An announcement

S., over at ApartmentCarpet, has some happy news.

Calling Gomez Addams

World's Scariest Model Train Wrecks

Your tax dollars at work

Want to know where your tax dollars are going? Check out this 2005 "trophy video", from Aegis, a mercenary gang on the US payroll in Iraq. Fair warning: You'll see mercenaries, on your payroll and officially immune from all military and legal oversight, cruising along the highway casually machine-gunning cars and their occupants completely at random to the cheerful accompaniment of American rock music.

"Why do they hate us?" Oh, yes, I forgot. "Because they hate our freedoms," right?

It's almost as shocking that, despite following Iraq-related news fairly closely, I neverheard of this video until now. It appears that the Christian Science Monitor carried the story, but so far as I can tell it was the only US major media outlet to have considered video evidence of US mercenaries casually murdering Iraqi civilians at random to be newsworthy. A little digging in online databases reveals that UPI and the New York Times carried short squibs about it, but they were apparently inconspicuous enough that I didn't see them. (UPI NewsTrack (Nov 27, 2005); "Shots on Web Draw Inquiry." The New York Times (Dec 10, 2005): A10(L).)

But, hey, you're far more interested in some dimwitted, drug-addled Hollywood pop-tart's latest hair malfunction than in documentary proof that your nation is committing acts of random terrorism against civilians, aren't you? Ooh! Ooh! OJ Simpson!!! And.. and.. there's a cute woman missing somewhere! Look, we have her college yearbook photo! And a cute puppy-dog video! Look! Look!

You're a good American. You watch TV obediently. Are you doing your part in the everlasting, ever-expanding "War On Terra" by going shopping? And watching what you say?

Meanwhile, while the corporate media spew out a steady stream of distraction and disinformation, billions of your tax dollars are funding the development of murderous paramilitary mercenary gangs that answer to no one but their paycheck and blithely slaughter civilians whenever they feel like it. They're already been employed as substitutes for Iraq-assigned National Guardsmen in the aftermath of Katrina, and further deployments to the United States are planned. Meanwhile the Bush administration keeps the military and the National Guard, which are at least nominally sworn to respect the Constitution and the rule of law, tied up in a distant overseas quagmire. (As noted in the New York Times, Bush is demanding a larger 2008 budget for his ongoing adventure in Iraq than in any previous year. So much for any talk about troop withdrawals, as favored by the majority of the population in our purported democracy.)

Naomi Wolf has a theory about this. But of course it would an irresponsible conspiracy theorizing to propose that there could be any connection between these events. Nah, that sort of thing never happens. La la la.

UPDATE: a summary of the federal tax dollars shoveled out to Blackwater USA during the Bush Administration can be found here.

God Hates the World (He Hates You!)

A musical message from Fred Phelps' congregation, via YouTube.

This would be simply stupid and comical if it weren't recognizably just an amplified form of the literal worship of hatred and sadism that has hijacked segments of most major religions. As Harold Bloom memorably put it in The American Religion, reading the words of certain fundamentalist religions makes you realize that their authors and adherents should never be left unattended with small children or helpless animals.

For a corrective, one might consider actually reading the Bible, rather than just waving it about like a mute leather-bound idol (to steal another memorable image from Bloom).

Silly rabbit. Civil liberties are for Republicans!

From the New York Times:
Larry Craig's Great Adventure: Suddenly, he's a civil libertarian

... After his arrest, Mr. Craig was called hypocritical for his longstanding opposition to gay rights in Congress. His legal defense, though, presents a different inconsistency. He joins a long list of conservatives who believe in a fair legal system only for themselves.....

The American Civil Liberties Union has come to Mr. Craig’s defense. It says the law he was convicted under — criminalizing “offensive, obscene, abusive, boisterous, or noisy conduct” that tends to “alarm, anger or disturb others” — is unconstitutionally vague, and makes a lot of perfectly harmless speech illegal. It’s right. If boisterous conduct that disturbs others is a crime in Minnesota, the state must be planning mass arrests of the speakers at the 2008 Republican National Convention, which is being held in Minneapolis-St. Paul....

