Our country wonders this weekend what is on President Obama's mind. He is apparently, about to bring months of deliberation to a close and answer General Stanley McChrystal's request for more troops in Afghanistan. When he finally announces how many, why, and at what cost, he will most likely have defined his presidency, for the consequences will be far-reaching and unpredictable. As I read and listen and wait with all of you for answers, I have been thinking about the mind of another president, Lyndon B. Johnson.

Ozark, Ark | November 20

Examiner - A police officer In Ozark, Arkansas could face criminal charges after he Tasered a combative ten-year-old girl last week.

According to a police report, Officer Dustin Bradshaw was responding to the girl’s home on November 11 because the girl refused to go to bed. Bradshaw reported the girl was acting violently, even hitting and kicking officers as they tried to move her.

Thursday, November 19, 2009 3:30 PM
Poll: Majority of Republicans Believe ACORN Stole the Presidential Election
Katie Connolly, Newsweek

As his hopes of winning the congressional election in New York's 23rd district fade, conservative candidate Doug Hoffman is clearly getting desperate. Today he's blaming his loss on "ACORN, the unions, and the Democratic party" who he alleges, without a shred of evidence, tampered with votes to rig the election against him. Never mind that ACORN told David Weigel that they didn't have volunteers in the area, or that it largely operates in poor urban communities, which NY-23 is not. For conservatives, ACORN is shorthand for the evils of the left.

It works but slowly.

Definitely alpha level of development.

Mike Shepard |Washington Post Staff Writer |November 20
Wapo - Paulo Roberto Vieira stumbled into the Brazilian consulate on L Street NW bedraggled, nearly broke and at the end of his rope.

Dressed in a battered black leather jacket and scuffed black jeans, he told consular officials an almost unbelievable story -- that he had just ridden his motorcycle from his home town in southern Brazil to Washington, a monumental, 18,000-mile quest for official recognition of his life's proudest work, a vehicle accessory he says he invented.

Here's some music from the cradle of civilization - it has the core of all rhythms (according to a few commenters).

more videos in comments, add one! - ed

Henry Ford, for all his faults, once stated that he needed to pay his workers enough that they would be able to buy the cars they manufactured. I guess globalists thought such laws don’t apply when you ship the jobs to a foreign land.

Now I hear people say that a cheaper dollar will make American products more competitive to foreign buyers. Who exactly is going to buy these “cheaper” American goods? Some Chinese guy earning $2 a day? Now out of a job because there’s an ongoing depression in the United States?

Rather than bring the rest of the world’s workers up to some sort of decent living standard, global financial players and manufactuers raced toward the lowest common denominator: workers earning slave wages, receiving no benefits, toiling in unsafe conditions, exploited to produce a bunch of cheap disposable products then sold in our big box stores.

Interesting take from Sabrina Tavernise in the NYT:

The military and intelligence establishment remains unassailable. It is both revered and feared by Pakistanis, who suspect its nationalist fringes of maneuvering behind the scenes, with help from allies in the news media, to keep civilian governments off balance.

At the same time, the news media today need little prodding, and are more diverse, powerful and nationalistic of their own accord than at any other point in the nation’s history.

“The media has a larger-than-life role,” said Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States. “It’s been setting the agenda for the country.”

Pakistanis themselves are not entirely comfortable with that development. In a Gallup Pakistan poll released last Friday, nearly one-third of 2,765 Pakistanis surveyed blamed the media for political instability in the country, according to the Gilani Research Foundation, which released it.

The anti-Americanism is part of that new media explosion. “It reached a fever pitch,” said Madiha Sattar, a journalist with the monthly magazine The Herald, who wrote a cover article on the topic in October.

Pakistanis have reason to mistrust the U.S. of course. Most notably our backing of the military dictator Zia who crushed dissent and executed the elected president. That was followed by ignoring the region once the Cold War ended. Now we're suddenly concerned again. It's no wonder the local Rupert Murdochs see a play in fomenting against the Great American Satan.

Extraordinary microscope images

Montréal, Québec | November 19

CBC - China's terracotta warriors are coming to Montreal in 2011.

The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal will receive rare visit of 14 of the warriors — life-sized replicas of soldiers of the Qin dynasty — it announced on Thursday.

Flying is the pits, especially in America. It's also getting worse:

A failure early Thursday morning of a system that feeds flight plans to air traffic controllers snarled thousands of flights in the eastern United States. By mid-morning the system was working again, but the backlog caused wide airport delays.

The same system failed in August 2008, but it was not clear if the cause was the same this time. The system, the National Airspace Data Interchange Network, situated in Atlanta with a backup in Salt Lake City, was a casualty of another failure in the tightly linked [system], one official at the Federal Aviation Administration said. Technicians were still trying to determine the cause of the glitch.

This is just another argument for a better, more comprehensive and expanded rail system in the United States. Sure, it's not a 'shovel-ready' infrastructure project, but it is one that will help grow the economy, create jobs and increase the quality of life for many Americans.

The airlines would surely lobby against such a thing, however, just like Southwest lobbied heavily against a high-speed regional Texas rail system several years ago.

For the second day in a row, the new bushfire warning system has been implemented down under.

The map shows all areas affected by the top three warning levels for Nov 20th - the first time I can recall seeing nearly 50% of Australia under immediate threat of bushfire, with almost 60% of the Aussie population living in that area. Night time temperature in Canberra today, Nov 19 is ~22C - the normal maximum November daytime temp. We are experiencing Jan/Feb daytime temps. It's going to be a long summer, and record high temps are likely to continue.

I'm going to say right up front that I don't come to any conclusions in this post. I was simply struck the contrasting outcomes in these otherwise very similar stories.

