Bionic Octopus

Hell, I Don't Fucking Know

2006-07-18T18:26:00.000-04:00

A few kind souls have posted comments recently wondering where I've gone and urging Bionic Posting Activity. I thank them very sweetly for caring, but I have to confess I'm at a loss to think what would be the point.

I don't mean that all drama-queenily, and I'm certainly not fishing for a chorus of 'We wuv you, BionOc, come back!'s. I honestly don't know what possible good I could do by posting the things I have to say about this festival of barbarity and global apology. For one thing, there's sterling opposition blogging going on all over the damn place. jews sans frontieres, the Tomb, Angry Arab, From Gaza with Love, and untold others are saying and reporting everything I can imagine contributing and much more.

Thanks to the heroic and indefatigable Jennifer Loewenstein (contact me if you want to get on her amazing mailing list), I am daily supplied with an avalanche of data, opinion, reportage, rage from all over the world's media. I struggle to keep up with the death counts (latest from Lebanon = more than 200 Lebanese : 24 Israelis, maintaining the steady 10:1 Arab-Israeli exchange rate that Europe and the US appear to feel is eminently reasonable; as for Palestinians, we're apparently not getting Gazan death counts anymore--the Gaza invasion is so July 11th, and where's the dramatic flair in death by pestilence, dehydration, failed health care and heat stroke?), the sundry analyses (it's Iran/it's Syria/it's Palestinian solidarity/it's, for fuck's sake, the Mideast Death Dance), the searing offensives and limp-dicked apologies, the statements of defiance and the endless, bloviating, self-aggrandizing, schmaltz-belarded lies.

I fight wearily on my med-student listservs with people who post things like 'Does anybody understand that Hizbullah and Hamas operate and hide behind women and children making it near impossible for Israel to avoid some civilian casualties? What about taking a stand against those Arab societies that teach hate in schools and encourage families to sacrifice their children?' (Nobody, but nobody, retails bankrupt fact-unimpeded racist caricatures as argument like thick American Zionist children. Honestly, a halfway-intelligent Likudnik would cringe with mortification to read this shite.)

So I spend my days reading, in a marinade of impotent rage and perma-beggared belief. How would it help anyone if I upchucked my bolus of bile into the blogosea? How would it not be an insult to the overpowering immediacy of Lebanese and Palestinian suffering if I used a blog to exorcise my personal little grief and rage from my cozy summer ass-plant in London? (I am aware that this could be construed as precisely what I'm doing in the present post, but it isn't. It's an explanation.)

By this, please understand, I intend no slight whatsoever to all those who are blogging this nightmare. So many people are providing vital information, analysis and energy that we're so desperately lacking from the official media. I'm especially awed by and grateful to those who find ways to blog from the ground, to make sure we see what this savagery actually looks like.

All I have to contribute is fury and grief, and that does fuck-all for anyone. So except for those circumstances in which I imagine I can actually do some concrete good by posting, I'm going to sit this out.

One thing before I go, though. I got the following article via email last night from Jennifer Loewenstein:

Last update - 01:14 18/07/2006
Senator Clinton: All Americans are standing behind Israel

By Shlomo Shamir, Haaretz Correspondent and The Associated Press

Speaking at a large demonstration in support of Israel in Manhattan on Monday, United States Senator Hillary Clinton expressed unreserved support for Israel and commended President George Bush for his stance in the present crisis.

Clinton said on Monday that all Americans, whether Democrats or Republicans, stood behind Israel at this time.

The demonstration, which drew an estimated 5,000 people, was described as one of the largest Jewish events in recent years.

Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel also spoke at the gathering, which ended in a call to free the captured soldiers.

[...]

[Italics mine.] Parenthetically, this article has now disappeared from the Ha'aretz site, which may be the result of skulduggery on the part of She's handlers, or equally the general crapness of haaretz.com. Not the point.

Point is, FUCK YOU HILLARY CLINTON YOU PUTRESCENT DRAGGLE OF STINKING HUMAN WASTE. Don't you fucking DARE to speak for me and what I stand behind, now or ever. I hereby pledge to devote myself tirelessly to the struggle for your unelection and precipitous, humiliating descent into infinitely-deserved disgrace and obscurity, you foul, pandering, principle-shunning megalopportunist bucket of treachery. I spit on you.

That is all, for now.

Olmert: Did I Say UNIlateral Convergence?

2006-06-14T10:35:00.000-04:00

I meant, uh, BIlateral convergence. I mean road map. I mean, oh, just shut it and suck up these facts on the ground. Reality is my bitch, bitch.

In light of the international opposition [B: e.g., the UK's ultrahardass 'reluctance' to see the 'very much second-best' solution of unilateral action--booyakasha] to further unilateral steps by Israel, the government has begun to draft an alternative plan that would essentially convert Olmert's unilateral convergence plan into a bilateral move carried out in conjunction with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

According to the plan now being drafted by the Prime Minister's Office and the Foreign Ministry, Israel would propose to Abbas that they reach an agreement to establish a Palestinian state with provisional borders in Gaza plus about 90 percent of the West Bank. The provisional border in the West Bank would match the route of the separation fence, with one exception: Israel would retain security control over the Jordan Valley.

In this way, Israel hopes to present the convergence plan as an implementation of Phase II of the road map peace plan, thereby acceding to the demands of the United States, Jordan, Egypt and others that Israel resume negotiations with the PA under the road map.

Tap Tap...Is This Thing On?

2006-06-13T05:27:00.001-04:00

Um, hello world? Paging the fucking world? Could I have your attention for like 5 fucking seconds? Cause I was just curious about what exactly it might take for y'all to actually consider that maybe, just maybe, it might be a good idea to think about slightly a little tiny bit reining Israel the fuck in.

I mean, I get that bombing families to smithereens on beaches is not that tipping point for you. Your deafening silence has made that pretty clear. Nor do you appear to balk at Israel's attempts to put over the risible-if-it-weren't-so-utterly-filthy deceit that 'the explosion that killed Huda Ghalia's family was caused by a Palestinian rocket'. OK. So we know your threshold is high.

How about openly threatening to assassinate democratically elected heads of other states?

"Yassin and Rantisi are waiting for you, Haniyeh, if you implement the same stance of liquidating Jews, indiscriminate firing, and suicide terror attacks aimed at paralyzing Israeli society anew," said Hanegbi, chairman of the influential Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

Anyone else remember Executive Action, the special assassinations wing of the CIA, revelations of whose botulism-cigar-spikingesque activities forced Gerald Ford to ban assassinations by US agencies some 30 years ago? A ban dutifully upheld by presidents ever since (though naturally, even as it was created ways were being found to pare its application down to virtually nothing outside of a CIA agent actually walking up to a foreign president in broad daylight, whipping out a sword and disembowelling him with a gleeful cackle--no cackle, no assassination).

Even the US of fuckin'A doesn't get to openly waltz around killing heads of state. Yes, everyone knows we do it anyway, but this is not my point. My point is, Israel is advertising it. Surely someone, somewhere thinks, Palestinian justice completely aside, this might not be a completely brilliant precedent. Anyone? Anyone?

P.S. No but really. Really. You have got. to be fucking. kidding me. When will it be fucking ENOUGH?!

X-Men: The Final Solu--er, Last Stand

2006-06-01T00:25:00.000-04:00

GIANT SPOILER WARNING:
I am about to reveal or refer indiscreetly to practically everything important that happens in 'X-Men III'. If you wish (though I don't advise it) to save yourself for the cortex-searing cocktail of geek disillusion and drop-jawed political aghastness that is this cinematic artifact, run away now. Also, much detail is required for analysis purposes, so this is fucking long. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Right. First let me preface by saying that I fucking love X-Men. I was ridiculously excited to see this film. Excited unto sitting through the ubiquitous trailers and TV ads with my eyes squeezed shut and my ears finger-stoppered chanting lalalalalalalalala, to the undoubted joy of my neighboring movie-goers, so as to escape the slightest hint of spoilage.

And of course I secretly knew it would be disappointing, as any 3rd epigone in a beloved franchise will inevitably be. (Beyond 3, I know better than to shell out even two hours of Sunday afternoon cable-watching, let alone actual coin.) What I didn't know was that it would be, hands down, the most overtly, unapologetically reactionary piece of 'entertainment' I can remember seeing. 'X-III', or as I like to call it, 'Kapos Without a Cause', is effectively a manifesto for the implosive capitulation of liberal political ethics into its own hollow, convictionless, security-craving heart. It is the Democrat Police-State Summer Blockbuster.

[Interlude: let me now, against the very slight risk of being blindsided later, allow for the possibility that this is in fact a shockingly sophisticated piece of left-political critique in deep, deep, DEEP cover. There are actually several things about the film that make me think this is a genuine possibility, but ultimately we have to engage with the argument the film appears to make and authorial intent be damned. And as it plays on the screen, this is a film about the heroism of kapos. But just in case it comes out that Brett Ratner is actually a savage Swiftian cryptoTrot for our time, let it be known that I thought of that.]

The premise: post the thwarted mutanticidal ambitions of William Stryker in X2, (American) humans and mutants are at last coexisting in apparent harmony, complete with (the freakishly appropriately-cast) Kelsey Grammer as a big blue furry Secretary for Mutant Affairs in the Presidential Cabinet. But of course all is not durable serenity: a pharmaceutical company has developed a 'cure' for mutants, copied from the DNA of a little mutant boy called Leech. (They keep him shaven-headed and white-clad in a sealed room with a very big television, as one will do. He seems limply ok with this plan, though no one on either side ever appears to ask him.)

Cue queer-style identity politics: many see the 'cure' (quite correctly) as an attempt to pathologize their mutant identity as a disease, while others queue up to get their normal-shots (including Rogue, whose sole, and blessedly scant, function in the film is to enact an odd little embedded High School Misfit narrative: her mutation means she can't touch her boyfriend, which granted does suck, and she miserably suspects him of running around with another girl. In the time-honored self-hating-misfit move, she runs off secretly to get fixed, and we confidently expect that at the last minute she will learn to Love Herself and Value Her Special Difference, and not get cured after all. Hold that thought). Protests, factions, confusion. Isn't it awful? What to do? Then Magneto shows up to organize a real resistance, and the fascist fun begins.

It quickly emerges that the 'voluntary' cure has already been weaponized by the government (poor Mystique is shot with it, and is turned speedily and permanently into a pink, naked and oddly chunkier Rebecca Romijn; NB: head-to-toe teal apparently slimming). By way of justification, the supposedly mutant-friendly President tells outraged Mutant Affairs Secretary Beast that 'I worry how democracy survives when a man can move cities with his mind.' Apparently in this model democracy survives by forcibly genetically bleaching that man, along with any other inconveniently-abled citizens. Beast has a hissy fit, denounces the weaponized cure, and walks out on the government to join his X-friends at Xavier's School, where they all stand around looking Very Concerned about how awful it is, consider packing it all in and then boldly decide to, er, continue holing up in their posh private school. This is the bold plan, mind you.

Magneto meanwhile has been busily gathering a throng of radical followers--naturally pierced, dyed, gender-ambiguous and gothed-up to a man-woman--and they all convene in a forest encampment that evokes, surely non-accidentally, Robin Hood. Magneto delivers an address rousing the Brotherhood to fight the 'cure', and rather desultorily gesturing toward some kind of vague mutant-supremacy platform. (This is one of a small handful of moments thrown in to present him as an eville, heartless tyrant-presumptive; the problem being that they're so lazily conceived that they're completely inconsistent with his character and thus completely unconvincing. The sloppiest, and nastiest, of these is when devoted henchmina Mystique, 'cured' and lying naked and helpless on the floor, looks up plaintively and says, 'Eric...?', to which Magneto icily replies, 'You're no longer one of us', turns and leaves her there. This makes exactly no sense in the context of his character, which has been notable for its loyalty, even to King Kapo Xavier. A clumsy smear-job.)

Meanmeanwhile, having died so promisingly in the end of X2, Jean Grey has come back as the unpromisingly dyed, issuetastic Phoenix and, rather redeemingly, appears right off to have iced Cyclops, her old lover. Dr. Xavier supplies the charming back-story of how, when Jean was but a wee mutantette, she was like totally the Most Powerful Mutant Ever, and for reasons unspecified (but in fact embodied in the entire program of the film) we couldn't have that, so he whisked her off to his school and handily created a series of blocks inside her mind. This caused her to develop a split personality and bury all her impulses of joy, desire, anger and power in the id-persona Phoenix, leaving the sensationally insipid control-shell Jean Grey to struggle pathetically at shifting pennies with her mind-fragment (not to mention at achieving some tepid flicker of chemistry with ultraweenie Cyclops).

Man just out and says all this, as if he'd committed a perfectly understandable, justifiable intervention, instead of, oh, criminal therapeutic child abuse. Now of course the hellcat's out of the bag, and she is one supremely fucked-off megamutant. She explodes Xavier, which to be honest he pretty much deserves, then schleps conflictily off with Magneto (who btw tried to stop her killing Xavier; heartless and disloyal my ass) to Sherwood Base Camp (stopping on the way to pick up some curiously ill-fitting gothwear). Now Magneto and his posse have The Ultimate Weapon. But ahhhhh, can they control her?

This is the last point at which the movie bothers to make any kind of narrative logical sense. Wolverine shows up to try to get Phoenix/Jean (Jeanix?) back, and on the way kills an absolute fuckload of other mutants in Magneto's camp, basically just cuz. (Wolverine's body count in these films has always dwarfed the entire rest of the cast's combined, but this is the first time we see him killing almost exclusively other mutants. I don't believe this is the slightest bit accidental. By the end he will become the prime motivator of the X-Men going out deliberately to kill untold other mutants in order to save [actively mutanticidal] humans--the precise inversion of his role in X2, and the sad resolution of the major ongoing storyline across all three films: the taming/reclaiming of Wolverine into a tool of the state that, in its most pathological [but still broadly sanctioned] incarnation, created him. Poor Wolverine; he was better than this. And to add insult to injury, they present his domestication as if it meant he's finally grown up.)

Jeanix just sort of looks at him for a bit, and then Magneto hucks him magnetically off into the forest far far away, so he mopes blowdriedly back to the school.

Magneto broadcasts a public service announcement on Fox News telling the humans to stay out of the Brotherhood's way and don't fuck with their mission, or prepare to get squished. That irritating fire-boy from X2 (now abruptly risen to #1 Magneto henchman; man does go through minions) blows up the pharm company's office building, and then they all set off to uproot the Golden Gate Bridge so they can take it to Alcatraz Island, where the labs and the cure-mutant are kept in ostentatiously remarked-upon impregnability. (Unclear to me why they couldn't simply have taken some kind of boat to Alcatraz, much as I did myself some years ago for the rather tedious prison tour.) All in all, we are rather generously treated to the spectacle of Resistance Going Too Far. As soon as we use violence, you know, They Have Won™. Thing is, though, nobody actually ever does argue that Magneto's position is in any way incorrect, either factually or morally. We're simply strenuously informed that he is being not at all nice about it.

Meanwhile, back at the plush, leafy Westchester X-ranch, the (mysteriously decimated; could they not afford scale for more than 6 speaking X-Actors?) gang are gearing up for war. Not against the government that is openly preparing to retro-eugenically bleach them. No suh. Rather, they get their war on and go jetting off in defense of the forces of genetic fascism, seemingly because Magneto's lot are preparing to inflict some property damage and kidnap Cure-boy.

Very Important Note: at no point do the (clean-cut and J-Crew-clad) X-Men ever actually say out loud why it is that they must go out to oppose Magneto's (gothy-punky) resistance. There is no 'But if he succeeds in doing Thing N, the world will end/humanity will be wiped out/mutanity will be wiped out/puppies everywhere will die horrible deaths! Quick, to the X-Jet!' In fact, quite the reverse. All that's happening is that the resistance is going to fuck up a factory, to stop production of the eugenic weapon that does in fact threaten to wipe out all mutants, including the X-Men. And yet without a second thought the latter are off to oppose the saving! At Wolverine's urging they stand, literally six of them heroically Holding The Line, to protect hundreds of human soldiers, who are at that very moment in the process of firing cure-weapons at their fellow mutants, from being overrun by Magneto's insurrectionary Brotherhood. Because here's the thing: it's not that the Brotherhood's opposition to the cure is aberrant; we got some terribly soul-sista-stirring lines from Storm earlier on about how awful and unacceptable the cure is. It's quite simply that they're doing it wrong. And when it comes down to a (really rather minor) crunch, the X-Men unhesitatingly lock and load on the side of Order, even when it means killing hordes of their own fellows to serve an authority that effectively wants to kill them all.

What does that make the X-Men? It makes them kapos. This is rendered absolutely clear in the final boss-battle with Magneto, who, having succinctly identified them as 'traitors to their own kind', is handily kicking their asses by flinging burning cars at them from the bridge. In their huddled bunker, Wolverine looks down and sees a little clutch of cure-cartridges fallen from one of the soldiers' magazine. He and furry blue quisling Beast exchange a dawning, manly, determined look, a look in which the two give each other implicit permission to abandon any last tatters of independent moral compunction: Beast to betray his own earlier principled stand against that very weapon, and Wolverine his very self, constructed in resistance against the genocidally normative forces that built both his skeleton and the cure-weapon. And so they make a sneaky little plan, and they go out and defeat Magneto by stabbing him from behind with that handful of cure-darts. They use the enemy's anti-mutant weapon to kill the mutant Magneto, reducing him to the helpless, unwilling human Eric Lensherr.

(The Eric Lensherr who, as all three films repeatedly emphasize, was not only a victim of Nazi genocide, but whose mutantness opened the whole trilogy in that searing scene that constructs the boy Eric's suddenly-emerging mutant identity as a desperate, somatic act of resistance against that genocide--an act that has its fleeting moment of efficacy before he is overcome and beaten down by the agents of fascism. These films will not let us forget that central fact of Magneto's identity. This is actually Thing #1 that makes me wonder whether something might be Going On with this film. The interplay between Magneto's mode of defeat and his so-emphasized Survivor identity is so overt and telling that, if it isn't meant as some kind of inversion, those responsible are astoundingly thick. I'm just saying.)

I can scarcely think of a scene more chilling in a film, ever. That's really the climax, or I should say the nadir, of the film. That's the money shot, the pragmatic payload of 'X-III': real heroes will stick at nothing, will collaborate in the basest atrocity, to fulfil their empty, mechanical, ineluctable, fratricidal obeisance to Order. For fuck's sake, no one even called and asked the X-Men to go stop Magneto. There was no actual content to their impulse, stated or implicit. They just upped and did it, because that's what they're for.

Does any of that start to sound familiar at all? Does it sound like an epically-enhanced depiction of a political party so abased before the imperative of Order that, unasked, it will savagely censure its own members rather than allow 'uncivil' opposition to the party it faintly purports to oppose? That it will freely deploy the enemy's ideological weapons of 'patriotism' against its own, rather than let them question the extinguishing of individual liberty in the name of Order? That it will volunteer legislation designed to out-draconian the demonic fever-dreams of the party in power, so that if it must attack that party it can do so on the grounds that the governing party is not sufficiently attending to the maintenance of Order?

That is the yawning moral vacuum, contentless yet bizarrely active, of the Democrat-liberal political existence, and it is not merely justified but celebrated in this film. The denouement is stunningly reactionary: status quo restored with a vengeance; well-behaved mutants returned to nice, quiet, separate-but-equal 'coexistence' in their lovely green island of mutants-only privilege [cough-Israel-cough]; nasty radical mutants violently killed or 'cured' or both; 1-2-3 manicured graves in the garden of the Xavier School, sedate monuments to those who fell in sacrifice to almighty Order (no graves for the scores of rebel mutants killed, most of them by Wolverine, the rest by the effects of being forcibly 'cured' while, say, clinging mutantly to the underside of a hundred-foot tower); and most jaw-dropping of all, Capo di Tutti Kapi Beast rewarded with, I shit you not, the post of Ambassador to the UN. (That's Thing #2 in my Something's Up Suspicions List: in the era of John Bolton, could anyone posit that reward with a straight face?)

(Thing #3, fwiw, is the extremely odd resolution of the Rogue subplot: she goes through with it. When she comes back to the school, we're quite obviously set up to expect that she's had the requisite change of heart and learned to love herself just as she is. And yet she just fucking hasn't. She's just gone and got normalized, in defiance of every teen film ever, and it's quite obvious from the unenthusiastic finger-twine she gets from Bobby that she is so not going to get the boy. What is that about? It's about something, clearly. This film's desperate, rationality-trumping need to stamp out desire in all its forms is the subject for a whole nother essay. Most obviously: in Boss-Battle 2, when Phoenix has gone all glowy and is threatening to bust up everything and everyone, why exactly is it necessary for Wolverine to kill her, when they have conveniently on hand the little cure-boy whose precise power is to deactivate other mutants? Because she is embodied desire, and you'll recall that we couldn't have that. It must be slaughtered in sacrifice. And poor Wolverine has to do it, to seal his self-surrender. And, most horribly, Jean has to recognize and welcome that necessity in the moment of her death, and forgive him with her eyes. A thousand, million, billion times ew.)

This film is an absolute paean to jackbooted collaborationism. One is accustomed to science fiction that critiques fascism from the liberal (and harder) left, as well as that which celebrates it from the right, and that which glares dyspeptically at both from the 'apolitical' outside. The startling, if dubious, innovation of 'X-III' is in presenting a glorious vision of the soi-disant left heroically facilitating the ends of fascism. A document for our times, indeed.

Happy Catastrophemas

2006-05-13T10:59:00.000-04:00

Monday is the 58th anniversary of the Naqba, the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and lands to make way for the Israeli apartheid state. Fifty-eight years of dispossession and savage oppression in full view of the rest of the world, which on its kinder days sat by and watched, and on other days (like today) jumped in and joined the fun. The Palestinians are a people so fucked by history it leaves me constantly gapemouthed and hollow-bellied with dismay. Just a few good points of reference to mark the day.

-Karma Nabulsi's excellent, angry Guardian piece on how the Naqba continues to define the identity of a new generation in diaspora.

-Virginia Tilley in Counterpunch on the moral and pragmatic bankruptcy of requiring Hamas to 'recognize Israel' as a condition for lifting collective punishment of the Palestinians.

-The Palestinian Center for Human Rights special report on Poverty in the Gaza Strip. Useful statistics:

From September 2000 to the end of 2005, the number of Palestinian civilians killed by IOF and Israeli settlers reached 2,936, including 651 children and 106 women. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were injured. The injured included 8,662 injured people from the Gaza Strip, including hundreds who now suffer from permanent disabilities.

And to bring the tally up to date:

In April and May, more than 40 Palestinians have been killed by the army - most of them civilians, at least eight of them children....Schoolchildren blown to bits while playing in Beit Lahia, like Mamdouh Obeid; Eitan Youssef, a 41-year-old mother from Tulkarm, shot in front of her children because troops "thought they saw a suspicious movement"; an old man, Musa Sawarkah, herding his flock in Gaza, gunned down; a taxi-driver, Zakariya Daraghmeh,"accidentally" shot in the back in Nablus.

