'M' is for Microsoft and Monopoly; 'S' is for Sun and Sue
Aziz Poonawalla says the unspeakable (writes the unwritable, sorry) about Microsoft, Sun, and free markets. It goes something like this: Sun is using the courts to compete with Microsoft because they've failed in the marketplace. Two commenters raise what might be salient objections. It's all worth reading.
Leonard of Unruled has been back for a while now, and I knew it. I was just keeping Unruled to myself (there aren't enough anarcho-capitalists to go around, you know). But, it's time to share.
Music: "Touratina" is two hours of classic Arabic folk music (the music begins about one minute and a half into the stream, after an Arabic announcer introduces it).
"FMAC 2" is a mysterious title, but zoom to 7 minutes and 43 seconds into the stream and you'll get two minutes of instrumental and then a woman's lonely voice. She's singing "Don't leave me."
"Sabah Fakri," gives you strings, drums, and the traditional sounds of Arab music. There are no significant vocals until two minutes and forty seconds in.
Electrolite: "On a rural road in Kenya, two cars collide by night. Both are driven by American citizens. The driver of one car, a white diplomat, calls the American embassy for help, and is whisked away for medical treatment. The driver of the other, a black teacher, is left to die."
The incident involved a white American whose day job was heading up the regional office of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and a black American whose day job was teaching at the International School of Kenya. The black American taught the son of the USAID head. But at night, after the car wreck, the white USAID employee climbed into an ambulance under his own power, and he and the ambulance drivers left the blacks to their fate.
I imagine that Dirk Dijkerman, the white USAID employee, is not a racist in his thoughts. I am sure he believes in equality. I am sure that he chose to work in Kenya in order to do good. One thing I've learned from following the news in Israel and Palestine is that people who think of themselves as good can display a stunning callousness towards human life.
Listening to the radio I feel so out of place
There's a certain something missing that the treble can't erase
I know you can tell just by looking at my face
A word about my weakness
I'm totally addicted to bass
Whatever it is, Hansen had better be careful. He may find himself murdered by the Israeli army, shot in the back in broad daylight perhaps, like his UN co-worker Iain Hook was in November (more here and here). Hook is one of five UN Relief and Works Agency employees killed by Israel in the past year.
Arafat to Bin Laden: With Friends Like You, Who Needs Enemies?
Our man in the street Roy (who now uses the last name McCoy, but I'm skeptical) reports on Arafat's ringing condemnation of Osama Bin Laden in a recent interview with the UK's Sunday Times.
Arafat doesn't denounce the 9/11 attacks here (he has before), but focuses on OBL's transparent attempts to link his harabah with the Palestinian resistance movement. "I'm telling him directly not to hide behind the Palestinian cause," says Arafat in the interview.
Update: Another article with a good deal of background on al Jazeera reveals this little tidbit in paragraph 14: Qatar, the country where Al Jazeera is based, was offered $5 billion from another Gulf state to shut the station down (via cursor.org). If this isn't a sign that al Jazeera is doing something right, I don't know what is.
And instead of supporting the freest media in the Middle East, the US wants to stifle it .... Let freedom ring.
Update 3: Censorship must be in the air. This time it's self-censorship. The English version of Ha'aretz is choosing not to reproduce for foreign readers all of the articles that appear in the Hebrew version. It leaves out embarassing stories like this one about how Israel's government cracks down on Jews who marry a Muslim or try to convert. (via Aron's Israel Peace Weblog, via Alas, a blog -- both recent additions to Unobjectionable Content)
As Brainsluice noted a few weeks ago, it was recently "Buy Nothing Day". This Brainsluice guy decided last year to make it "Buy Everything Day". Why? Because, as he says on his blog, "I like buying stuff. And I like being able to. Long live the art of purchasing!"
I've posted some links to Adbusters (the guys who invented Buy Nothing Day) before, because I appreciate some of their critiques of modern capitalism. But for me Adbusters is more of an advocatus diaboli, (which makes me the Catholic Church, I guess). Capitalism isn't perfect, but it beats socialism and communism hands-down.
"Consumerism" as social critique of a shallow, possession-driven culture might be a fair thing to be concerned about, but I can't get all worked up about Buy Nothing Day. I like buying gifts for people I care about, and I like receiving gifts. The whole idea of exchanging presents seems pretty darned wonderful to me. I actually wonder if the people who come up with ideas like Buy Nothing Day are just lacking in meaningful interpersonal relationships. If I didn't have anyone to buy for, and no one to buy for me, then maybe I'd hate the idea of gift giving too.
I will say up front that I still hold a grudge against Miss E. of Letter from Gotham. And I will say, to her credit, that she has written things that make me admire her, and things that make me want to go back and disagree with my own posts (yes, the anti-war ones).
What Diane does, when she is at her best, is grapple with the strongest arguments of her opponents and criticize the worst elements of her "own" side. When she is at her worst, people like me find themselves with grudges.
But you aren't me, and you can benefit from reading something that, frankly, is better than anything I've had to say recently on the subject of war.
So here it is. It starts on Alas, a Blog, and he's just quoting Where is Raed, and Diane's part doesn't come 'til the end, but that's ok. It is all worth it. Just start where I told you to start. You'll end up with Diane.
Me, I will go on admiring and being infuriated by her.
Weeks have gone by and I haven't mustered the motivation to post about that topic, but I'm happy to say that I've found another reason to direct you all to Roy's fine blog: his post about Winston Churchill, the greatest of the Britons. Here is a taste:
The British people rightly voted Winston Spencer Churchill as the greatest Briton ever. What is perfectly clear is that if it wasn't for Churchill most of Europe would have been occupied by Nazi Germany for some time. Britain would have remained free. The old fallacy frequently spouted by some ignorant Yanks is that they saved our asses. Not true.
