I was doing the malls on McKnight Road in the North Hills of Pittsburgh, mostly for nostalgia purposes. I end up buying most gifts online these days. Shopping malls are, sad to say, twentieth-century institutions. I'm sure yinz have seen the "Dead Malls" website, right? Northway Mall is by no means a "dead" mall, but it's been on lifesupport as long as I can remember. It's been full of empty shops for at least the last twenty years. They keep renovating it, but the renovations don't generally take. The two tent poles holding up that sagging bladder of a mall are the cheap-movies multiplex on the second floor, and a Borders on the first floor. Eh. I kind of miss the old Northway. They used to have an enormous, two-story birdcage filled with dozens of songbirds. It must have generated a lot of bird dung; it certainly produced one hell of a lot of noise. You could hear it from one end of the second floor to the other.

Northway Mall now has a temporary, third tent pole. It's a library. Northland Library, the main public library for the North Hills, is apparently in the middle of a full-building renovation. Instead of simply putting the whole library into storage for the duration, somebody decided to put all of that empty retail space to use. They've hauled a cluster of tables, desks, and associated library-ish furniture into what was once a large, no-brand toy store, along with one heck of a lot of bookshelves. The librarians on duty insisted that the mall library represented the whole of Northland's holdings, which alarmed me because Northland had been a good-sized two-story library with far more books than could possibly be fit within a single room, no matter how large. I've since been reassured that they put a good share of the less-popular holdings into storage.

I find it amusing that they're using a failing example of twentieth-century commercial technology, the enclosed shopping mall, to house a still-vibrant exemplar of the height of 18th-century intellectual technology - the public lending library. It demonstrates that the blinkers of American zoning ordinances are removable, given enough imagination. I hope to one day see the increasingly-worthless strip malls and enclosed shopping malls of America turned to new, old purposes - housing, office space, or some day, back to the land itself.

Steven Den Beste has been watching anime again, which is always news to be approached with trepidation, caution, and good humor. People give him "advice", and the results can be somewhat farcial. I don't know what to make of a guy who occasionally writes for the Wall Street Journal seriously reviewing Steel Angel Kurumi, let alone what to say when he uses it as a platform for yelling about amnesiac Japanese nostalgia.

To start out with, somebody dropped him in the deep end of "robot maid" fetish anime, and to his credit, he's noticed that it's fairly stupid wish-fulfillment. Still, a diet of Hand Maid May, Steel Angel Kurumi, and Mahoromatic is the anime equivalent of dining on Vending Machine Row - not good for you under any circumstances.

Anyways, the outrage:

It would be a period of a couple of years around the time of the Berlin Olympics, and it could also be seen in about the way these series' see 1925 Japan. No one does that for 1936 Germany, because they understand how monstrous it really was.

This belief, that mid-20s Japan was the same chaotic, oppressive hell that the late 20s and early 30s were, is a misunderstanding of the period. It isn't true. The early and mid 20s represented a "bubble economy" between the end of World War I and the social/political collapse into full-bore militarism of the late 20s. This brief period - the second half of the Taisho era in which both Steel Angel Kurumi and Sakura Wars are set - was the closest Japan ever got to European-style bourgeois prosperity. The Japanese of the period were still uniform-addled, regimented, prone to let paramilitary organizations take the place of private society, and poor by European standards - but it still was a sort of calm before the Showa storm.

I don't know if Germans ever idealize the Weimar Republic in this fashion - I don't really "do" German literature or pop-culture - but that's the parallel that should be used. Japan in 1925 is a Weimar Republic, not an early Third Reich.

To be strictly honest, when I've seen Japanese pop culture do idealized nostalgia, they're much more likely to do Meiji, rather than Taisho. Urusei Yatsura has a lot of that, especially in the OAVs.