As an American I spend a truly ridiculous amount of my life hearing people spout pompous bullshit about Palestinians' 'habitual slaughter of civilians', without the tiniest hint of awareness of the daily, unapologetic, unremonstrated civilian murder conducted by the IOF. Part of this is down to the media's criminal lack of interest in reporting these crimes. But at least as much is attributable to a stubborn moral blindness that has its roots in race preferences both long-standing and politically expedient.

The ongoing global abandonment of an occupied, brutalized people, the utterly disingenuous scapegoating of Hamas as the source of the current untenable situation, and most of all the deeply racist characterization of Palestinians as a pariah people devoted to the infamous 'cult of death', dedicated to the extermination of Jews, and the primary authors of their own misfortune: these are crimes in which we may be complicit or against which we can fight. There is no neutral position. Victory to the Intifada.

Question

2006-05-11T08:39:00.000-04:00

Does anyone out there have a good bio-ecological definition for 'predator'? I'm trying to figure out what makes a predator specifically that, and why for instance a parasite isn't considered just a rather slow subset of predator. In what inheres predatorness? In pouncing? In killing quickly? In eating whole? In being larger than the prey? I can think of predators that violate each of these conditions.

When we talk about a species (e.g., humans) not having any 'natural predators', that presumes the exclusion of parasites, of which we got plenty. I can't find a good definition of predator to explain this to me. Anyone help me out?

Take My Agenda, Please

2006-04-27T18:19:00.001-04:00

Approximately a-millionth in an occasional series on why the pro-choice, pro-contraception mainstream sucks so hard. Or rather, on how they do; I couldn't presume to guess at why.

Today's example comes from, bet you didn't see this coming, Glamour magazine. What? I read it religiously every week while I'm having my face botoxed! OK fine, somebody sent it around to one of my listservs. But I could read it...you don't know.

Ahem. The article, which is actually pretty decent, is about the sad state of sexual/personal freedom for American women, with special regard for how government agencies and programs have been hijacked by ultraright agendas, resulting in all those abstinence-only sex-ed classes, the FDA's shenanigans over Plan B approval, gutting of foreign HIV/AIDS prevention assistance, &c. It contains the following quote, from someone theoretically on our side:

"Abstinence is a laudable goal," says Deborah Arrindell, vice president of health policy for the nonpartisan American Social Health Association, an STD-awareness group. "But it is not how young women live their lives—the reality is that most women have premarital sex. Our government is focusing not on women's health but on a moral agenda."

What is a WHAT??! WHY please? Explain to me in 50 words or less why on earth abstinence is a 'laudable goal'. The only possible reason, absent a whole barrel of case-specific modifiers I don't see her providing, could be that sex is Bad. In fact, Arrindell's whole argument is framed around that notion: we tacitly acknowledge that sex is Bad and ideally to be avoided, but what can we do? Young women will do the bad thing, so we must take pragmatic action to pick up the pieces when they inevitably succumb to the not-laudable.

This is a horrifically patronizing argument, which like so many of the crypto-moralist 'necessary evil' arguments of the pro-choice mainstream (see especially the purulent patriarchalist William Saletan), accepts and expands on anti-choice's infantilization and moral de-agentification of women.

Look. I can't believe I have to spell this out, especially to our own damn side. Sex is not bad, nor is avoiding it in any way inherently admirable. Sex in 2006 is women's right, and what we as a society owe both young women and young men (but especially women, on whose bodies is visited so vastly much more of the consequences of ignorance) is the information and material tools necessary to exercise that right in a way that doesn't do harm to themselves or others.

If we cede the moral terrain once again to the forces of reaction, we're reduced to a position of shamefaced special pleading: we know it's wrong, but it happens so we have to deal with it. This is not only undignified and unnecessary, it's actively wrong. No fucking quarter for those who seek to infantilize and stigmatize women for having sex. By trying to shy away from taking a moral stand, we simply abdicate the moral position to those who are unafraid to prosecute their own repugnant one with vigor. We have the right, nay even the obligation to a moral stand. We who support sex education, contraception and emergency contraceptive measures for women of all ages have nothing to apologize for. We are young women's champions, not their corruptors.

And another thing. I admire Susan Wood for stepping down from the FDA over Plan B, I really do. She put her career where her mouth is, and good on her. But I confess I grow impatient with all the decent liberals who are only now finding themselves shocked--shocked!--to discover that politics plays a role in 'scientific' decision-making. 'Scientists do not normally engage in what is going on in Washington, D.C., or politics,' says Wood. The New England Journal of Medicine ran an editorial on the Plan B brouhaha entitled 'A Sad Day for Science at the FDA,' commenting that the decision 'appeared to reflect political meddling in the drug-approval process.'

No! Can it be that the sterile, impregnable fastnesses of scientific evaluation have suddenly and inexplicably been breached by the creeping contagion of political influence? How fucking tiresome and thick. If these people honestly believe that 'pure science', not to mention science concerned with product consumption like drug approvals, has not been thick-woven with political and economic influence from the Enlightenment on, they're--well, they're exactly as analysis-challenged as you'd have thought they were.

How do they think NIH grant allocations are awarded? By divine impartial fiat from the God of Meritorious Research? Do they think we're not all cruising around now gently farting water vapor from our hydrogen-cell vehicles into a clear blue ozone-rich sky because alternative-fuels research is a dead end and undeserving of funding? Do they think we have no specific data on healthy blood-cholesterol levels in women because women are physiologically identical to men and therefore don't require gender-specific research trials?

Science is always already lousy with politics, you lazy fucking ninnies. Read fucking Steven Rose, people. Read Levins & Lewontin. Even at the level of the individual investigator, there is no such thing as conducting scientific research without political/material bias. The best you can do is be aware of your bias, and how it interacts with the biases around you, and if possible use it to triangulate with the biases outside your control. But that requires acknowledgement that the bias is there, is everywhere. By perpetuating the bankrupt notion of 'pure' research unsmudged by the grubby pawmarks of politics and commerce, these people (often with, I fully allow, genuine good intentions) do as much as the Hagers and Winkenwerders to perpetuate the unchecked control and exploitation of scientific institutions by the wielders of capitalist political power.

Addition: Great Counterpunch piece here by Sherry Wolf saying, basically, exactly what I've been saying for a year: the Dems are profoundly not our friends in the pro-choice movement, and neither are NARAL, Planned Parenthood, NOW. Only she says it better, with more research, and in Counterpunch.

Budget Allocation's A Bitch (Like Certain Unnamed Senators)

2006-04-27T08:02:00.000-04:00

The latest beauty to sashay down the runway in America's Spring 2006 'Xenophobia: Mexicans Are The New Arabs' Collection: a $1.9-billion reallocation for 'border security' just approved by the Senate. Where's that paltry sum coming from? Among other things, post-Katrina rebuilding 'efforts'.

And honestly, who can blame them? Katrina is so Fall '05. And it's not like over 50% of New Orleans' former residents have yet to return to the sodden, mold-contaminated piles of toxic debris they once called home. Or like Mayor Ray 'Chocolate City' Nagin has set up a Bring New Orleans Back Commission apparently for the purpose of directly panhandling random web surfers.

Maybe Katrina victims should just accept that their 15 minutes are over, and gracefully cede the spotlight to the plight of border-patrol agents who need their vehicles replaced so they can achieve smooth acceleration and better gas mileage running down Mexican women in the desert. Who speaks for their pain?

Oh but wait, guess who's had the cojones to stand up and protest this amendment? She, that's who. She speaks for the displaced and disenfranchised of New Orleans! She campaigns for government to take responsibility for its failure to protect its citizens! Mm, not so much. Not at all, actually. La Clintonessa in fact squawks against money being taken away from the (coincidentally also $1.9-billion) Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Fund.

Catchy name, that. First I'd heard of it. This is informative. Also some interesting stats on procurement. It appears, inter alia, that while feeling that the Navy had requested 1/3 too much money for Weapons Procurement, the Senate Committee concluded that Navy Aircraft Appropriations was simply not thinking big enough and handed it an extra $140 mil. Because what does a Navy need more than airplanes, really? How else will they stick it to the, oh, Air Force?

Dept. of Unrefusable Offers

2006-04-14T08:31:00.000-04:00

OK, thought experiment time.

Say you go to war against a country, as one will do, and as part of your invasion plan, you occupy one of its islands (killing say a third of the civilian population) and you cover it with military bases. OK. War's over, you win, you get to keep the island as part of your package of valuable prizes.

OK, so then 27 years later, you officially give back the island, yet interestingly all your military bases are still there and operational (are belong to us, if you will [and if you are as ancient as I am]). Your troops occupy some 20% of the populated land area of the island, with all the innocent fun'n'games, civilian assault and general mayhem that entails.

Fast forward another couple decades (how time does fly!) and finally, in response not to years of massive local protests but to the rising toll of your military adventures in other lucky parts of the world, you decide to remove a paltry eight thousand of the 26,000 or so troops stationed on the island. Do you:

a) Throw them a rockin farewell party that keeps the neighbors awake till all hours and carpets their lawns with PBR cans and toilet paper?

b) Apologize for any inconvenience caused over the last 60 years, vacuum the corners and make a quiet, dignified exit?

c) 'Suggest' that your hosts pay 3/4 of the $10-billion cost of redeploying your own troops back to your own territory, or else nobody's going anywhere?

If you picked c), you have a bright future with United States Forces Japan.

Hey, what do they call that thing where you muscle around someone else's property making their life really difficult and maybe roughing them up a bit for emphasis, and then make them pay you to go away? Oh yeah! Protection.

Bonus Activity: Kids, try this at home! Go to this handy government info site and click on any of the links. Hmm?

One Lucky Winner Becomes An Apostle!

2006-04-09T18:09:00.000-04:00

Fine, I get it. I've been really lax on the blogging. So lax that the universe (inexplicably having noticed) has decided to just go all out and present me with my own special, personally customized Post-On-A-Plate. If you can't be fucked to blog this, the universe is clearly notifying me, you just really need to pack it in and stop swanning around, flaunting and preening with all the airs and graces that so naturally adhere to the status of Lefty Blogger in contemporary polite society.

So what am I gonna do, not post the contest the NYT is sponsoring to win an all-expenses-paid trip to Somewhere Dirty TBD with none other than Nicholas White Christ of Cambodia Kristof, the good lord's gift to copygenically-suffering women everywhere? Please. I may be a completely fucking crap blogger, sirrah, but withal I am a blogger still.

Without further ado then, I'll step aside and let 'Nick' describe it himself, as only he can:

Over the next month, I’ll be holding a contest to find a university student or two to accompany me on a reporting trip to the developing world. I’m not sure where yet, and that will depend partly on what’s in the news at the time. But to give you a sense of the kind of travel I’m thinking of, the possibilities include a jaunt through rural Burundi and Rwanda in central Africa, or an odyssey from the coast of Cameroon inland to the heart of the Central African Republic.

Don’t expect comfort so much as diarrhea. We’ll be on the go from dawn to late at night every day, interviewing anybody from peasants to presidents (usually the peasants are more interesting). We might visit a clinic, an AIDS program, a school, a factory.

Isn't he wild, like some kind of amazing Free Spirit? Isn't the whole thing just outrageously, titillatingly devil-may-care? You could go anywhere, so long as it's adequately sufferingful. You could wake up not knowing whether come evening you'll be dining with dull diplomats or fasting with far-more-interesting farmhands. Yeah. Are ya scared? You could get exotic parasites! Don't be so squeamy-square, man, with your western notions of hygiene!

You could meet unforgettable yet apparently interchangeable Real People from Somewherepooristan! But most of all, young one, you could be changed. Yes. Truly changed.

And all of it, all the joy, the ache, the laughter and tears and heartical lesson-learning, the wisdom will be immortalized in a multi-media webstravaganza for the vicarious changetastic edification of Times readers.

What you won't get to do, nIck assures us for legal reasons, is buy any Cambodian prostitutes (I note he doesn't, however, rule out sex slaves of any other nationality). So that's lost 3/4 of you right off the bat. As for the rest:

- you must be 18 or over

- you must be enrolled in an American university

- it doesn't say actually this out loud, but I'm betting it helps a lot if you're a nubile co-ed. Although to tweak WCoC's particular brand of cryptoneopatriarchal compensatory kink you'd most likely need to be the kind with long dark hair, a white buttoned blouse and studious spectacles who talks so impassionedly about global injustice, development theory and the work of Paul Farmer that one could almost fail to notice her boomin body and firm ripe young nectarine of an ass. Almost.

Do You Think

2006-04-06T08:24:00.000-04:00

she wakes up in the morning already looking like the banshee of eternal shrieking damnation, or is it something she has to work at? Maybe it's Maybelline™?

All Goes According To Plan In Gaza

2006-03-02T08:17:00.000-05:00

The cage door closes. Is anyone surprised?

Murderous fucking barbaric ethnic cleansing scum. Dear christ how I hate them.

Just to clarify, for those at the back having trouble keeping up: this is what the Gaza withdrawal was for.

On February 16 Middle East Online reported that Dov Weisglass chief advisor to ailing Israeli PM Ariel Sharon and architect of the Gaza disengagement plan, strongly pushed for further measures to impoverish the Palestinian population. “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet but not make them die of hunger”, Israeli public radio quoted him as saying.

[source]

Don't Say I Didn't Warn You

2006-02-22T09:32:00.000-05:00

OK, am I the only one who's clocked this? Is anyone else aware that earth has been invaded and we're all about to die with our stomachs burst open?

Forced to watch the utterly staggeringly shriekingly militantly pointless film remake of Pride & Prejudice on a transatlantic flight last night. Perhaps thus the conditions were uniquely propitious for the sudden realization that we have been infiltrated by that...thing, with its Jabberwock neck and its thin insectile lips and its terrifying predator's smile. Humanity is doomed.

We've Come, Mmm, Actually Not Such A Terribly Long Way, Baby

2006-02-05T09:35:00.000-05:00

Betty Friedan is dead, and we owe her, big time. We owe her thanks, and memory, and respect.

What we do not owe her is the obituary the Beeb news site gave her last night. Want to see the last paragraph? The last paragraph of Betty Friedan's obituary?

In 1947, she married Carl Friedan, with whom she had three children. The marriage ended in divorce after 22 years.

There you go. Betty Friedan's life in précis, courtesy of the BBC.

In case maybe you thought we didn't have to fight anymore.

Collective Punishment, With A Twist of Rank Hypocrisy

2006-01-29T20:16:00.000-05:00

So now the US has come out, in the ever-winning person of AnaCondi the Snaky Charmer, and definitively said they won't provide aid to a Hamas government.

'The United States is not prepared to fund an organization that advocates the destruction of Israel, that advocates violence and that refuses its obligations.'

Ah. Unless of course that organization were, oh, Fatah, which let us not forget remains the largest constituent of that favored old whipping-boy, the PLO. The same party which spawned Black September, the group that carried out the 1973 Munich Olympic assassinations from which Stephen Spielberg is so handsomely profiting as we speak. The same party widely denounced as undealable-with terrorists until '93, and then treated pretty consistently as pariahs until Arafat's death and the installation of the pliable demi-quisling Abu Mazen. And for clarity, that would be the same Abu Mazen who wrote his doctoral thesis on Nazi-Zionist collaboration (which NB is verifiably true) and put the number of Jews killed in the Nazi holocaust at 'only a few hundred thousand' (which emphatically is not), and who was in fact fingered as responsible for funding those same Munich assassinations.

Now, that kind of organization that advocates the destruction of Israel and that advocates violence is worth funding. Funding, say, to the tune of two million USAID dollars spent expressly 'to ensure that the Palestinian Authority receives public credit for a collection of small, popular projects and events to be unveiled before Palestinians select their first parliament in a decade.'

[As an aside, this amuses me greatly: 'The plan was designed with the help of a former U.S. Army Special Forces officer who worked in postwar Afghanistan on democracy-building projects.' Ooh, is that what we're calling them these days? So tough to keep up.]

In recent days, Arabic-language papers have been filled with U.S.-funded advertisements announcing the events in the name of the Palestinian Authority, which the public closely identifies with Fatah. Some of the events, such as a U.S.-financed tree-planting ceremony here in Ramallah that Abbas attended last week, have resembled Fatah rallies, with participants wearing the trademark black-and-white kaffiyehs emblazoned with the party logo, walls plastered with Fatah candidates' posters, and banks of TV cameras invited to record the event.

Nice. US-financed 'black-and-white kaffiyehs emblazoned with the party logo' which I've reproduced for your handy reference above. The one with the tasteful machine-gun-and-grenade iconography. About which presumably our esteemed Kofi was temporarily forgetting when he pontificated--about Hamas, naturally--that 'to carry weapons and participate in a democratic process and sit in parliament, there is a fundamental contradiction'.

Of course, I could go on for days and weeks peeling back the umpteen-thousand layers of hypocrisy that swaddle the West's reaction to the election of Hamas. I will spare you that, and content myself with pointing out the obvious: that US leaders have taken a well-worn page from the Israeli playbook, and are fixing to visit one holy motherfuck of a collective punishment on the Palestinian people, for daring to exercise the right to Freeman Moxie in a manner not approved for the service of American interests. May they (again, still, yet more always) rot in hell.

Newsflash! UberJohn Kristof Still a Cock!

2006-01-28T17:23:00.000-05:00

Whee! The brilliant and furiously eloquent Alexander Cockburn has just dealt out a well-deserved spanking to White Christ of Cambodia, aka Nicholas Kristof, Shady Purchaser of Prostitutes.

Seems Nick the Chick-Picker has branched out, geographically if not thematically, and is taking his annual brothel-crawl in India (registration required) this year. We all need a change once in a while, or things just get stale.

OK, I'll be honest. I haven't read this round of columns. I couldn't stomach it; man makes me sick. I couldn't choke down another bolus of that ultrasmarmy, self-adulatory, liberal-patronizing, wildly ahistoricizing indignation that is 'Hard-Bargain' Kristof's specialité de la maison. But luckily, turns out I don't have to. Cockburn's done it for me, and provided a far better-researched and more thoroughly indicting riposte than I could have managed.

In the tradition of my original post on WCOC, and indeed that of every reasonably intelligent, reasonably leftish response to his prostitutopsonatory oeuvre, Cockburn pours scorn on His Acquisitiveness of Poipet for crusading against prostitution without emitting the tiniest squeak about the socioeconomic conditions that make prostitution an inevitability. Happily, Cockburn goes on to correct that minor oversight for him, providing a substantial and compelling exposé of the depradations wrought on India's rural population by neo-liberal reform, as well as (not quoted here, but well worth reading in the piece) a look at some pretty great people who actually are finding ways to help prostitutes that don't involve personally retrafficking them.

India has endured more than a decade of virtually unimaginable rural torment amidst the imposition of the neo-liberal "reforms", endlessly hailed by New York Times reporters and editorially endorsed. With withdrawal of subsidies, collapse of farm credit and of markets there is a gigantic rural crisis, affecting millions of families.

As The Hindu newspaper's chronicler of these rural catastrophes, P. Sainath, (with whom I traveled around India last year) wrote to me this week, "Take Anantapur district in Andhra Pradesh which saw the maximum numbers of farm suicides for any district in India (over 3,000 during the years of the NYT's poster boy of the reforms, Chandrababu Naidu [at that time the state's chief minister], every single NGO and social organization dealing with women's issues worried about how bad was the rise of prostitution as the agrarian crisis bit deeper and deeper.

"If you drove from Anantapur in Andhra to India's 'Silicon Valley' in Bangalore in the neighboring state of Karnataka, as I often did and do, you could see dozens of women hanging about the highway waiting for pick ups, mostly truck drivers. This was simply not seen on those roads ten-twelve years ago."

Take fucking that, Kristof you sanctimonious cock. You just keep riding around on your fat crusader ass, rubbing up against the most damaged women you can find and grinding their misery into columnfodder for that foul neo-liberal-boosting rag you pimp for. People are so on to you.

[Thanks CM for the pointer.]

Kofi Tells It Like It Is

2006-01-27T09:23:00.000-05:00

Kofi fucking Annan. My god. Do you think when he gets up in the morning and takes a shower, his back-scrubber gets tangled in the pull-cord protruding from his back?

--Pull-- 'Waaaaaaaaaah!'

--Pull-- 'Denying the Holocaust is baaaaaaaaahd!' [Especially if you happen to be the leader of a country threatening to develop nuclear technology outside the cozy precincts of the Nuclear Country Club.]

--Pull-- 'Governments carrying weapons is baaaaaaaaahd!' [Unless they're carrying them to Haiti. Or Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or indeed New Orleans.]

A Nobel cunting Prize to this contemptible apology-puppet for imperium. Never mind the shower, how does he get up in the morning to begin with?

Zombie Bulldozer (New From Caterpillar)

2006-01-14T11:54:00.000-05:00

Look, I'm not really here, I can't stick around and chat, I just popped in for literally one second to say: how dead is Sharon? I mean, c'mon. Man so dead! Man deader than a big bucket of mortality, whatever the arcane mediconecromancies they're feverishly deploying to keep his cells pumping until someone sorts out the succession.

What's funny is the gigantic collective peptic ulcer undoubtedly being nurtured as we speak by the scheduling secretaries for all the major western-world leaders. Poor anxious lambs, skittishly making priority appointments and planning big brass meetings day on day, all the while knowing full well that the instant the Royal Narcomages withdraw their animating hoodoo from the husk that was Arik, all commitments will have to be abrogated and sundry respective Air Forces One prepped for immediate takeoff so the international community can skedaddle out there to pay their po-faced respects within 24 hours. Jewish funerals, so inconvenient.

This Is A Genius Photo Op

2005-12-16T08:31:00.000-05:00

The only thing keeping John 'Sta-Puft' McCain from sidling right out of the frame is W's iron oh-christ-please-don't-let-me-drown-in-my-own-political-sewage grip on the tender flesh of his triceps.

Note how his eyes are glued to the exit stage right, whither he will bolt like a jackrabbit the instant the shutter clicks.

And Exhibit C

2005-12-14T09:00:00.000-05:00

Three days running now, the BBC News site is providing us with All The News That's Fit To Promote Israel. Yesterday I noted their unbecoming credulity in the matter of Shaul Mofaz's defection to Kadima, and that party's establishment 'in order to give [Sharon] more room for manoeuvre in seeking a peace deal with the Palestinians.'

Today, it's clear that we were both right. Mofaz and his satanic master are in fact after 'more room', just not exactly for peace-seeking purposes.

Note please caption to accompanying photo: 'Settlement construction is trying to meet Israel's "natural growth"'. Are the Beeb's captions written by the Israeli Public Relations Ministry?

Beeb In Disgraceful Bias Shock

2005-12-13T07:47:00.000-05:00

The BBC News site has just gotten worse and worse on Palestine. They don't even bother to mum objectivity anymore.

Exhibit A:
In this piece yesterday on Henchman Supreme Shaul Mofaz's defection to Sharon's new Kadima party after a failed bid to take over leadership of Likud (silly Shaul--once a sidekick, always a sidekick), we are blandly informed that

The prime minister set up the centrist Kadima party in order to give himself more room for manoeuvre in seeking a peace deal with the Palestinians.

