Werner's to the rescue

I had passively learned that Joaquin Phoenix was in a car accident a few days ago, but it turns out that he was pulled from the wreckage by Werner Herzog. This quote makes a simple overturned car way more interesting:

"I remember this knocking on the passenger window," Phoenix said. "there was this German voice saying, 'Just relax.' There's the air bag, I can't see, and I'm saying, 'I'm fine. I am relaxed.'"

"Finally, I rolled down the window and this head pops inside. And he said, 'No, you're not.' And suddenly I said to myself, 'That's Werner Herzog!' "There's something so calming and beautiful about Werner Herzog's voice. I felt completely fine and safe. I climbed out."

But this blurb from a little piece in the Guardian made it even better:

But like all do-gooding superheroes, Herzog refused to stick around and take the glory. "I got out of the car and I said thank you," Phoenix said. "And he was gone."

I wish I could fully describe the delight this news has brought me, I'll just say that coffee spurted from my nose and leave it at that.

When the word fellatio becomes an adjective...

This is kind of a weird thing to be first post in a while, but... I couldn't resist. Plus, I needed something to get me doing this again.

So some background: Andrew Sullivan, a blogger/columnist sort that Andrew (from this blog) and I dig, described a biography on Bush by a conservative pundit named Fred Barnes as, "Fred Barnes' fellatial biography of Bush."

Let's ruminate on that one for a second, "Fred Barnes' fellatial biography of Bush"...

Wow. Leaving aside the accuracy of that brief description, that is a pretty kick ass one-word takedown. I'll leave the full analysis to one Arnold Zwicky at Language Log, from a post called "The vocabulary of toadying". Needless to say, it's an extremely comprehensive and thoughtful post on the use and meaning of the word fellatial. Which, I'm sure, has something to do with why I laughed so damn hard while reading it.

Superbowl fun fact

Detroit native Jerome Bettis was recently given the key to the city this week. Only three others have ever received this honor: James Earl Jones. Detroit neurosurgeon, Dr. Benjamin Carson, of Johns Hopkins University and Saddam Hussein.

Sullivan gets his points back

Man when he delivers he delivers.

Perestroika?

I still read the Earlham Word occasionally not so much as a source of shadenfreunde as I did in the past but because Earlham remains a fascinatingly weird place for me. (I’m also utterly fascinated by North Korea BTW. The DPRK has a “heart” too, but it has a 60 foot statue in the middle that you’re strongly encouraged to give flowers to.). In the most recent Word, Doug Bennett, I believe, made the most candid admission yet that all is not well in Earlham’s intellectual ecosystem.

Bennett also warned against two particular threats to the search for truth. The first threat, he said, is the threat posed by fundamentalist religions. There are elements of fundamentalist religions that believe simple readings of their holy texts can reveal all truth and tolerate no compromise. For these elements, Bennett said, "reason leads to dangerous conclusions." Bennett insisted that free inquiry is essential to a genuine search for truth. Echoing Cardinal Newman, Bennett declared, "Our truth seeking should be fearless and unfettered."

According to Bennett, the second danger to the free exercise of reason comes from reason itself. In searching for truth, we may end up seeing only what we want to see. Our search may be distorted by relationships of power and diverted by our passions and interests. "Our commitment to truth seeking must be thoroughgoing, even if it leads to unpleasant conclusions."

Unless you consider “Fair Trade” a fundamentalist religion, I think the possibility of being influenced by the former at Earlham is remote. The latter posited by Bennett is clearly the greater threat to Earlham’s (and academia in general) intellectual integrity (knee jerk pseudo-intellectual criticism from predictable sources adds credence).

While my Kremlinology may be a little a little excitable in this case, in the past year or so from the many EC mailings I somehow still receive I’ve detected increasing notes of perestroika from Bennett; more or less acknowledging that the long campaign to unencumber the academic establishment from tradition may have gone too far; that instead of intellectual discovery being hindered by ridged social and religious tradition, it is now being compromised by those unwilling to let their newest thought experiment be constrained, much less respect the inherent value of convention/tradition. This environment helped bring about the civil rights movements, but also gave us new math and crippling political correctness. In short I think Doug was very reasonably trying to say that in order for institutions of higher learning to regain their once lofty place in the marketplace of ideas (outside of stuff you can patent) balance needs to be restored between absolute and relativistic perspectives.

I'm a blog whore

I haven't been very communicative lately. I guess it's time to fess up...I started my own blog. I'm a whore-slut-hussy. It's a little more journal-esque, describing my life, including my recent career crisis/mental breakdown. It was awesome! Here it is if you want to see it

My one political observation of the day: maybe W. is starting to realize...democracy can be a bitch! Be careful what you ask for, George.

