Hitler!, I Coulda Killed Her!

Michael Gerson isn't really worth mentioning, but as he notes a famous debate exchange between Buckley and Vidal, it is worth noting that he omits Buckley's first response to Gore calling him a cryptonazi, which was to sneer, "Now listen, you queer."

Also, Gerson rehashes the usual Spielbergian sepiaization of the Holocaust as a sort of touchstone memorial. Here is an interesting, important, and timely counterpoint that has the added benefit of being written in a language appropriate for human beings who are able to walk upright, feed themselves, and put on their big-boy pants.

Not the Size of the Ship, but the Motion of the Ocean

Exhibit A:

[...]Ashraf Ghani, the most educated and Westernized of Afghanistan’s presidential candidates, is shaking up the campaign before Thursday’s election in unusual ways.

Exhibit B:

Mr. Ghani’s national support is hard to gauge — one recent poll put it at just 4 percent — and he probably remains an outsider in the race, trailing Mr. Karzai and his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, both of whom have much larger power bases.

Exhibit C:

Such is his experience, and his support in Washington, that Mr. Ghani is among the contenders mentioned to fill a strong executive position under the president that is being proposed by American officials to strengthen the government’s performance should Mr. Karzai win another term.

Well, fortunately, to paraphrase a different arm of the entertainment-industrial complex, no Afghans were harmed interviewed in the filming of this episode writing of this story.

McThoughtProcess

Aside from the almost insanely, historically inaccurate implication that pre-industrial agrarian societies were consuming larger daily calorie loads because they were working so hard in the fields, what strikes most about Yglesias' encomium to market-based nutrition is that it marks him as the last Liberal on earth not to have read Michael Pollan's charming children's science text, The Omnivore's Dilemma, which can be read over a lunch hour. Well, he may not have read anything else written about food and agriculture in the last thirty years either.

If he had, he would understand that Fast Food is the business of selling unhealthy food. It's the business of delivering calories to consumers at higher margins than the nice little restaurant down the street. Food is expensive. Preparing fresh and healthy foods is expensive and time consuming. The industrial processes that turn corn, beef, and potatoes into "billions and billions served" do not produce healthy meals, or low calorie counts. They produce unhealthy meals with indigestible additives. They produce foodstuffs that are chemically engineered so as not to sate hunger as effectively as a nice bowl of pasta at the nice restaurant down the street, so that you will buy more. Fast food is the business of short-circuiting normal gustatory desires in order that you eat more of it. The marginal cost increases of increasing fast food serving sizes are less than the increase in revenue from tacking on an extra fifty cents or a dollar for a Supersize. Saying the the fast food industry is not inherently about selling unhealthy food is like saying that the petroleum industry is not about selling hydrocarbons; saying so because there are some "healthy" alternatives or nods in the direction of other people's national tastes is like saying the petroleum industry is not about selling hydrocarbons because you saw one of those ads that tells you BP means beyond petroleum.

(I am not inherently opposed to large-scale agriculture, although I am opposed to the deranging influence of state subsidy on what gets produced and what does not. Industrialized production of grain staples combined with far more localized production and consumption of produce and meats seems to me to be something worth pursuing, at least until Roland Emmerich's 2012 destroys the world . . . or, at least, America.)

In any case, the conviction that consumers want something, ergo The Market produces it, is fine for undergraduate economics, but here in the fourth dimension there is a remarkable science of advertising, which unlike its chiropractic counterpart, psychology, has demonstrably proved itself capable not only of regulating human behavior, but of creating and modifying human desires, and it is this science in partnership with food science that guarantees many more years of fat people eating thousand-calorie burger combos. America. Fuck. Yeah.

A Tautology for our Times

If you try any preversions in there I'll blow your head off.

-Col. Bat Guano

A friend asks that I comment on the presently popular expression, "It is what it is." You may be familiar with it. Perhaps your boss has stopped by your desk at five to five.

BOSS: Listen, uh, we're going to need you to front-burner this spend management growth process report.

YOU: Who's "we"?

BOSS: Well, okay. Me.

YOU: What do you mean, "front-burner"?

BOSS: You know. Put it on the front burner.

YOU: Um, you mean, do it sooner?

BOSS: I don't think we need to take a deadline approach.

YOU: So I can do it whenever?

BOSS: Sure. Yes. Absolutely. But we do need it tomorrow morning.

YOU: [sigh]

BOSS: Hey, I feel you. But, you know buddy, it is what it is.

Or, perhaps your favorite powerpitcherback was just accused of peeing on babies in an Atlantic City Casino suite and is speaking at a hastily called presser:

REPORTER: Would you care to comment on these allegations?