As if they had fact-checked it with his prefrontal cortex and it was a matter of empirical record.

Exhibit B:
Today's reporting on the shooting death of a 22-year-old Palestinian stone-thrower during a raid on Nablus. The curious formulation is made

Israeli forces entered the city at dawn and were attacked by youths throwing stones and, later, by gunmen.

'Entered the city' and 'were attacked'? What exactly were the IDF doing there, if not attacking? Did they enter the city at dawn to do some shopping? Seeing as they were acknowledgedly there conducting a raid, surely the Palestinians were less attacking and more defending?

The article is, naturally without the slightest bias, accompanied by this photo of some Palestinian youth Lurking In Ambush around a corner with a big gun, and a caption that reads, 'Palestinians have attacked Israeli forces during raids in the West Bank'.

Again, I am confused. Since when is defending one's home against incursion by an armed force 'attacking'? I mean, I suppose you could say that if you come at me with a fist to the face and I hit you back to stop you hitting me again, then you have attacked me and I have technically 'attacked you back'. But after all in the bountiful fecundity of English vocabulary we do have a whole word for that 'attack your attacker back' concept: defense. (Or in English English vocabulary, defence.)

No, the only way the BBC's formulation makes sense is if it's based on the assumption that the inhabitants of Nablus had the raid coming to them. The Beeb volunteers that '[t]here have been several raids in the West Bank since an Islamic Jihad suicide bomber killed five Israelis in Netanya earlier this month'. OK, so a suicide bomber kills five Israelis, thus it is now time for the rest of the Palestinian population to sit quietly and take their collective punishment. If they dare to defend themselves, they are 'attackers'. Fucking disgraceful.

Outpost Alert

2005-12-09T13:36:00.000-05:00

I posted a thing about the NHS over at the Tomb, for all you completists out there who can't bear the thought of missing a jot or tittle of the BionOc oeuvre.

Because Here's The Thing

2005-12-06T11:29:00.000-05:00

Just to expand a bit, because the more I think the madder I get. Spielberg's fucking hi-tech arts-n-crafts project is profoundly despicable on several axes, the most egregious of which is the fact that it presents a willfully, monstrously false and ahistorical notion of what it is to be a child under occupation.

Can he possibly believe that he's going to penetrate to the True Universal Heart of Palestinian childhood, to a land where we're really all alike, playing with whatever toys we can find or make, creating innocent lighthearted make-believes in the soft-focus landscape of youth? FUCK YOU. The world inhabited by Palestinian children is nothing to do with the experience of Israeli children, or American or any other children who don't live in shattered ghettos under siege, surrounded by the daily, absolutely real threat of vicious violence and death at the hands of their occupiers.

Early in the fighting, Palestinian children watched countless reruns of news footage that captured the death of Mohammed al-Durra, 12, even as his father used his own body to try to shield the boy from a barrage of bullets. "In their games, children identify with the martyr," says Dr. Eyyad Sarraj, a psychiatrist who heads the Gaza Community Mental Health Program. Psychologically, he says, "they have left their fathers for the martyrs." A cult of death has appropriated a Palestinian generation, but a deep fear underlies it. Today, according to Sarraj, 35% of Palestinian children under the age of 15 wet their beds, up from 7% before the intifadeh. Sarraj estimates that 30% of children suffer from post-traumatic stress.

This from fucking Time Magazine, hardly a bastion of pro-Palestinian progressivism, as evident from the use of the execrable phrase 'cult of death', than which I can think of no more alienizing, teratifying rubric. The article's rubbish, but even it can't skirt the screaming obviousness of the fact that there is no such thing as 'being a Palestinian child' outside the brutalizing context of the Occupation.

So Spielberg wants to show these traumatized, utterly hope-extinguished children videos of the daily lives of Israeli kids, enjoying plentiful food and running water, living in intact houses, interacting with parents who have jobs and lives, able to walk the streets without fearing harassment or worse from soldiers or settlers, having somewhere to walk to. What exactly is meant to come of that? Is that going to make Palestinian children less likely to want to kill Israeli children?

And for that matter, what does Spielberg think will come out of the Palestinian videos? What happens when, as will without fail happen, some of those videos document the IDF shooting the young directors' playmates for throwing stones? Will he decry those children as unnatural, unchildlike, political? Will he allow those videos to be shown to the Israeli participants? Or will he deem them, (unlike the footage of Mohammed al-Durra's death), too traumatic for children's eyes?

The conception of childhood that Spielberg is promulgating is not only sickeningly sentimental and factually wrong, it's an active, filthy lie that seeks to paper over and deny the deliberate, root-and-branch destruction of yet a third generation of Palestinians by the Zionist project.

Lights...Camera...Empathy!

2005-12-06T09:08:00.000-05:00

Know who needs a beating? Steven Spielberg, that's who. Not a critical drubbing, not a stern verbal dressing-down, not an open letter in the New York Times, a real, honest to god, within-millimeters-of-his-life thrashing. It won't teach him a damn thing, but it'll make me feel a whole lot better.

Spielberg, or as I prefer to call him Official Schmaltzographer of the Zionist Project, has Broken the Wall of Secrecy surrounding his unspeakably hateful-looking new film 'Munich', trailers for which have been souring my evening television enjoyment for a week. Responding to Israeli and Palestinian concerns about their respective portrayals in the closely-guarded film, Spielberg has stepped forward to pour oil upon the waters, magisterially informing Time Magazine that

the film is a "prayer for peace", and that the biggest enemy in the region is not the Palestinians or the Israelis but the intransigence that exists between the two sides.

Ahahahaha! See what he did there? Guns don't kill people, intransigence kills people.

But His Mawkness wasn't finished. That pearl of perspicacity was merely a lagniappe, an amuse-bouche to prepare our palates for the big revelation, to wit Spielberg's new project 'aimed at tackling that lack of understanding':

"What I'm doing is buying 250 video cameras and players and dividing them up, giving 125 of them to Palestinian children, 125 to Israeli kids, so they can make movies about their own lives," he said. "Not dramas, just little documentaries about who they are and what they believe in, who their parents are, where they go to school, what they have to eat, what movies they watch, what CDs they listen to - and then exchange the videos.

"That's the kind of thing that can be effective, I think, in simply making people understand that there aren't that many differences that divide Israelis from Palestinians - not as human beings, anyway."

What is it about filmmakers and messianism? Your average dentist doesn't believe that the salvation of humanity lies in collaborative bridgework. The American Carpenters' Association isn't organizing a Let's Nail Peace Now cabinet-making exchange. Even people like Médécins Sans Frontieres generally confine themselves to quietly going about the business of healing the sick and wounded, rather than, say, sponsoring International Sick-Ins where the aforementioned can learn to Share Each Other's Pain.

But find me a single fucking filmmaker who doesn't believe, loudly and without irony, that we really could all get along, if only people would make more films.

Casting Perfidy Strikes Home

2005-12-03T23:04:00.000-05:00

Can somebody please tell me whose genius idea it was to stick Mr. Fucking Big in Law & Order: Criminal Intent, not even to speak of Annabella Sciorra? And not just to wedge them in, but to give them their own whole episodes, completely Vincent-free? They have their own set of Vincentless credits, people! That's not right.

Does Big have Magic Powers of Perpathy? Does he have special histrionic hand gestures and opaque fits of emotional vapors? No he does not. Does he have a tiny, creepingly endearing partner who follows him around like a small phlegmatic dog, gamely interpreting his delphic pronouncements? Again, I must report No. He's got nothing, nothing but La Sciorra kitted out improbably polyglot, presumably so somebody in the partnership would have an actual skill. He's just a big dippy garden-variety cop who doesn't belong on the same soundstage as the Vincent, let alone muscling in on his credits.

Why would you do that? Why?

Not Another One

2005-12-02T08:21:00.000-05:00

Is there some explicit clause in the neoliberal plan for world domination that calls for incinerating the poor? I dunno about you, this shit's starting to look suspicious to me.

No News Here

2005-11-28T08:24:00.000-05:00

OK, I know this will come as exactly no surprise to you, but I just have to say it: Paul McCartney is such a useless fucking twat.

Sir Paul, and his wife Heather, looked aghast and close to tears as they watched the footage for a special report for the BBC's Six O'clock News to be screened on Monday.

[...]

"This is barbaric. Horrific," said Sir Paul.

"It's like something out of the dark ages. And they seem to get a kick out [of] it. They're just sick, sick people.

"I wouldn't even dream of going over there to play, in the same way I wouldn't go to a country that supported apartheid. This is just disgusting. It's just against every rule of humanity. I couldn't go there."

What's that, you say? Has political consciousness ripened so far? Can Sir Paul be supporting the Israeli boycott? Mmm, no. That would be the Chinese boycott you didn't know about because there isn't one, but which Sir Wings is trying to start because he saw a video of some horrid Chinese people torturing some poor defenseless widdel dogs and cats.

And lest you assume this is just the flash-in-the-pan divertissement of an edemic, psychotically affluent celebrizombie who's outlived the era of his remotest creative relevance by some mortifying half-dozen multiples and who spends his days in a clammy welter of desperation to retain the affections of his earnest, animal-lovin', daughter-aged wifebunny, well, just you think again:

Sir Paul McCartney has written to Martin Beaumont, the Co-op’s Chief Executive, urging him to give the store’s ethical claims meaning by immediately ending the sale of all factory-farmed duck meat.

That's right. It's about commitment, people.

Ooh, Another Shatteringly Effective MoveOn In-Home Activity!

2005-11-17T12:29:00.000-05:00

Hey kids! Stuck inside on a rainy, politically-apocalyptic afternoon? Don't despair! MoveOn.Org, Militant Arts 'n' Crafts Wing, is here to fire up your doldrums with a flurry of faux-folksy 'grassroots' engagement-style activity, complete with the cozy illusion of political effectiveness. And the best part is, you finally have an excuse to figure out how to use that fancy digital camera you couldn't resist buying last season. Behold, the MoveOn 'Face America' Photo Petition:

We're aiming to collect thousands of photos of ordinary Americans with homemade signs, asking Congress to oppose the Republican plan to cut services for poor while handing tax breaks to the rich. To make sure you're heard, we'll deliver every photo to every member of Congress before the final vote and run some as online ads in the newspapers Congress reads.

Joining the "Face America" photo petition is easy. Just write a simple message on whatever is handy, grab a digital camera, point and shoot.

Aim for short, easy to read messages like:

Stop the reverse Robin Hood budget!
Hands off Medicaid, food stamps and student loans!
No empty plates this Thanksgiving!
Don't rob the poor to give to the rich!
Be creative!

If you've benefited from any of these programs, make your message personal, like Don't cut my student loans! or Hands off my health care!

Feel free to get the whole family in the picture—the more of us there are, the more powerful our message will be.

Good times indeed. And if you've benefited from these programs, what are the odds of your being in a position to 'grab a digital camera' and get in on the fun?

But never mind that. What matter such quibbles in the face of the political juggernaut soon to bear down on Capitol Hill in the form of 39 pictures of middle-class white people with magic markers?

Where There's Smoke...

2005-11-17T08:11:00.000-05:00

OK, we've all known for some time that the US is using white phosphorus in Iraq, against both its own claims and the specific prohibition of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

So far as I've seen the response on the part of the administration to these revelations has been more or less, 'Yeah? What if we did? Which we didn't. But if we did, whatcha gonna do about it?' It appears now, though, with their approval ratings splashing about merrily in the septic tank, they feel they have to come up with something a bit more seeming-to-care than that, and they've gone so far as to, hang on to your hats, admit they used them.

Tiny, barely-audible fallout ensues. Luckily, they've got the spokesman for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons on their side, ready with this handy bit of impenetrable sophistry:

The CWC is monitored by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, based in The Hague. Its spokesman Peter Kaiser was asked if WP was banned by the CWC and he had this to say:

"No it's not forbidden by the CWC if it is used within the context of a military application which does not require or does not intend to use the toxic properties of white phosphorus. White phosphorus is normally used to produce smoke, to camouflage movement.

"If that is the purpose for which the white phosphorus is used, then that is considered under the Convention legitimate use.

"If on the other hand the toxic properties of white phosphorus, the caustic properties, are specifically intended to be used as a weapon, that of course is prohibited, because the way the Convention is structured or the way it is in fact applied, any chemicals used against humans or animals that cause harm or death through the toxic properties of the chemical are considered chemical weapons."

Ahahahaha. OK. I get it. So if, for instance, you are angering me, and I throw a knife at your head, not with the specific intent to utilize its pointy stabbing properties, but in fact intending to create a cooling breeze to fan you (did I forget to mention earlier that it's a warm day?), am I legally and morally exempt from the sequelae of its impaling you through the eyeball? 'Cause if so, ok. At least we know where we stand.

Someone At The Guardian Was Snoozing Last Night

2005-11-15T07:51:00.000-05:00

They appear to have accidentally printed an editorial that says

...Palestinians are one people, whether living under military occupation or in refugee camps. They have a right to self-determination, and they have fought hard for their liberty for generations, which is also a right. For a people to negotiate their way out of an occupation by diplomatic means alone, when the occupier is determined to hold on to their land, has no successful precedent.

And also

This is not a conflict healed by providing economic recovery to Palestinians, since their impoverishment is entirely due to an entrenched and permanent military occupation. It is not a holy war against Palestinian terrorists who seek the destruction of the Israeli state, nor excited speculation on the role a new Israeli Labour party leader might play. This is a battle over the right to call this conflict a conflict between two peoples: one that is oppressed, and the other that is denying them their right to be free.

And by a former PLO member, no less. I don't know what they were thinking. Surely heads will roll.

Not To Put Too Fine A Point On It

2005-11-13T20:35:00.000-05:00

If Hillary Rodham 'The Israeli Apartheid Wall "Is Not Against The Palestinian People"' Clinton were to contract leprosy and be forced to live out her benighted days shunned by humanity, ringing a bell and shying away from sharps and open flames, cosmic justice could not be said to have miscarried.

Thanks to WII.

AnaCondi 2: Scowl Meaner

2005-11-13T09:52:00.000-05:00

Whee! La Rice is back in the Middle East, with her Magic Lucite Wand of Democracy and her Travelin' playlist of Joni Mitchell and Metallica. You can't really see it, but under that homicidal mien she's bopping like Cyndi Lauper.

And why not, really? She's come to ask Syria to stop the 'arbitrary detention' of 'prisoners of conscience', and there's nothing like that kind of righteous mission for Freeman Moxie to warm the cockles of a handmaiden of despotism.

It's funny though, I can't shake the feeling that I've just heard somebody else talking about this same damn thing. Must be one of those random déja vu hiccups.

Serpentina also mentioned that 'Washington continued to support what she described as the aspirations of Syria's people for liberty, democracy and justice.' And the Syrian people are all, 'Er, um, yeah, about that. Jesus fuck please please god no. We're fine here with our tyranny and undemocracy and all. Really. Really. Fine. Here, take this sacrifice of virgin unblemished white sheep and swallow them whole. Take our oil. Take Lebanon. Just please, dear christ please don't liberate us, Madam Snakelady. Please.'

It's Not Like I Relish Being Right All The Time

2005-09-25T08:15:00.000-04:00

OK hello people. I've been awake for more than two hours already and nobody has called, written, sent a giant apologetic bouquet or come rushing over to say in viva voce 'Oh my god you were so right, the Gaza 'withdrawal' was precisely the prevarication, dog-and-pony show and pretext for reinvasion you said it would be! Someone shrive me for my sins of credulity in having had even the tiniest molecular quantum of hope in that cynical charade!'

The officials said the army planned to create a buffer zone in northern Gaza by ordering residents to leave their homes, and said a closure barring Palestinian laborers from entering Israel would remain in effect.

See? See how different? Everything in Gaza is changed. Small children got to paddle in the sea!

And from CNN we get bland exposition of the explicit intent to collective punishment:

Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told security chiefs in a meeting that "the ground of Gaza should shake" and that he wanted to exact a high price from Palestinians everywhere, not just the militants, participants said.

I grow tedious, I know, but again I say this is how they do it. As WII has also observed. There is a well-thumbed play-book for this somewhere in the archives of Likud, and it reads something like this:

1) Wait for a lull and the impression of imminent progress toward peace
2) Carry out sudden targeted assassination
3) Provoke thereby pitifully impotent display of rage from Hamas/Islamic Jihad/Al-Aqsa/PFLP/Insert Chump Militant Group Here
4) Launch Armageddon on civilian refugees, women and children targeted at random
5) Contact everyone in worldwide media and package Armageddon as 'Reprisal'
6) Rinse
7) Repeat.

And again, again again again, the world will stand by and watch them do it. The PA will watch them do it. I can't stand it.

But Who Will Speak For Poor Pharma?

2005-09-18T08:58:00.000-04:00

It appears the British pharmaceutical industry has acquired its very own Lorax.

The British Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is launching an inquiry into the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme (PPRS), a voluntary agreement between the government and the British pharmaceutical industry, which caps drug companies' annual profits from branded drug sales to the NHS.

According to the Beeb,

The OFT inquiry is meant to check whether safe and effective branded prescription medicines are being provided at reasonable prices.

Well, that seems like a commendable activity for an Office of Fair Trading to get up to, doesn't it? Nice to think that government regulatory agencies are actually trying to regulate the safety and affordability of citizens' life necessities?

Mm, not so much. In the event, the inquiry will investigate the PPRS's progress toward its 'core aims, including the promotion of a strong pharmaceutical industry capable of research and development that can lead to new and improved medicines.'

The Chairman of the OFT makes pretty clear where its priorities lie:

"We want to examine whether the PPRS works well to ensure that pharmaceuticals markets meet the needs of patients by offering adequate rewards to pharmaceutical companies for developing new and useful drugs, while providing the taxpayer with value for money."

OK, good. So British taxpayers are footing the bill for a government inquiry into whether a voluntary agreement negotiated by the pharmaceutical industry is perhaps over-harshly restricting that industry's ability to charge them top dollar for medicine.

Because if there's one thing you can say about drug companies, it's that they're altruistic to fault. Just constantly entering into unprofitable trade agreements on a voluntary basis, out of the goodness of their civic-spirited hearts. Somebody please stop Pfizer from giving me the shirt off its back, lest it catch cold on its way to the bank.

Oh The Gall

2005-09-16T21:31:00.000-04:00

Email from MoveOn (2nd today; the first being the traditional 'Give us money to run an ad, and if we don't actually use it to run the ad rest assured we'll use it for our own undisclosed discretionary purposes' dun-note):

Next weekend on Saturday, September 24, there is a massive "End the War on Iraq" peace march and rally in Washington, DC organized by United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ). The weekend of activities will make it unmistakably clear to President Bush and Congress that the American people want an exit plan with a timeline to end the war in Iraq.

Fuck you. That is not what my presence at the rally will make clear at all, and don't you presume to ventriloquize my agenda. Which, like that of involuntary MoveOn poster-child Cindy Sheehan, is 'End the war now. Troops out now.' An entirely different thing.

Of Course, You Already Know This, But...

2005-09-16T06:13:00.000-04:00

Juan Cole rocks.

Of course, it's all so many shovel blows to the zombie's head; The Late Christopher Hitchens will keep on twitching his necrotic tongue and forcing corpse breath over his rotting vocal chords while he lurches around trying to sink his teeth into anyone on the left slow enough for him to catch. But George Galloway is not so slow, and neither, gratifyingly, is Juan Cole.

Prez Promises Rez

2005-09-15T21:18:00.000-04:00

Holy shit. I'm watching the Chimp address the nation from the only dry spot in New Orleans, as no doubt are many of you. He's making promises for how he gon' fix everything he and his filthy hellbound venal minions fucked up so unspeakably.

He's just announced three specific initiatives for rebuilding the area. Besides promising to 'take the side of entreprenooers' (a telling formulation, that) to rebuild industry and create jobs, he's promising the victims relief accounts containing up to five thousand whole dollars to get education or skills retraining to take advantage of all that new entreprenooerial job-creation. Oh, and that five large is meant to cover child care too, while they're gittin' ejucated. Words can't really express the overwhelming enoughness of that sum.

No, but that's not the worst. Proposal #3: the creation of a Gulf Coast Homesteading Act (or something like that) which will use a lottery to give poor people plots of land in government-owned territories, provided they commit to building homes on that land and living there.

Yes, that's right. They are going to create a reservation to contain the poor of former New Orleans. I have no fucking words.

And They Should Know

2005-09-15T08:26:00.000-04:00

Henhouse population dropping, says Security Fox.

Once More, With Almost Imperceptibly More Feeling

2005-09-15T08:11:00.000-04:00

Oh look. Hurricane coming. And this time we've learned our lesson. This time, instead of equivocally, belatedly implying that local residents should perhaps evacuate (or more accurately, should retroactively already-have-evacuated) on their own recognizance, they're unequivocally, belatedly 'asking and begging' same:

'These floods are going to be worse than anticipated yesterday," the governor said. "We're asking and begging [people to get out] because it's going to be hard to get them out later. Once the high winds come, we cannot get in and get you out - cannot get you by boat, cannot get you by helicopters, cannot get there by plane.'

Pressed by the urgency of the emergent crisis, Governor Mike 'The Big' Easley obviously had no time to add, 'We cannot get you in a box, we cannot get you with a fox.'

From 'Rescue' to 'Looting' In One Short Day

2005-09-14T08:09:00.000-04:00

BBC yesterday on what Palestinians have been up to amidst the rubble of the settlements the Israelis took such care to smash and strip before leaving:

Many Palestinians have been picking through the rubble of settler homes. They rescued and carried whatever they could - from electricity cables and doors to pipes and scrap metal.

BBC today on that same activity:

[Abu Mazen's] comments come amid mass looting in Gaza's abandoned Jewish settlements, and are seen as a warning to militants seeking to challenge his authority.

But Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he was not surprised by the lawlessness in Gaza.
[...]
"This rioting - even they understand they have to control this."

Wow. That's some pretty fucking swift Katrinafication. Can you say 'seeding the pretext for IDF reinvasion?' And can somebody please tell me under what definition the salvage of near-useless scrap from a smashed, abandoned property counts as 'looting'? As opposed to, well, 'salvage'?

Oh, Those Fighting Democrats

2005-09-13T08:17:00.000-04:00

The Guardian assures us that, as the 'battle' over John Roberts's Supreme Court nomination approaches,

Democrats on the senate judiciary committee made clear that they did not intend to give him an easy ride, and would put him on the spot over his beliefs on abortion and other polarising issues over which a Roberts court could have a decisive say in years to come.

How not easy of a ride would that be? Apparently, this not easy:

"If you're confirmed, you serve not just for the remaining three years of the Bush administration, you could serve through the administrations of the next seven or eight presidents," Senator Patrick Leahy said.

I dunno. To me that sounds less like 'You're in for it now, mister' and more like 'Bob, tell him what he's won!'

Saddam Hussein Stole My Homework To Make WMD

2005-09-13T07:47:00.000-04:00

When, oh when will they fucking let this lie go?