"Don't Be Evil"

tiananmen - Google Image Search.

tiananmen - Google Image Search in China.

Even billionare idealists have a price.

New York Times == Village Voice part 2

With today’s editorial begging Democratic senators to filibuster the vote to elevate Alito to the Supreme Court the NYTimes has now completely undone it’s legacy of being the “paper of record” and has nearly become the equivalent of one of those metro-rags chocked full articles that earnestly ponder whether Bush is retarded, evil or both. There is nothing wrong with these papers it’s just that it’s unlikely that their writings would ever seriously be held up in the Senate as justification for criticism a given policy as the Times was most recently with NSA eavesdropping (Though Teddy surprises me more every year). In a more reasonable, credible era, such a plea for filibuster from the paper of record would have served as justification itself. Now in a few days we’ll likely see that the utterings of the NYTimes have no more import than the latest street corner screed on Chimpy HalliBushitler.

Disillusioning

Knight Rider used to be my favorite TV show when I was a kid and I thought Michael Knight was a badass. This has sent many a happy childhood memory into disarray.

Banjo goodness

This is me playing "Spanish Point" by Bela Fleck. Check it out--it's a pretty cool song. I filmed it just to have as a memory, then later thought that it'd be fun to share on the blog. The audio isn't great but you can get the gist of it. (It's a 5 minute song so it may take a bit to load).

The Decline of Sullivan

Until recently, Andrew Sullivan’s blog used to be one of the 3 or 4 blogs I checked every day. He seemed to “tell it as it is” and had few if any sacred cows. This is no longer the case. This is not a matter of disagreeing with any of his positions as I’ve always disagreed with some but instead his transformation into a shrill ideological hack; a rigid believer rather than the questioner he was before. Kevin Holtsberry does a pretty good job summarizing this recent rhetorical decline:

It seems to me, that he rarely argues in good faith and his animus and personal obsessions color almost everything he writes.

Sullivan is a skilled polemicist. He is obviously smart and can be, or at least has been in the past, an effective advocate for a particular type of conservatism. It is not, nor has it been, the dominant form in this country, but it is a legitimate form worthy of debate and discussion.

But I am afraid I can no longer take his arguments seriously on a host of issues when he blatantly over-generalizes and argues from bad faith based on emotion and sloppy rhetoric rather than logic and first principles. As I noted above, Sullivan would not tolerate this type of argument from others regarding homosexuality or any of the issues important to him. His double standard is a mile wide: trust those who support your ideas and distrust everything the other side does.

Urban Artifact

We did the “Pleasant Run” bike trail yesterday (the last two weekends have been unseasonably warm here) which happens to go through many scenic inner-city neighborhoods. It was among some spectacular urban decay that I found this picture on the trail which appears to be a family photo snapped during a prison visitation. Which begs the question: Of all the backgrounds a prison could have, why a Star Trek theme? And I suppose more importantly, if the prison is going through the trouble of allowing family photos with a spectacular star trek background, why not let the guy put on some regular clothes? I mean, what kid is going to want a collection of photos where daddy’s in prison jumpsuits?

“What’s does you your* daddy do?”

“5 to 10.”

* Jeez-o-pete I hope people didn't think I was trying to write in dialect. I already discovered black people don't like white people attempting this in my required (diversity credit) Afro-Lit class.

Democratic Katrina policies at work

Remember all the energy price control hullabaloo from the Democratic party after Katrina to “help the poor”? Fortunately this didn’t happen because the democratic party currently has about as much influence on policy as a double scotch does on Ted Kennedy. But assuming they did, through the miracle of crappy socialist dictatorships, we can see into a likely democratic future in Venezuela if below we substitute “coffee” for “oil”:

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Coffee is vanishing from Venezuelan stores as producers protest price controls they say are strangling profits -- no laughing matter in a country where drinking the bitter brew is not simply a habit but a culture.

Troops and inspectors have begun raiding inventories held by private companies in an effort to ease the scarcity, authorities said on Wednesday.

The dispute over the bitter beans can be traced back to early 2003, when coffee fell under price controls for staple foods imposed by President Hugo Chavez's government as a way to counter inflation and protect the poor. But prices set in early December outraged coffee producers, prompting protests in downtown Caracas and paralyzing deliveries.

National Guard troops have so far seized about 330 tons of coffee stored by wholesalers in Yaguara and Guacara, near the capital of Caracas, and more raids were planned, said Gen. Marcos Rojas Figueroa of the National Guard.

