes things are not what they seem

Customers in an Australian bookstore noticed a man who came into the store and started acting strangely, taking books off the shelf and scribbling in them. Obviously a vandal! Or possibly just a poor fellow whose mind was missing a few staybolts.

Or maybe not....

Recent reads

Bizenghast, Vol. 1 and 2, by Alice LeGrow. This rather frilly little piece of Goth-manga first attracted my attention because of its title, which sounds like an allusion to the towering literary edifice of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, and the attractively surreal cover art.

The storyline is okay. Dinah, an orphaned girl with a fondness for elaborate dresses replete with a mixture of Victorian and modern ornamentation, is troubled by dreams of ghosts which bring on "fits" of near-insanity. She lives with her aunt in a dilapidated former asylum and home for "troubled children" in the mysterious New England town of Bizenghast. Occasional news clippings inserted into the story suggest that Bizenghast is the locus of many weird happenings. Most notably, its local records indicate far more deaths than its cemetaries account for. Dinah's best and, apparently, only friend is a teenage boy, Vincent, who seems to live a curiously unsupervised life.

While exploring in the woods near town, Dinah and Vincent find a strange structure and graveyard. For reasons not clearly understood by me, it seems that Dinah is been drafted, somewhat unwillingly, into becoming the human agent assigned to help troubled spirits trapped in this Mausoleum find their way -- willingly or unwillingly -- to their final fate.

There's a good deal of visual creativity on display here, not only in the arrestingly odd creatures that Our Heroes meet in fulfilling their tasks, but in the perpetually-changing clothes and hairstyles of the two principals. Indeed, it sometimes seems that displaying these is the whole point of the exercise. The tasks assigned to the principals, and the rules governing the Mausoleum and their interactions with it, seem to be, in typical anime/manga style, rather contrived intellectual constructs that exist mainly to give the characters something to do while looking attractive.

Fortunately, most of the plot contrivances are worked out in clever or humorous ways, and the artwork, and, yes, even the costume designs, are consistently appealing. An appendix to the second volume confirms that the author is, indeed, a cosplayer and an accomplished seamstress whose graphic art and seamstress work frequently cross-fertilize each other. Her webpage at DeviantArt contains examples of both, as well as a clue that the Gormenghastly allusion in her title is no coincidence. (It troubles me only slightly that some of the artwork on offer is rather cute-ishly morbid, and that certain commenters on Wikipedia have dubbed her main female character's style of clothing as "Gothic Lolita", or Loli-Goth for short.)

Libel tourism and free speech

There's an interesting situation brewing over in the UK at the august offices of stodgy old Cambridge University Press.

The rest of the story, from YahooNews. (Other news stories.)

And the drumbeat goes on

As part of its continuing drumbeat for more war in the Middle East, the Bush Administration reportedly plans to designate Iran's so-called Revolutionary Guard, a significant part of its official, uniformed army, as a "terrorist organization". Intelligent minds over at DailyKos wonder whether, given the Bush Administration's track record of asserting unlimited "unitary executive" power over anything labelled "terrorist", this might be a prelude to launching Dick Cheney's longed-for invasion of Iran without seeking a Congressional declaration of war, as demanded by the Constitution, or even the kind of limp-wristed abdication of war-making authority that it bleated out in response to the Administration's 2003 demand to invade Iraq as a "response" to an attack masterminded by a Saudi Arabian radical holed up in Afghanistan.

One need not be a fan of the bigoted and obnoxious government of Iran to see this as troubling and potentially disastrous. Unfortunately, the Democratic leaders of the Congress, elected by the people on a wave of anti-war feeling, have foolishly abdicated their constitutional authority over this strutting popinjay of a Presidency and gone on vacation, trusting the Bush administration to behave itself in their absence. This is something like trusting a hyperactive toddler to look after himself for a few weeks in a warehouse full of nitroglycerine.

All your colors are belong to us, part III

About a year ago I noted that universities were claiming to "own" certain color combinations and seeking to prohibit non-licenced retailers from producing clothing or other products in those colors.

Now it seems that Scotts Miracle-Gro Inc., a $2.2 billion giant that dominates its market, has asserted ownership of the colors green and yellow. They're suing Terracycle, a relatively miniscule producer of organic fertilizer derived from earthworm excrement. The suit also seeks to prohibit TerraCycle from stating that its products are superior to "leading synthetic fertilizers" in various ways.

Is this a developing legal trend, or are corporate claims to "own" colors, per se, an established part of the legal world?

Recent reads

The Rise of the Counter-Establishment : from conservative ideology fo political power, by Sidney Blumenthal. In this 1986 book, political analyst Blumenthal argues that the post-Goldwater conservative movement defines itself, not, like most historical conservative political parties, as the defender of an existing status quo, but as a persecuted, outsider movement which exists in order to oppose a perceived "liberal" establishment.