ATHLEBRITY: Well, you know, I'm just, you know what I'm sayin? Because teamwork, that's what matters. You know what I'm sayin? I just, these guys, and the coach, you know what I'm sayin? I'm just gonna keep giving it my all, you know? Because we're gonna take it one day at a time, and just, you know, build a team. You know what I'm sayin?

REPORTER: So you have no comment on the charge that you urinated on infants in your hotel room during a recent Atlantic City trip?

COACH: I think what he's saying is that his mind is in the game, and he's going to focus on the fundamentals.

REPORTER: But the allegations--

SPOKESCREATURE: [interrupting] Look, regrettably we live in a culture where people who achieve celebrity through excellence are targeted. And I think we all expect these sorts of things to arise from time to time. It is what it is.

Or perhaps you were hoping to hear the President say that he would string up past torturers by their torturing little fingers:

PRESIDENT: I am interested in looking forward, not backward. Whatever past wrongs, those are not America. What happened is what it is, and cannot be changed. But we can look forward.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

I Am the Walrus

It's like Lenin said, look for the person who will benefit. And you will, uh, you know, you'll, uh, you know what I'm trying to say. . .

-Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski

Oh my. Sara Robinson, "one of the few trained social futurists in North America," has diagnosed Amerikkkkkka with an acute case of futurefascism! Our good friend Al Schuman puts his arm around her shoulder and strolls in the direction of the woodshed on that number. Meanwhile . . .

Ms. Robinson moonlights for something called Cognitive Policy Works, which is exactly as funny as it sounds. Pulled at random from their site, some language:

social change strategist and facilitator of idea implementation for people seeking to innovate at the intersection of the advocacy, policy, and technology worlds.

values opportunities to learn new skills and perspectives and use them to envision creative new solutions

innovative marketing models inspired by the open source software movement.

the cognitive dimension of particular material policies and how the cognitive dimension—the often-unstated ideas behind material policies—shapes those policies. We are especially concerned with how change in those ideas point toward material policy changes.

A major consideration for climate policy is how the air is conceptualized. Is it a substance, or a void—a nothingness?

Or does it explode?

Leave it to these Dilberts ponder the Phlogiston Theory behind a scrim of obfuscating, Business-Week, "best practices," managerial-class jargon. This is progressivism, kids: an internet-bubble ad for a company that's just a website that doesn't do anything. Well, like the senator, or whomever, once said, it beats farming.

Anger, Frustration Consume Senator in Health Debate

LEBANON, PA - Hoping to confront the growing dissension that has marked the debate of health care reform, Senator Arlen Specter, a Republican-turned-Democrat, was eaten by a boisterous crowd yesterday in this small town in Pennsylvania.

This largely rural area has faced tough economic times in recent years, but suspicion of President Barack Obama runs deep. Mr. Specter hoped to assuage some of those fears, but his efforts may not have been successful.

More than 1,000 people showed up for this meeting, many to voice their dissent. Echoing statements recently made by prominent right-wing radio and television personalities, they demanded more less and less more. Debbie Bulkycowski, a local mother of two who waited in line for over an hour but did not gain admission, put it succinctly: "I ain't no diabetes forehead, mouseclick Limbaugh row." Such sentiments were not uncommon.

Inside the hall, several members of the town's SEIU union attempted to ask questions about the various bills before Congress, but were forced to take a back seat when local men, several wearing VA Hospital caps, approached the rostrum and removed the Senator.

As Mr. Specter pleaded for calm and his security detail restrained a couple of women who began chanting slogans in favor of a single-payer plan that is not currently under discussion, the men opened the Senator's chest cavity with a large knife and removed his still-beating heart. Assisted by activists from as far away as Philadelphia, they constructed a bonfire and cooked Mr. Specter.

Both Mr. Specter's office and a number of other prominent Democrats from the state claimed that the crowd had been spurred on by Conservative propaganda. "You have Glenn Beck on TV telling people to gorge themselves on human blood," said Lily Beddwetther, a legislative aide. "Obviously it plays to people's fears and emotions, and so you just can't have a civil conversation."

But Erasmus Hicksworth Whorlington, a media fellow at the conservative Foundation Instutite for Traditional Heritage, disagreed. "Tensions are high and you are getting disinformation from both sides. The truth is that there is a lot of opposition out there, and people need an outlet."

Spokesmen for Glenn Beck and FOX News pointed repeatedly to transcripts. Virginia Gorges, a producer for Beck's popular evening cable show, said, "Glenn has simply noted that calls for human blood are out there. The issue has been raised, in other words. We have simply reported things that may be happening."