"That coffee is going to be sold ... at the established price," he said.

NYTimes in self-parody

For a paper so squeamish about attaching the label “terrorist” to individuals who blow innocents up in Iraq to create “terror” they seem awfully at ease at applying labels to the individuals and actions of those involved in the various leak cases in which they’ve become enmeshed. While each leak case involved the potentially illegal public disclosure of sensitive information by current and former executive officials, the NYTimes explains their reasoning for why one leak is bad and the others are good; leakers that provide information that validates the papers editorial views – that the Iraq war and the Bush administration are bad – are “whistleblowers” and leakers that challenge these views are engaged in an illegal campaign to “silence and discredit” said brave whistle blowers. It’s a wonder that they haven’t simply done away with the pretense that conservatives are capable of ethical behavior and simply refer to liberals and conservatives as “good folks” and “evil doers” respectively.

I never knew how entertaining a Judicial ruling could be...

I just read page 137 of the Pennsylvania ID ruling. I'll admit it. I started at the end. I never do that with stuff I read, but this time I'm hooked and have to start at the begining. It's just great.

Here's what caught me:

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the
Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals,
who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would
time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID
Policy.

With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID
have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor
do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As
stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an
alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an
activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court.
Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction
on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a
constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an
imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the
Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which
has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers
of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal
maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

Oddly enough I found it courtesy of Neil Gaiman's blog, where he described it thusly:"The 139 page decision in the Pennsylvania "Intelligent Design" case is facinating reading -- remarkably lucid and interesting." I repeat, great.

Same ole' song and dance. Sort of.

I just came across this post from Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and co-owner of 2929 Entertainment (who own the Landmark theater chain and produced the movie "Good Night and Good Luck", among others). It details a recent experience he had as the subject of a New York Times piece. It's pretty amazing to see all of the communication that passes between Cuban and Randall Stross, the author of the piece, and then the end result.

It's pretty blatant that Stross had a good idea of what kind of article he wanted to write, how he wanted to portray Cuban's position in the movie/distribution industry, and what value he placed on the Cuban's perspective. To some degree, the tone of the article (which, if you don't feel like reading it, is bitchy) is to be expected, but when compared to the dialogue that preceded it, seems extreme.

Cuban followed up his post with this:

the more time i spent on my last blog entry, the more it became apparent i wanted to ask this question and see the comments to this blog, and inevitable commentary around the blogosphere and in traditional digital and analog media..

even a year ago, this would have seemed like a preposterous question.

Given the admitted rush job by Randall Stross for the Sunday NY Times Business column that I discussed in my last blog entry, along with my previous experiences with that paper, i dont think it is preposterous any longer.

Who has higher editorial and reporting standards. Your typical fulltime blogger, or the NY Times ?

Who puts more effort into researching their articles ?

Who conveys more depth ?

The NY Times is obviously feeling some financial pain and cutting back. Costs impact the amount of space they can provide for any article, or for all content as a whole. Bloggers do not have that limitation. I can write as many pages as i like.

The NY Times is limited by deadlines. They have to get to print and get the product out the door. Bloggers do not.

Costs and deadlines limit the amount of resources that can be applied to any given article for both bloggers and the NY Times. Who is more constrained as a result ?

This has nothing to do with bias, per se, but it does have to do with the preconcieved notions of journalists. You may as well extrapolate from here... but I can't help but think of how many pieces of good news I've heard from Iraq via the NYT. Hmmm, I think I know the answer to Cuban's question...

Reason for Iraq pessimism?

This may be a pretty big reason people have such a pessimistic view of the situation Iraq despite steady progress for the last year. Even news that is almost unqualifiedly good gets spun as negatively as possible. Seriously, if gold coins began to rain from the sky and all the Sunni's, Kurds and Shiites all spontainiously joined hands and started singing "I want to buy the world a coke" the headline would still probably be "US Corporations Claim another victim: Commercialism Runs Rampant in Iraq." and "Numerous eye injuries from projectiles."

Does intel have an axe to grind?