This may seem self-evident to a good many political observers, but even so it remains a useful frame for understanding the dynamics of politics today. Unfortunately, the conservative movement has remained stuck in this attitude of defensive counter-establishmentatianism, even after gaining political ascendancy in all three branches of the government. The same old defensive self-definition as persecuted victim can be seen in a good many present-day antics of the conservative "counter-establishment", most notably Fox News' absurdly hyperbolic screeching about such things as a nonexistent "war on Christmas".

Blumenthal analyzes in detail how the conservatives of the 1970s and 1980s went about creating a counter-establishment movement. Think tanks and networking organizations like the American Enterprise Institute figure prominently in his account, and indeed they have continued to be significant parts of conservative politics since the book appeared.

Republicans, as the chosen standard-bearers for the conservative movement, have been successful at using the counter-establishment frame to motivate voters and gain political power. Unfortunately, as this insightful article from The Economist points out, their movement has proven less competent at wielding the power of the political establishment effectively than at railing against it from the position of a self-defined outsider.

Conservatives advocate "another 9/11"

From the editorial page of the Philadelphia Daily News:

America's fabric is pulling apart like a cheap sweater.

What would sew us back together?

Another 9/11 attack.

The Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Rushmore. Chicago's Wrigley Field. The Philadelphia subway system. The U.S. is a target-rich environment for al Qaeda.

Is there any doubt they are planning to hit us again?

If it is to be, then let it be. It will take another attack on the homeland to quell the chattering of chipmunks and to restore America's righteous rage and singular purpose to prevail.

If another terrorist attack does take place, remember who advocated it. Remember who egged it on, and helpfully suggested specific targets. Remember who proudly proclaimed -- again -- that their political faction benefits from the slaughter of American citizens, and that government should "let it be" in order to quell the "chattering of chipmunks"... i.e., the working of democratic government.

Cui bono, indeed.

(Link found via ThinkProgress and Eschaton)

Killing for Jesus

More[DailyKos] on the ludicrous "Left Behind" videogame. Which is now, in a masterstroke of middle-Eastern diplomacy, apparently being distributed to our troops in Iraq for their entertainment and edification. With helpful accompanying written material in English and Arabic, no less.

From The Nation:

With the endorsement of the Defense Department, OSU is mailing "Freedom Packages" to soldiers serving in Iraq. These are not your grandfather's care packages, however. Besides pairs of white socks and boxes of baby wipes (included at the apparent suggestion of Iran-Contra felon Oliver North, according to OSU) OSU's care packages contain the controversial Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game. The game is inspired by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' bestselling pulp fiction series about a blood-soaked Battle of Armageddon pitting born-again Christians against anybody who does not adhere to their particular theology. In LaHaye's and Jenkins' books, the non-believers are ultimately condemned to "everlasting punishment" while the evangelicals are "raptured" up to heaven.

The Left Behind videogame is a real-time strategy game that makes players commanders of a virtual evangelical army in a post-apocalyptic landscape that looks strikingly like New York City after 9/11. With tanks, helicopters and a fearsome arsenal of automatic weapons at their disposal, Left Behind players wage a violent war against United Nations-like peacekeepers who, according to LaHaye's interpretation of Revelation, represent the armies of the Antichrist. Each time a Left Behind player kills a UN soldier, their virtual character exclaims, "Praise the Lord!" To win the game, players must kill or convert all the non-believers left behind after the rapture. They also have the option of reversing roles and commanding the forces of the Antichrist....

...What's more, OSU's "Freedom Packages" include a copy of evangelical pastor Jonathan McDowell's More Than A Carpenter -- a book advertised as "one of the most powerful evangelism tools worldwide" -- that is double-published in Arabic. Considering that only a handful of American troops speak Arabic, the book is ostensibly intended for proselytizing efforts among Iraqi civilians.

I wonder how successful that'll be, when accompanied by a videogame about slaughtering non-"Christians" with machine guns?

Pretty successful, perhaps, if your goal is convince Muslims that the United States is, in fact, the Great Satan and their only choice is to kill or be killed.

Toxic sludge? Bring it on!

The Bush EPA approves of BP's plan to dump toxic sludge in Lake Michigan. No doubt the Bush appointees who ruled on the matter will be suitably rewarded with lucrative corporate positions and stock options sometime in the near future.

Or perhaps it's not that simple. This is, after all, the same Bush EPA that informed us in 2002 that toxic sludge is good for fish. So perhaps this is part of a benevolent effort to help the fish by giving them more of that delicious toxic sludge.

Still... every time Your Humble Correspondent has visited Lake Michigan, he's seen multiple dead fish floating in the water. I wonder why.

Meanwhile, Bush's approval rating among non-incorporated persons continues to plummet. I wonder why.

Bill Moyers & Co. on impeachment

A must-watch video for any patriotic American. Transcript of the whole program included.

A different approach to electric cars

Sell the car, rent the battery, says a company called Think.