Mr. Craig is hardly alone in deciding that he likes defendants’ rights after he became a defendant. Among law-and-order conservatives, it’s the norm. Oliver North got his Iran-contra convictions thrown out, with the A.C.L.U.’s help, on a relative technicality. This year, an official of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, James Tobin, got his conviction for jamming Democratic Party lines in New Hampshire on Election Day reversed on a fine point about what his “purpose” was....

Just another variety of the IOKIYAR syndrome.

Train runs through Bangkok market

This is bizarre. Or bazaar. At any rate, it puts a whole new intepretation on the phrase "urban mixed use".

(Note: link is to www.ifilm.com with embedded video clip.)

The care and feeding of Congress

This is hilarious, if more than a little depressing.

Update re. Blackwater USA massacre of civilians

The Independent, a UK newspaper, reports more details of the massacre, which US new outlets are apparently refusing to cover. The death toll is now apparently 28 and expected to rise further. Discussion rational and otherwise here.

Blackwater USA, of course, claims that they are blameless. A video of the incident reportedly says otherwise. But who are you going to believe? Right-wing militarist/theocrat Erik Prince and his corporate mercenaries, or your lying eyes?

Your tax dollars at work. "Why Do They Hate Us?"

No comment really necessary on this one

"God" responds to legislator's lawsuit (CNN)

The return fax number should have been no surprise. Any well-schooled Christian can tell you that God resides in the Body of Christ.

It is somewhat odd that the photograph of the legislator who filed the lawsuit appears to have a halo around his head.

All your ISBNs are belong to us

Ah, those Ivy League schools. They're so advanced. So far out in front of the rest of society, in research, in science, in intellectual resources.

And, it appears, in wildly ambitious interpretations of intellectual property. The Harvard Crimson reports that the campus co-op bookstore expels students who take notes and compare prices on textbooks. The bookstore claims that the ISBNs of the books on the shelves are its intellectual property.

Discussion, paranoid and otherwise, at Slashdot. I can't wait until car dealers follow suit and decide that the specifications of the cars on their lots are "intellectual property", and that their customers therefore are not allowed to take notes and compare prices at other dealerships.

Uh-oh.

Fears of dollar collapse as Saudis take fright (Telegraph.co.uk)

Saudi Arabia has refused to cut interest rates in lockstep with the US Federal Reserve for the first time, signalling that the oil-rich Gulf kingdom is preparing to break the dollar currency peg in a move that risks setting off a stampede out of the dollar across the Middle East....

China threatens 'nuclear option' of dollar sales (Telegraph.co.uk)

Two officials at leading Communist Party bodies have given interviews in recent days warning - for the first time - that Beijing may use its $1.33 trillion (£658bn) of foreign reserves as a political weapon to counter pressure from the US Congress....

Yet another scam to be wary of?

Beware of e-mail scam offering to rescue friends.

... This new scam has seen bogus e-mails claiming that a common friend is attending a conference in Africa on "Empowering Youth to Fight Racism, HIV/AIDS, Poverty and Lack of Education". Then the person - whose e-mail account has been hacked - is portrayed as being stranded in Africa after forgetting in a taxi a "little bag" that contained "money, passport, documents and other valuables".

Friends who write back to the hijacked account are replied to and told to send the $3,500 urgently....

Run away from the scary brown people!

That's exactly what the Republican party seems to be doing, as evidenced by the reported refusal of all the major presidential candidates to appear at an upcoming nationally televised debate focusing on "minority issues".

No matter what one thinks of "racial politics", this seems like a bad strategy for a political party that wishes to remain relevant in a nation where the number of Hispanic, Asian, Indian, native-American, and African or African-American people in the population is increasing. Quoth Jack Kemp, the party's 1996 vice-presidential candidate: “What are we going to do, meet in a country club in the suburbs one day?”

Addendum: Discussion at DailyKos.

WWGD: What Would Greenspan Do?

Apparently he wouldn't vote Republican. At least not for the current crop of R's.

Robert Jordan

His demise is not exactly a surprise, since he announced in March of 2006 that he had been diagnosed with a deadly illness. Still, both he and his fans would certainly have hoped for more time to finish his epic "Wheel of Time" series. (Thanks to Fiend, who is much more in tune with the news of the day than I usually am, for initially mentioning it to me.)

Especially for Carlos

... since he's looking for a place to live somewhere out in the burning deserts of the Southwest. How 'bout Arcosanti?