Since the Plame controversy, and all the subsequent articles that have been sourced to “unnamed intelligence sources” about renditions of suspected terrorists and domestic NSA spying, many have commented that it appears that there is a rift between the Bush administration and the intelligence gathering establishment. While occasional leaks are normal, the flood of leaked info that – on its face – casts the current administration in a negative light doesn’t seem to be coincidence. Pundits on the left have interpreted these leaks as coming from people of conscience sick of bullying by the white house while those from the right view the intelligence leakers as ineffective bureaucrats retaliating for post 9/11 shakeups. What if it’s something more simple than that?
In my field one of the biggest career risks is to acquire skills based on technologies that die. For example before 2003, numerically most people who developed windows applications used Visual Basic and then very rapidly – companies switched to .Net. In most cases VB developers with many years of experience went from being highly valued to requiring assistance from recent college grads for even the most basic programming tasks. Those who couldn’t adapt were demoted or let go. Is it possible that something similar is happening with the intelligence organizations? Imagine if you busted your ass for learning Russian and all the ins and outs of the Soviet regime only to see the cold war end and Democratic Russia turn out mostly okay? How would it feel instead of being an agent in Moscow to be a desk jockey (like Plame) with all the best assignments going to people less experienced but with the right skill sets? After years of high risk and crap pay only to be thanked by getting warehoused in an office somewhere there may be some intelligence folks that are understandably resentful and want to be in the limelight again(Plame). This doesn’t excuse them for potentially violating national security laws but it seems to be more likely than some of the more extreme scenarios being discussed in the media.

Done and done.

I just finished my last final for the semester! YAY!!!! And I'm almost positive I passed everything. Yay!!!!

The anti-Churchill party

Now I know Dean is a nutcase, but he is the head of the DNC. His guaranteeing US defeat is a little unseemly is it not?

Saying the "idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong," Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean predicted today that the Democratic Party will come together on a proposal to withdraw National Guard and Reserve troops immediately, and all US forces within two years.

Dean made his comments in an interview on WOAI Radio in San Antonio.

"I've seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening."

While I think Ann Coulter is a nutcase as well, doesn’t this make her charges that anti-war liberals are tip-toeing on the borders of sedition slightly more credible? (And believe me, I'm glad no one like Ann is the head of the RNC)

UPDATE: Kerry intimating that US soldiers in Iraq are behaving unprofessionally – almost as if they were terrorists (If plumbers plumb; terrorists ________)
-- probably doesn’t weaken Ms. Coulter’s argument either.

Kerry: “there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the--of--the historical customs, religious customs. ...Iraqis should be doing that.”

Ok so I now think that 2012 is probably the soonest I won’t be pants pissingly terrified of Democrats being in charge of national security. Anyone who views occasional lapses in cultural etiquette as reason enough to turn over a country with incalculable oil wealth to the next new-and-improved Taliban cannot be taken seriously.

UPDATE: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi claims over half of house Democrats favor "speedy withdrawl" (much to the consternation of the other half).

UPDATE: Dean changes his mind (again)
"We can and have to win the War on Terror." "We can only win the war -- which we have to win -- if we change our strategy dramatically. ... if we want to win the war on terror we cannot pursue the failed strategy we've pursued..."

UPDATE: This can be filed under Murtha’s “Democrats not sure what they believe at any given moment” category. Delaware Sen. Tom Carper seemingly criticized much publicized pro-withdrawal comments by Howard Dean and other Democrats after returning from a tour from Iraq which I first thought was a rare display of candor.

"I wish more of my colleagues, and folks like Howard Dean, would try going to Iraq to see the situation there for themselves"

Great! So he’s implying that what they said was poorly informed and incorrect. Err no.

“Anyone who has visited Iraq and talked to the people there, he said, is not going to come back thinking this thing is going to be won militarily. It's not."

Huh? Isn’t that exactly what Howard Dean said? (see above)

Has Rove figured out a secret weakness in the liberal mind that causes pandering engines to engage simultaneously in forward and reverse inevitably causing a full logic meltdown? Will we see Dean interrupted in a future speech on the necessity of the Iraq war by a rebellious left hand attempting to make a peace sign?

UPDATE: So while conservatives are actively trying to allow democracy to take hold in Iraq liberals are exporting well worn tactics to discredit democratic elections through claims of disenfranchisement.

Juan Cole: ”The only way the vote will happen at all is that the US military has forbidden all vehicular traffic, so everyone has to walk for the next few days. This tactic prevents car bombings from disrupting the elections, but it is a desperate measure and not a sign of an election that could be certified as free and fair.”

Goodness that’s sounds almost as bad as Ohio. Everyone knows inconvenience = Jim Crow unless you happen to be in country with a tin-pot socialist dictator and then it isn’t inconvenience but a valid cultural preference we’d be arrogant and ignorant to judge. Just ask Jimmah.

UPDATE: Holy cow. I was totally joking about the Iraq/Ohio comparison and Eric Alterman is actually making the comparison....seriously.