British Defence (see how I spell it the British way for verisimilitude? these are the little complimentary services we at Bionic Octopus like to provide for your enhanced comfort) Secretary John Reid on why Britain needs to bone up the old nuclear deterrent system:

"It is the case that others been trying to develop and in some cases have developed their nuclear weapons". He cited North Korea, Pakistan and India, adding evidence existed Saddam had been heading in same direction.

Forty years from now, Labour are all going to be doddering around nursing homes bleating, 'But Matron, I had to steal Jenkins's biscuits at tea! There was evidence Saddam Hussein was planning to use them to make weapons of mass destruction!'

I Love When They Make It Easy

2005-09-12T08:10:00.000-04:00

Ah, priorities. The newly up-spruced, fancified Guardian Digital, normally a subscription service for which I pay, is now generously open to all comers until sometime later in the month, to celebrate its facelift. The main page today provides the following caveat:

We have had to make some changes to how the digital editions operate, so regular users will notice some loss of functionality for a limited period. We are working hard to restore the full service as soon as possible.

'Loss of functionality' appears to mean that many of the articles which are visible in the little thumbnail of the print paper are not actually clickable for the reading. In a few places an entire page's worth of articles is inaccessible, though you can see them taunting you maddeningly with their headlines.

Know what's working like a charm on all those pages, though? Every damn click-through ad.

A Little Fitting Shamefacedness Please

2005-09-12T07:40:00.000-04:00

OK Britfriends, look. We may have a chimp, but you have a prince. Not merely a prince, but one given to rumination:

"It [life in far northern Britain] is a gentler, calmer approach to life in a world which has become frenetic, really, and the aim seems to be to go ever faster, but I often wonder 'how much faster can we all go?'"

How much faster indeed. I suspect, Your Highness, that one's terminal velocity has everything to do with one's inherent swiftness. So in Your Majesty's case, not so very much faster at all.

One thing I'll say for the Chimp: some not-too-far-off day, he won't be President anymore.

Docket Of Aesthetic Crimes Against Humanity

2005-09-11T10:12:00.000-04:00

The latest installment in the cavalcade of Israeli valedictory fuck-yous to Palestinians in Gaza: they've decided to just up and leave the settlement synagogues standing when they take off. All 20+ of them.

Now, besides the monstrous symbolic bird-flippage this represents; besides the fact that the PA is now in the impossible position of either tearing down synagogues, and drawing massive fire from world Jewry, or letting stand the looming citadels of the religion in whose name the Palestinians have been treated like animals for forty years in their own land; besides the fact that if they choose Option A the costs of demolition and cleanup will be borne by the not-exactly-wildly-solvent (no thanks to a federal court in Rhode Island) Palestinian government; besides all these injuries, there is in addition the gross and gratuitous aesthetic insult.

Twentieth-century synagogue architecture is widely acknowledged to be the most heinous artistic perpetration ever devised by the fevered mind of man. I mean, look at that shit. It's like someone leaving a gigantic statue of Liberace carved out of guano planted in your front lawn, with a bomb in the middle that will go off and cover you and your house with a rain of petrified-shit shards if you try to move it. In fact, almost exactly like that.

Update: According to an email update from the Beeb, the PA's going with Option B, raze the motherfucking eyesores. Booyah.
Update update: Er, make that 'Option A'. I guess I was overexcited.

Just Ignore The Coughing, Listen For The Cha-Ching

2005-09-09T08:01:00.000-04:00

Here's an interesting little case study in whose interests the media serve when they report on pharmaceutical developments.

Say you read CNN for news of a morning. Here's what CNN Health has to say about the endorsement by an FDA advisory panel of an inhalable form of insulin called Exubera, manufactured by Pfizer, Sanofi-Aventis and Nektar Therapeutics:

Federal health advisers on Thursday recommended government approval of the first inhaled form of insulin, offering some diabetics an alternative to many of their daily injections.

The recommendation by a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel came despite questions about use of the drug in people who have lung disease or were exposed to secondhand smoke.
[...]
During drug trials, researchers found that inhaled insulin was generally as effective as injections in controlling blood sugar levels. However, some patients who took inhaled insulin complained of coughing and a small decrease in breathing capacity.

OK, new drug, 'questions about [its] use' in people with compromised pulmonary health. 'Some patients' had a 'small decrease in breathing capacity'. Doesn't sound too bad. All drugs have limitations, right?

Now read MedPage Today, a news service targeted at health professionals, and you get a somewhat different story (free reg. required):

Exubera, an inhaled insulin, won endorsement today from an FDA advisory panel despite concerns about the agent's pulmonary toxicity.
[...]
Inhaled insulins have been in the works for more than a decade. In clinical trials they have been demonstrated to have efficacy similar to that of short-acting insulins, but without the needle stick required for subcutaneous injection. This for some patients is a barrier to better glucose control.

But a host of concerns regarding Exubera have cropped up, including worries about pulmonary toxicities, and questions about its ability to get glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c) levels -- a measure of glucose control over time -- down below 7%, the gold standard set by the landmark Diabetes Control and Complications Trial (DCCT).

At the 2005 meeting of the American Diabetes Association in San Diego last June, researchers from Quebec reported that in a 226-patient safety study, Exubera was associated with an early decline in pulmonary function that appears to peak by week two and then declines but doesn't completely disappear.

Additionally, use of the inhaled insulin was associated with a decline in carbon monoxide diffusing capacity, a measure of the ability of the lungs to deliver oxygen to the blood.
[...]
Also at the ADA, William Cefalu, M.D., of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge presented results from three two-year studies of Exubera for treatment of type 2 diabetes. The investigators found that in the more than 500 Exubera-treated patients, there was a slight decrease in pulmonary function as measured by a drop in FEV1 of about 0.07%, and a similar decrease in oxygen exchange.

'A host of concerns'. 'Pulmonary toxicity'. That's hardly comparable to CNN Health's 'questions' about its use in a limited, compromised subpopulation. Even allowing for the scare-value of medical jargon, there's more cause for concern here than CNN allows when it obligingly translates for the lay reader.

On the other hand, say you get your morning news from CNN Money. You learn that '[a] panel of experts advising the FDA voted Thursday in favor of Exubera, the first form of inhalable insulin, a step that could lead to approval by the regulatory agency.' You get an enthusiastic quote from the Pfizer executive in charge of the drug development team, and a handy little primer on diabetes and how it's

seen as a promising area for the drug industry because it is so common in the United States and Europe. There are 18.2 million diabetics in America, including an estimated 5.2 million who have not been diagnosed yet, according to the American Diabetes Association.

An additional 1.3 million diabetics are diagnosed every year. And another 41 million Americans have "pre-diabetes," or high blood-sugar levels, and are at risk for developing adult onset type 2 diabetes. Type 2, sometimes coined "diabesity," is expected to become more prevalent among the aging baby boomer population.

Well, talk about turning misfortune into fortune. Nation getting fatter and sicker? Now that's what I call Opportunity!

Some excited hyping of the drug's profit potential:

Many analysts see Exubera as a potential blockbuster. Andrew Forman, analyst for WR Hambrecht, and David Steinberg of Deutsche Bank both project that Exubera sales will total $1 billion by 2008. Bernstein analysts project $1 billion by 2011. David Moskowitz of Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co. projects $1.3 billion by 2008.

But then, at last, a note of caution intrudes: 'But not everybody is bullish on Exubera.' Ah, here we go. Now we'll get the pulmonary toxicity results, right? Yeah, right.

Albert Rauch, analyst for A.G. Edwards, believes that Exubera won't be as convenient as some people believe and sales will be paltry, not even reaching $1 million.

Oh, heartbreaking. Less convenient than people believe! Paltry sales! Caveat investor, it would appear.

Just in case you had perhaps been lulled into thinking that the media exists to give you information that safeguards or benefits you. Caveat lector.

Bisy

2005-09-07T12:02:00.000-04:00

Most precious blogfriends, I want to let you know that for a little while the blogging around these parts will be quite light. Medical school has started up with unrestrained ferocity, much on-the-ground political work needs doing in the Land Of Threatened Choice, and I find there are significantly fewer minutes in the day than I previously assumed.

Also, to be honest, the past week, all the stuff about Katrina here and at the Tomb, has really kind of taken it out of me. Not to whinge or anything (jesus, like I have anything to whinge about), but it's been, you know, a Thing, and it's a bit hard to get straight back to snarking about newsbits while the police are manhandling survivors out of NO. I need a bit of a break first, and some time to organize the furniture of my off-blog actual life.

I'll be back in it soon; frankly I don't know how I could stop myself doing it for long. In the meantime I thank you for coming around, and for your many lovely comments and occasional lovely emails (and fuck it, for your occasional insane and incomprehensible emails too), and I hope you won't stray too far. Backson.

Hoo Boy, Heads Sure Gonna Roll Now

2005-09-06T12:18:00.000-04:00

Breaking News: 'US President George W Bush says he will lead an investigation into how the Hurricane Katrina disaster was handled.'

Do the words 'fox' and 'henhouse' jump to mind?

Don't be holding your breath though; he's 'going to find out over time what went right and what went wrong.'

Ah, time. You know what it heals all.

HHS Hypes Fictitious Public-Health Fears

2005-09-05T11:39:00.000-04:00

Last week Mike Leavitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services, gave a press conference and announced:

'We are gravely concerned about the potential for cholera, typhoid, and dehydrating diseases that could come as a result of the stagnant water and the conditions.'
[....]
In addition to cholera and typhoid, officials are concerned about other bacterial and parasitic infections, such as salmonella, E. coli, cryptosporidiosis, or strongyloidiasis, to name a few, said Roger Lewis, Ph.D., an associate professor and director of the Environmental Health Laboratory at Saint Louis University School of Public Health in Missouri.
[....]
Even fecal matter from the dead can pose a health risk. Typically, a decomposing body does not pose a health risk. However, Dr. Lewis said, there could be a potential threat if the dead cannot be located and collected quickly and if the decomposing body had a virulent infection at the time of death. Rescue workers who come into contact with the dead, Dr. Lewis said, and are unaware of any infection, could be susceptible.

Even if the death toll "remains in the low hundreds, the waterborne illnesses are significant," Dr. Lewis said.

[source; free registration required]

Now it appears, however, that they were full of shit (NPI):

Aside from the emotional distress caused by dead bodies in the streets, they should be the least of the public health worries for the survivors here of Hurricane Katrina.

What people need to understand is that "for almost all infectious agents, when the body dies, so does the agent," said Michael T. Osterholm, Ph.D., director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Harmful bacteria and viruses cannot survive without a living host, a point that health officials need to make clear to a confused public, said Dr. Osterholm, a nationally known epidemiologist.

The comments by Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt on Wednesday regarding government fears of typhoid and cholera "were unfortunate," Dr. Osterholm said. "The hurricane doesn't invent infectious agents. They have to be there. Cholera and typhoid are not problems in the United States."

Irwin Redlener, M.D., a pediatrician who is director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University in New York, agreed that decomposing remains do not pose a significant threat to the general public.

"There's a lot of mythology of so-called dangers of dead bodies that have been left, but really there is not much to worry about," Dr. Redlener said. "The psychological issues are the prevailing concern and are much greater than any possible infection risk from the dead."

That is to say, there's still plenty to worry about from a public-health point of view, just none of the things HHS actually told us to worry about. Can you feel the magnitude of my not-surprise?

Elsewhere, Police Brutality Carries On As Usual

2005-09-05T11:27:00.000-04:00

In Chicago, police Taser a teenage boy into cardiac fibrillation.

And with all the glorious convenience of capitalism at work in our lives, having found that story on the NYT web site you may also avail yourself of no fewer than eight opportunities to buy a Taser of your own to test its veracity.

I Wanna Be Just Like You

2005-09-05T10:35:00.000-04:00

Is there any action Tony Blair undertakes that isn't a slavish, pitifully rinky-dink imitation of some Chimpian act of malevolence?

He's even incredibly crap in precisely the same way, only smaller and lamer. In response to 'criticism from some of those [British Katrina survivors] returning to the UK that the response had been slow and information scarce,' Blair rallied with a magisterial 'I'm really sorry if there has been difficulties...but I can assure you some of these staff have been working round the clock.'

He's not just sorry, he's really sorry. If he could have failed you in a more spectacular way befitting the long-fled glories of empire past, he undoubtedly would. Post-lapsarian realities being what they are, 'some' of his staff working overtime was as imperial as he could muster.

Duck & Cover, The National Guard Is In The House

2005-09-05T10:31:00.000-04:00

cross-posted at Lenin's Tomb

This business of the New Orleans police killing 5 (or 4) civilians, either contractors or, an hour later, not contractors. (Hmm, yeah, I'm definitely putting my confidence in the revised report. After all, why would the Army Corps of Engineers lie about innocent civilians being randomly shot to death? And what with the tremendous verifiability of the whole thing...)

It's a straw in the wind, this. The city is filling up with National Guardsmen straight out of Iraq. This is what those troops do over there; it's literally SOP, what they've been trained for all this time, over there where nobody important is going to notice one or two or a dozen more dead civilian towelheads. When in doubt, when suspicious, jumpy or even just bored, kill civilians indiscriminately. Shoot first, don't even bother asking questions.

And now they're in New Orleans, in a situation their commanders are already calling a combat operation, helpfully identifying the point elements in question as 'insurgents'. That must make the Guardies feel so at home! And they certainly know what the United States Armed Forces do with 'insurgents'.

We will be seeing more of this. Civilian 'accidental' shootings are about to skyrocket, and I for one am agog to see how that goes down on American turf. The government has been notably slow to catch on to the fact that the whole world can see them (a touch of Ravenous Bugblatter Beast syndrome); when they do things like pull that insane fake-aid-station-photo-op stunt, or for that matter leave 20,000 monumentally fucked-off people sitting outside the Convention Center to tell reporters exactly what's being done to them, the pols just don't appear to get the fact that we're watching.

So I'm betting it's going to take them a while to cotton to the fact that, appearances to the contrary, this ain't actually Fallujah, and people here actually are counting bodies (or trying to). And I can't help feeling that, assuming news continues to get out (despite FEMA's efforts), people just aren't going to stand for it they way they do (unjustly of course), when it's happening in someone else's country.

And Another Thing

2005-09-04T17:48:00.000-04:00

Let's for a minute look straight on at the fact of the people in New Orleans who actually are committing acts of dreadful violence, against each other, their fellow citizens and/or the rescue personnel trying to save them. (NB: New Orleans police are in a separate category from these, constituting as they do an unofficial death squad and having been widely witnessed participating in the looting themselves; combat between armed citizens and Nawlins Filth might almost come under the Rules of War, Urban Guerilla Edition.)

So yes. There are, if widespread reports are true, a number of people committing rape, beatings and murder in New Orleans. Rumor has it that many of these are convicted criminals, who were haphazardly released from the jails because no more provision had been made for their evacuation than for any of the other souls deemed drownable in the emergency preparedness plan. This appears not to be the case; though depending on who you believe, a massive riot at Orleans Parish Prison either did or did not take place during the prison evacuation, which interestingly was apparently well underway by Wednesday night. (Is there anyone who wasn't escorted out of there before the poor grandmothers outside the Convention Center?)

So absent escaped prisoners, we seem to have the unavoidable fact of a bunch of civilians, numbers unknown, on the loose in the ruined city committing horrible crimes. Now, I'm not for a minute going to excuse those crimes. They are inexcusable. But I'm damned if I'm going to shy away from trying to understand them.

And you know, it's really not that hard. You take, for example, a bunch of young, impoverished black men who've spent their lives receiving the message from all sides that society values them approximately as much as dirt. Who've grown up learning the intricacies of brutality direct from the most corrupt, vicious police force you could hope to run for your life from down a back alley in the Ninth Ward. Then you put them in a situation where society finally just comes right out and says, 'Hey yo, dirt! FUCK YOU! Stay there and die!' Where the official instructions are 'Go to this central location and wait days for nonexistent buses without food, water or support of any kind, in conditions of unimaginable, inhuman hellishness, while your grandmother and your baby son die together in a wheelchair next to you.' Where food and water manifestly exist, within arm's and a baseball bat's reach, and they've been told--by those same instructive cops--they'll be jailed or worse, zero-tolerance, if they try to get some for their families and friends.

And you're surprised when they go mental? You're surprised when they feel the rules of society weren't exactly constructed with their comfort in mind, so maybe they'll just give the rules a big old miss? You are surprised when they don't greet the advent of armed National Guardsmen, troops sent in with the loud and clear mandate of maintaining order, not rescuing victims, with open arms and tears of grateful welcome?

Newsflash: when you fuck people up, the people duly become fucked up. No one is looking to justify crimes of violence, but it's incumbent on us to understand their roots if we hope to eliminate them. These criminals didn't just happen. They were made. And they were made, over the course of years and in the last few days, by the same corrupt, corrupting social conditions and actors that made this whole edifying spectacle the fathomless hell-visitation it's turned out to be. So please would the endless shocked liberal wittering about people 'not rising to the occasion' of the crisis just fucking stop? Get. A. Fucking. Analysis.

* * * * *

Now it's time to take a restorative mental-health break and attempt to focus on something other than New Orleans. Perhaps some light televisual entertainment? Ooh look, I'm in luck: TNT has returned to its longstanding policy of showing 'The Shawshank Redemption' to the exclusion of all other programming ever. I mean, who can ever get enough of that kind of spiritual uplift? However, bloggy friends, I'm in a Feel-Good Inspiration quandary--TBS is showing 'Pay It Forward' at the same time! How on earth to decide which load of Turner-sponsored unbearable mawktastic horseshite to shovel into my forebrain tonight?

I know, I'll watch episodes of 'The Shield' on DVD. That seems a bit more a propos.

Update: Silly, silly me. 'Resident Evil' is on SciFi. We have a winner.

'The Only Reason They Haven't Looted The Wal-Mart Is Because That's Where The Police Sleep'

2005-09-04T16:49:00.000-04:00

I would like to be able to stop talking about this, but I just fucking can't. I spend all my time hunting online, watching CNN and crying and shouting at the television. It's not that this is the worst disaster that's ever happened, nor that the victims are any more 'important' than the victims of the Bhopal disaster, the Boxing Day tsunami, or any of the uncounted number of other catastrophes either directly caused or exacerbated by the forces who brought us the sodden corpse-strewn wreckage that was New Orleans.

But it is nonetheless tremendously and immediately important, for all kinds of reasons, not least for its having cracked open, unmistakably and irrevocably, the delusional discourse around race and class injustice in this country. I don't think we'll be able to go back from here, from the open and widespread acknowledgement that in America poor black people are institutionally considered beneath society's attention.

So that, after a somewhat ghoulish fashion, is a positive outcome. Watching even the hardened-sycophant media break down, often literally, in the face of such naked, depraved indifference provides some crumb of hope that this newborn consciousness will not simply be swept under the Oh What A Senseless Tragedy rug. This was a sensefull tragedy, and for once it's not only the left who think so.

What I just can't get past, though, is the continuous creeping hold of this campaign of criminalization. Even while the MSM find themselves in the novel position of shouting at politicians and even their own anchors to acknowledge the inhumanity of conditions in NO, they still dutifully retail the nebulous, hysterical vision of 'a city in chaos', ruled by 'lawless gangs' who 'attack those who come to rescue them'. Troops are conducting what are openly called 'combat operations' to put down, god help them, 'the insurgency in the city' (via WII).

And the poisonhearted right, of course, are doing their best to whip this up into a wholesale demonization of not just the victims themselves, but the kind of people the victims are. I.e., to reiterate, poor black people. Someone (someone, mind, who plans to be a doctor) sent around my healthpolicy listserv yesterday this piece of contaminated fascist filth, which is so corrupt that I can barely bring myself to link to it, let alone quote it.

At tweezer-grasped arm's length I vouchsafe you the summary that it blames this disaster on 'the welfare state', and explains the victims' failure to 'rise to the occasion' (i.e., be noble, humble, above-all-quiet sufferers who wait patiently for succour and receive it with becoming gratitude) by reference to the high proportion of 'criminals and welfare parasites...people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness.'

See? Now I've gone and quoted it. I feel dirty.

And the trouble is, it creeps down. 'Decent' liberals all over the place are, in the same breath, lamenting the fate of New Orleanians and cursing the lawless, ungrateful looters for their criminality. The narrative of a post-apocalyptic cityscape so surrendered to violence that it's impossible for rescuers to aid the innocent is swallowed without question, even when that narrative is constructed on endless repetition of the same tiny handful of concrete anecdotes--the hospital sniper, the shots reportedly fired at the Superdome helicopter (a claim disputed here by an FAA official), the rapes and beatings in the Superdome (which surely represent vastly more danger to those trapped inside than to any incoming rescue mission, and, one would think, more incentive than otherwise to get the victims out instanter)--embedded in a vast haze of evocative insinuation.

People don't ask who might benefit from the construction of such a narrative. They aren't bemused by the fact that talk of sending troops in to 'maintain security' began a full day before the media reports of widespread 'lawlessness' started to appear, media who were conspicuously closer to all the action than any government representatives, and who surely would have known a lot sooner what was going on in the city.

Cui bono the isolation and criminalization of the people remaining unrescued in New Orleans? Here's a clue. This one should give you chills: on Meet The Press this morning, the president of Jefferson Parish, LA, broke down in tears after telling Tim Russert how FEMA cut all their emergency communication lines yesterday, and the local sheriff had to reconnect them and post armed guards to keep them safe. Why, I wonder, would FEMA want to keep information from getting out of the disaster area? For that matter, why would FEMA refuse to allow the delivery of three trailer-trucks of water and 1,000 gallons of fuel to the same parish?

Why would FEMA keep 60 people imprisoned in a middle school in Marrero, LA? (Audio file of interview with one of the detained.) Why are the Red Cross banned from entering the city, but mercenaries given free passage?

You'll have seen where this is going. This isn't a rescue mission at all; it's a salvage mission. The primary, explicit aim of the government all along has been the safeguarding and restoration of property. Insofar as people could be rescued--or even fed--without detracting from that critical mission they have been, grudgingly, sporadically, incompletely. There are still an unknown number of people trapped in houses and on roofs all over the city, and no one seems much exercised to go after them.

Insofar as the people dared to raise a ruckus and demand aid, or god forbid interfere with property when aid was not forthcoming, they've had to be neutralized, whether by punishment, demonization, isolation or outright extermination. Contrary to the general impression, FEMA has been pretty damn efficient in the execution of its primary mission.

Just A Thought

2005-09-03T07:39:00.000-04:00

I'm just saying. You'll have noticed that Chimpy's first reaction to the obliteration of 90,000 square miles of Gulf Coast was to bang on about oil. As were most of his subsequent reactions, at least until he finally ambled down there to put in a couple desultory photo ops hugging people in the rubble of their homes. Up till then, it's been oil oil oil: running out of it, not price-gouging it, conserving it, and most prominently, releasing it from the emergency petroleum reserves.

Now, those reserves are going to have to be refilled at some point, from somewhere. And I think we know someone who's been getting all up in the Administration's face lately, flaunting all that extra oil he's got and making lairy remarks about 'cowboys'.