Don't take all of this as defense of either Steel Angel Kurumi or Sakura Wars. I couldn't stand Sakura Wars. I'm somewhat ashamed to say that I bought the whole first series of Steel Angel Kurumi, but in my defense it was more of a "well, that provided just enough of a margin of entertainment to justify buying one more disc at online discounted prices". I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone - it's horribly saccharine cheesecake piffle. But there are much more noxious examples of Japanese nostalgia for prewar fascism out there.

Almost every goddamn thing Leiji Matsumoto has ever been involved in, for instance. Space Battleship Yamato, in which our Japanese heroes wage heroic self-sacrificing war against space gaijin. I direct the audience towards the excellent, but queasy Arreviderchi, Yamato, in which our protagonists re-enact the February 26th Incident as part of a doomed campaign that eventually concludes with a massive, suicidal kamikaze attack. Captain Harlock, in his many incarnations, rebels against thinly disguised American occupiers, or relives his Nazi-fighter-pilot ancestor's last flight, or just generally goes on in the sort of self-dramatizing Volk-hero defiance of last-man accommodation that is so central to the spirit of fascist anti-rationalism. More than one of the later Harlock projects are remakes of Wagner Ring-cycle mythology, for the love of Nietzsche! You'll get yet more of the same from the three-part OAV adaptation of The Cockpit which, among other things, features another Nazi pilot who's too noble to allow the dropping of a German nuclear bomb, preferring to go out in a blaze of glory after proving that German fascists are more moral than American butchers.

Don't get me wrong. I *like* Matsumoto's stuff, or at least some of it. The first Captain Harlock TV series is twenty-five years old, and it's still a good show. Arreviderchi, Yamato is an excellent movie. The Cockpit OAVs are brilliant. But it's hard to get away from the obvious, which is that Matsumoto is, at heart, a fascist, and he retails a type of anti-rationalist nostalgia. It isn't as if he's the only creative in anime with a dodgy political point of view. Otomo(Akira) and Mamoru Oshii(Patlabor) are both one-time street-fighting New Leftists. Miyazaki was a doctrinaire card-carrying Communist who was one of the leaders of an internal revolt at Toei in the mid-60s that resulted in a two-year occupation of that animation studio. (The eventual result was the grand, but deeply flawed Horus: Prince of the Sun.)

I drove to Pittsburgh this morning, on the understanding that my parents wanted me home a day before Thanksgiving, for what reason, I hadn't really bothered to ask. I arrived about 1:30 PM, to find the front door open and no-one but a dozing, elderly shih-tzu on the premises. So, I settled back, expecting whomever had need of me this day before the season, to show up from whatever errand they were on, list of familial assignments in hand. You know, the usual.

Three hours later, I hear a car pull up to the garage. Walking over to the garage, I managed to scare the crap out of my dad, who was getting out of his SUV, and apparently not expecting anyone to greet him. I noted sourly that if he's going to leave the front door unlocked in a major metropolitan area like Pittsburgh, he's lucky it hasn't happened to him more often than it has. I asked him why I had been summoned. He was damned if he knew. So, we waited.

A half-hour later, mom shows up as I was walking over to move my car from in front of the neighbor's garage. She saw me pulling the car around, and assumed that I had just arrived. I asked *her* why I was there, and she said something to the effect of "you're the one who drove here, wouldn't you know?"

After some back-and-forth, we established, finally, that her busybodiesque inquiry of how many days of vacation I had left (under the mistaken impression that my company operates on a yearly vacation use-em-or-lose-em plan, instead of the continual personal-days rollover we actually use), had *not* been intended as subtle instruction to extend my Thanksgiving Day visit to the better part of a week, but rather just the usual casual meddling. So, I find myself marking time in Pittsburgh, instead of, you know, getting work done in State College.

Ah, family. The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.