Roy has a way with words. The rest is a solid defense of that last bold claim.
Evolution is a natural process, in language as in biology. Meanings change over time, until "boy band" can refer to a group of over-21 males who don't play musical instruments, and the prefix "pop," once short for "popular," can come to mean "the absence of" ... as in pop culture.
"When the hell are bloggers gonna get tired of discussing themselves? Oh wait, I know... NEVER. If you ask me, the blogosphere is nothing but a vaunted cesspool of unpublishable tripe written on the company dime, and I hope you all die." - Max
In a startling report called Inside the Secret Campaign to Topple Saddam, Time Magazine reveals that Israeli special forces have been actively operating within Iraq for years.
U.S. and Israeli officials tell Time that Israeli special forces have been operating inside Iraq's western desert on reconnaissance and training missions, surveying 30,000 sq. mi. for places where Iraq might have hidden the missiles and launchers it kept after the Gulf War. "You sniff around in the western desert," says a U.S. official, "and try to get an idea about those hardened concrete bunkers that Saddam has created to put his Scuds in." In the past few years, members of an Israeli special-forces unit called Shaldag, Hebrew for "Kingfisher," have taken part in the Scud hunt.... Sources say that should a war start, Israel will ask the U.S. to allow it to contribute a few three-man teams to the search for missiles.
First Turkey and now Israel admit that small units of their armed forces have crossed the Iraqi border and continue to operate there -- all of this occurring with the approval of the United States, whose own special forces are also on the ground in Iraq. Yet the President repeatedly tells his own people and the world that he hopes to avoid war.
American citizens might be forgiven for wondering what kind of suckers their government takes them for.
The aggressive movement of Israeli, Turkish, and American special forces into Iraq is another sign that the U.S. and its allies are not seriously engaged in any kind of peace process. In fact, what is going on is pre-war -- not an adjective, a noun.
Pre-war is what negotiation and diplomacy really mean in our modern newspeak. Pre-war is a constant vigilance against peace. It is the Tonkin Gulf and the USS Maine and, when even these kinds of charades are no longer necessary, it is a first-strikeforeign policy.
War is the health of the state, and for warriors, peacetime is only a hiatus, the pause that makes the notes meaningful.
In Iraq, pre-war is the order of the day. "Whatever timetable the U.N. Security Council resolution on Iraqi disarmament may imply, and whatever Saddam may or may not do to cough up his weapons of mass destruction," the Time article begins, "people in the know are behaving as if a war to unseat the regime in Baghdad has already begun."
An article in The Independent called Focus: The Secret War (via Ethel the Blog) reads like a companion piece to the report in Time. "US special forces are reported to be on the ground in western and northern Iraq," it reveals. "In many ways, the war on Iraq has already begun."
Our pre-war in Iraq is actually quite old, having started almost the moment that the hot conflict ended. This pre-war is no-fly zones, and not simply no-fly zones but their expansion into an (even more) aggressive bombing campaign. According to the same Time article:
Already, U.S. and British warplanes have moved to a more aggressive posture while enforcing Iraq's no-fly zones, the northern and southern regions from which Iraqi planes are banned. In the past, when Iraqi forces fired on allied planes, the reply came in attacks on guns and missile batteries. That has changed. Now the allied planes are attacking command-and-control centers, communications nodes and the fiber-optic network that links Iraq's air-defense system. "We're responding differently," says a Pentagon official, "hitting multiple targets when we're fired upon—and they're tending to be more important targets."
The Independent article suggests that air attacks increased when peace appeared more likely: "Since Iraq accepted the UN resolution on 14 November, US and British planes have gone into action on 10 days out of 11."
Pre-war is provocative. That's the point.
Saddam is being squeezed. "I see it as poking," says a State Department official. "Let's poke this pressure point and see what happens; let's see what reaction we get."
State Department policy as described by this unnamed official is a recipe for diplomatic failure that cannot but lead to conflict. As an unknown witsaid in August, it is
[the] geopolitical equivalent of teasing a dog with a stick - actually it's been the equivalent of teasing a dog with a stick while saying, "I'm going to kill you soon."
Which is to say, the State Department isn't stupid, it's dishonest. Our current policy works better as escalation than as negotiation, and policy-makers are quite aware of this. But they don't present it to the public that way.
We are not trying to come to terms with Iraq. And although such a stance may be appropriate and even moral on its own, when sold to the people as an attempt to avoid war it becomes dishonest and immoral.
Pre-war dwells in the language of last resorts and diplomatic solutions while bombs drop and soldiers quietly move into advanced positions behind enemy lines.
Soon the floodlights will go on and the show will begin, but ladies and gentlemen, lets not forget all the hard work that went on behind the scenes to make this all possible.
(Pretty Much) One Year Ago Today in the Objectionable Content Archives
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The Secret of Thanksgiving "Today marks two months of Matt and me. In celebration, we have given the nation the day off, scheduled football games and parades, and are recommending a feast of turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes. For dessert, you are obligated to have some pie, preferably pumpkin, in our honor."
I just read that and thought it was clever / funny. Also, the Matt she
mentions has a cool web site of his own which I've linked to before.
________________________________________
So I think Matt and Leia are still together. Happy one year and two months a-versary, you two crazy kids. PS: Matt, I will pay you to bring back your blog.
Contributors to Stand Down have pointed out that the no-fly zones over Iraq that the US and UK have enforced since 1991 have little to no justification under international law or UN resolutions -- a point that is little mentioned here at home but often discussed in the foreign press (Jim Henley being, as usual, a welcome exception).