I'm just saying, from this blogger's armchair the putative 'oil shortage' (and for this remember we've pretty much only got his and the oil industry's say-so, corroborated predictably by piracy at the pump) visited by Katrina starts to look like a mighty opportune pretext for a little Venezuelan Regime Change action down the road.

You heard it here first.

And slightly off-topic, may I just add: Halliburton. Do you think if they came around our house and personally pissed in each of our faces it could possibly better express their contempt?

UPDATE 9/4: Well now, it seems a Certain Someone has also had this same thought. Hmmm. (via CM)

Lying Piece Of Shit

2005-09-02T10:54:00.000-04:00

Apparently, CNN would have us believe there's a 'debate' over whether the response to the New Orleans disaster was 'magnificent' or 'an embarrassment'.

It appears the sole proponent of the 'magnificent' school of thought is Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who

...told CNN Thursday that he believes he thinks FEMA and other federal agencies have done a "magnificent job" under difficult circumstances to deal with the unprecedented disaster, citing their "courage" and "ingenuity."

Insisting that aid is coming as fast as possible, Chertoff said, "You can't fly helicopters in a hurricane. You can't drive trucks in a hurricane."

Ah. OK. It appears Mr. Chertoff could use a brief recent-historical refresher. When was it again that the hurricane didn't actually hit New Orleans? That would be Monday. And when did the always-already-going-to-fail levees actually succumb to inevitability and begin to flood the city? That, Mr. I-Should-Just-Commit-Seppuku-Now Chertoff, would have been Tuesday, 'a full day after Hurricane Katrina hit'.

There was no hurricane preventing helicopters dropping food outside the convention center for the last three days. Yesterday the severest meteorological event was some fucking rain in the afternoon. Which was, I promise you, a hell of a lot worse for the 20,000 people stranded outside in it amongst the corpses, which by now are surely starting to stink in the 90-degree dripping heat, than for the helicopter pilots who might have had to turn on the windshield wipers to complete their apparently-optional mission of mercy.

La Compassion de l'État

2005-09-02T08:35:00.000-04:00

Housing PR blues getting you down? Too many poor black people dying in unsafe-housing fires and tarnishing your image? Well my friend, I think your course is clear.

Boot 'em out. That way, when they die of exposure, starvation and communicable diseases, they'll do it in small, manageable increments, and can be tidied away with those kicky little green plastic brooms.

Dept. of Truly Shameful Corporate Weaselry

2005-09-02T00:22:00.000-04:00

Tomb raiders, er, readers among you may recall China's recent post drawing well-deserved attention to the interesting fact of New Orleans's having shopped out its disaster planning function to a private firm called, apparently straight-facedly, Innovative Emergency Management, or IEM, Inc. If so, it might have occurred to you to wonder today, as you sat with your face superglued to CNN, where exactly was any mention of IEM's role, or glaring lack thereof, in this epic upfuck.

Well might you have wondered. Apparently the kind of Emergency they're best qualified to Manage Innovatively is, you guessed it, a PR Emergency. IEM, Inc: We Make It Like Your Disaster Never Happened. At Least Not On Your Watch.

Meanwhile, Back At Eville Inc. HQ, Business As Usual

2005-09-01T18:37:00.000-04:00

A handy little reminder of RNC priorities, courtesy of WIIIAI. Peruse if you will this email, circulated to the GOP mailing list:

From: "Chairman Ken Mehlman"
To: <--->
Subject: Support Elimination of the Death Tax
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2005 15:54:03 -0400 (EDT)

Dear ----,

For the last four years, President Bush and Republicans in Congress have championed a pro-growth agenda that has brought tax relief to millions of Americans. Historic legislation in 2001 and 2003 put America on the track to economic growth, and today our economic outlook is bright. There is more work to do, however, to ensure that tax-paying Americans can keep more of their own hard-earned income.

When they return from their August recess, Senators will consider a key issue: elimination of the death tax. The death tax is an unfair double taxation of income, which hurts America's small businesses and farms and threatens job growth. Unfortunately, Senate Democrats are working hard to oppose our efforts to eliminate this unfair tax.

Will you help bring tax relief to more hard-working Americans? Call Senator Dianne Feinstein at 202-224-3841 today and ask them to eliminate the death tax.

Our party's opportunity agenda means allowing families to keep more of the money they earn. The historic tax relief in the President's first term was only the beginning. Americans deserve a tax code that is simple and fair. The Senate needs to do its part by making tax relief permanent and burying the death tax forever.

Call Call Senator Dianne Feinstein at 202-224-3841 today and ask them to vote to eliminate the death tax!

Make your voice heard on this important issue. Call Senator Dianne Feinstein. Express your support for tax relief and economic opportunity.

Elimination of the death tax would be a victory for fairness and job creation. Working together, we can help eliminate the burden of the death tax once and for all.

Thank you,

Ken Mehlman,
RNC Chairman

Yes, you read that right. No, I did not doctor the date. This email went out this afternoon.

Do they deliberately seek out the most gruesome possible juxtapositional ironies? Do they think we're not clever enough to decipher their completely open program of hatred and scorn for poor and working-class Americans, so they need to send us these special clues till we get the message?

They really. should. die. And then get taxed. A lot.

Look What They're Doing

2005-09-01T17:31:00.000-04:00

So this is how they're going to play it. The new theme of all the heads-talking is 'New Orleans in criminal chaos'. They've been preparing the ground for hours; every public figure who's held a press conference this afternoon has talked endlessly about the scores of thousands of police, National Guard and deputy sheriffs being rushed to the scene 'to restore security'. The Governor of Louisiana held a press conference in which she assured us that all these troops had taken law-enforcement oaths and been issued power of arrest to enable them to 'quell the civil unrest'. The zero-tolerance looting policy is much touted, and continually reiterated in its universal application. It's now all about 'taking back control of the city'.

FEMA Director Michael Brown informed us that we're dealing with a 'criminal element' who seek to gain control of the city. He also distinguished between the 'bad person' who talks to the news cameras and 'wants to shout and complain', and the nice mother 'sitting quietly in the corner with her kids--she understands, she's being patient'.

Oh and my fucking god, he's just come back to share that 'he doesn't want to second-guess why' all those people didn't heed the evacuation orders. He just wishes they could 'convince them that when an evacuation order goes out, it's for their own good.' Oh, oh, oh. Here is a very good response to that.

And now the news coverage is duly falling in: we're being repeatedly told how the 'lawlessness' and violence are hampering and even preventing rescue efforts. Police, we're told, are afraid to go out on the streets. A sniper, or possibly two, paralyzed the evacuation of a hospital for several hours.

This is how they're going to play it. They're going to try to blanket-criminalize the victims they can't even be fucked to rescue. The tens of thousands of people they fucking abandoned to die or, in the words of CNN's reporter, 'live like animals' in a devastated apocalyptic landscape, and some tiny few of whom have, in the world's least surprising development, acted like animals in response. Some have visited punishment on their fellow victims, and some on rescuers. Some have looted property. Vastly, vastly more have quietly waited to be rescued, in vain, or have taken provisions from stores to feed and clothe themselves, their neighbors and their children after waiting days to be given food, water, medical care. Tarring these victims as 'a criminal element' and using 'looting' as an excuse for the monumental, unforgivable cockup that is this shambolic rescue effort is beyond outrageous. That is what's criminal.

On the bright side, though, I'm not sure it'll actually work. I don't think even the lapdog press are buying the 'security' line with their usual credulity. We're still hearing a lot of unaccustomedly sharp questions about preparedness and response time, a steady questioning of the zero-tolerance policy for people looting for survival, a real and strong outpouring of genuine sympathy from not only the reporters on the scene (who are practically babbling hysterically with horror) but the visibly-shaken anchors in the studio. I think the people who did this may actually take an amply-deserved beating for once.

Catastrophe

2005-09-01T14:19:00.000-04:00

I'm watching CNN, cycling footage of thousands and thousands of people stranded at the New Orleans Convention Center, without food or water for two days, ankle-deep in shit, dead bodies lying in the street and propped in wheelchairs around them, screaming at the camera for somebody to help them.

The government is pulling out rescue teams because of the 'security situation'. Evacuation efforts were halted because someone fired shots at a helicopter. The President has announced a zero-tolerance policy for looting. White House Spokesscumbag Scott McClellan, asked at the latest press briefing whether that policy applied to people who were desperate to get food and water to survive, and said, 'You heard the President. It's a zero-tolerance policy. The National Guard is distributing food and water, these people have ways to get food and there is no excuse for acting unlawfully.' They are saying out loud that property is more important than people's lives. And they are lying. The people outside the convention center, where they've been sent to wait for evacuation buses that never arrive, have been in one place for two days waiting for food, and no food has been given. WHAT ARE THEY SUPPOSED TO DO?

They're holding a press briefing with Michael Chertoff, Homeland Security Director and Attorney General Gonzales, and all they can talk about is 'security'. They keep citing the number of police and National Guard they're bringing in, not to rescue or feed the stranded thousands but to maintain order. We're being told how lucky it is that the National Guard is exempt from the Posse Comitatus restriction on military forces being involved in law enforcement. Security, not saving lives, is the explicit order of the day.

This didn't happen. This was done. There is no 'natural' about this disaster. The hurricane passed New Orleans by. This happened because the levees were fucked, and that was publicly declared and remedy funding requested and denied two years ago. And when they broke, as it was known they would, the fucking government waited two days to act. How much more clear could they make it that they just don't fucking care?

This has to change things. CNN is showing dead bodies on television for (to my knowledge) the first time ever. People are being shown on camera, sitting outside the convention center dying. The press are actually bringing themselves to ask, over and over, how this can have happened like this, and what the government is doing to make it better. At some point, despite all the attempts to proscribe 'talking about politics' and 'pointing fingers', despite the fact that these are only poor black people taking the brunt, people in general will have to have seen enough needless, senseless, abandoned suffering in their back yards that they'll start to ask hard questions, and demand answers.

And maybe, if we're really lucky, to ask why billions of dollars are being spent every month to occupy Iraq, while we can't even afford to feed and rescue thousands of our own citizens from their drowned city, drowned in a catastrophe that could have been prevented if anyone cared.

Update: The mayor of New Orleans has just released a statement announcing 'This is a desperate SOS. We're out of resources at the Convention Center, and don't anticipate getting help for 15-20,000 people.' The promised buses are not in fact coming to the rescue. So they're 'allowing those people to march' out of New Orleans 'to find relief'. How the fuck all those old people and wheelchair-bound people and teenage mothers with babies are supposed to march out of New Orleans is beyond my ken, as is what kind of 'relief' they're expected to 'find' (without looting, of course) when they get there. And the government's holding press conferences saying 'Be patient. We have resources and we'll get them to you.' A thousand, million, infinite times fuck you.

What's The Opposite Of A Hydra?

2005-09-01T10:01:00.000-04:00

By what mechanism are politicians created? I've always assumed they were spontaneously generated from rotting meat, like pre-Enlightenment flies, but I'm open to other theories.

Whatever the process is, it appears never to have been introduced to Israel. Israel has had the same four (more recently three) major politicians since the Dawn of Time, and they don't go away, and they don't get lastingly discredited by any of their shocking scandals, and they just keep going off in disgrace and then returning in glory, and they do periodic elaborate mutual dances of opposition, coalition, betrayal and rapprochement, and they only ever fucking die if someone assassinates them. What is up with that?

Now 'Bibi' (how I loathe these cutesy domesticating diminutives--Aren't you an adorable widdle homicidal megalomaniac! Oh yes you are! Oh yes you are!) is launching his bid to take over Likud, while 'Arik' is rumored to be scheming to create a whole new slice-n-graft party out of the left tranche of Likud and the right of Labour. Pretty soon there will be more Israeli parties than politicians to lead them. And that, one can't help feeling, could very well lead to some small reduction in efficiency of the pursuit of everyone's goal. Now wouldn't that be a shame.

Human Rights Revolution At Gitmo!

2005-09-01T09:10:00.000-04:00

Big, exciting changes in the military 'trial' process for detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon, wishing in its benevolence 'to model the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay more closely on the judge and jury structure', has implemented reforms that are bound to ensure that a Gitmo kangaroo hearing walks, talks and looks just like a Real Trial!

1. 'Each hearing will have a presiding officer who will effectively act as the judge and decide most questions of law.'

Well, sure! I mean, the next-best thing to an actual judge is obviously an officer acting as a judge. Right? Heck, everyone knows officers are eminently qualified to decide most questions of law. And what with the well-known dire shortage of real-life judges these days, we should just be grateful that these civic-minded 'presiding officer' people are willing and ready to step into the judicial breach and offer their no-doubt-enthusiastic lay opinions.

2. 'There will also be a number of panel members who will support the presiding officer but also work like a jury. They will determine findings and set sentences.'

OK, so some petty malcontents might point out that this setup bears precious little resemblance to anything enshrined elsewhere in our legal system as a 'jury', what with the 'support the presiding officer' part, the 'determine findings and set sentences' part, and of course the whole not-being-a-disinterested-body-of-your-peers technicality. But to them I say, Hey. Come on now. These people have a lot on their plates, they're working really hard and wearing many different, albeit directly conflict-of-interest-producing, judiciary hats. If it makes them feel better appreciated for their efforts to be called 'a jury', who are we to deny them that small satisfaction? Walk a mile in their combat boots, then maybe you won't be so quick to judge.

3. This is the best one! 'The accused will be present at the hearing, except when classified information is discussed.'

Now what's not to be excited about there? The accused gets a front-row seat at the majestic drama of his own extrajudicial tribunal! At least, during those parts of the hearing when 'classified information' is not being discussed. Last I checked, 'Good morning, ladies and gentleman' was still public-access intel, so that should guarantee the accused at the very least a good peek at the inside of the court room before he's escorted back to his stress position.

And people called these Courts of Star Chamber. That'll show 'em!

No, I Just Have No Words

2005-08-31T08:21:00.000-04:00

There is this.

And then there is this.

No. fucking. words.

....

No wait, you know what? I do. I have two words: collective punishment.

A United States court, in fucking Rhode Island of all places, is not only holding the PA responsible for killings officially recognized as committed by Hamas, but it is collectively punishing the entire Palestinian people by freezing the assets of its government.

An entire people, a people which could not at present be more desperately in need of funds, is being literally starved as retribution for the killings of two Jews. That's collective punishment on a scale the IDF must be chartreuse with envy over.

Psychotic, unimaginable barbarity.

Oh, You Shouldn't Have!

2005-08-31T08:05:00.000-04:00

I really do think sometimes the universe goes about its vast quotidian business with the main object of arranging things so as to entertain me. Is that solipsistic?

Today's evidence: the spokesman for a group called the Jewish Community Security Trust, responding to the inclusion of renowned progressive Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan in the British government's new 'working group on tackling extremism':

"It's a strange choice given his past statements which some have viewed as being anti-Jewish. Some of our community view him as extreme.

"He speaks with two voices, one for his European audience which appears moderate, and one for his Arab hinterland where he voices many of the demands of Islamists.

"He is at the soft end of the Islamist extreme spectrum."

The name of this insinuatory savant? If it please the court (as it boundlessly does me), one Mike Whine.

Don't Be Such A Wuss, They're Just Devices

2005-08-30T07:58:00.000-04:00

In honor of the first day of school, I bring you the news that the FDA is reviewing the medical use of maggots and leeches, which has been on the rise in recent years.

Aside from the massive gross-out chic factor, the kick of this is that up to now the FDA in its wisdom has regulated both as 'unclassified devices':

The agency decided that maggots and leeches are devices, mainly because of how they perform their medical chores. Maggots chew dead flesh and leeches eat blood. "Those are mechanical processes," Mark Melkerson, acting director of the FDA's Division of General, Restorative and Neurological Devices, told reporters.

Currently, both leeches and maggots are regulated as unclassified devices. The agency is proposing that both maggots and leeches be classified as class II medical devices, subject to some safety requirements, but not as stringently regulated as class III devices, such as implantable pacemakers.

The nifty thing about maggots, as you may know, is that they only eat rotting flesh, and they produce their own natural antibiotic that helps sterilize the area, which means they're vastly more effective than surgery at salvaging a necrotic wound with minimal tissue loss.

No, all that evolutionary engineering and mind-bogglingly precise usefulness doesn't make them any less viscerally utterly fucking disgusting. Yeah, the thought of someone dumping a bunch of 'sterilized' maggots in my wound and sewing them up in there makes me want to tear my skin off. Right now, preemptively.

But gotta say, still pretty fucking cool. Especially when it happens to other people.

NYT Hitches A Lift On The Anti-Choice Wagon

2005-08-29T08:52:00.000-04:00

Following up on the recent JAMA report showing that fetuses don't have the neural wiring to feel pain before 30 weeks, there are apparently two journalistic paths to choose from.

Some, like that notorious pinko rag the Boston Globe, have chosen to highlight the fact that since publishing the article, Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, editor of the JAMA, has received dozens of 'horrible, vindictive' emails from anti-choice bigots. MedPage Today (free reg required) adds that the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine was similarly so harassed that the journal was forced to hire a bodyguard.

Not so the intrepid New York Fox-Newsified Times. Chez the Grey Lady, there's only one obvious aspect of interest in this story: 'Study Authors Didn't Report Abortion Ties'.

That is to say:

One author, Susan J. Lee, a medical student, is also a lawyer who for eight months from 1999 to 2000 worked in the legal department at Naral, an abortion rights group. Another author, Dr. Eleanor A. Drey, performs abortions and is medical director of an abortion clinic.

Neither tried to conceal those activities from reporters before the journal article was published.
[...]
In interviews yesterday, Dr. Drey and Ms. Lee said they did not regard their work as a conflict of interest and so it had not occurred to them to report it to the journal editors.

Now, the fact of the NYT focusing on this particular issue (alone among the major papers; the WaPo makes no mention of it, instead printing this obviously on-our-side look at how much progress anti-choice legislation has made this year), and the gotcha! tone in which they've done so (the LA Times at least presents the issue as a debate with two active sides), are telling enough as to where the NYT is positioning itself these days on abortion rights.

But let's think about the basic premise of the charge. Dr. Eleanor Drey is being accused of unethical behavior, of an unreported conflict of interest, on the basis that she is the director of an abortion clinic and performs abortions. I.e., she conducted a scientific review of medical studies in the field in which she works and is qualified. How, pray, is that a conflict of interest? If a neurosurgeon, who is the head of a neurology clinic and performs brain surgery, publishes a peer-reviewed study of some aspect of brain activity relating to her surgical specialty, would anyone dream of calling that a 'conflict of interest'? Or would they consider it not merely acceptable but optimally desirable that a physician publish research in the field in which she is experienced and qualified?

What would the alternative be? Should gastroenterologists be meta-analysing fetal neurodevelopment studies? Or perhaps lay readers? People with no knowledge or experience of abortion or fetal development at all? Would that be sufficiently unconflicty?

We already know that the forces opposing women's reproductive choice are anti-science, indeed anti-reason. That's old news. In fact the report in question is expressly intended to function as a scientific, empirically-based corrective to the the utterly evidence-free, medically unsupported assertions of the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act.

The fact that the New York Times is jumping on the anti-rationalist bandwagon, and with such gleeful enthusiasm, is newer, and more depressing. The Democrat-led liberal establishment is abandoning women's rights with ever-greater alacrity. We have no one to count on but ourselves. Time for a new movement.

And Some Sunday Reading

2005-08-28T11:43:00.000-04:00

Go check out ReverseVoteSwap.org, a blog both correct and clever: a rare enough conjunction in these debased times. It make me laugh, especially this:

Anguish as Car Thieves Forced to Give Up Favorite Cars

LOS ANGELES -- The decision by the heads of the city's leading auto theft ring to repaint and resell some of the small-time hoods' favorite cars has provoked much anguish and soul-searching among some of the nation's most dedicated thieves.

"This is disgraceful," said one gangster. "I've driven this car for several days, and it's a part of my spiritual being. The people I stole it from, they were just animals, they didn't know how to use a car properly. For instance, I installed those fuzzy dice myself." [there's more.]

It Could Have Been Otherwise...Oh No, It Really Couldn't

2005-08-28T10:50:00.000-04:00

Sometimes even the B-team catch a break. The My Lil' Journos at the Observer have come panting up with the scoop that someone in Labour's Foreign Office at some distant historic point was actually possessed of a brain, with functioning eyes connected thereto.

In May 2004, the Foreign Office permanent under-secretary Michael Jay sent this letter to the cabinet secretary, stating baldly that

British foreign policy and the perception of its negative effect on Muslims globally plays a significant role in creating a feeling of anger and impotence among especially the younger generation of British Muslims.
....
This seems to be a key driver behind recruitment by extremist organisations (e.g. recruitment drives by groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir and al Muhajiroon).

Rather an obvious conclusion, one would have thought, but of course we currently inhabit the universe where the official Labour position maintains 'there was no "causal link" between Iraq and the London attacks'.

The interesting thing about this letter, beyond of course the curiosity of its existence in the first place (as opposed to the not-at-all-curiosity of its having subsequently been completely disregarded), is that it goes on to lay out a variety of (lord preserve us) 'work streams' undertaken by the FCO in its 'building bridges with mainstream Islam' program.

Now, some of these are laughably vague and government boondoggly, e.g.: 'One of the key priorities of this new unit is strengthening the relationship with, and consultation of, the Muslim community. We have employed a specialist to assist us in this.' Oooh! A specialist! In relationship-strengthening! Dare one presume to guess who this specialist might have been?

Others, like the 'Islamic Media Unit' and the 'Muslim News Awards for Excellence', are the usual, predictable propaganda measures.

(The 'British Hajj Delegation' of 8 doctors and consular staff to provide aid to hajjis is, I must say, pretty random and kind of batfuck, but I suppose broadly commendable.)

But a few of these measures actually seem, given the parameters of the problem for the actually-existing government, like not bad ideas:

- British Muslim delegations to the Islamic world...to strengthen the links between the British Muslim community and many other countries in the Islamic world

- Regular ministerial briefings for key Muslim representatives

- Ministerial outreach to...grassroots organizations in different UK cities, to engage with people who don't normally have access to government Ministers, in community centres, women's organizations, youth groups, etc.

- Outreach to Muslim youth

OK, so not for a moment to get all starry-eyed about the noble intentions of the Foreign Office as opposed to anyone else in Labour, I would nonetheless characterize these measures as, in general, A Reasonably Good Start at building good, respectful community relations. They presume not only the acceptability but the desirability of connection between British Muslims and worldwide Islam, they seek to incorporate Muslim perspectives, both leadership and grassroots, in governance, and they recognize the specific need to engage with young Muslims. The latter are highlighted for attention in the letter, which notes (in a formulation that comes perilously close to a nuanced analysis of the attractions of extremism) 'many of whom are taking on the burden both of the perceived injustices and of the responsibility of putting them right, but without the legitimate tools to do so.'

And these measures already being instituted by the FCO, it would have been easy enough to strengthen and frontline them in the wake of the July bombings, to make them highly visible, official Labour policy. But apparently even easier was to McCarthyize mainstream British Islam, to require loyalty oaths and disavowals from the MCB, to produce slanderous trash like the Panorama special whose express, open purpose is to tar all of Islam with the brush of extremism.