Dan Drezner hosted a debate (here, here , here, here, and here) a few weeks back about the "imminent threat" kefluffle. The "they implied an imminent threat" guy whipped out a thesaurus to "show" that the administration said "imminent" via synonyms - looming, etc. I was reading a new military Iraq blog, when I came across this demonstration of the dangers of relying on thesauruses for serious rhetorical work - a thesaurus containing 42 synonyms for "guerilla", none of which actually retaining the original meaning of "nonconventional warrior, or insurgent". Drezner gave the palm to Thesaurus Boy; I still say he was rewarding the cleverest manufacturer of straw men.

Iraq Now is an interesting blog (via ye olde Instapundit)- he sounds like either a company commanding officer, or a battalion officer of some sort. I'm still reading through his backentries.

Update: our military blogger comments on the Army Times "they're screwing our boys!" article that Fred Ramsey pointed out to me a while back, without having the link handy. He also points out a Stars and Stripes article spinning the same story the opposite way, which is how I had heard it, not being a regular reader of the Army Times. Looks like the Army Times link is dead - so much for media permalinks, what?

Looks like he's a battalion XO.

I vaguely knew that Nelson Ascher wrote about poetry in Portuguese; I didn't know he was a published poet himself. He's posted some translations of his work on Europundits. Normally, I don't have much use for translated poetry. Native language is so central and primary an element of a poem that I have some difficulty regarding a translation as anything other than an adaptation - not to be considered the thing in itself any more than the film made of a book ought to be confused for the novel itself.

But there are exceptions to this vague rule. Some translators take the original work as inspiration for their own flights of fancy. Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is the model and exemplar of this derivative art. I don't read Persian - I merely rely on the informed opinion of those that do - but it is my understanding that the third-rate poetry of 'Umar Khayyam has only a passing resemblance to Fitzgerald's epochal editions. This is a *good thing*.

The above translations of Ascher's poems, on the other hand, have been selected by the writer himself, and thus, endorsed. I find myself ambiguous on the subject.

Oh, well, leaving all pedantic objections aside, there's a lot of excellent imagery in the selections - and imagery is, perhaps, the one element of poetics that is least reliant on the tricks of language. The bitter humor also comes across without linguistic confusion.

I especially liked "the Statue of Wallenberg".

The sky over the office was blue, red and white, and contrails covered the heavens like a child's cross-hatched notion of infinity, stretching out to some poorly defined vanishing point.

For all my life I lived under a full sky, a sky full of man. The visual affirmation of man's continued refusal to admit that he was just another animal - the sign that he could re-make the world entire in a reflected image of himself, his inner imaginings. The contrails were our mark on the world itself.

Then the disasters came, and the skies emptied out, and remained empty. Late afternoon came, and the commerce of humanity was - gone. We were too far out from the major cities for the combat air patrols to quarter our skies in protection of the remaining buildings, the communication centres, the vital hubs. There was just - nothing.

And the skies were terribly, terribly blue, and empty, and it was as if man was already gone, and if we were not quite extinct, it was as if our dreams had died before us. The skies were empty.

Then, at last, they resumed flights, and there were new fears, and you couldn't help but twitch whenever a plane appeared overhead, in irrational fear that it might fall, but these were little fears, and lesser worries. The skies had men in them again; the void was full.

The great blue abyss was divided, by white contrails stretching off towards forever.

Iaa. I just ordered a couple of books (Walter Jon William's the Sundering and Devine's Scotland's Empire 1600-1815) from Amazon UK, and thought "35 pounds isn't that much". That'll teach me not to pay attention to exchange rates. 35 pounds is a little under $60 at today's rates.

Ouch.

Oops. It seems as if ANSWER is laundering its donations through a 501(c)3, which are not supposed to be political. How the hell did that get by the watchdogs? They claim to be "educating" people about peace activism. Right. I'm going to start a 501(c)3 dedicated to "educating" the public about the wonders of democracy by funding the campaigns of pro-war Democratic candidates. I'm sure it'll slip in under whatever loophole the People's Rights Fund thinks is covering their politized asses.

Via Professor Bainbridge.