Leaving aside their illegality, the main argument for the no-fly zones has been that they protect Iraqi dissident groups (the Kurds in the North and the Shi'a Muslims in the South) from the wrath of Saddam Hussein. However, Arab and non-Arab organizations have long claimed that the no-fly zones do not achieve their avowed purpose:
There is ample evidence to demonstrate, however, that human rights abuses committed by the Government of Iraq have continued unabated on the ground throughout the ten years in which the No Fly Zones have been in operation. Indeed, despite the claim made ... that the No Fly Zones are necessary for the protection of Iraq’s civilian population, the fact remains that the No Fly Zones only prevent the use of air power by Iraqi forces. Offensive actions by US and UK pilots have consistently been linked to infringements of the No Fly Zones themselves, rather than to humanitarian abuses against Iraqi civilians, while violations of UN Security Council Resolution 688 have been routinely reported but rarely prevented or checked. The No Fly Zones, therefore, are not only failing, but not even attempting to protect the civilian populations of northern and southern Iraq from ground attack. - CAABU [emphasis mine]
At their inception during the early `90s, no-fly zones were created to provide a safe haven for Kurds and Shiite Muslims and to contain the regime of Saddam Hussein. Today they represent less a shield for persecuted ethnicities than a burden and an embarrassment for the U.S. and Great Britain. No-fly zones have been successful in that the Iraqi military does not threaten Kurds or Shiites from the air. Unfortunately, unless the Allies are willing to maintain a military-exclusion zone—prohibiting the movement of heavy armor and military convoys—the no-fly zones remove only one weapon from the Iraqi military. They do not deter the type of destruction visited upon the Kurdish uprising in the fall of 1995 [was actually 1996 - Jim], which the Iraqi Republican Guard conducted in under a week without the assistance of aircraft. That the no-fly zones offer no protection to people on the ground was obvious to those Kurds who watched Allied planes circle overhead while Saddam's armored divisions crushed them below. - Brookings Institution [emphasis mine]
When evaluating the no-fly zones, it seems we must set aside not only considerations of legality, but also those of effectiveness.
No-fly zones! What are they good for? As policy, the no-fly zones appear both poorly conceived and executed. Though they could serve several useful purposes, these goals are either being pursued ineffectively or not pursued at all. Consider five possible aims for the no-fly zones:
Defend dissidents
Extract diplomatic concessions
Contain the regime
Impede miltiary build-ups
Topple the regime
How successful have we been in achieving these goals?
Defend dissidents. The no-fly zones have been a mixed bag at best when it comes to their stated purpose of protecting dissidents. Hussein retains control of the ground, which allows him a great deal of leeway, as his 1995 suppression of the Kurdish uprising demonstrated.
It is true that Hussein's influence in the North has waned since 1995, and the Kurds now operate in what is effectively a semi-autonomous zone. However, this is due in part to U.S. commitments made after 1995 to respond should Hussein once again move against the Kurds.
"Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright reinforced this belief in a September 2000 speech laying out "red lines" that would generate a U.S. response, which included attacks or provocations against the Kurds, threats against Iraq's neighbors or U.S. forces, or a reconstitution of WMD. In July 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell went further when he wrote a letter to the two main Kurdish leaders, Jalal Talabani (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) and Masud Barzani (Kurdistan Democratic Party), stating, "As we have said before, should Saddam's forces move against the Kurds, it is our policy that the United States would respond in a strong and sure manner..." - Washington Institute for Near East Policy
We have already seen the no-fly zones fail at protecting the Kurds. It seems clear that what is now securing their safety are new U.S. commitments to retaliate on their behalf. Deterrence is proving to be an effective policy where no-fly zones on their own have not.
The situation in the South is much worse. Hussein continues to actively persecute the Shi'a there, and his government has "drained the marshes that had supported their villages for centuries. These actions, combined with artillery attacks, have reportedly reduced the Shi'a population in the marsh region by 75 percent over the past few years." - Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Extract diplomatic concessions. It is possible to construe the no-fly zones as conditions imposed on the loser of a war by the victor (though they were not part of the UN-imposed cease-fire). Still, as the price of its aggression against Kuwait, Iraq could easily have been told that it forfeited its sovereignty over the former Northern and Southern regions of Iraq -- until specific reforms were enacted which would allow it to reclaim them.
But what is the plan? No attempt has been made to use the no-fly zones as bargaining chips. Where are the encouragements for Hussein to change his behavior or to enact reforms in exchange for an end to the enforcement of no-fly zones? We are holding Iraqi airspace hostage... what are our demands?
Since the no-fly zones are not supported by the UN, any diplomacy involving them can only be pursued by the US and UK; but we have not cared to do so.
If the no-fly zones are not bargaining chips, then what do we hope to get out of them? It is hard to imagine that we desire permanent control over large sections of Iraqi airspace -- but then what is the exit strategy?
One might well argue that the no-fly zones have kept Iraq contained, but is this an effective long-term strategy for ensuring that Iraq does not threaten its neighbors? We have already enforced the no-fly zones for eleven years; without either war or a final peace with Iraq, can we afford to do so indefinitely?
It is also quite possible that Iraq could be kept in its box even without our enforcement of no-fly zones. If bombing is not part of the equation, spy satellites could monitor Iraq as effectively as reconnaissance aircraft do. Further, force buildups in Kuwait and elsewhere in the region, modeled after our presence in Taiwan and South Korea, could effectively deter Iraqi aggression.