We know why: because maintaining a suitably terrified, docile population under a security state requires the erection of a straw baddie who is not merely terrifying but insidious, an enemy who could be anyone, who is all around us, lurking behind the seemingly moderate, inoffensive faces of our Pakistani or Iraqi or Jordanian neighbors. It's not enough to locate Al Qaeda cells in every hedgerow: that could just as well serve to bind communities together in fear of an external enemy. To frighten the people sufficiently that they will gladly surrender their individual rights and those of their neighbors for the promise of security, you have to atomize them.

You have to convince them that no one can be trusted, and if anyone certainly not those brown-skinned people up the road who may seem nice, and who may have lived there in harmonious coexistence for generations, but who subscribe to a religion that we all really know, given its head, would have every one of us spitted on jihad's sword for our secular, freedom-loving ways before you can say 'allahu akbar'.

Update: (via particleist) Ah, and here's the Observer doing its bit for today, in the 'person' of Martin Bright.

And Again I Am Compelled To Say

2005-08-27T18:14:00.000-04:00

How is this news? Second-from-top story in my BBC News email today:

The family of murdered schoolboy Rory Blackhall have laid flowers near the spot where his body was found.

Now please don't get me wrong. Their son has been horribly killed, and now they've put flowers at the scene. Terribly, terribly sad. Worthy of tremendous sympathy. But news? Really not so much.

Either it's a shockingly slow news day, or it's an excuse to run yet another article about the murder. And what I don't like about that is, every time they have, they've included some version of the following:

Officers said they wanted to speak to two men described as "vagrant types" who were seen walking 100 yards south of the underpass on Nellburn Pass on Thursday.

On Wednesday, a father walking his children to school saw a man dressed in black who came out of the woods near Westwood Park, near where Rory's body was found.

And on Saturday last week a dog walker noticed smoke coming from woods near Dechmont Law at 6.30am and saw a teenage boy and another male sitting around a large campfire.

Now, I may be paranoid, but my XenophobiaDar pings at that. That's just a little bit too when-in-doubt-blame-the-Travelers for my entire comfort. Especially when we're getting stories headlining quotes about 'evil prowling around' the community. And now it appears that both the campfire males and the 'vagrant types' have all been (quite quickly) traced, so there doesn't seem to have been too much urgent call to publicize them as suspects. Unless it was the need to scratch that blame-the-outsiders itch, and for once they couldn't find any Muslims, or for that matter Brazilians with 'Mongolian eyes', in the immediate vicinity.

Please Excuse BionOc

2005-08-27T16:35:00.000-04:00

From substantive blogging today, as she was up at the ass-crack of dawn to hustle down and defend an abortion clinic from a mob of rosary-swinging, moaning, chanting, fake-aborted-fetus-poster-hanging, psychotic bigots whipped up into a misogynist frenzy by this man.

And when I say defend, I mean some 80 of them, half that many unfriendly Cranston cops, and 15 of us chanting.

Fifteen, people. In a state with a clear pro-choice majority. Do y'all think abortion rights are going to defend themselves?

Hurrah For International Worker Solidarity

2005-08-26T10:38:00.000-04:00

Big up to Unite Here, the American hospitality workers' union, which is threatening solidarity action against Gate Gourmet if they don't reinstate all the Heathrow workers recently sacked by megaphone for a strike they were blatantly provoked into by management.

In a letter to Gate Gourmet's chairman and chief executive, David Seigel, Mr Rayner says: "I write to express Unite Here's unyielding support for the Transport & General Workers Union members negotiating with Gate Gourmet in the UK.

"As you know, Unite Here and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have been negotiating with Gate Gourmet on behalf of over 6,000 members working at your US kitchens.

"Let there be no doubt, we consider your assault on the union employees in London to be an assault on union members everywhere. We are outraged by such immoral behaviour and we expect that you will resolve this dispute by reinstating all of the fired workers. Failure to resolve the matter in the UK will certainly cause the unrest to spread across the Atlantic as our members will be forced to take every lawful measure possible to support our fellow union members."

Referring to the London dispute, Mr Rayner said his members "want to make sure Gate Gourmet knows we will not tolerate such actions in the US, the UK, or anywhere else in the world".

Boo, and indeed yah. Lovely to see Americans taking solicitous note of comrades outside our borders once in a while.

Meanwhile, Gate Gourmet and T & G appear to have reached some sort of preliminary agreement to offer voluntary redundancy to all its workers, including all 670 sacked. GG is avowedly hoping the 'troublemakers' it's been holding out against rehiring will take the redundancy offer, but won't say how it will respond should they decline.

And finally, Polly Toynbee has strangely not-half-bad things to say about it all. Go figure.

Oh, one more thing: neither the NYT nor the WaPo makes any mention of Unite Here's action, though both cover the latest in the GG/T&G talks. Unsurprising, to say the least.

Oh Come On Now

2005-08-26T10:20:00.000-04:00

The Guardian offers this well-wouldja-lookit-that-style bit of credulous fluff, about a new meta-analysis of gender IQ disparities, conducted by, if you can credit it, one bigot who 'has long maintained that men are more intelligent than women, believes that white people are cleverer than black people and has called for the procreation of the "underclass" to be kept in check', in wacky collaboration with one man who 'would like to describe [him]self as a feminist'.

The study, about which the elective feminist expresses himself duly anguished--'To be honest I'm not sure I have done the right thing, but in the end I thought it would be dishonest to suppress it'--finds that on average men have IQs five points higher than women's. The article, meanwhile, is so titillated by the odd-couple pairing of the two scientists, and the naughty politically incorrect implications of their conclusions, that it entirely bypasses (aside from a glancing quote from a dissenter, which is not the same as the journalist engaging with the issue) the very notion that there might be any controversy over IQ testing, what it measures, whether it measures with gender or cultural bias, and whether what it measures has any useful significance or actually serves to reinforce the existing societal biases it reflects.

This I call sloppy, not to say irresponsible.

Self-Moderation

2005-08-25T23:58:00.000-04:00

I had a post up here which, it seems to me now, could easily have been construed in a way I didn't intend. Specifically it could have been taken as gloating over the killing of an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. Be assured, that was not at all my meaning. I was amused (macabrely, I grant) by the photograph accompanying the story, and a joke came to mind.

Having thought it through in the light of day, I've pulled the joke so as not to give the false impression that I'm in any way amused or gratified by the death of that poor innocent. Mea culpa for posting past my bedtime.

Rattle Rattle

2005-08-24T13:05:00.000-04:00

Gee I'm gabby today. Possibly because I'm stuck in my house waiting for my new sofa to be delivered. On any (in fact on most every) given normal day, I may very well elect not to leave my house ever, but give me a 3- (or 4- or 12-) hour delivery window and I'm all over cabin fever and yearning for the wide-open spaces.

Anyway, this is amusing me:

The United States has criticised an independent investigation which found no evidence that Iran was working on a secret nuclear weapons programme.

The report said traces of bomb-grade uranium in Iran's nuclear facilities came from contaminated Pakistani equipment, not Iranian activities.

But the US said there were other ways Iran could be building nuclear weapons.

Presumably this last refers to the widely-rumored Iranian program for spinning nuclear weapons from straw, codename Rumsfeldstiltskin.

Also this:

Iran insists its nuclear programme is peaceful and that US pressure over its nuclear programme is part of a wider effort to change the regime in Tehran.

However, a State Department spokesman said the report did nothing to reduce their concern at Iran's nuclear programme.

He listed a series of what he called "unresolved concerns", which included Iran's alleged dealings with clandestine nuclear procurement networks and the Bush administration's strong belief that the country was developing and pursuing a nuclear weapon.

[italics mine]

Now, say I have a 'strong belief' that you have a cat in your pocket. If independent investigation of your pocket reveals no empirical evidence of feline presence, surely any lingering 'concerns' relating to my undiminished belief in the putative pocket-dwelling cat should reasonably be concerns about me, not you. Am I wrong here?

Can I Just Say

2005-08-24T12:51:00.000-04:00

How truly, overwhelmingly, astoundingly right I am?

I have been saying for years that the notion of the constancy of the speed of light is a bizarre, quasi-religious shibboleth that, as far as anyone's ever been able to explain to me, was determined to be the case through an exercise in physical logic rather than rigorous empirical observation (which, to be fair, wasn't technologically possible at the time, but sure as fuck is now). And further, that within our puny lifetimes light would be measured at variable speeds and the whole 'c' thing would be shown up for the heathen idol it is.

Oh and how. fucking. right. am. I.

Don't worry, particleist you hardcore-lefty-scientist darling, I don't blame you. I'm sure you suspected something was off the whole time.

What He Lacks In Eye Distribution, He Makes Up In Ear Prominence

2005-08-24T10:32:00.000-04:00

No honestly, I need Charles Clarke to look more like the product of a doomed cross-barnyard liaison between a billy-goat and a congenitally obese rabbit.

What is with those neck-whiskers?

This Just In: Anti-Choice Lawmaker Talks Shite

2005-08-24T10:23:00.000-04:00

Hmm, well somehow this contrived to pass me by the first time around: the not-at-all-polemically-named Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act, sponsored in January by Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas, the upright gent who brought us the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act; not to mention S. J. Res 26, the proposed constitutional amendment against gay marriage; and of course the vital-to-national-security call for the FTC to investigate the maker of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. On the other hand, he also sponsored the delightfully contrite Native American Apology Resolution, which along with $2.87 will buy them a tall latte. Native Americans might be excused for holding out on the gracious apology-acceptance until Brownback sponsors a resolution to, say, return the billions of dollars stolen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Ahem).

This little legislative bagatelle 'would require those who perform abortions on unborn children 20 weeks after fertilization to inform the woman seeking an abortion of the medical evidence that the unborn child feels pain', and 'also ensure that the woman, if she chooses to continue with the abortion procedure after being given the medical information, has the option of choosing anesthesia for the child, so that the unborn child's pain is less severe.'

Senator Brownback's brownbackgrounder on the bill posits that '[m]any are unaware of the scientific, medical fact that unborn children can feel'. This might be attributable to the circumstance of its being neither scientific, nor medical, nor a fact. A new systematic review published in this month's Journal of the American Medical Association indicates that 'fetal perception of pain is unlikely before the third trimester.'

For my fellow med-porn aficionados, the reasoning:

Fetal awareness of noxious stimuli requires functional thalamocortical connections. Thalamocortical fibers begin appearing between 23 to 30 weeks’ gestational age, while electroencephalography suggests the capacity for functional pain perception in preterm neonates probably does not exist before 29 or 30 weeks.

In addition, the provision on fetal anaesthesia not only promises no evident benefit for the fetus, but could potentially harm the woman undergoing the abortion:

Little or no evidence addresses the effectiveness of direct fetal anesthetic or analgesic techniques. Similarly, limited or no data exist on the safety of such techniques for pregnant women in the context of abortion. Anesthetic techniques currently used during fetal surgery are not directly applicable to abortion procedures.

Not that we would expect Brownback & co. to be much bothered about the safety of a woman undergoing an abortion; we already know how highly they value the life of a woman as compared to that of any fetus she may be carrying. And of course it's not like Brownback and his fellow intelligent-design cult members have ever been all that concerned with niceties like scientific evidence. But still it's always nice to have one more pebble of actual empirical refutation on our side, if only to add to the vast unheeded mountain already there.

Cultural Anxieties of Imperialism: Two Case Studies

2005-08-23T08:15:00.000-04:00

Spoiler warning: This post contains spoily plot details about episodes of 'Law & Order: Criminal Intent' and 'The Closer', so if you're really hardcore about not having your police procedurals spoiled in the service of political analysis, stop right here, pardner.

In the last couple of days, in the unflagging grip of my obsession with polprocs, I've seen two episodes that struck me as fascinating reflections of the mainstream liberal culture's confused and anxious reception of the world under GWOT. Both clearly came from the fading-but-still-tenuously-dominant patriotic-liberal wing of Hollywood (this is not a given; many of these shows are or have become profoundly reactionary: witness the despicable CSI: Miami and the cybernetically jingoistic CSI: NY). Both found themselves in a quandary of befuddled handwringing, vised between their instinctual distaste for oppression, their unreasoning panicked fear of Muslims and 'terror', and their inability to even begin to frame a critique of government that might help resolve the confusion. In both cases, the muddle resulted in complete breakdown of plot and characterization, kind of the episode equivalent of a rogue supercomputer in original Star Trek being confronted by Kirk with an insoluble conundrum of logic. Smoke pouring from vents.

The first was a rerun of 'Criminal Intent', the only interesting Law & Order littermate (starring the divinely histrionic Vincent D'Onofrio, my adulation for whom will be familiar to longtime readers of this blog, and guest-starring the decidedly less appealing Chris 'Big' Noth), entitled 'Stress Position'. (I'm about to summarize the whole plot, so spoiler-stragglers, flee now.) Prison guard is found murdered, and the investigation reveals that a group of 'secret prisoners' are being held in a Brooklyn jail, under the abusive watch of a ring of corrupt guards (of which the vic was one, albeit troubled and about to leave). The secret prisoners are, it's implied, all Arabs, and are being held under the material witness statute; one former prisoner is so terrified of reprisals that he fervently denies his evident mistreatment. The secret-prisoners thing is the big hook of the plot; there's also various interpersonal stuff, and they save the day by means of the usual delightfully improbable psychological intervention by Goren, who shame-talks all the ancillary baddies into standing down and not killing him and Big and Big's girlfriend the troubled but compliant prison nurse, leaving Fat White Piglike Ringleader Guard abandoned in his corruptness.

But here's what's so weird. Although it's chock-full of outrage at the notion of these prisoners being treated thus, and packs plenty of exchanges showcasing that outrage, the show can't actually bring itself to blame the government. It doesn't have the balls to come out and admit that, duh, the material witness statute is a tool invented and used by the government for its human-rights-abrogating War on Terror. So instead, omg this was so weird, it invents a completely insane, barely-explained, plot-credibility-hashing Mob connection. It just suddenly waves its hands in the air and says 'Oh it was the Mob who were behind the whole thing, and who killed the guard and for no apparent reason whatsoever were maintaining a stash of secret Arab prisoners under the material witness statute. Hush hush isn't it terrible, lucky we put a stop to it.' It's absolutely extraordinary. Faced with an incontrovertible chain of logic, the logic of a real-life phenomenon that they chose to write a show about, the writers so lost their bottle that they simply jumped the rails of logic altogether and ran screaming off into the night.

The second instance was last night's episode of 'The Closer', TNT's new series starring Kyra Sedgwick as the Adorably Bumbling, personally-out-of-control Deputy LAPD Chief Brenda Johnson, who despite her Georgia accent and untidy ways always manages to get her man (or in this case woman) in the interrogation room. (This show, I must say, constantly has my misogyny sensors on low-level alert, without ever quite tipping over into full-scale Awoogah. Its relationship to Johnson's femaleness and the ways she exploits it or is stereotyped in it is far from straightforward, and I'm persistently on edge watching.)

This one was really complicated. Wealthy Iranian businessman is assassinated along with his bodyguard. FBI intervenes in LAPD's investigation, looking for $2M the dead man supposedly had. References to terror investigations and national security ensue, met with scorn and disbelief from Johnson and her boss. They go to the victim's house to interview the widow (played by Marina 'Deanna Troi' Sirtis, looking like aging ass I must say and wearing, as an Iranian widow, rather more clothing than ST fans will be accustomed to, which these days is probably a blessing) and son, and find the FBI have trashed the place searching for the money, which it appears they had given him themselves in some never-clarified sting. Sympathy for the victims from Johnson, menacing references to the PATRIOT Act from the FBI liaison, who happens to be Johnson's boyfriend Fritz.

Here's where it starts to get complicated and kind of ugly, because the widow is angled very sympathetically, and the whole oppressed-Muslim-woman thing is played to the hilt, with ample coverage of her fearful but restive obedience to her angry son, and a constant uneasy juxtaposition of blame for the Feds' paranoia and brutal methods with the never-resolved implication that the victim, and now his son succeeding him, were in fact involved in funding terrorism. Johnson does a lot of mooning about worrying and trying to protect the widow from her son who slaps her in public (she slaps him back), but the woman insists on staying with him. Then the Feds arrest the son and send him (possibly) to Egypt for interrogation, giving Johnson the opportunity to express her personal opposition to torture. So that's that covered.

In the end it gets even more confused, because it turns out, based on some entirely contingent and dull plot details, that the murder was in fact plotted and committed by the widow and her lover, a white doctor who was trying to save her from her husband who wanted to send her back to Iran to his fundamentalist family. So we get this extraordinary interrogation scene where Johnson has the widow and doctor in a room and he's telling her not to say anything, to get a lawyer, and Johnson manipulates her into confessing by telling her that if she waives her rights to counsel and to remain silent, she will at last be taking control of her own life and not letting men tell her what to do. And this is played like sisterly solidarity! We're supposed to be cheering Johnson on for empowering an oppressed sister to incriminate herself for premeditated murder!

Tearful confession, big cow-eyed sympathetic gazes from Johnson, then suddenly she turns all hard and says 'Well what about the innocent man [the bodyguard] you also murdered in cold blood, just so you wouldn't have witnesses?!' Onscreen consternation, momentary confusion while the audience tries desperately to figure out what we're supposed to be thinking, followed by the Feds suddenly busting in and dragging the woman away, sobbing for them not to hurt her son, while Johnson just sits in her chair looking tiny and wide-eyed up at the (male) FBI agent who's stolen her perp.

The whole thing was astonishingly jumbled, in gender, religion, race and authoritarian terms. It just didn't know quite what it thought in any cohesive way, but it was pretty sure that Islam was bad, because it oppresses women and, you know, it's probably linked to terrorism, and then on the other hand that women who are oppressed might turn out to do desperate things and kill innocent men, and that's bad too, but it's also bad if the FBI come and take them away from you, and also the FBI might probably be bad, unless they're your boyfriend in which case they might have a reversion to conscience late in the plot, in which further case it will be all right to end the episode by deliberately stopping and with a coy glance allowing him to open the door for you like a lady. A lady cop, of course, but Still A Lady.

The GWOT has scrambled liberal minds. They're stuck between the rock of their terror of terror and the hard place of government encroachment on civil liberties, with a substantial dash of siege-mentality xenophobia thrown in to make the ground (beneath the rock and the hard place, you know, stay with me) slippery. They literally just don't know what to think anymore, and they end up thinking many logically incompatible things at once, some of which are commendably compassionate and others passive, bigoted or downright cruel. Result: they make TV shows that make no sense. Chalk up one more casualty in the War on Terror.

The Immorality of Moral Hazard

2005-08-22T01:31:00.000-04:00

Via WII, a good piece in the current New Yorker from Malcolm Gladwell (for whom I usually have scant time), on the fatally flawed theoretical/ethical underpinnings of the Bush Administration's plans for health coverage, the much-hyped Health Savings Accounts initiative.

A particular strength of this piece, beyond the fact that it takes the time to clearly delineate both the deprivations suffered by Americans lacking health insurance and the manifest failings of our health system across the board, is its focus on the pernicious effects of moral hazard theory.

Moral hazard, a primary linchpin of the motivation behind cost-sharing measures like HSAs, is an economic theory positing that easy (e.g., free or low-cost) availability of a commodity leads to profligate consumption of that commodity. It's usually used in the context of insurance, to describe the phenomenon in which having insurance causes the insured to engage in riskier behaviors, presumably because her personal liability for bad outcomes is now greatly limited.

As Gladwell points out, moral hazard has been a major factor in health economics for the better part of the last four decades, and underlies cost-cutting efforts like HSAs and high deductibles and co-payments on the grounds that, if you force personal health liability back onto the individual, she will make more economically sensible choices with respect to healthcare consumption.

There are two big problems with this model. The first, ideologically, is that it commodifies healthcare in ways that simply don't stand up to scrutiny. Health consumption is manifestly not analogous to the consumption of commodities like cars, TVs, &c. Nor is it analogous even to consumption of staple commodities like food. The dynamics of healthcare consumption are vastly more complex than this, taking into account, for example, preventive care: the decision to forgo a dermatological checkup may appear to be a sensible economy in the short term, but if it allows an undetected malignancy to spread it will eventually prove much more expensive, both in economic terms (exponentially greater cost of treatment) and in terms of the individual's actual life. Multi-factored, diachronic calculations like these are not reducible to the economics of commodity demand. And from a purely philosophical perspective, to attempt to do so has the additional negative effect of discounting any notion of healthcare as a human right, distinct from the discretionary consumption of material goods. Which is, of course, very much part of the point.

More concretely, studies have shown that, while moral hazard-type incentives do in fact play a significant role in healthcare consumption, they don't play out the way the classical theorists would have us believe:

Mark Pauly, one of the architects of the conventional insurance theory, recognized this ambiguity as early as 1983. He pointed out that his original theory of moral-hazard welfare loss was intended to apply only to “routine physician’s visits, prescriptions, dental care, and the like” and that “the relevant theory, empirical evidence and policy analysis for moral hazard in the case of serious illness has not been developed. This is one of the most serious omissions in the current literature.” This distinction, however, has been lost on most health economists. For example, health economics textbook writers continue to present moral hazard as being unambiguously welfare decreasing, and health policy analysts continue to use the conventional theory in developing their recommendations for optimal cost-sharing rates, managed care programs, and other policies designed to curb U.S. health care costs.

If even Mark Pauly, Mr. Moral Hazard himself, recognizes these limitations, you can bet they're pretty glaring. In fact, the use of moral-hazard reduction measures like increased cost-sharing has been shown (note here the actual data findings, not the tendentious interpretation) to reduce consumption of healthcare not merely for 'frivolous' needs like cosmetic surgery, but across the board. That is to say, people who will have to pay more for their healthcare consume less healthcare regardless of how urgent their need is. Heart meds or Viagra, Botox or broken bones, people who can't afford their health care will do without any or all of it. This result is a perversion of the ostensible intent of moral hazard reduction, i.e., to minimize unnecessary or excessive expenditure, and in fact shows up instead the real nature of healthcare cost-cutting initiatives, which are by and large indifferent to questions of welfare increase or decrease, so long as costs are reduced. This is the inevitable result of the commodification of healthcare.

I've said it before: for-profit healthcare is the moral equivalent of war profiteering. It is morally bankrupt and relies for its perpetuation on demonstrably false shibboleths of market efficiency, the primary importance of 'consumer choice', and capitalist incentivization. The United States stands practically alone in maintaining this barbaric let-them-eat-cake system of 'caring' for its citizens' health. When will we join civilization?

Dept. of The Incredibly Useful

2005-08-21T11:08:00.000-04:00

Students in a new sleep medicine course at Warwick Medical School 'are being taught the importance of getting a good night's sleep .'

Presumably this is so that when they become residents, they'll know to an acceptable level of scientific accuracy precisely what they're missing.

