It works but slowly.

Definitely alpha level of development.

But, then, you-all suspected that, with my links to Times articles.
This week, Gail Collins has written two columns that lead me to believe that she has reached the "sometimes you just have to laugh" stage. I'll sample each one and give links.
after the break...

USC religious studies professor Kevin Lewis has been thinking about the meaning of being lonesome in American culture. He’s written a new book that explores the theme of loneliness and lonesomeness that is pervasive in American art, from Emily Dickinson’s poems to country music lyrics, and analyzes why solitude is sometimes good.

The State/SC - To be an American is to have buried, deep within our collective DNA, a profound sense of the lonesome.

At least that is what USC religious studies professor Kevin Lewis has speculated during a long - and perhaps lonesome - intellectual trek through the landscape of American music, fiction, art and religion.

For all the cultural reflection on the meaning of e pluribus unum, he believes Americans are a people who understand the solitary ache in the heart, the twist in the gut. After all, he noted, who among us has not walked through "that lonesome valley" or traveled down an open highway with the wail of Hank Williams in our ears?

"That word lonesome seems to do so much more work in our vocabulary than in any other anglophone culture," he said. "Americans like lonesome."

His ruminations have borne fruit in a newly published book titled, simply, "Lonesome: The Spiritual Meanings of American Solitude." In this scholarly work, he explains how we are a people hard-wired to perceive and experience lonesomeness in a way that is far different from that of our counterparts on other continents.

This looks like a fun viewing experience:

Americans generally like to hear good news. They like to believe that a new President will right old wrongs, that clean energy will replace dirty oil, and that fresh thinking will set the economy straight. American pundits tend to restrain their pessimism and to hope for the best. But is anyone prepared for the worst? Michael Ruppert is a different kind of American. He predicted the current financial crisis in his self-published newsletter “From the Wilderness” at a time when most Wall Street and Washington analysts were still in denial.

Sitting in a room that looks like a bunker, Ruppert recounts his career as a radical thinker and spells out the crises he sees ahead. He draws upon the same news reports and data available to any Internet user, but he applies a unique interpretation. He is especially passionate over the issue of “peak oil,” the concern raised by scientists since the 1970s that the world will eventually run out of fossil fuel. While other experts debate this issue in measured tones, Ruppert doesn’t hold back at sounding an alarm. He portrays a future that resembles apocalyptic science fiction. Listening to his rapid flow of opinions, the viewer is likely to question some of the rhetoric as paranoid or deluded; and to sway back and forth on what to make of the extremism. Smith lets viewers form their own judgments.

Trailer in full entry

Government is outsourcing a variety of important tasks to private contractors, who operate with little oversight

"In her new book, One Nation Under Contract, Allison Stanger documents in stunning detail the extent to which the United States has turned much of its most important work over to private contractors whose motivation is profit and level of public accountability near zero.

“Lockheed Martin . . . gets more federal money each year than the Departments of Justice or Energy. Lockheed Martin sorts your mail, tallies up your taxes, cuts social security checks, counts people for the US census, runs space flights, and monitors air traffic.’’ In fact, “in this new world,’’ she writes, “the private sector increasingly handles the everyday business of governing.’’

I was going to post pictures of my new Grandson. Couldn't remember how to do it.

~ edited to add

We live in an age of sports immortals. Men like Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Roger Federer, and women like Serena Williams, have not only thoroughly dominated their sport, they have set records which will last for a very long time – possibly forever. What they have in common is a rare combination of athletic grace and unwavering determination to win. These are athletes who are noted for making everything look easy, when in fact they put in hours of work each day to accomplish just this illusion.

Three of the four are still performing and gave wonderful examples this week of what makes them so extraordinary. Tiger Woods completely dominated the field in a victory at the BMW Championship, part of the playoffs for the FedEx Cup that caps off the PGA Tour. Roger Federer displayed some unusual brilliance at the US Open this week, and then in the finals failed to show anything of his normal form as he lost to a newcomer, Juan Martin del Potro. Still, people will be talking about this tournament as the one Federer lost, just as they will be discussing the mental collapse of Serena Williams in her pursuit of yet another US Open title.