Erin O'Connor passes along an interesting anecdote in which a "Post-Christian" English professor refuses to address students' questions about the theology in Milton on the grounds that "she didn't think a discussion of Christianity was important to an understanding of Milton". You can't make this stuff up, people.

Book meme:
The rules: Take someone else's list of authors. Remove any you don't have on your shelves. Add replacements, keeping the total number at ten.

Ilaria's list:

Jane Austen
Connie Willis
Michael Ondaatje
Lois McMaster Bujold
Emma Bull
Tanya Huff
Diana Kappel-Smith
Damon Runyan
Christina Quinn
Sharon Lee & Steve Miller

My list:

Jane Austen
Connie Willis
Lois McMaster Bujold
Emma Bull
Tanya Huff
Glen Cook
George R.R. Martin
Walter Mosley
Sharyn McCrumb
Neal Stephenson

A nasty misunderstanding based on an accidental kanji/mahwa pun in a skit performance by some Japanese students in a university in Xian resulted in a large and violent anti-Japanese riot in that city. Here's a first-person account of what happened. As far as I can tell, a stupid "we love China" skit by the Japanese students (they were there learning Chinese in some sort of exchange program, it seems) resulted in an accidental pun that jingoistic local students took as disparaging. I'd hope that this sort of thing would stand as a lesson for those folks who think that American nationalism or American racism is somehow unique or exceptional.

Oops. Via Gweilo's Winds of Change China Wrapup.

David Carr of Samizdata infiltrated the London protests to see what happened, and was quite disappointed to find a subdued, mechanical march, that sounded more like a slog with patchouli. Good piece - has a bit of that P.J. O'Rourke flair.

The furor over Nick Confessore's hitjob on Tech Central Station led me to read Arnold Kling's TCS article on the Austrian School of free-market economics. I'm passingly familiar with the Chicago School - I don't think you can get through a decent college education in the states without having encountered it at least once - but the Austrian School is confusing and more than a little gnomic. Descriptions of the Austrian School seem to revolve around the idea that central banks poison the knowledge-base of investors and businesspeople by creating false ideas of the available pool of capital - I get that much. It's when they start in on all of these labored analogies about time preferences and long-term projects versus short-term projects that I tend to lose the train of their argument in a crowded thicket of metaphor and simile.

I went looking for comparisons of the two schools, when I came across this article by an Austrian which makes a great, if somewhat tangential, argument about why high-level economics is such a doubtful science. He makes the point that the development of economic theories resembles the behavior of fads more than it does scientific paradigms or the free-market evolutionism preferred by mainstream triumphalists. A dominant theory tends to glide in stasis until catastrophic error causes a spasm of reconsideration, whereupon a replacement theory is adopted, until the next catastrophic error. I suspect the author is underplaying the degree of hypothesis-testing that goes on during periods of triumphal stasis - young economists do have a slight incentive to tear down the existing paradigm in order to get noticed. But it's this worry, the danger of fads, that makes me suspicious of the "soft" sciences, and their claims to rigour.

It is this fear that "there can ... be no presumption whatever in economics that later thought is better than earlier" that makes me leery of the more religiously progressive supply-siders. If economics, the hardest of "soft" sciences, is so unstable and fickle, how much more so can the political "science" be? Nothing alarms me more than this fear of quicksands beneath the feet of the evangelical philosophers of Democracy.

Roger Simon linked to a Free Republic reproduction of a Herber Meyer speech calling for a revival of "Team B", although Meyer didn't specifically refer to it by that name. I found out that what he was talking about was the "Team B" I've heard so maligned by googling his name and coming up with this article on the work "Team B" did uncovering Soviet economic/financial lies. According to that article, systemic Soviet misrepresentation of economic data meant that the conventional CIA mistakenly believed that the Warsaw Pact economies were twice as large as they actually were.