Ms. Bulkycowski did not get into the meeting, but she summed up the sentiments of many inside, supporters and opponents alike. "Arrest building treehouse. Fall the big powder up inside. Exit cold why nothing yesterday."

Step Right Up, Ladies and Gentlemen. Authentic and Eastern! Cures What Ails Ya!

It certainly speaks to our character as a nation that our "wrenching conflict over torture" was, like everything else in America, somebody's get-rich-quick scheme.

The linked article contains the usual fallacies, asserting that these were "important" interrogations because importance has been confused with notoriety, claiming that the Bush gang was "eager to get tough on those who had killed 3,000 Americans," when for the most part they were interested in getting tough on unlucky Afghan cab drivers and sexually violable little boys. And it embraces the larger and more pervasive fallacy that as a matter of principle The United States Does Not Torture, and therefore Docs Mitchell and Jessen's Patented Water Cure represented a clean break from a lamb-like past, when we should all know by now that whether it was fighting its own Indian Wars or helping various Latin-American juntas fight their own dirty wars, the US sure as shit tortured, and how.

Well, as the great poet Galway Kinnell wrote in his great eulogy, we know the spirit flowers without stop, but a man is in particular flesh, and so too America's torture programs, here born of two itinerant shrinks with nothing but a suitcase, a dream, and some grisly instructions from Chairman Mao, who from his teatime with Nixon in hell looks upward and laughs, oh, he laughs.

America is the huckster's last native soil, and since the species is being eradicated in Europe and Asia by the creeping destruction of its natural habitat, it is only decent and proper that our government should strive to preserve him. From Ahmed Chalabi to Curveball to our good Doctors, they bloomed like roses in the desert after a rain. If we cannot extricate ourselves from this recession by ordinary means, why, we can subsist indefinitely by selling each other bridges and swampland.

It Means, Blessed

Every time I read something by Ezra Klein I think of one of those movies where Keanu Reeves hatches from an egg inside of the mainframe and then is Mila Jovovich and someone who might be a scientist says "she is learning at an incredible rate!" but still she remains a child. Leloo Dallas, multipass! Anyway, there is little to add to what Wilkinson already wrote, except to point out again and for the billionth time that modern liberals are technocratic utopians who truly, truly believe that if only the right people were in charge, things would be fine. They truly, truly viewed the George W. Bush presidency as a unique rupture in American history, a time outside of time, and all the howling about the mendacious, lying, violent, dishonest, opaque, nightmarish, totalitarian government during the past eight years simply lost its relevance when Barack Obama took over. It no longer obtained. They do not conceive any continuity in the American government; they imagine that each new presidential election represents a new incarnation, a new cosmic cycle, a new creation.

In Ezra Klein's honor, I quote a better Baracka:

A NEW REALITY IS BETTER THAN A NEW MOVIE!

How will it go, crumbling earthquake, towering inferno, juggernaut, volcano, smashup.
in reality, other than the feverish nearreal fantasy of the capitalist flunk film hacks
tho they sense its reality breathing a quake inferno scar on their throat even snorts of
100% pure cocaine cant cancel the cold cut of impending death to this society. On all the
screens of america, the joint blows up every hour and a half for two dollars and fifty cents.
They had taken the niggers out to lunch, for a minute, made us partners (nigger charlie) or
surrogates (boss nigger) for their horror. But just as superafrikan mobutu cannot leopardskin his
way out of responsibility for lumumba’s death, nor even with his incredible billions rockefeller
cannot even save his pale ho’s titties the crushing weight of things as they really are.
How will it go, does it reach you, getting up, sitting on the side of the bed, getting ready
to go to work. Hypnotized by the machine, and the cement floor, the jungle treachery of trying
to survive with no money in a money world, of making the boss 100,000 for every 200 dollars
you get, and then having his brother get you for the rent, and if you want to buy the car you
helped build, your downpayment paid for it, the rest goes to buy his old lady a foam rubber
rhinestone set of boobies for special occasions when kissinger drunkenly fumbles with
her blouse, forgetting himself.
If you don’t like it, what you gonna do about it. That was the question we asked each other, &
still right regularly need to ask. You don’t like it? Whatcha gonna do, about it??
The real terror of nature is humanity enraged, the true technicolor spectacle that hollywood
cant record. They cant even show you how you look when you go to work or when you come back.
They can’t even show you thinking or demanding the new socialist reality, it’s the ultimate tidal
wave. When all over the planet, men and women, with heat in their hands, demand that society
be planned to include the lives and self determination of all the people ever to live. That is
the scalding scenario with a cast of just under two billion that they are not even whisper.
It’s called, “We Want It All . . . The Whole World!”