Just Beyond Disgraceful

2005-08-21T10:15:00.000-04:00

What. THE FUCK. is this:

Truly the Beeb have gone out of their zionism-enfeebled little minds. This is the lead photo on the BBC News home page, linking to an article entitled with DeMillean eschatological grandiosity 'Final prayers at Gaza settlements', and describing, in full maudlin Technicolor, how the last handful of fascist colonists are being removed from the settlements, weeks ahead of schedule and with minimal difficulty, in the last act of the Tragedy of Israel's Heartbreaking Sacrifice.

8500 illegal settlers have been politely and swiftly removed from their illegal homes, given fat wads of cash and rehoused at the state's (read the States') expense.

Or, as the Beeb would have it, ISRAEL IS IN FLAMES!

It's utterly, utterly disgraceful. Read this excellent piece by Jennifer Loewenstein in Counterpunch about the deliberate fabrication of this shameful spectacle. What she said.

You Tell 'Em, Jenny

2005-08-20T09:22:00.000-04:00

The Metropolitan Police Authority, 'an independent authority that scrutinises the work of the London police force', has issued a bold indictment of the Met's conduct after the extrajudicial execution of Jean Charles de Menezes:

Authority member Jenny Jones said it should have been "an immediate priority" for police to clarify the information after the 22 July shooting.

One suspects Authority member Jenny Sparks might have had something a bit more trenchant to say on the subject, followed by the summary electrocution of Sir Ian Blair and sundry other criminal elements.

Meanwhile, the death-defying mendacity continues apace, Sir Ian (an anagram, btw, for 'raisin'; coincidence? I think not) taking the bit firmly in the teeth he so relishes lying through, after several days of bitchslapping by the media:

'The thing that I would want to say is that of all the allegations made in the last couple of days, the matter I would most want to reject is the concept of a cover-up.'

Well yes, I don't doubt you would very much want to reject that allegation. I don't think anyone's asking if you want to reject it so much as whether or not you have a hope in hell of getting away with rejecting it. Which, sadly, it looks increasingly likely he will; as the Beeb noted yesterday, nobody important is calling for his resignation. Only, you know, the people whose son his boys butchered.

I do love when they lie about the lying. It all takes on a kind of psychedelic hall-of-mirrors effect, like if they nest enough lies around each other, eventually the outermost lie will in fact be a truth, because it double-triple-quadruple-negates the lies inside it. That's just a theory though; I've never seen it pulled off in practice.

Not content with building his personal Mighty Ziggurat of Lies, Sir Ian is shamelessly exploiting the July 7th bombing victims for a classic Look Over There gambit, exhorting people 'not to let the shooting overshadow the deaths of 52 victims of the London bombers.'

'Tragic as the death of Mr Menezes is, and we have apologised for it and we take responsibility for it, it is one death out of 57.

"The context here is the largest criminal inquiry in English history with 52 innocent victims dead, still double figures of people whose lives have been wrecked, four dead bombers and we can't let that one tragic death outweigh all others.'

Leaving aside the fact that he appears to have taken the curious step of including the dead bombers in his sympathy-tally purely for the purpose of boosting his Deaths Which Outweigh Menezes's Death count, he fails to acknowledge the salient differentiating factor. To wit, while the other 56 deaths are all being vigorously pursued in 'the largest criminal inquiry in English history', Lucky 57's death, at the hands of those very inquirers, is the object of a criminal cover-up by same.

It's a detail, but I think it's relevant.

Incredibly Lame Joke I Just Made Up Myself

2005-08-19T10:53:00.000-04:00

If bees are kept in an apiary, where do apes live?

Crawford, of course.

I know, I'm sorry. I don't make the rules.

South Carolina Wants Inconvenient Poor People To Die

2005-08-18T12:58:00.000-04:00

Via Princess Sparklepony (pleasing and newly discovered thanks to Whatever It Is), this astonishing intel about South Carolina's plans to 'reform' Medicaid, America's government health insurance program for the poor and disabled. As currently constructed, Medicaid covers beneficiaries for a fair number (though by no means all) of health services and treatments, regardless of the total costs of their care.

Under the new proposal, Medicaid recipients will instead be given 'personal health accounts' to pay for care, with a capped amount of money in them allocated according to age, gender and health status. If their accounts run out, i.e. if they get sick more often or more expensively than the government thinks they should, they'll have to make up the shortfall out of their own pockets, or go without.

So let's play this out. A single mother on welfare or, worse, with a job at Wal-Mart, gets lupus. She has kidney failure, and has to go on dialysis, maxing out her personal health account with maintenance treatments that will last the rest of her life. But then, oops! Liver goes too. Assuming no wealthy patron appears to rescue her, now she gets to choose how she wants to die: quickly from not paying for the liver transplant, or (relatively) slowly by choosing the transplant and stopping dialysis? Truly 'consumer choice' is a marvelous thing.

Naturally the right can hardly walk for the hard-ons they've got over this:

Devon Herrick, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, said the plan promotes personal responsibility.

"If they've made wise choices, they might have money left over," Herrick said. "If they've made poor choices, it might take some money out of their pockets."

Herrick said Medicaid recipients already have a hard time finding doctors willing to see them because of the program's reimbursement rates, he said. The lack of access can itself lead to health problems.

"I think they'll get better care because I think most of us in private health plans do get better coverage than Medicaid enrollees, even if on paper, Medicaid looks better," Herrick said.

See how that works? They get shitty care now because Medicaid pays so little, so the answer is clearly to give them less money, and make it their fault when it runs out. It's all about 'wise choices', you see. Poor people get sick through choosing foolishly, and they'll only stop it if we make them pay. Or of course if they die. In which case, problem solved!

I swear to god, if you look closely you can actually see the mark of the Devil branded on these people's foreheads.

Talk Dirty War To Me

2005-08-18T09:37:00.000-04:00

What is it with military porn? No, I don't mean those ever-elusive Abu Ghraib images. I mean, what is it about military jargon that makes everyone, even the most hardened anti-imperialists among us, go wobbly-kneed with awful secret shameful crush? Get some deadeyed jarhead General from Kentucky on the news talking incomprehensible nonsense about 'running hot' and 'tracking point elements' and suddenly we're all crossing our legs while we carry on decrying the occupation (with, I strenuously stipulate for all our lovely wingnut friends waiting to pounce and tar us hypocrites, undiminished sincerity and good faith) in now-strangely-strangled voices. It's a brain-stem thing. It makes no sense. Examples.

OK, so Juan Cole, right? None more impressive blogger, blindingly knowledgeable, insanely useful resource, a man deserving of utmost respect and admiration, and widely in receipt of same. But not exactly Gary Dourdan, you know? Yet today, he's all

Since the guerrillas have so many former military officers and veterans in their ranks, and since they know where thousands of tons of hidden munitions are buried, they believe they still have an edge over the ragtag Shiite militias such as Badr Corps and Mahdi Army. I personally think they would need tanks and helicopter gunships actually to prevail; but maybe they think they can buy some on the world market.

and I'm like, 'Well hello sailor!' All because he personally thinks they would need certain items of military equipment, and he sounds reasonably like he knows whereof he speaks. What is up with that?

Or yesterday, in a thread at the Tomb about the ever-more-obviously-criminal extrajudicial execution of Jean Charles de Menezes, Meaders posts a clip from the Sunday Times about the kinds of weapons carried by the 'armed response team' (read 'death squad') that whacked JCdM. And as I'm reading, the inferno of my outrage not one whit dimmed, somewhere in my lower lower brain I'm going, 'Ooooh, "a specially modified Heckler & Koch G3K rifle with a shortened barrel and a butt from a PSG-1 sniper rifle fitted to it".' It's just not right!

I honestly don't know what this discomfiting thing is about. If anyone has any insights or hypotheses, I'll be delighted to entertain them.

Disengage This

2005-08-17T11:50:00.000-04:00

Like the rest of the world, I've spent the past few days marinating in schmaltz occasioned by the Gaza Disengagement till I feel it exuding a slimy film from my every pore. The media are beside themselves with an orgiastic spectationfreude that queasily combines kneejerk zionist empathy (those poor brave Jews, driven from their hard-won homes! why, they Made The Desert Bloom™!) with orientalizing fascination for the manifest religiwackos wailing and davening in dusty squares with their freaky-ass black boxes strapped to their heads.

C-Span, that unchallenged champion of punitively soporific legislative programming, tore itself away from the proceedings of the House Sub-Committee on Navel Exploration Appropriations the other evening to lend its platform to the Israel Broadcasting Authority, as fronted by this curious gentleman, speaking flawless Middle Atlantic Broadcast English and looking for all the world like Peter Jennings in a kipah:For an approximate eternity we were treated to a lacrymose cavalcade of caterwauling settlers bemoaning their savage abandonment by the world (much like the woman interviewed on Five News the other night, who asserted with truly unexampled chutzpah 'I know... [sob]... if an Arab were to go through what we are going through... [sob]... everyone - the US, Europe, *everyone*... would say "No Way". But... [sob]... with *us*? It is as if we are not human.' via CM), interspersed with interviews with Israeli citizens like this fine specimen,

whose asseverations that the Disengagement is a violation of 'moral law, Israeli law and international law' had the double virtue of not only being factually incorrect, but also manifesting a startling and unprecedented interest in the concept and existence of international law at all (one could have been forgiven for surmising that Israel had been out sick that day, and nobody would loan it their lecture notes. But no, turns out they knew about IL, they just didn't think it was all that relevant before), and appearances by po-faced government officials and former Air Force generals trying to appear to give a shit about the settlers while walking the strange line of simultaneously supporting the policy and deeming it a grave national hardship.

And I watched all this, watched all these people unblinkingly asserting the horror and misery of 8,500 fascist, racist, murderous scum--who are uprooting their own olive trees (not content with having destroyed so many thousands of the Palestinians' during their occupation) so the Palestinians won't have them, who tell the news cameras they would be glad to leave behind their chattels undestroyed if only humans would be getting it, but Palestinians aren't humans (via WII), who have terrorized and butchered and starved and shat on a million and a half Palestinians for decades--the unspeakable tragedy of these filth being graciously moved into accommodations elsewhere and generously compensated for their inconvenience in giving back the land they cleansed the Palestinians from. And I thought, Israel is a metastasis.

Israel is the malignant, life-destroying outgrowth of traumatic events that, for vast numbers of Jews living today and since the nazi holocaust, instilled a sense of essentialized, inherent victimization so profound and so durable that it has come to reflexively justify any and all means of 'survival'. It's a tumor, born of grave injury to the body of world Jewry and allowed to proliferate unchecked in all directions, engulfing and annihilating not only innocent others like the Palestinians who happened to inhabit Palestine in 1948, but also anything good and human and humane that might have survived in Judaism's conception of itself in relation to the world.

Jews could have come out of the holocaust with a fierce, fire-hardened resolve never to allow such atrocities to occur again, anywhere, to anyone. No doubt some, even many, did. But Zionism came out of the holocaust bent on the creation, fortification and relentless expansion of a racially exclusive Jewish state, and if atrocities had to occur, if innocents had to die (be they Palestinian or Jewish) to achieve that always-already corrupt project, so be it. From the word go.

I think of Israel and I am sick with rage and horror and vicarious shame. Not. In. My. Fucking. Name.

BTW, it's a bit old now, but if you missed it then it's instructive to read last October's Ha'aretz interview with Dov Weisglass, (via Rafahpundits), for a reminder of what the Gaza Disengagement is really for, and how very little hope there is in this supposed 'step forward'.

No Worker Too Small

2005-08-17T09:11:00.000-04:00

Hello, I'm back from my sybaritic seaside revels, and I can't quite decide if this is really cool or really creepy. Or plausibly, I guess, both. Scientists have harnessed up algae cells and made them haul tiny cargoes of polystyrene beads around little chambers, dubbing the petite slaves (not even a carrot to motivate this workforce: they're enticed along the desired path by attractive low-intensity light, or else driven along it by repulsive high-intensity) 'microoxen'.

Most chilling statement from the report's co-author: 'We harness their motors to make them perform unconventional tasks.'

The imagination balks.

Joint Chiefs Wriggle Like A Detainee On A Wire

2005-08-13T08:15:00.000-04:00

(As WIIIAI has also noted), the Bush Administration was revealed yesterday in its, by my count, third desperate and wholly discontinuous attempt to resist releasing the torture images from Abu Ghraib, as ordered by a federal judge in early June.

(Attempt #1 was of course my favorite for sheer barefaced gall: they argued that to release recognizable images of the men, women and children being tortured, raped, sodomized, set on by dogs and beaten to bloody mincemeat by US forces would constitute unacceptable humiliation and therefore violate the victims' rights under the Geneva Conventions. This gambit of truly epic chutzpah was swiftly dispatched with reference to the miracle of modern photographic redaction technology.)

This latest effort, revealed in arguments submitted to the US District Court by General Richard B. Myers on July 22nd, claims that to release the images would 'pose a clear and grave risk of inciting violence and riots against American troops and coalition forces.'

[Myers] said it was "probable that al-Qaida and other groups will seize upon these images and videos as grist for their propaganda mill," leading to violent attacks, increased terrorist recruitment, continued financial support and a worsening of tensions between the Iraqi and Afghani populaces and U.S. and coalition forces.

[....]

Myers said the United States has documented situations in which insurgents have falsely claimed that U.S. actions in Iraq caused suffering to women and children when the damage was actually done by violence and sabotage by the insurgents.

He said the insurgents rely on doctored photographs and images to support their calls to violence.

This is absolutely extraordinary. The logic of this argument is twofold and utterly, fatally bankrupt. It posits that:

i) If the consequences of revealing crimes which we fully acknowledge having committed threaten to prove harmful to our cause, we have no obligation to reveal them. I.e., the way to avoid harmful consequences is not to avoid committing the crimes, but to refuse to reveal them later, even when we've admitted to them.

ii) The fact that our enemies allegedly fabricate similar evidence of wrongdoing on our part absolves us of responsibility to reveal true, unfabricated evidence. This is completely fallacious; the one accusation, even if true, has exactly no bearing on the other assertion. If we didn't want to hand our opponents propaganda-on-a-platter, we might have considered not issuing orders abrogating international conventions on prisoner abuse. But tough luck, we did, and now we have to belly up to the fallout. The fact that it gives Iraqis more reason to loathe and resist us is not some unfortunate collateral effect, it is precisely the point.

The government's obligation to reveal the Abu Ghraib images is an obligation not particularly to Iraqi insurgents who may indeed use it for 'propaganda' purposes (wouldn't you?), but to its own citizens, to the abuse victims and Iraqi citizens who suffer under the jackboot of this depravedly human-rights-indifferent occupation, and in fact to the entire world, which has every moral right to demand accountability from the hyperpower that claims the quasi-divine prerogative of enforcing global Freeman Moxie at the point of a gun.

The Triumphal, If Short-Lived, Return

2005-08-12T10:10:00.000-04:00

Hello hello hello, bloggy friends. What a pleasure to see you all again after so long away interacting with actual real people in the real world who have faces you can see. All very disconcerting. And you know the inconvenient thing I discovered? When you shout at a 'person' in the 'real world' that they're an ignorant asshole lacking any scrap of analysis or historical rigor and they should shut the fuck up and stop polluting the universe with their warmongering filthy spew, there is no little 'x' in the top corner of them you can then click to make them disappear. They remain stubbornly present, as do the violent invective and fisticuffs they then proceed to direct your way. This is a design flaw, I feel.

Anyway. Having evaded by less than 24 hours (yes! an idiot non-anecdote!) the demi-Inferno that is Heathrow Terminal 4 (and here may I insert a massive fucking big up to the T&G members at BA who walked out in solidarity strike with the Gate Gourmet workers who have been treated beyond abominably by their putrescent union-busting employer, which among other more concrete offenses told the union that its workforce, mostly composed of minimum-wage workers from South Asia, 'is a community we cannot work with'. Racist fucks. All the solidarity in christendom to the sacked GG workers and their supporters, and here's trusty Lenin with a basket of useful resources in re), I am once more, albeit fleetingly, ensconced in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

Fleetingly I say, for tomorrow I'm awa' to Cape Cod for a few brief halcyon days, my one and only trip to the sea this whole summer. I know, I know, it's practically five weeks in Crawford (less the bronco-bustin' or the [presumptive] armadillo-tackling--and how fantastic would it be if he caught leprosy?). You have my apologies for such slackerousness (which is more than you'll fucking get from His Chimpesty), and my assurances of utmost diligence upon return. It remains possible that I will have connectivity in my sandy seclusion and hence be able to resume service in situ, but I don't know yet, so I wanted to Manage your tender Expectations and not o'erpromise.

Meanwhile, I wish to thank the divine Tempestua for her custodianship in my absence. You'll have gathered that I have a rather checkered acquaintance, given that Ms. T is the one I deemed best (least ill?) suited to represent me in public. She is, you'll surely agree, an Original. And Harry my dear, it will do you no good at all to go mooning about here plaintively wondering when Tempestua will be back, or if she perhaps left a message for you, a lipstick or a forwarding address. You're not the first to fall prey to her desiccated but curiously puissant charms, and you undoubtedly won't be the last. Safe to say that when in the fullness of time (gods willing many long, pickled years from now) Tempestua takes her leave of this mortal plane, the coroner will assuredly be called to the tearful scene to pry her rigored fingers from the delicate bits of some poor bewildered innocent who only came in to deliver a Get-Well bouquet from one of her countless admirers. Ladies and gentlemen, Tempestua Ignatieff.

Little Tameem And The Mystery Of The Floating Quote

2005-08-12T05:25:00.000-04:00

Woke this morning, rather late and very dry about the mouth, to an excited email from George, which he apparently sent at 3am. He has recently, with my encouragement, graduated to broadband, with the result that instead of getting a message from him about once a month, when he remembered to connect, they now come thick and fast. An additional encouragement in this respect has been his acquisition of a laptop (a rather dainty 12" iBook, as it happens) and an AirPort Express, so he now surfs from bed, and has, so he informs me, discovered the delights of chat rooms. For myself, I discovered chat rooms years ago, but never their delights. Oh well.

In any case, George, I surmise, is now a regular visitor to such sites as gaywired.com, where he discovered the news, eagerly forwarded, that the Crown Prince of Qatar was recently outed by a Middle Eastern newspaper, allegedly after getting into a fight at G.A.Y. Having been to this club myself once, when charged with looking after Jasmine's younger son Terry for the evening, I have no idea why someone with as many exquisite options open to him as I presume the young Crown Prince has should end up there, but to each, as this whole business so amply demonstrates, his own.

George's interest in this story was largely personal: he was charged, many years ago, with 'organising security' for the Qatari Royal Family; it was one of his last jobs, and I imagine all that was required of him was to smile and make small chat as they wandered round Fortnums, but he rather took to them, and particularly the then-small boy. 'What a surprise!' his email concludes, 'Little Tameem! But you know, I swear I saw something in his eyes.'

I hate to break it to George that this revelation, and his post-facto investment of some kind of emotional significance in what I will refrain from pointing out to him was a shared glance between a man of near-retirement age and a seven-old-boy, may, as we used to say, be heavily underseasoned (and thus need a pinch of salt: do you see? How witty we once were!). It's striking that the claims seem to have eluded the mainstream media entirely, and while, as Professor Chomsky would doubtless point out, that hardly means it's not true, even OutRage!, in their press release on the subject, add the caveat:

The police say they have no record of any charges. We cannot discount the posibility that the story was put out by the Prince's political enemies in a bid to discredit him and to destabilise the government of Qatar.

At this point, some of you may be doing a double-take: press release? OutRage!? Well, quite. It turns out they have not, however, resurrected the campaign, with which they toyed more than a decade ago but which they never put into practice, of outing public figures, and decided to start with little Tameem. Rather, the story gives them an opportunity to continue harping on endlessly in their assault on Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Islamic cleric who popped in for a chat with Mr Livingstone last year and caused such a storm in his teacup. Even to skim over the endless saga will probably bore you beyond recovery, but as you probably recall this proposed visit was the target of a sustained campaign in the media in which the ever-boyish Mr Tatchell played a major part, and which rather irritated many members (I use the word 'many' in a relative sense, of course, as I am about to the word 'out') of the out Muslim gay and lesbian community, who were confused by his apparent claim to speak in their name, and far from sure they agreed with what he was saying. All this led to the rather peculiar circumstance of Mr Livingstone and Mr Tatchell swapping dossiers in which they offered competing glosses on the learned cleric's Islamic scholarship. Certain people, of the variety I hope I may be allowed to refer to as Friends of Ocky, rather suspected that Mr Tatchell had been co-opted in all his huffings by the pro-Israeli lobby. (Never let it be said that because I am old I am no longer in touch with things!)

Now Sheikh Qaradawi is back in the news, being mooted by newspaper journalists and the like as a possible candidate for Mr Blair and Mr Clarke's exciting new Coach and Horses policy (You're barred!, do you see? Tee-hee.) And the maybe-true maybe-not catfight in which little Tameem and one Michael Heard are said to have indulged among all those provincial homosexuals in the Astoria provides Mr Tatchell with a new opportunity to weigh in on the get-him-out side, with this apparent revelation (in the same press release) that:

The Crown Prince of Qatar should be stoned to death for being gay, according to Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim fundamentalist scholar who is based in Qatar.

These allegatons appear in the Middle East news magazine Aljazeera.

Dr Qaradawi was defended by the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, in a Guardian comment article only yesterday, Thursday 4 August.

Aljazeera quotes Dr Qaradawi as saying:

"The scholars of Islam, such as Malik, Ash-Shafi`i, Ahmad and Ishaaq said that (the person guilty of this crime) should be stoned, whether he is married or unmarried."

This news is an absolute gift for Mr Tatchell, who has been squabbling endlessly with Mr Livingstone over whether or not the good doctor actually throws his weight behind stoning to death as an appropriate sanction for gay men (far more severe, certainly, as OutRage! notes, than the current legal penalty in Qatar, 5-10 years imprisonment). Previously, the best direct quote from Sheikh Qaradawi that he could find on the subject was this rather equivocal waffle, from a long article in the enticingly-named 'Fatwa Bank' of islamonline.net:

Muslim jurists hold different opinions concerning the punishment for this abominable practice. Should it be the same as the punishment for fornication, or should both the active and passive participants be put to death? While such punishments may seem cruel, they have been suggested to maintain the purity of the Islamic society and to keep it clean of perverted elements.

Now, when that was all OutRage! had, they certainly did their level best to milk the stone for all it was worth:

The death penalty only seems cruel, he argues, until we understand that it is actually necessary “to keep [Islamic society] clean of perverted elements”

But all of that fun sophistry is now rendered happily redundant by the Aljazeera (a magazine, not the TV channel) article upon which OutRage! bases its press release. After all the article itself clearly says, as Mr Tatchell relates:

The eminent Qatari based scholar Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi also quoted:

"The scholars of Islam, such as Malik, Ash-Shafi`i, Ahmad and Ishaaq said that (the person guilty of this crime) should be stoned, whether he is married or unmarried.”