Of course, a force presence in the Middle East may have its own pitfalls, but the good news is that one exists already. Ending the enforcement of the no-fly zones while maintaining U.S. force presence at status-quo levels could be seen as a diplomatic win and it would have little to no security cost to us. If we find in the long term that our soldiers don't need as much of a presence in the region in order to deter Iraq, then we can remove them -- the threat of retaliatory force should work regardless of where we are deployed, given our ability to mobilize anywhere in the world on short notice.
Impede military build-ups. Can we use the no-fly zones to fetter Iraq's armed forces? If the Bush Administration is to be believed, then the no-fly zones have not prevented Iraq from developing weapons of mass destruction. The administration's own stance is that the no-fly zones are not sufficient impediment to Iraq's attempts to acquire WMD.
Even if we focus on purely conventional arms, there is no evidence that the no-fly zones have provided significant benefits above and beyond those of the UN arms embargo. While we are now in a position to bomb military infrastructure, it is unclear how much value this has provided us:
In fact, despite the coalition's continuing strikes on air defense sites and partially effective sanctions efforts, it appears that Saddam has actually improved his air defense network. The most significant recent improvement in capability has been the installation of fiber-optic cables, a move that not only protects the Iraqi air defense communications network from attack, but also allows the network to process information faster and prevents the data from being easily monitored by the coalition. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has stated that China was responsible for assisting Iraq with this upgrade, and that this increase in technological capability was the reason behind the February 2001 U.S. attacks against five military command and control sites around Baghdad. Although those attacks were deemed successful, Iraq was able to repair the damage to the network within a few months. - Washington Institute
While our bombings have certainly imposed a cost on Iraq, they have also apparently trained the regime to build an infrastructure that is more resistant to air attack. Overall, have the no-fly zones provided a clear incremental value relative to the arms embargo and our other efforts?
Topple the regime. After eleven years of no-fly zones, Saddam Hussein remains in power, despite one or two attempts at rebellion by various Iraqi groups. Every insurrection was put down, while the U.S. conspicuously refrained from assisting the rebels.
OK, so it's clear what the no-fly zones don't do: practically anything useful. What do they do? Simple...
A thorn by another name The no-fly zones make normalization of relations with Iraq nearly impossible. Enforcement of the no-fly zones constitutes an undeclared air war against Iraq, and it has since the policy began in 1991.
The military forces of our nation (and the UK) are conducting operations in the airspace of another sovereign nation (Iraq) without its permission. These military actions may or may not be justified (protecting the Kurds is certainly a noble goal), but this does not change their character as acts of war.
The no-fly zones could have been made legal -- they might've been included in the UN cease-fire agreement, for example -- but they were not.
It is possible that the US and UK initiated the no-fly zones with some hope that these alone would indeed topple Hussein. But when it became evident that this was not going to happen, we chose to continue the interdiction despite its almost total uselessness as a humanitarian or military tool.
Though the no-fly zones could have been used as bargaining chips as part of efforts to sue for a workable peace, they were not -- our air war against Iraq went on while inspectors were there, and it continued unchanged after inspectors were withdrawn. The enforcement of the no-fly zones has had almost no connection to political developments in the region, which it would have to if it was being used as a bargaining tool.
Diplomatic use of the no-fly zones would involve tying their presence or removal to some action on Iraq's part. This hasn't happened, because a workable peace with Hussein is not desired. What is desired is a replacement for him.
What's the opposite of a peace process? Though they serve almost no justifiable military purpose and are untried as a negotiating lever, the no-fly zones make it practically certain that no rapproachement with Iraq will occur. Enforcing the no-fly zones is effectively a commitment not to make peace with the current Iraqi regime. How can we, when we are bombing them?
Lt. Col. Gibbons opens his analysis (linked to above) by noting that "Since 1991, the United States has averaged over 34,000 military sorties per year in support of no-fly zone operations in Iraq." Thirty-four thousand sorties per year. It should not be difficult to see this as an obstacle to any normalization with Iraq -- and it bears repeating that this occured even while UN inspectors were present.
An obstacle to normalization is a facilitator of war. If we desire war, the no-fly zones turn out to be quite useful. First, they make war more likely by closing off avenues for peace. And second, they make it easier for us to re-invade. Gibbons quotes the Commander of the US Central Command in his 2001 testimony before Congress. There, the Commander said that the no-fly zones "ensure [that] the ingress and egress routes that would be necessary to prosecute an expanded war against Iraq remain sufficiently clear of sophisticated surface-to-air missile systems." [emphasis mine]
While of limited incremental defensive value, no-fly zones have a plain and obvious use if we desire to invade Iraq again. They're great on offense.
... but war is interested in you As hawks and doves debate the merits of a full-scale invasion of Iraq, it is easy to ignore the fact that we have been conducting a low-intensity war for more than a decade. Aside from trade sanctions and other non-military acts has been this overt invasion of sovereignty.
Why weren't the no-fly zones made legal? It was certainly possible. The problem is that legality might've introduced norms for their use and conditions for their end, and this would have impeded our purpose in establishing the zones in the first place. The no-fly zones are not part of a peace process, but a war process. They have become another example that our intention is to topple Hussein regardless of his actions and regardless of international rules or agreements that we are party to.
The bastard child of Cassandra and Oedipus Rex Perle's comments simply reinforce what the no-fly zones have illustrated for years: the steps we are taking are meant not to avoid war but to make it inevitable.
Brian invited his mother over for dinner. During the course of the meal, Brian's mother couldn't help but keep noticing how beautiful Brian's roommate, Stephanie, was. Mom had long been suspicious of a relationship between Brian and Stephanie, and this had only made her more curious.