Exactly as planned

There seems to be mass confusion about how Blackwater USA mercenaries, on the payroll of the US government, ended up shooting several Iraqi civilians in Baghdad recently. Eyewitnesses unconnected to Blackwater state that the mercenaries were not provoked. Or, possibly, that they panicked in response to a distant explosion. Or maybe they got cranky because of rush hour traffic. The official report states they were responding to small arms fire. Blackwater claims that in any case, the mercenaries' killing of eight civilians was lawful, and that they are immune from any and all legal consequences.

And you know what? They may be right.

Ain't it wonderful having a privately-owned and operated mercenary army that doesn't have to follow either US law, Iraqi law, or international law?

Blackwater USA is also aggressively seeking contracts to provide "homeland security" in the United States as well. And of course they're in line to cash in on the ever-profitable War On Drugs. Won't that be fun?

Especially for Pablo

Vampire Population Ecology: a statistical analysis of the vampire population dynamics of Sunnyvale, California.

Perhaps it's Kryptonite

From The Guardian: Peru meteorite crash 'causes mystery illness'

Some good news

The blogger known as Riverbend reports that she and her family have escaped the war-torn wreckage of her native country and taken refuge in a less-chaotic country.

Casualties

Two of the US soldiers who wrote this editorial describing their experiences on the ground in Iraq and criticizing the war are reported killed. A third of the group was recently reported injured. Stories here, here, here.

It's tough being a soldier. A real soldier, that is, as opposed to a chickenhawk.

Logic, Republican style

From today's front-page editorial at www.redstate.org, a refreshingly honest call-to-brutality by one pseudonymous "Frank J.", who has somehow neglected to sign up for the war that he so eagerly demands that *other* people fight for his satisfaction:

When someone tells you we should bring the troops back, ask him who does he think will then kill the terrorists. When he inevitably gives you a dumb answer, punch him in the face....

Republican "logic": bully and physically attack anyone who deigns to disagree with Der Fuhrer, just like Nazis always do when confronted by the unacceptable presence of free men who think for themselves. Devoid of facts and logic, Republicans now have nothing but explicit brownshirt threats to fall back on. But, like the cowardly author of this call-to-thuggishness, only in the safety of a mob of like-minded bullies, in a "safe space" like RedState where dissent from the party line is banned.

Disgusting. And no, I'm not going to give him a link.

Piechart

"Pacified", over at squarestate.net, makes a point graphically:

"The creatures looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

An Opportunity for Wall St. in China’s Surveillance Boom (NY Times)

Go on, tell me again how capitalism and communism are opposites.

Administrative ignorance, part whatevereth

From the Times of London:

Biblical error costs Church £½m
An historic collection of religious books whose sale for £36,000 was approved last year by a Church of England diocese has been sold on by a book dealer for more than £500,000....

“Those on the management committee had no idea of the value of the material they were dealing with. The decision was made in principle that the pre1800 collection be disposed of simply because in the past ten years no one had inquired about any book in it at all. Therefore, the library management committee felt that the space was being taken up in a way that was not productive....

In all fairness, though, this is preferable to the clueless managers simply tossing them in the rubbish skip. (That's British for "dumpster".) At least they made some effort to keep the books in existence, if not necessarily available to the world at large.

News noted

Updates to some railroad-related news I've blathered about.

The Texas State Railroad, saved from drowning, has been contracted out to a private operator.

The mighty Canadian Pacific merges its way into the Powder River Basin coalfield by taking over the persistent little Dakota Minnesota & Eastern, which had gotten regulatory permission to extend its South Dakota trackage into the Powder River Basin but up till now couldn't come up with the capital to do so. CP also acquires a route into Kansas City as part of the bargain. (Map of combined systems here.) UP and BNSF are predictably unhappy with the prospect of a third competitor horning in on their very profitable coal traffic. They're reportedly planning to sue to stop the merger, thereby diverting a substantial amount of all three railroads' revenues into the pockets of lawyers for the foreseeable future.

Of publishers and rejection letters

The diary of Anne Frank:

The work was “very dull,” the reader insisted, “a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions.”

Animal Farm:

“impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.”

Just two of the enlightening comments dredged out of the rejection letters of the Alfred E. Knopf publishing company, as described here in the New York Times. It's worth noting that Knopf has generally been regarded as one of the more intellectually enlightened publishing houses.

