I can't decide if this is clever or too obvious to be funny.

What am I saying? This is politics. Nothing can ever be too obvious.

Couldn't They Have At Least Gotten Rid of Jackson?

They've redesigned the $20 bill for the second time in what is it, a decade? Doesn't look nearly as garish as I thought it would. Isn't about time we stopped celebrating a constitution-abusing filibustering racist like Andrew Jackson?

via Crazy Kimchi, which often has pretty interesting links, if the sort one might expect from an angry ranting-leftist artist.

Andrew Sullivan has given Fred Kaplan a much-deserved tearing-into. Kaplan strikes me as the most intellectually dishonest of the Slate neolib crew. He irritates me more than Josh Micah Marshall does, and that takes some work.

The Hobo Traveller Leaves Iraq

I've been following the Hobo Traveller's blog for about two weeks now. He's a near-professional traveller from Indiana who was in the first wave of private visitors to the new Iraq. He's now wrapped up his month-long journey through that country. I strongly recommend reading his archives for the entire period. Fair warning, however: they're very exhaustive, and there are hundreds of photographs.

His style is very Daoist - a very spare writing-style, strongly influenced by the Basic English he seems to get along with in his travels. He doesn't seem to be a big advocate of learning local languages - he's quite stern on the subject, and argues that people with less than a hundred words in the local language are more likely to get themselves in a pile of trouble than talk their way out.

He's a strange blend of judgment and neutrality - he insists on not feeling superior or inferior, and tries not to mis-represent himself as being other than an American. On the other hand, he can get quite heated about local bigotries, and isn't inclined to excuse much, either.

Strongly, strongly recommended.

"I Decline To Accept The End Of Man"

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

William Faulkner, on his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature as Korea burned, Europe bristled and the end was very, very near.

15,000?

The new figures could put even more pressure on the government to correct snags in its highly respected health system and increase outrage over the staggering death toll.

"Highly respected". Not any more. Any health system that doesn't believe in patient ward environmental controls is decidedly second-world, in my opinion. At best.

Well, Which Is It?

The other day, he was giddy over the chance to become a martyr. Today, he's upset because the court sentence is "haram", un-Islamic. I think somebody pointed out to him that the various hareth say nothing about martyrdom, virgins and execution sentences. It's almost as if he's trying to make his case before Allah - "It's martyrdom if the judge isn't ruling sharia! I'm not actually guilty, despite having done what I stand accused of!"

"... enel hokm ella lellah" - "God is the only one fit to judge". And the books generally show that God to be unamused by those that look to the letter rather than the spirit. (via Joe Katzman at Winds of Change)

National Stockholm Syndrome

Tacitus reviewing a book written by a survivor of one of the North Korean gulags, discussion of South Korea's bizarre and hysterical Stockholm Syndrome reaction to the hell to the north of them, and the insanity of the "bijou gundan", or "army of beautiful women" phenomenon.

Update: to quote Tacitus in a followup post: "Gosh, they're cute. I feel like rationalizing horrendous crimes!"

Here's an example: Ajemi's article is cited by half of my daily reading list today: Roger L. Simon, Porphyrogenitus, and LLittle Green Footballs. At its worst, this results in an echo chamber. At its best, it creates a self-reinforcing phatic chorus that can counterattack media assaults that weaken the consensus necessary for the address of tough questions.

Slate has recently been banging the drum on how the neocons are "cracking up", as well as dripping bile in every day's newspaper roundups. The neolibs think they've got the neocons on the run. Of course, it didn't help that some neocons *did* go wobbly for a while there. But the strange thing about the current situation is that there is a collection of pro-American Arab pundits like Fouad Ajemi and Amir Taheri who are playing against the sour, opportunist neolib drumbeat of the Kaplans, Saletans, and Noahs of the commentariat.

Hee Hee

The Arab League accepted Hoshiar Zeibar, the Iraqi Governing Council's foreign minister, as the current representative from Iraq. He's a Kurd. I like the idea of screwing with a racial organization like the Arab League in this fashion.

This will also, of course, make it very difficult for the UN to not let the Governing Council send an ambassador to take up Iraq's empty seat on the General Assembly.

Qrei?

The new Palistinian "prime minister", Ahmed Qrei, ladies and gentlemen. Looks like a particularly bad typo to me, but I guess the Arabic News would be authoritative.

Well, Hell

Another pipeline bombing. It's not as bad as the Aussie story makes it sound - it's a secondary feeder that carries a lot less than the main pipeline into Turkey. Still sucks. Somebody ought to be working on a way to monitor and ambush the pipelines in some fashion - nail the ratfuckers the next time they try this shit. Or even better, start blowing up sections of the Syrian pipeline everytime the Turkish line goes up. I still think this is the Syrians sniping at the competition.

On Never Learning

They're paving Rt 144 through Axemann this morning. The signs were out yesterday morning. I noted them at the time. Did I take this into account and take another road into work *this* morning? Of course not, because people never learn. We do so many things that we complacently believe are well within the bourne of our free will, of our free agency, of decisions and intentions and thought-out plans. Arrogance and willful blindness! Man is a creature of habit and reflex, of learned behaviors and mindless routines. I took Rt 144 because I always take Rt 144, and I had no-one to blame but myself when I found myself stuck in a long line of cars behind dump trucks steaming with noxious hot asphalt.

Didn't keep me from cursing the slowcoach dump truck drivers, though.