Over the course of the evening, while watching the two interact, Mom started to wonder if there was more between Brian and his roommate than met the eye. Reading his mom's thoughts, Brian volunteered, "I know what you must be thinking, but I assure you Stephanie and I are just roommates."
About a week later, Stephanie came to Brian saying, "ever since your mother came to dinner, I've been unable to find the beautiful silver gravy ladle. You don't suppose your mother took it, do you?" Brian said, "Well, I doubt it, but I'll send her an e-mail just to be sure." So he sat down and wrote:
Dear Mother,
I'm not saying that you 'did' take the gravy ladle from the house, I'm not saying that you 'did not' take the gravy ladle. But, the fact remains that one has been missing ever since you were here for dinner.
Several days later, Brian received a letter from his mother that read:
Dear son,
I'm not saying that you 'do' sleep with Stephanie, and I'm not saying that you 'do not' sleep with Stephanie. But, the fact remains that if she were sleeping in her own bed, she would have found the gravy ladle by now.
Hugh MacLeod made these. Instead of coming up with a fancy name, he calls them "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards." If it wasn't for Leushke and Mr. R. Allan, I wouldn't have found them.
They are about New York, which makes it easy for me to appropriate them and make them mine.
The Blogger's Motto
My income is in the 95th percentile in the richest nation on Earth.
This is how Hugh explains it:
About the same time I moved to New York (December, '97) I got into the very annoying habit of doodling on the back of business cards. The format stuck.
[...]
All I had when I first got to Manhattan were 2 suitcases, a couple of cardboard boxes full of stuff, a reservation at the YMCA, and a 10-day freelance copywriting gig at a Midtown advertising agency.
My life for the next couple of weeks was going to work, sleeping at the YMCA, and walking around the city in the evenings. Lots of bars and coffee shops. Lot of weird people. Being hit five times a day by this strange desire to laugh, sing and cry simultaneously. At times like these, there's a lot to be said for an art form that fits easily inside your coat pocket.
The freelance gig turned into a permanent job. I stayed. The first month in New York for a newcomer has this certain amazing magic about it that is indescribable. Incandescent lucidity. However long you stay in New York, you pretty much spend the rest of your time there trying to recapture that feeling ... I suppose the whole point of the cards is to somehow get that buzz onto paper.
There are forty-seven batches of three cards each. You have plenty of time.
Ah, it is Monday and I am feeling fashionable and well-dressed. Like a mild drunk I am certain that my conversation is delightful, which is sure to be a detriment to my blogging. It all seems cut from a fantasyof CapitalInflux's -- we are all very decadent and intellectual, but a little more of the former than the latter.
Can you feel well-dressed?
I am sitting at home in flannel pyjamas, unshaven and in need of a haircut ('Mr. Content, you've fallen on hard times!' I can hear the well-meaning English ladies saying, still hoping to clean me up just in time to marry me off to their daughters).
I'm reading Evelyn Waugh and finding it surprisingly enjoyable. Tonight I ought to go out as a British country gentleman and find companions wholly unsuitable to my station. Perhaps it wasn't a feeling of being well-dressed but a premonition.
"He thought he was coming with us. Sloth undid him too. Well, I did tell him ten. He's a very gloomy man in my college. He leads a double life. At least I assume he does. He couldn't go on being Hardcastle, day and night, always, could he?"
Yes, let's all talk in British accents. The girls can wear their mothers' shoes and hats and invite the boys to tea.
I will have something marvelously intelligent to say about Brideshead later. And there is politics too, I know you've been starved for it. There is an incredible backlog of non-self-involved posting, politely awaiting its turn. Which will come, but not yet.
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over
I'd like to attribute the spottiness of my posting to my picaresque, seat-of-the-pants, spontaneous lifestyle, one that takes me to the farflung wilds of Brooklyn or maybe Studio 54 to hang out with Halston. One that leaves me so exhausted that I simply can't update enough. This is not the case. Most nights, my head is lolling on my chest around 11 pm while Emeril is overseasoning the universe on my TV. The quality of my posts is lacking due to my staggering lack of ambition, both on this page and in life.
It is easy to waste your life when things are going so well.
- Me
I am back from my trip.
There's a feeling I have now -- I've been trying to put my finger on it for a long time -- like I've left something important unbegun.
Let's start with a premise:you are wired a certain way. You're a slave to neurons, dendrites, and deoxyribonucleic acid. Even nurture is nature now: your mother did or didn't hug you once and it was recorded in the grey matter. Everything comes back to electricity and chemicals; to wiring.
This is something that you know instinctively to be true.
You cannot play like Pele, quip like Wilde, or calculate like Penrose. You listen to audio tapes and read Dale Carnegie, but you still can't work a room like Bill Clinton. You are his fucking son, but you can't write songs like John Lennon, fight like Bruce Lee, be prudent like George H.W.
Or you are one of those people. You can be where the ball is before it gets there. You can pull off arch and urbane from inside the filth of a 19th century gaol. You work on relativity by day and in your spare time you pursue recreational mathematics as if the phrase itself was not absurd. And it isn't, for you.
Half the people in the country don't care that you got a blowjob in the Oval Office and then bombed some innocent black people in Africa to distract their attention from it. They know, but they don't care. You are that charming. And you're used to this. It's normal. Like being bigger than Jesus.
People can put "the legendary" in front of your name and it doesn't seem ridiculous. You're Bruce fucking Lee.
Yes, they worked. No, it wasn't effortless for them.
Except that it was. Because they worked at this -- at whatever it was, the one thing they were made for. It still takes work, but they were naturals. Lennon didn't try with all his might to become a physicist. Bruce Lee didn't fight his way into shape after back surgery to play futbol. Pele didn't run for President, and Slick Willy didn't parlay his Rhodes Scholarship into a professorship, or throw it away to try his hand at the rock music.