Madeleine L'Engle

Gone at age 89. PW has a very brief obit.

A Wrinkle in Time, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and her other popular and award-winning books continue on. At least until the next library-weeding project.

Random linkyness

StarTrek and Simpsons musical mashup on YouTube. (From the Stilyagi list.)

From the Chronicle of Higher Ed, the ever-interesting Writer Formerly Known as Thomas H. Benton pulls back the curtain on the eternally-recurring propaganda that this, that, or another profession is expecting an imminent "labor shortage".

Am I wrong to think the annual labor shortage claims do the work of business in creating a surplus army of the unemployed who can drive down wages in fields in which they might otherwise be rising? It seems that during a labor shortage rising wages result in downsizing, offshoring, and other forms of restructuring. As the newly trained workers arrive in droves a few years later, most of the high-wage workers can be dismissed, and the newcomers can be made part-timers with no benefits until the cycle begins again....

Also from the Chronicle, a discussion of the ethics of selling those review copies and "complimentary desk copies" with which publishers deluge academics in the hopes that the latter will assign their books as textbooks, thus forcing dozens or hundreds of impoverished students to buy them at the publisher's exorbitant retail prices.

Fantasy and sf writer Jeff Vandermeer opines about Margaret Atwood's remote book-signing device. I'm tempted to say that any writer who, like Ms. Atwood, is capable of creating, using and popularizing such a device clearly has an aptitude for science fiction. But of course Ms. Atwood's novels about future societies, genetic engineering, etc., are famously Not Science Fiction.

Speaking of genre fiction and its enemies, Ursula K. Leguin's short essay On Serious Literature (aka Return of the Genre-Zombie) should be required reading for anyone involved in writing, editing, buying or selling fiction in any form. (Tagline : "It rose from its shallow grave to haunt the critics!")

Belated poetry Thursday

Yesterday's selection for Apartment Carpet's Poetry Thursday reminded me of another poem that deconstructs the tradional sonnet:

Sonnet Reversed

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

Hand trembling towards hand; the amazing lights
Of heart and eye. They stood on supreme heights.

Ah, the delirious weeks of honeymoon!
Soon they returned, and, after strange adventures,
Settled at Balham by the end of June.
Their money was in Can. Pacs. B. Debentures,
And in Antofagastas. Still he went
Cityward daily; still she did abide
At home. And both were really quite content
With work and social pleasures. Then they died.
They left three children (besides George, who drank):
The eldest Jane, who married Mr Bell,
William, the head-clerk in the County Bank,
And Henry, a stock-broker, doing well.

A Tale of Two Auctions, or, The $500,000 Bottle of Beer.

Auction Number One can be found here. It sold for $304 dollars. The buyer then turned around, did more research, wrote a nearly dissertation-length description of the item and its historical significance, and offered it up in Autcion Number Two, with no reserve. The final sale price: a cool half-million.

What is this improbably pricy item? An old bottle of beer. But not just any old bottle of beer. To begin with, it's reportedly the world's oldest known intact, sealed bottle of beer. Still not impressed? How 'bout the fact that it's part of a special, freeze-resistant batch of beer that was brewed to order for a mid-19th century arctic expedition, and that its provenance and history are exhaustively detailed in a hand-written, 100-year-old note attached to the bottle? (Note: In the absence of any contrary revelations, I am presuming the authenticity of the bottle, because I presume that anyone willing to buy or sell an object for $500,000 is going to have it examined in minute detail by well-qualified experts.)

Certain web-commentators have mocked the first seller for not getting the full value of his find. But I'll speak up in his defense. I don't know how he acquired it, but it seems likely he got it cheap. Possibly he inherited it (in which case one can't help but wish that the heirs of Mr. Bolster, who wrote the charmingly erudite note that accompanies the bottle, had profited more from their ancestor's good taste.) Or perhaps he picked it up cheap at an auction, fleamarket, or estate sale where no one else recognized its value, in which case the heirs who let it slip through their fingers have only themselves to blame!. But in any case, if the first seller hadn't realized that the bottle had some historical significance, for all we know it might have ended up in a dumpster. He knew it was worth something, even if he didn't know exactly what it was worth. And without that recognition, a unique artifact might have been entirely lost.

On the other hand, if he was selling it on commission for somebody else, he has some 'splainin' to do.