Now, I don't actually know that much about "Team B". It turns out that there were several "Team B"s. This article describes the original "Team B", created as part of a creative wargaming-analysis project under Bush the Senior in 1976. The original "Team B" actually came to the exact opposite conclusion of Herber Meyer's "Team B" - they wildly over-estimated the Soviet capacity for military expansion and upkeep.

Safire has a column from a few years back where he refers to a Rumsfeld "Team B" which was pushing the theory that rogue states like Iran were capable of making a ballistic missile threat on the continental US within five years of project inception. Feith's Office of Strategic Planning has been called a new "Team B".

Well, this all is a nice partisan tangle. You hear and see great gobs of stuff about the earlier "Team B" which fell so thoroughly on its face.

I'm reading the Education of Henry Adams online. One of the more brilliant aspects of the modern internet is it's bottomless potential for self-impression and boundless pretension. You can go chasing pornographic doujinshi, or you can read the self-involved memoirs of Boston's most pompous son. Or, you can do both at the same time, while puttering around doing some actual work.

Yay.

The BBC has got a reporters' group blog up about the Bush visit to England, along the same lines as the blog they had running last spring during the war. It's somewhat amusing, because from all accounts the protests are looking like a massive wet squib.

The Iain Murray link via Instapundit.

Today's the 140th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.

Balticon sent me a flyer the other week; it seems Bujold will be the GoH. This is stranger than it would appear on first blush: I've never really attended a Balticon. I have no idea how I got on their mailing list. I used to do Philcon, back in college. I usually didn't have time to do conventions in the spring, and Balticon was PSSFS's (Penn State Science Fiction Society, for those random readers who aren't alumni) spring con. Philcon was the fall convention, and I usually was flush and at loose ends in the fall.

The one time I did show up at Balticon, it was to help run an anime video room, as part of a publicity/staffing exchange between Otakon and Balticon. This was the year that PSSFS alumni used Balticon as a reunion, the year that John Nadzam got horribly trashed on three pangalactic gargle blasters and earned his nickname "John the Volcano". Maybe I actually bought a membership. I don't remember at this point... No, I must have. I remember sitting on a panel.

Even though Bujold is one of my favorite authors, this is less of a draw than you might think. I'm not a big proponent of fans and authors mixing; I've found that such things invariably come to grief. I prefer to let authors produce books, and let me pay for them. Nice, commercial, distant. I've always felt that conventions should be gatherings of fans, and should concentrate on fannish activity. Discussion panels with "big fans" rather than "interview" panels, or press conferences without the name. Since I don't have a history of attending Balticon, this means that I don't have a lot of social contacts within the Balticon collective. What contacts I do have would be because of staff overlaps between Balticon and Otakon, which, after all, are held in the same metropolitan area.

Eh, call it a big "maybe". Maybe if I can find some PSSFSers who are going. Bill Johnston lives down that way these days...

The Carnival of the Vanities is at Peaktalk this week. There's an idiot sounding off about anime; Ilyka Damen reminds me why I can't stand protest activists; finally, Angelweave almost succeeds in talking me into reading Fast Food Nation.

You know, when I think of countries that specialize in the mercenary business, I usually think of cold, barren, mountainous nations - countries with little prospects, where the terrain actively encourages its sons and daughters to find their armed fortunes in foreign lands. The Scots of French military tradition. The Swiss Guards of the Vatican. The Norwegians and Danes of the Varangian Guard in the Byzantine days of Constantinople. Even the Kurds of the latter days of the Baghdad Caliphate.

So when did sunny, tropical, lush Fiji become this era's best-known exporter of mercenary troops? Perhaps Fiji is more mountainous and barren that I had always assumed. A check of the CIA Factbook definitely seems to indicate that it is, indeed, mountainous, and an arable land percentage under 11% ranks it below Afghanistan and Iran, and about equal with traditional-mercenary-exporters Switzerland and Scotland.

Huh. The things you think that just ain't so.