There is a difference between playing to your strengths and playing in spite of them.
Even the naturals are limited by wiring. The extroverts need to socialize, the introverts dread it. Maybe this drives both to be great, but it drives them to the greatness they are suited for. And it leaves their weaknesses and mediocrities intact.
I'm lucky to be incredibly smart. I am egotistical too, which means you shouldn't trust me to tell you about how smart I am.
The point is that lots of things come easy.
The problem is that some important things don't. You fight your nature as hard as you can just to achieve the smallest thing. You watch others move easily through terrain that is lined with obstacles for you.
Sometimes you make it, the way an alcoholic can go a day or a week without drinking. It wouldn't even rate as an achievement for a sober person, but for the drinker it means sleepless nights, sweating and cursing, shouting and begging at God, sighing in relief when it's over... and then knowing that no victory is permanent.
Every step is a pitched battle that you lose as often as you win. And every day the fight begins all over again, and you can't be sure if you grow stronger or weaker with each try.
There are victories, but what you really want isn't victory, it's ignorance. You don't want to be proud of your successes or your battle scars. You want to be blissfully unaware that there is a fight going on.
Most of the time, I am. But I came back from this trip feeling tired, and defeated, and lonely.
I feel old, like my future is already my past, lost before it was ever realized. I am out of my element and I can hear the poetry like a lullabye.
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.
This is what it really means to be self-made -- not that you capitalize on your gifts, but that you have fought your worst instincts and won. Where your every cell cries out to be meek, you force yourself to be brash. When your lizard brain shouts flee! or whispers fight! you hold still and do neither. If your body is sinking in sloth, you drive yourself into action.
Your inner self might be a simpering coward or a ravening beast, but you let neither define you.
Reason is a fist around the Id. You do not let go.
Natural ability flows. It is effortless. Like water it finds the broad and easy path, the lowest point. But you are a creature of willpower and the will is a graceless, talentless thing -- not innate but acquired, not inborn but earned. The will is an antagonist. It chooses the narrow path. It struggles and tries. It hammers against the anvil of fate.
This fate isn't an outside thing. Fate is you. Biology = destiny, and you are defined by your wiring. You are the anvil.
You are the hammer that says "fuck destiny."
You are the metal that is being forged between them.
You're here to change -- and the only way to do it is to take a beating.
You are a process and there are only two: growth or decay. Take your pick.
Objectionable Content will be on hiatus while I spend the next five days travelling. To tide you over, the song of the day: "King of the Road," by Roger Miller.
USA: Okay, I’d like to call this meeting to order.
BRITAIN: Right-o! I second that.
USA: You don’t have to second that – either the meeting’s started or it hasn’t.
BRITAIN: Quite right. Quite right. Dreadfully sorry. (to the room) Attention – nobody should second the call to order. Do we understand?
USA: All right, now let’s get to hashing out a resolution we all can sign.
RUSSIA: Is stupid! Russia will never sign such violent rhetoric! The UN’s authority must is being respected!
USA: We haven’t shown you the new proposal yet.
RUSSIA: Oh. Da. Give here… Ooh, is nice binder! I can be keeping this?
FRANCE: You think you can make wiz ze bullying of us to sign an agreement that bullies someone else, eh? Nevaire! As our philosopher Jean Louis Baptiste de Trenteville d’Armignac once said – “Fuck you!”
[...]
USA: Yes. Okay, so you’ve got our new resolution. Any objections to it?
RUSSIA: Is exactly the same as resolution from last week. Still has “material breach” clauses, and is including the “serious consequences” phrasing that we are having been rejecting last week. Is no different from one we said we would not be signing!
CHINA: This is outrageous! It is almost as if you have absolutely no interest in crafting a resolution that we can agree on. It is almost as if you called a meeting of the full Security Council because you simply want to be able to claim to your people that your tried to reach an agreement before you just go in and take the entire country by yourself without any international restrictions and ensuring that the whole post-war configuration of Iraq including the allocation of its economic resources is yours to decide on!
(A pause. The US ambassador stares unblinkingly at the Chinese ambassador for a long, long time.)
The Accordion Guy attended a kickass pumpkin carving party a few days ago. The results, like the Great Pumpkin over there on the left and Charlie Brown with Snoopy on the right, were stunning (via Team Murder).
Where do bad folks go when they die?
They don't go to heaven where the angels fly,
They go to a lake of fire and fry.
You won't see 'em again 'til the Fourth of July
They are publishing a book of Kurt Cobain's diaries and letters, something pretty typical for famous dead people I suppose. His ex-wife, Courtney Love, and Frances, his daughter, are getting $4 million for the material. His bandmates recently settled a lawsuit with Love over control of the band's legacy. Which I presume means that in exchange for allowing the band to posthumously release You Know You're Right, Courtney Love gets to sell Kurt's private thoughts for $4 million.
Isn't it unsurprising how settling a lawsuit does nothing to settle the underlying acrimony that motivated it?
This is what Krist Novoselic, ex bassist for Nirvana, and a co-founder of the band, had his agent say about the journals that Courtney is allowing to be published: “He just feels it’s wrong to talk about something this private. He doesn’t want to be involved with these diaries on any level.”
Krist would probably not approve of this post.
I might not approve of this post.