At last: no more beating about the bush. The double-tongued doctor, so elusive in conversations with Western media, has gone and said what he really thinks to an Arabic newspaper. (Actually, he's apparently gone and said what some other people think, the named 'scholars of Islam', think, and even here voiced no clear opinion himself. But hey-ho.) As the press release goes on:

"Dr Qaradawi appears to be encouraging the murder of a person in the UK, which is a serious criminal offence," says OutRage! "We are astonished that Mayor Livingstone is still supporting him."

Well, that's all sorted out then. Naughty Ken. Evil, duplicitous Doctor. Vindicated OutRage!

Except Dr Qaradawi never said it.

Ha! Weren't expecting that, were you? Tempestua, fearless investigative journalist and learned Islamic scholar! Well, sorry to disappoint, it's more Tempestua, member of a generation that was actually taught English at school, and Tempestua who can recognise the odd sentence if she's seen it before.

Forgive me for going about this the long way, but it's the easiest way to make things clear.

OutRage!'s press release (have the link again if you like, it's a long way up) says:

Aljazeera reports that other scholars from Islamonline.net, have also endorsed the execution of the prince, citing the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad to justify the death penalty for the heir to the Qatari throne:

"Whoever you find committing the sin of the people of Lut, kill them, both the one who does it and the one to whom it is done." (At-Tirmidhi: 1376)

Which is half-true. Aljazeera cites two quotes from Islamic scholars on the death penalty, one apparently from Dr Qaradawi and one other, as follows:

Scholars of Islamonline.net condemned the actions quoting religious text:

"Almighty Allah has prohibited illegal sexual intercourse and homosexuality and all means that lead to either of them. Moreover, Islam emphatically forbids this deed [homosexual sex] and prescribes a severe punishment for it in this world and the next. How could it be otherwise, when the Prophet of Islam (peace and blessings be upon him) said: "Whoever you find committing the sin of the people of Lut, kill them, both the one who does it and the one to whom it is done." (At-Tirmidhi: 1376)

The eminent Qatari based scholar Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi also quoted:

"The scholars of Islam, such as Malik, Ash-Shafi`i, Ahmad and Ishaaq said that (the person guilty of this crime) should be stoned, whether he is married or unmarried.”

Well, I've seen both of those quotes before, and so has Mr Tatchell. Because they're lifted from the very same fatwa bank article that contains Dr Qaradawi's equivocatory ramble that was the basis for OutRage's earlier rhetorical gymnastics around his use of the word 'seems'. OutRage! even link back to the article at the bottom of their new press release.

Are you still with me? Good. Yes, it's as simple as that.

Now, Aljazeera, or whatever work-experience teenager stuck the article together from a quick Google, has certainly made a mess of the quotes. The second one, which they attribute to Dr Qaradawi, doesn't come from him at all; it's further down the piece, after his long text, and either after or within the text by one Sheikh Muhammad Saleh Al-Munajjid; a floating double-quote makes it hard to be sure. And the first one is actually a running-together of two quotes, the first sentence (from 'Almighty Allah' to 'either of them') from Dr Qaradawi and the rest ('Islam emphatically forbids' to the end) from the aforementioned other chap.

'Moreover, ' is an interpolation.

Naughty, lazy, lying OutRage!. Now, I don't add 'lying' because they were so preternaturally dim that they didn't spot that the quote on which they base their entire press release wasn't by Dr Qaradawi after all -- but because not even said work-experience teenager tried to claim that these old recycled citations from islamonline.net were anything else.

It was OutRage! who added the invention that these sentences, which we know for a fact that they have previously pored over looking for evidence against the poor maligned Doctor, were responses to the alleged news of the alleged outing after the alleged fight, from 'scholars [who] endorsed the execution of the prince'. They weren't; they predate the whole G.A.Y. business by more than a year. OutRage! even have either the idiocy or the cheek to add:

Dr Qaradawi's comment to Aljazeera reiterated his "gays should executed" opinion delivered in the fatwa "Homosexuality and Lesbianism: Sexual Perversions" issued last year (17 May 2004).

In other words, the thing in the 17 May 2004 article on islamonline.net that Dr Qaradawi didn't actually say himself was apparently Dr Qaradawi himself now reiterating to Aljazeera an opinion that Dr Qaradawi did not, in the first place, express in the 17 May 2004 article on islamonline.net.

For myself, I prefer to remember Mr Tatchell as he used to be, years ago. Perhaps -- I'm not really sure I want to know -- like George does little Tameem.

Surrender

2005-08-11T13:32:00.000-04:00

On the horizon, a gathering darkness, through which bright white worms briefly wriggle and are gone. Around it the sky is stained, damp and grey. It's disconcerting, seeing a storm so far off. You know the silence in which you now witness it is wholly absent there, that it will approach relentlessly as a great army, drums building and gunfire echoing towards you, until your now-innocent patch of land begins to tremble, and the daylight seeps from it, and the tempest is suddenly on you in all it raging fury.

Can you see? Can you hear? There, just there, if you hold your breath?

With no hurry, with monumental deliberation, Ocky returns.

Neglect

2005-08-10T03:21:00.000-04:00

Oh dear, I really am letting things go. Bad Tempestua! Believe me, I know. I tried to warn Ocky that any appearance I might give of capability was merely the kind of illusion they used to teach you at finishing school. And see? I have let another two days go by without a single post, and even now I don't have the time to make a proper start on what I had been meaning to tell you about. And then tomorrow Ocky will be back, and poor little Tempestua will have blown her chance to do some good for once. At least by now I'm used to it. In fact, I have never been under any illusions about myself, which is why I never had children. It's not that I wouldn't have loved them, it's that I'd have woken up very early one morning, like this morning, briefly confused, and then wondering at the magical ability of gin to eradicate whole days, but instead of now, when at least the limit of my sin is allowing Ocky's blog to drift past its best-before date, I would find some tiny thing, starving and screaming. Even Harry, I hope, is not as starved on my account.

No doubt, though, the brief and thrilling friendship which Harry and I have enjoyed, our shared little firework display, will fade away when he realises how little I really have to offer; and Ocky, too, understandably let down upon her return, may drop round at funny hours less often than before. But then I seem to be shedding friends quite vigorously at the moment. Witness delicate little Jasmine and our adventure on the tube. I'm very fond of Jasmine, really, but the tiny creature is a nervous wreck, and last week, when our bridge game was interrupted, as usual, by George's quite bizarre version of narcolepsy, she began to tell me how, in the current circumstances, she had been avoiding the tube. Unfortunately for Jasmine, whose father was a most tedious roué and left her nothing but debts, avoiding the tube is not really an option: not only can she not afford taxis, but she most certainly can't afford taxis to Pinner. Of course, I brightly offered to go the first few stops with her to give her confidence, which was gratefully accepted, and off we went. At the station entrance was one of those gnarled individuals selling the Evening Standard, who told us it contained all sorts of detail on new and unimagined terror threats, and thinking we might need some distraction I bought a copy. For some reason it came with a free bottle of water, and as we descended in the station lift I offered it to Jasmine, for her nerves, which she politely refused. Now, exactly what about that exchange I should have found so amusing is beyond me, but the fact remains I was most taken with it, and while I managed to avoid actually smirking, I couldn't resist repeating myself. So as we waited on the platform for the train I asked her: 'Are you sure you wouldn't like the water? For your nerves?', to which she simply shook her head, and, a few stops later, after some discussion of the fashion these days for multiple, discrete terror cells, when it was time for me to leave her, I kissed her goodbye and bid her luck, and added, 'Jasmine dear, really, why not take the water? It might help with your nerves, you know,' -- to which she looked suddenly tearful and muttered very quietly, but believe me, utterly uncharacteristically: 'Oh fuck off Tempestua.' Which, with a look of surprise that was not a little manufactured, I did.

Do I suffer from a failure of empathy? What made me torment little Jasmine so? I don't like to think of myself as a cruel person, but from time to time, I catch myself behaving in ways that I can't easily otherwise describe. I'm sure Jasmine and I will patch it up -- at her age, let alone mine, one tends to hold on to friendships, friends being an increasingly endangered species -- but I wonder, now, what the point of all that was. Perhaps I made her sufficienly angry to distract her from her nervousness: if so, is it an excuse?

This I do know: friends, and even whole days, may disappear, but gin endures.

Reassurance

2005-08-07T13:39:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the many of you who have, in the wake of the sudden silence that followed my initial flurry of posts, emailed to check on my health. Evidently my advanced age is of concern not only to me. Rest assured I am fit as the proverbial, nor indeed would I be averse to a fiddle, but I've had no more time for that (NW aside, on which more later) than I have to fulfil my babysitting obligations here. Indeed, my admiration for Ocky, whose output here is so regular it could be a testament to a fibre diet, grows ever stronger. I've also had the great pleasure of encountering, in the comments box here and on their own blogs, many of her friends, all of whom seem to share her youth and vigour, not to mention her optimistic desire, which goes alongside that, to feed what I recently had to inform George he is no longer allowed to call 'all the hungry little piccaninnies of the world'. Still, the poor man's heart is in the right place, unlike, it must be said, his shoulders.

From Uzi To Ufi

2005-08-05T08:08:00.000-04:00

The robust Mr Blair today announced a wide slew of measures apparently designed to prevent terrorism by stopping people talking about things. We will now no longer welcome people who "foster hatred", although there appears to be no ban, for the moment, on directly giving birth to the stuff, which may come as a relief to certain members of the Conservative Party. He will be introducing laws to deal with "the sort of remarks made in recent days" -- I presume this too is not a direct move against the Conservatives, but as he doesn't tell us which remarks he means, or who made them, it's hard to tell -- and be consulting with the Muslim community on laws to close mosques, which is nice of him, as they are presumably just the people who might have an interest in that kind of thing. He'll also be working with the same community on a commission to advise the same community how to integrate itself better, although it seems this is a special privilege he will be extending only to Muslims. Some of us, who feel, what with reality television and Heat magazine, rather cut off from the rest of society ourselves, might have welcomed, in these difficult times, a commission of our own, to better advise us on how to interact with young people and those in the service industries, but I suppose these changes must be incremental.

Not mentioned by Mr Blair, but recently announced, and in the same vein, is the development of a new requirement for prospective citizens, who, before swearing their allegiance to this country -- something, thank god!, that those of us who were born here have never had to do -- will be asked to take a test on their 'knowledge of life in the UK'. I happen to know something about this, as my gardener, Luis, is trying to bring his lady wife here at the moment, and as the poor chap's rather hard up, I undertook, for his birthday, to pay her fee for this examination. It was with some surprise, then, that I found I would soon be writing a cheque for £40 not to the Home Office, or Hampshire County Council, but rather a company called Ufi Ltd, which runs something called 'learndirect centres' on behalf of the government, and will be administering these tests for the state. Never having heard of Ufi, but impressed with the serious nature of their activities, at least judging by the importance Mr Blair places on all this stuff in protecting us against threats unimaginable, I had a quick peep at their website. In particular, I wondered what kind of career would ready someone for the captaincy of an organisation designed to prepare people for life in this country, and weed out those whose knowledge of the life or language here was inadequate. Well, it turns out the key qualification is a solid track record in arms sales: both the chairman and chief executive of Ufi have spent the great part of their previous professional lives working for BAE and other military suppliers, the former, some years ago, having had direct responsibility for the Saudi account. At first this seemed a bit odd -- how much crossover can there really be between selling military aircraft on the one hand and promoting good citizenship on the other? But as a business strategy, I suppose, it's rather brilliant: first you sell disreputable governments military hardware, and then you charge £40 to each of the refugees who subsequently pitch up here trying to avoid said guns and bombs. If it is people as clever as this upon whom Mr Blair is relying to manufacture a more consensual society for us all, I'm sure we have little to fear.

How To Blow Up The US Embassy

2005-08-05T04:27:00.000-04:00

Brunch yesterday morning at 202 with George (his real name, not that it'll do you any good), who I notice has taken recently to describing me as an 'old flame', which is revisionism of the most energetic variety. Oh well: these days, it's hard to begrudge anybody their fantasies or evasions, at least the harmless ones.

For the food, I regret to say Ms Farhi has a lot to answer for. It is, to my mind, hardly on to advertise 'fried green tomatoes' and then deliver something the pillarbox hue of which, concealed in its cornmeal crust, you presumably hope will go unnoticed. More sinisterly, but at least intriguingly, when George, perhaps out of some misdirected impulse to impress, ordered the tuna burger, the young waitress informed us said burger had been taken off the menu 'until further notice'. How grand! What form this notice will, in the fulness of time, take, went unstated. A full-page advertisement in The Times, perhaps.

Fried green tomatoes, or at least those promissory words, are a big deal for me these days, but less so for George, as he was a little too keen to tell me. In fact he had recently been treated to lunch, by wallet, or perhaps purse, ostentatiously unspecified, at Le Gavroche, no less. Of course, I was able to squeeze in the news, which comes directly from Alex Who Does For Me, and is God's honest truth, sharing as they once did a gym, that the Marathon Chef goes commando, which discombobulated George more, and perked him up less, than I'd anticipated; frankly, I'd have thought, the number of layers between Petit Roux and your Omelette Rothschild are less important than the fact of such layers per se, and even in their wholesale absence any risk posed is not so much to you as to the eventual takeover of the lease by the third generation. But I digress.

The point of this story, inasmuch as I have one, is that George, wandering out of the restaurant rather sozzled in the mid-to-late afternoon, and emerging, as one does, bang outside (perhaps that should under the circumstances read 'right outside') the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, had encountered a couple of the policemen that now guard the place giving directions to a tourist. Now, it may well be that Ms Octopus has an international readership who are not familiar with the recent and not-so-recent changes that square has undergone: I remember fondly the days, as you will not, when the embassy building's optimistic glass had not yet been obscured with protective cladding, and indeed, in the days of the great modernist Hiltons, before all that silliness in Southeast Asia initiated the great country's slide, among certain factions, into gross unpopularity, even attended a couple of free jazz concerts there. But if the once-encouraged public access to the building was eliminated from the ’60s, such changes were trivial compared to what happened in late 2001. Looking at Grosvenor Square today, it's almost as if the Americans are trying to acclimatise themselves to Baghdad by recreating it outside their London staging post: concrete barriers, of the same kind that now protect our parliamentary members from Otis Ferry and his whinnying crowd, line the park in old Eisenhowerplatz, and are yet one more disincentive to trying to park near Selfridges (the incentives for which, forgive me for saying, continue to diminish. These places are meant to be forbidding. That is why they used to be, for those of us who were comfortable entering, such oases); residents of prissy little Blackburne's Mews, running behind the great building, are ahead of the rest of us with their already-compulsory identity cards, which they must produce at the miniature Checkpoint Charlies at both ends of their street when they pop out for a pint of milk; and the local bobbies have for some time been carrying the most ferociously unpleasant-looking guns, great black tubes on a scale beyond the capacity, I would imagine, of even hungry little Alex Who Does to incorporate, and which are probably capable of shooting down the next hijacked Ryanair flight from Stockholm.

The point of George's story was that these very officers, PC Plod gone Rambo, had been engaging most, I suppose, engagingly with the misplaced tourist, and trying, with evidently limited success, to help him locate Upper Brook Street in an A-to-Z. I pronounced myself rather pleased by this vision, which seemed to me tremendously if obscurely reassuring, but George was more dismissive, particularly given that Upper Brook Street was the extension, merely a block over, of the very road on which they were stationed. Surely, he insisted, they should have known where they were. What, he demanded, would they have done had the urgent announcement suspect vehicle on Upper Brook Street come crackling over their walkie-talkies?

He had a point, I suppose, but as usual with George the point of this anecdote was less its tenuous interest -- believe me, I know -- and more, rather too obviously, the reassertion of his alleged professional life, which has receded even further over the visible horizon than his hairline, in the world of security. I have never given much credit to the more august of his claims in this respect, George's lavender tendency having remained, despite all his contorted misdirection, rather sweetly overapparent since university, and his desperate need for comfort having been, for just as long, so palpable that it would have been clear even to the most bluffly imperceptive recruiting officer quite how immediate would be George's surrender, in the sympathetic company of not only a young and broad-shouldered Soviet, but probably even an aged and podgy one, of any and all state secrets that had been entrusted to him.

My own assumption, if you are curious, is that George did play some kind of supporting role in the great drama of our secret state, but that it was an administrative one, and even at the late stage of his career did not score particularly well on the great security-clearance pole-vault. Now that career is as permanently behind him as the slight but growing hunch about his shoulders, but like the rest of us, he has plenty of time for retrospection, and so it is understandable that, keen to walk off his stupor of grenadin de veau aux morilles, he wandered round the square in the mental drag of an active intelligence officer. And here, so he related, he became somewhat excited, because the conviction slowly gripped him that a tremendous oversight had been made by those charged with protecting our American cousins. Now, if you and I were gossiping over puds in the Fifth Floor restaurant, I would relate quite happily the details of George's theory: I don't, after all, believe the poor chap really knows what he's talking about, and while even I will concede the Americans seem to be ballsing things up a bit at the moment, I'm sure they are giving it their all, considering the frightful eyesore they are prepared to make of that lovely square, as far as such prophylaxis is concerned. But this friendship of ours is virtual in more than one respect: I am sure Ocky's friends are a lovely bunch, but how can I be sure that I am not unwittingly dropped in on, say, by one of the minions of the unpleasant Mr al-Zawahri, who popped up on our screens yesterday with more of his finger-waving hectoring?

(Those of us who fell prey, in our middle years, to a passing obsession with the Nouvelle Vague, will have noticed a peculiar thing about this latest transmission -- not that Mr al-Zawahri looks not unlike Ronnie Barker in a stick-on beard, which he does, but that whatever you learn in CIA or al-Qaeda training camps, it does not, apparently, include learning to focus a video camera. It is the gun propped up behind him that is sharply-defined, not the crabby Egyptian, who is dressed, by the way, to fit right in with Selfridges' Autumn/Winter Black and White promotion, but appears nevertheless in a terrible blur. But then he is in the centre of the screen, which is where today's cameras are taught to auto-focus: so the possibility arises that far from an oversight, this is a deliberate aesthetic choice on the part of the film-maker, and if so, the question follows, to what end? I don't, I must tell you, have a good answer to that. I toyed momentarily with the hypothesis that it was somehow meant to impair the intercession of whatever artful CIA algorithms are now crawling all over the image, but if he wanted not to be recognisable he'd have stayed off-screen; I considered too the possible agency of simple vanity, the soft focus doing for the ageing grouch's skin what it used to do for movie post-starlets before digital smoothing took over, but if that was a concern he would have gone for a more flattering angle than the veritable belly-level to which we are relegated. Or maybe it is a mistake to look for an explanation in the effect on al-Zawahri alone, and we should rather consider the intention behind the mise-en-scène entire: the director may be drawing our attention to the gun even as we listen to the translator's inevitable voiceover, either because it is a neat symbol for violence, or because it says this is what is constant: our leaders may change but our methods will not. Or maybe the camera just found nothing to focus on in the white expanse of tunic and went for an easier option instead. But once again I digress.)

In any case, George became quite worked-up over the course of relating to me his apparent insight, and went straight off after brunch, in a taxi, no less, to compose an email to various authorities, on which he copied me, and which was copiously illustrated, the following being but one of many attachments.

Poor George! And yet is the unvarnished desire for human contact, for someone simply to listen, so evident in his excited little missive, any different from whatever illusions I myself am sustaining as I bash out this now embarrassingly overlong circular to persons of whose existence, apart from the delectable Harry's, I can hardly claim certainty?

But perhaps I am grown too cynical. Perhaps there are thousands of you out there eager to share in the little ups and downs of my day; perhaps, even, George's urgent memorandum will not be peremptorily deleted by a spotty functionary, but make its way up some serious and secretive command tree and result in refinements to security arrangements that may in their turn prevent or discourage all kinds of unwelcome nastiness on the very door of the enchanting Gavroche. Perhaps the noisome little yahoo to whom all the people George has busied away several of his precious remaining hours for eventually report will stop using the unlovely Mr al-Zawahri's idiosyncratically-video'd harangue as an excuse for the dizzying and apparently impromptu sophistry that this all goes to show that Iraq is -- note he did not say was -- a part of the war on terror (a war I believed had been dropped in favour of global struggle, but has now come back, not unlike the phenomenon which eventually led to my presence on this blog), and go and do something useful instead, like jump off a bridge. After all, as young people like Ocky and Harry keep showing us, there's something rather beautiful about optimism, in the end.

Relax

2005-08-04T18:03:00.000-04:00

Did that first post sound bitchy? Don't get me wrong -- delightful creature, one of life's treasures. But, it must surely be conceded, a little loud after a while, no? My only ambition during this brief babysitting exercise is to be a smaller voice, albeit not entirely still or calm. Earthquake, Wind and Fire will be back soon enough. You'd never guess, but in person she is a pussycat.

The name, the more observant among you will have realised (and to the others: forgive me, but we won't be stopping too often for you to catch up), is an obvious pseudonym. I'm afraid I'm one of those people who don't really trust all these endless promises of online privacy, although I have, as it happens, recently begun to shop from Amazon: did you know they accept cheques? A bit of a kerfuffle, but you try parking in Onslow Square these days.

Still: for here, for now, and however much it may sound like a bad drag queen (which I am not; they may be a tad deflated, but they are all mine) my name is Tempestua. Welcome to my chill-out zone.

I'd say you're stuck with me for the week, but of course you're not. Pace Echelon, the internet is yours to escape to, with all its brutish glamour. Be off, then, if you must, to your spectacle piercings, your nanofactory visualisations, your gay Harry Potter castrato porn. With which, after all, I can hardly compete.

Has She Gone?

2005-08-04T12:02:00.000-04:00

Are we alone?

There. Everybody breathe.

Right

2005-08-04T09:43:00.000-04:00

I'm off for a week or so to sunny Glasgow and various other points east.

To ease your passage through the dark hours of my absence, I've done the trendy thing and arranged for a guest blogger to fill my Jimmy Choos.

I tracked down my dear friend Tempestua tricking for smokes on an insalubrious corner, and enticed the little hellion to blogsit for me with the promise of unlimited Chinese takeout and a place to crash.

I trust you will accord my surrogate pro tem the same degree of respect and deference you do me, which is to say none at all.

How Is This News? How Is It Even Interesting?

2005-08-04T09:17:00.000-04:00

This is a story about a rabbi. He hasn't done anything particularly newsworthy, nor has anything been done to him; he's just a Reform rabbi in Manchester. Is it such a fucking slow news day that we need to be informed that there are about 1500 Reform Jews in Manchester and Rabbi Silverman views them as his 'extended family'? What is with this endless orientalizing fascination with Jews qua Jews?

Oh, and by the way, in case we're curious about his position on Israel:

"We keep a very critical mind on developments in Israel whilst being very supportive of Israel," he said.

"We are not blinkered and we speak our minds openly in terms of human rights.

"I've had a couple of visits to Israel and Palestine in recent months as part of my involvement with Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel."

The movement's position on Israel is that it is "deeply saddened that, up until now, the Palestinians have failed to agree peace terms which we believe to have been a fair and just settlement of the conflicting claims and clashing rights that have bought so much suffering to the area".

Mm yes, how very critical. For you, random rabbi, a universe of Fuck Off And Die.