First there is the news that the pseudonymous call-girl and author "Belle Du Jour" has revealed her true identity, as a PhD level cancer researcher named Brooke Magnanti. Check out how her illicit activities have paid off for Dr. Magnanti:

The Belle du Jour blog became a hot media property, spurring speculation about the true author, a lucrative book deal. The book was serialized on UK prime time television in 2007’s “Secret Diary of a Call Girl,” starring actress of Billie Piper, and eventually played on pay cable in the US.

When I read this story, I couldn't help but recall the sad story of Brandy Britton, an American college professor who similarly dabbled in prostitution, but with a very different outcome:

More after the jump.

Read and weep.

I have been reading The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor written over half a century ago, and have been continually struck by Flannery's use of the word nigger in a matter of fact way with no apparent underlying hint of racial bigotry.

I grew up in Australia in the late '60's and '70's and was educated to understand that nigger was a racist term used by 'rednecks'.

Can any agonistas comment on my perception that nigger was a common term in the USA, and became increasingly understood as dis-respectful only in the past fifty years?

Consider two turkeys. One is a wild turkey, part of a flock that lives in our pecan bottom along the banks of the Guadalupe River. She finds food, shelter, water, protection from predators and all the other things she needs to survive in her environment.

The second turkey lives across the road, not more than a mile from the first, in a house full of domestic turkeys being fattened for market. This turkey has a roof over her head, climate controlled air, is never too hot, never too cold. Food and water is automatically dispensed at all hours of the day and night for her consumption. The walls keep predators at bay.

Thanks to Sean Paul and Tina and all of you for having me post poems on Tuesdays. This will be fun.

The trumpeter Miles Davis used to say that he knew the music was good when he felt it "all up in his body." That's the way I feel about Rilke, who to me came as close to the pulsing undercurrent of everything as any poet ever has. Here is Sonnet #1 from the Second Part of The Sonnets to Orpheus in the Stephen Mitchell translation:

Breathing: you invisible poem! Complete
interchange of our own
essence with world-space. You counterweight
in which I rythmically happen.

Single wave-motion whose
gradual sea I am;
you, most inclusive of all our possible seas-
space grown warm.

How many regions in space have already been
inside me. There are winds that seem like
my wandering son.

Do you recognize me, air, full of places I once absorbed?
You who were the smooth bark,
roundness, and leaf of my words.

Something hits me every time I see American troops in Iraq or Afghanistan. Several World War Two veterans and fellow Vietnam veterans I know have the same reaction. It has nothing to do with the politics of the wars. It’s the uniforms of our soldiers today, the ones in combat zones. They’re astonishingly tidy. Parade-ground tidy, one might even say. I know the reason and it’s partly my fault.

Even though there are no Vietnam veterans in the military anymore (unless there’s a white-walled sergeant major somewhere with hash marks like the Union Pacific railroad), the military looks back on the disciplinary troubles of the Vietnam War with horror and disgust – as a Calvinist minister would a drunken weekend in a Swiss whorehouse. The wayward minister could deny it ever happened, but our generals can’t. There’s news footage and a lot of us were there. Insubordination and AWOLs were on the rise. Morale and cohesion were on the decline. Discouraging words were heard as the peasants were daring to question the regime.

The confused lifestyle of Carrie considered by Rebecca Hagelin, in the Washington Times who ponders the posting of explicit material on line

Young women, in particular, think that the sexier their sites, the better. Why on earth are they eager to post X-rated images? Three reasons: 1) They are simply copying the explicit media they see all around them, 2) They have no sense of personal modesty or decency, 3) They mistakenly view their sites and communications as personal diaries, of sorts.

abc.net.au - The New Oxford American Dictionary has named "unfriend" - as in deleting someone as a friend on a social networking site such as Facebook - its word of the year. Oxford University Press USA, in a blog post, said "unfriend," a verb, had bested netbook, sexting, paywall, birther and death panel for the honour.

"Unfriend has real lex-appeal," said Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary program. "It has both currency and potential longevity. "In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for word of the year."

NYT - The first complete Hebrew-language edition of Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan” was published in Israel last month, and instantly became one of the 10 best-selling books in the country.
Five scholars ponder it's ongoing significance.

Wonder what Sinclair Lewis would say about this?

Not ragging on Krugman here. Rather I'm pointing out a little irony in some of the economic arguments we've heard the last few years.

First this:

But with the financial crisis abating, this process is going into reverse. Last week’s U.S. trade report showed a sharp increase in the trade deficit between August and September. And there will be many more reports along those lines.

Wasn't the export sector, lead by a weak dollar, supposed to help the economy? (Of course, my contention has always been, how can you export your way into growth when you've eviscerated your manufacturing base, right?)

And then this:

Unfortunately, the Chinese don’t seem to get it: rather than face up to the need to change their currency policy, they’ve taken to lecturing the United States, telling us to raise interest rates and curb fiscal deficits — that is, to make our unemployment problem even worse.

Isn't this what the IMF/World Bank tells developing countries to do in the even of a crisis? We dispense the medicine, but when someone tells us to take the same, well, you know.

November 16, 2009 | John Chuckman

Aung San Suu Kyi, Omar Khadr, and Barack Obama: A Dreadful Tale Of What America Has Become

During his trip to Asia, President Obama called for the government of Burma to release Aung San Suu Kyi, a noted dissident who has spent years under house arrest.

It made headlines, a fact which tells us more about the role of media as an outlet for government press releases than in communicating genuine news.

Obama’s was hardly a brave or innovative act when you consider that it is a universally-condemned military junta keeping Aung San Suu Kyi penned up.