In the two Newsweek articles that I am quoting from, stealing images from, but not linking to, one single quotation from Cobain's diaries stood out:
Within the months between October 1991 thru December 92 I have had 4 four notebooks filled with two years worth of poetry and personal writing ... The most violating thing ive felt this year is not the media exxagerations or the catty gossip, but the rape of my personal thoughts. Ripped out of pages from my stay in hospitals and aeroplane rides hotel stays etc. I feel compelled to say f—k you F—k you to those of you who have absolutely no regard for me as a person. You have raped me harder than you’ll ever know.
Stand Down is what the anti-warriors have been waiting for, a group blog. It is "an alliance of left and right-wing webloggers opposed to the military conquest of Iraq." As of 11:38PM on Wednesday night, there are 33 blogs on the list, with 22 on the left and 11 on the right.
I found Stand Down via Jim Henley, and he is the source of the quote above as well as the #2 blog on the right side of Stand Down's list.
The blog has a unity statement, but given that Stand Down has such an eclectic group of bloggers under its tent, it is a fair question as to whether there is any consistent statement that can be made as to why its members oppose the war.
Are we against aggression, or just unilateralism? Do we oppose all foreign intervention, or do we just lament our country’s inability to undertake the necessary nation-building in post-war Iraq? Is the issue that Hussein does not represent a threat, or is it that even though he is a threat, he should not be dealt with in the way that the Bush Administration hopes to deal with him?
According to the unity statement:
The members of Stand Down hold a wide variety of different and, indeed, conflicting political positions, but all are in agreement on a single proposition: that the use of military force to effect "regime change" in Iraq is ill advised and unjustified. We do not deny that the current Iraqi regime is monstrous, but we hold, following John Adams, that the United States need not go "abroad in search of monsters to destroy" unless they pose a clear and direct threat to American national security.
Even this statement is not something that I can get behind without equivocation. Is “regime change” in Iraq ill advised and unjustified under any circumstances? Certainly not.
But I am on board given the current situation, because it appears that the Bush administration prefers war to inspections, deterrence, and containment. Though I have doubts about all three policies, my doubts about war are greater.
Stand Down’s co-creators (Max Sawicky and Julian Sanchez) have built the foundations of a great thing: a non-partisan intellectual resource. Stand Down explicitly unites people whose political views are on opposite ends of the spectrum, but who share common cause in opposing this war. It unites them via the medium of the weblog – less effective than rallies and other mass actions in terms of mobilizing change, but far more effective in terms of catalyzing thought.
I am excited by both these aspects of the site. I think that our ideas will be strengthened by debate – not only with fellow anti-warriors on the other side of the political spectrum, but with the hawks as well. I am glad that the best results of our grappling will be preserved in one place as a reference for everyone seeking to make the anti-war case to other people of goodwill.
I hope that the record of our deliberations is one of both fairness and intelligence. If Stand Down can honor the reason and judgment of our opponents by honestly grappling with their strongest and most valid arguments, then we will have done a worthy thing.
An experiment to store large quantities of carbon dioxide emissions under the floor of the North Sea has been highly successful, according to seismic imaging data.
Over five million tonnes of CO2 have been pumped into sandstone under the Sleipner Field since 1996. The greenhouse gas had been separated from extracted natural gas and would normally have been released into the atmosphere...
"This method of carbon dioxide sequestration is probably one of the most powerful techniques we have for the next 50 years for reducing CO2 emissions," says Chadwick. "We believe it is safe, technically feasible and certainly has very little environmental downside." (more)
"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination."
-Thomas De Quincey, "On Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts," 1839
[ Stolen wholesale from Norm Jenson, after I murdered him ]
I'd read and admired John Hiler's Microcontent News even before I met him for the first time on June 14th at a blog party. We spoke only for a little while, but I'd enjoyed it -- enough for me to recall and later write that he was "intelligent and fair-minded," like his weblog.
The day before the blog party, John had been attacked while walking home. It was a violent attack, three men ambushing him, one of them with a two-by-four. But John attended the Blog get-together the next day, where I was lucky enough to meet him. He appeared none the worse for wear; I would never have guessed what happened to him just a day earlier.
In his place, I would not have been at a party socializing. I would not have been that tough or that resilient.
John is tough, and resilient, and a fighter. I wish we, the bloggers who admire his work, could've been in that street with him on June 13th. But we can at least let him know that he isn't fighting alone right now. John's post about the attack and his continuing recovery is here. His e-mail address is john@corante.com.
Getting towards midnight, with beer: Damn it, I want to drink and dance and sing, with my friends, Rick's friends; I want to burn wood and smell the smoke and piss in the sea, shout at the moon, cry at the beauty of this world and swear eternal opposition to those who would paint it with blood, again, I want to hold you my friends in my arms and circle around our wounded brother and sing and weep and shout and break the shell of the words. I'm drunk again, by god, and I'm typing with tears running down my rugged goddamn manly cheeks, and I feel so useless. I want to bellow in pain like some big dumb beast, and I want to hold my friend and tell him that he has nothing to fear.
Those words were stolen from here. That site, the epersonae weblog, is by Elane Nelson. Elane Nelson designed the very blogger template used by this humble site, and one or two others. Hi Elane.
The lovely Jane Galt points to a blog by a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. I just took a peek, and I can say that the two posts on the main page are thought-provoking yet quite brief. Plus it has nice large fonts and a good deal of whitespace. What more could you ask for when delving into the murky world of philosophical discourse?
In other news, Objectionable Content steals "Department of ______" -style post headings from Unqualified Offerings. Officials have no leads on the whereabouts of OC's mysterious proprietor, "Jim," but they warn that he may also have escaped with the first name of Unqualified Offerings' proprietor, ___ Henley. Police are advising other bloggers to use only their initials if at all possible.
Recently, the Israeli government announced its intention to dismantle a number of "illegal" settlements in the Occupied Territories.