Vince Foster, Redux

Christopher Hitchens. Without him, I cannot imagine the internet, or, at least, The Blog. A tedious drunk who believes that he is independent because he is mercurial and brave because he . . . well, he wrote rudely of Kissinger, it was his frankly insane decision to "support" our Iraqi misadventure that gave so much material to early bloggers, and for that, let's thank him.

But what must it be like to be Hitchens, for whom the classic truism that the personal is the political has long-since swollen like an overripe zucchini after a heavy rain, become useless and flavorless, a mere curiosity, goofy and fascinating in its grotesqueness?

Let me stipulate that Hitches is almost certainly correct in assuming that the North Korean government intended all along to use Ling and Lee as pawns in a cruel and silly public relations maneuver, yet if the Dear Leader succeeded, it was not because of The Clinton, but because of Hitchens and his hysterical colleagues, who have seized the moment like puppies seizing a stick, growling, yapping, and yanking futilely, wholly unaware of their own miniature silliness. Imagine writing:

The two young women were picked up in March and released in August. That means they spent almost half a year in the North Korean prison system. Yet to judge by the photographs of them arriving back on U.S. soil, they were in approximately the same physical condition as they had been when they were first unlawfully apprehended.

Now, I spent less time than that as an honored guest in North Korea and still managed to lose weight during my stay.

Holy mother of heaven . . . perhaps you weren't drinking as much, you paunchy monstrosity, you single-malt tumor, you flabby, winded, emphysemaic facsimile of a human being.

The notion that this rescue operation constituted some great and incalculable expense to America, Freedom, The World is beyond absurd. As far as I can tell, an aging American celebrity got permission to fly to North Korea, did so on the private dime, sat for several grim photo-ops, and returned with two nice American girls who were thankfully in okay shape, who had thankfully not been horribly mistreated. For the cost of a vacation, two women were sprung from the slammer, and now that slim and acceptable cost has been added to the gristle of past resentments on which Hitchens forever gnaws.

Unsinkable

Now here is an interesting story. America invaded Afghanistan, occupied its capital and created a new government. It installed a fellow named Hamid Karzai as President. Karzai found that the only means to exercise power in a heterogeneous country like Afghanistan is to broker deals between rival factions, in essence governing by shifting coalition. This is all a bit esoteric, since Afghanistan's central government doesn't control most of Afghanistan, but, you know, can't have everything. Meanwhile, "American officials have grown increasingly disenchanted with Karzai's leadership over the past five years, amid rising Taliban violence, rampant corruption and an ineffective bureaucracy." The dilemma: the one thing that the President of Aghanistan can do effectively is campaign for reelection, for although he lacks the resources or "security forces" to govern his fractious nation, he at least has enough helicopters and bodyguards to run a decent whistle-stop campaign and enough cash to bribe and suborn local power brokers.

On the other hand, the Afghan Constitution! How many divisions has it got? So why not create a "Chief Executive," with the perfectly plain intention of vesting him with Prime Ministerial powers and relegating the "President" to a mere head-of-state--not, to be sure, an uncommon arrangement among national governments. Of course, you would not want to pick his nearest rival, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, who appears to have garnered the pre-election support of about a quarter of the voting population. You might instead consider a fellow like Ashraf Ghani, "a former finance minister with a doctorate from Columbia University, [who] has worked for the World Bank and has a reputation as a competent technocrat." He hasn't got more than 4% of the vote, but America's got what, the equivalent of five, six divisions in-country with more on the way? It's like the old joke, how many tens of thousands of American soldiers does it take to shuffle the deck chairs on the Titanic after it has already sunk and the world has been destroyed by an asteroid the size of Texas and the Sun has gone nova and the universe has experienced heat death and is at last naught but black holes and dark matter and the cold iron cores of dead stars? A lot, that's how many!

Quote du jour of the day

Duh. Or, to put it another way, the social conflict between freedom and restriction is an argument that liberals and progressives have been struggling with since the days of Spinoza, if not earlier.

-Tristero

Well sure. Or since the days of Erasmus, if not earlier. Since the days of Augustine. Since the days of Heraclitus. Since the building of the pyramids. Since the advent of agriculture. Since the mitochondrial Eve.

Well, as Baruch Spinoza often said, "The basis of virtue is not arguing with morons." We might note instead that libertarianism, properly understood, is a political philosophy concerned with the scope of power, to which the specific applications of power are largely considered irrelevant, whereas liberalism, properly understood, is a political philosophy concerned with the specific applications of power, to which the question of power's proper scope is largely considered irrelevant.

Both approach the relation of human beings to power as physics might approach the question of just how much strong nuclear force a man needs in his life, and just which atomic nuclei he wants it to affect in what manner.