A Comic Journal of WWII

The wartime comics & art of a P-47 pilot killed in battle during the Normandy campaign, along with letter excerpts and commentary from his surviving friends. Put together by his son. Highly recommended.

Why Bloggers Rock

This little minidrama, wherein one of the Command Post bloggers (if you don't check the Command Post daily, do so - excellent collaborative warblog), having posted what turned out to be a bad report on a munitions seizure in Saudi Arabia, loudly and angrily announced his mistake, is a fine example of how blogs can blow the wheels off of mass media. Not just a correction, this was a full-throated declamation of error and explanation. It was delivered with fire and fury, and the blogger (Alan Brain of Australia) took full responsibility for the problem, while explaining the full provenance of the report.

This is how journalistic checks-and-balances should work.

Free Trade

The hills have an issue with
Imbalances of trade
The smart and beautiful and ambitous
Gusth forth into the lower lands
Making their mark
In the wider ways
Far from the narrow slopes.
In return the world delivers
Its waste and refuse
The losers in search of
Cheaper lives
The spent retired, in search
Of quiet vista views.
A poor exchange
Promise for refuse
And still some wonder at
Mountain poverty.

8/3/03

Presidential Speechifying

Well, that was less disastrous than I've come to expect from the chimp. He's largely dropped his bad Methodist minister cadences, and his speechwriter almost made him seem eloquent. He only stuttered a couple of times; shame one of them was in the middle of the "captain from the 3rd Infantry" section.

The talking heads didn't seem to grasp the point of the speech - that he was explicitly laying out the case for the current strategy, on a very Denbestian line of argument. He seemed to be ruling out a UN-sponsored "return to normalcy" strategy, which I think is vital.

Agricultural Subsidy Politics

My job depends on the surpluses generated by American agricultural subsidy programs. My job depends *directly* on those surpluses, as I'm a customer support guy for a program used by large cotton agribusinesses. It also indirectly depends on those surpluses, as they generate additional grant money and demand for agricultural IT among agribusinesses that benefits the rest of the company I work for.

I'm a free-trade economic conservative.

You could say that I'm kind of conflicted about agricultural subsidies.

I like to think that the work I do in HighQ contributes to more efficient fertilizer and chemical usage among our customers, indirect and direct; that a better picture of costs and usages makes overapplication and wasteful application less common. That's my rationalization for what I do. But I wonder if the agribusinesses would have money for the recordkeeping and costs involved if they weren't so heavily subsidized by the government.

In other words, I acknowledge that subsidies create distortions in the market. I'm just afraid that I make my living off of one of those distortions.

Weathering Continent

This anime showed up recently in R1. It's an old-fashioned "adventure" story, in the 20's-30's pulp tradition of Robert E. Howard and C.L. Moore: desert wastes, half-naked barbarian hordes, lost cities and dying civilizations. It was made in Japan as one of Kadokawa's "advertising" movies - a series of high-budget, double-bill hour-long films made from existing novel or manga Kadokawa franchises. I believe it ran on a double bill with the second Silent Moebius movie.

Weathering Continent was a series of novels in a Japanese variant on a Howardesque setting - the dying days of the continent of Atlantis, when civilization was breaking up in the face of environmental disaster. I've got a radio drama sitting around somewhere in my apartment that's also based on the novels (I had thought it would be a soundtrack CD - more fool me!). I have no idea how good or bad the novels are - as far as I know, they've never been translated into English.

The movie doesn't really require any prior knowledge of the books, as it turns out. It's a compact, spare ghost story, with fairly few extraneous parts, all of which are adequately explained for those that pay attention. Our protagonists are a wandering trio of - well, we're never really told what it is they're doing. Trying to avoid dying of thirst, for the most part. They come across a larger band of travelers who have been ambushed, tortured, and murdered in a tumbledown ruin on the edge of the high desert. A survivor tells them that they were treasure-hunting for the lost city of Aztec Sistra before tragically expiring. Our heroes go on in search of the hint of water, and find the lost city nearby. Aztec Sistra is an enormous necropolis, filled with the mummified, masked dead arrayed in the clothes, situations, and postures of their lives. Here, they run into the barbarian-bandits who murdered the other group, and things quickly spiral downhill in a fashion vaguely reminiscent of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's a very atmospheric, stylish exercise in high pulp.

Why am I going on at this length about Weathering Continent? Because it was once my contribution to fansub culture. Back in the day, fansubs were rather rare, and fans tended to trade raw copies of anime. Certain Big Fans made their reputations by translating anime and circulating their scripts. Sue Shambaugh, Dave Fleming, Jeff Okimoto, Tonghyun Kim. Kim did a script for Weathering Continent, a show that wasn't, to be strictly honest, ever massively popular. I had managed to get a decent copy off of LD of said show, and lived in a group house with someone with a setup conductive to fansubbing - a genlock, low-end Amiga, high-end VCRs, etc. Others in the house had already done some fansubbing work under the "Quest Labs" name, and I had helped out. Weathering Continent was my contribution to the endeavor. I edited the script for tone and sense, and dumped it into the proper format for timing purposes. Then I sat down and did the slow work of timing the subtitles. Back then, the software was pretty primitive, and I sucked at hand-timing. The end result wasn't anything that you'd want to write home about; it was frankly amateurish, in the worst sense of the word. But it was my contribution to "the cause". Quest Labs stopped doing fansubs a few months later, as another project started eating up all our creative energy and free time. Fandom's turned over about four or five times since then. But that was my brief adventure in fansubtitling.