Palestinians argue that all settlements in the West Bank and Gaza are illegal because they are based on an expropriation of land, but Israel recognizes the legality of settlements in general, so long as the government authorizes each new project and goes through the legal formality of zoning the land out of Palestinian hands.
When this zoning doesn't occur fast enough, groups of Israeli settlers often move to create outposts and new settlements even without waiting for the approval of the Israeli government. While all settlements are illegal in Palestinian eyes (and under the 4th Geneva Convention according to the Red Cross and others), these settler outposts are doubly illegal, as even the government of Israel does not condone them.
When Israel decided to remove one of the doubly illegal settlements in order to smooth over an upcoming meeting between Sharon and President Bush, the response was a settler riot involving 1,000 people, described by a spokesman for Israel's Judea and Samaria police department as "fierce and violent." Another article gave more details:
During the two days of evacuation attempts, 43 policemen were lightly injured, while 12 required medical treatment. The police arrested 15 settlers for violent behavior.
The policeman were instructed to act with utmost restraint, avoid confrontation with the settlers, and not use weapons or other means of riot control ... policemen and soldiers evacuated the settlers with their bare hands ...
settlers assaulted the policemen and soldiers, beat them, threw stones at them, and cursed them. The settlers tore off policemen's uniforms and slashed the tires of police and military vehicles. (more)
The instructions given to soldiers and police are illuminating: they went in bare-handed, without weapons or even crowd-control gear such as fire hoses and tear gas. We need not speculate as to how Israel would have acted had this violent mob been made up of Palestinians instead of Israeli Jews; we can just look at the history: in September of 2000, Israeli soldiers attacked Palestinian demonstrators with live ammunition.
Even if you make no distinction between Palestinian protestors and the settlers -- even if you call them both violent mobs -- the government of Israel has demonstrated its double standard. Israeli Jews are treated with restraint, Palestinians are met with deadly force. Twenty were killed in two days of rioting in September of 2000, versus not a single Israeli death in these two days of violent clashes.
Nor did the rioting settlers limit their attacks to soldiers and police offers. A Red Cross worker was assaulted, and when an Israeli television crew tried to document the violence, the cameraman was beaten:
A stone-throwing crowd of militant settlers protesting plans to dismantle an illegal outpost south of Nablus attacked a Red Cross worker, as well as a film crew from state-owned Israel Channel One television covering the event, including a cameraman who is a disabled IDF veteran, crew members said.
"They attacked the cameraman, kicked his camera, they threw rocks on us, and broke the camera," Channel One reporter Muki Hadar told Israel Radio. "When we retreated to our car, they continued with a salvo of rocks and broke the front windshield. This was a riot such as we have not seen."
[...]
"We, along with still photographers and others were forced to run for our lives ... How can one expect this from Jews, this kind of hatred, with clubs thrown at us and people beating [cameraman] Moshe Friedman, who is disabled. He even told them 'Guy's, I'm ... [an] IDF veteran,' and that made no difference to them." (more)
Doubly illegal settlements are an embarrassment to Israel in its relations with other countries, as their presence significantly undermines Israel's claims that it is willing to trade land for peace. Many of the most radical settlers are against any such trade -- not just with the Palestinians, but with all Arabs.
Far-rightist Michael Kleiner accused Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of being responsible for the clashes.
"The one to blame for the evacuation of outposts is Arik (Ariel)Sharon, who has returned to the Arik of Yamit," said Kleiner, referring to the forced evacuation of an Israeli community on the Sinai Peninsula in 1982, when the land was handed back to Egypt as part of a peace treaty between the two nations. (more)
Kleiner and those he represents would undo the peace treaty with Egypt if they could, and it is these people -- among them a number of violent fanatics -- that the Palestinians must live beside every day, on land that was once theirs.
It seems that every few months, one needs a reminder that radicals in the Middle East are not a uniquely Muslim or Palestinian phenomenon.
But the behavior of the radicals is less disheartening than the double-standard applied by the supposedly fair and reasonable majority in the Israeli government. Israel's decision in September of 2000 to respond to rioting Palestinians with lethal force triggered the violence that led to over two thousand subsequent deaths -- Israeli and Palestinian. We now see that Israel knows how to respond non-lethally when it wishes. The government should be called to account for not choosing to do so earlier, when the lives at stake were Palestinian.
Eight-year-old Palestinian boy Naseem Sobih, center, cries, as does his younger brother Hazim, 4, while other family members grieve quietly, as they crowd into their car, and vacate their village of Yanun, under ongoing pressure from nearby Israeli settlers.
"Groups of masked Jewish settlers have charged into the village, coming at night with dogs and horses, stealing sheep, hurling stones through windows and beating the men with fists and rifle butts, Palestinian residents said."
This is the ongoing reality of Israel's occupation. Although the settlers that terrorized Yanun are living in doubly illegal outposts, even those settlements that are legal by Israel's standards are ultimately involved in the same project: taking land from one people and giving it to another. There is no way to do this peacefully. There is no way to do this without force. It is an inherently violent act.
The government of Israel is complicit in the anti-Palestinian violence that springs from the settlements.
"An Israeli army spokesman, who insisted his name not be used, said soldiers try to prevent conflict between settlers and Palestinians, but that forces are primarily in the area to protect Israelis from attacks by Palestinian militants." What this amounts to is that settlers can terrorize Palestinians with impunity, but Palestinian violence is punished harshly and collectively, with entire cities suffering for any crime committed by a single resident.
This is not an accident or a side-effect. The fate of Yanun, and all of occupied Palestine, is one of institutionalized injustice.
Objectionable Content 
Monday, December 30, 2002