Michael Jordan is retired from basketball but was in the news this week with some illuminating comments, so let’s begin with him.

of Everything Economic entitled

How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

"All I know is just what I read in the newspapers." - Will Rogers

An article credited to "Spengler", said to be channeled by David P. Goldman, and published August 18 in the Asia Times, has an approach to the Palestinian problem that I had not encountered before. Usually, mention of the word 'Palestinian problem' educes much brow-wrinkling, moaning, or wringing of hands.
This article accepts the current stand-off and asks this question about the Palestinians: "Why are they still there?"
The answer, with the article to follow: "The simplest explanation is that they like it there, because they are much better off than people of similar capacities in other Arab countries."
Spengler compares the GDP of Palestine with surrounding countries, then moves on to compare spending power of ordinary people, life expectancy, and literacy rates.
He issues a general comment on life in Arab countries, quoted from the London Economist:

"With barely an exception, its autocratic rulers, whether presidents or kings, give up their authority only when they die; its elections are a sick joke; half its people are treated as lesser legal and economic beings, and more than half its young, burdened by joblessness and stifled by conservative religious tradition, are said to want to get out of the place as soon as they can." Life sounds intolerable for the Arabs generally; their best poet, the Syrian "Adonis" - Ali Ahmad Said Asbar - calls them an "extinct people".

[More after the break]

A review of Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, we were inundated by hysterical books which purported to give serious analysis of al Qaeda but which instead only added to our confusion – and also to our injudicious responses ever since. Leaderless Jihad was not published until well after the attacks and that is one of the reasons it is perhaps the most thoughtful book on al Qaeda and the social movement associated with it.

Though a psychiatrist, Sageman rejects a psychological approach to understanding terrorists. (A sign of an independent mind, this.) After going through his database of jihadists, he finds no personalty type or traumatic event that makes people heed the call to jihad. Nor does he see social context such as poverty to be helpful. Any such context is hopelessly vague and cannot explain why so many millions of people living in that context do not become terrorists.

TPM Cafe is hosting a very interesting discussion of Ryan Grim's This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.

Grim starts it off:

When it comes to drugs, Americans have put precious little stock in the concept of pleasure, at least officially. Speed is acceptable as long as it boosts a kid's attention span and isn't just a good time. "Euphoria" is listed a negative side effect of pharmaceutical drugs. Ours is a nation in which medical professionals who prescribe narcotics face the real prospect of prison time even when staying within accepted medical boundaries. Ronald McIver, a doctor from North Carolina, is now doing thirty years in a federal prison for reducing more pain than the government thought appropriate, though his prescribing habits were well within accepted medical practices. When pleasure is suspected, American drug use gets tricky, particularly when that high might do some real good, as in the case of medical marijuana.
...
When Barack Obama solicited questions from the public on his presidential-transition Web site and allowed users to vote on the most popular, sixteen of the top fifty questions had to do with liberalizing drug policy. In the midst of war and financial collapse, the question voted most pressing asked whether Obama would legalize marijuana. The media ridiculed the result, but in doing so, they showed how much they misunderstand the importance we currently place on getting high in America. Today, huge majorities support legalizing marijuana for medical purposes, and almost half of Americans support legalizing it for everybody twenty-one and older. Such widespread acceptance of exploratory drug use helped lead to the comeback of LSD, pot, and other hippie drugs in the nineties.
...
In reality, there's no such thing as drug policy. As currently understood and implemented, drug policy attempts to isolate a phenomenon that can't be taken in isolation. Economic policy is drug policy. Healthcare policy is drug policy. Foreign policy, too, is drug policy. When approached in isolation, drug policy almost always backfires, because it doesn't take into account the powerful economic, social, and cultural forces that also determine how and why Americans get high.

It's hard to tell if I'm preaching to the choir here at the Agonist or beating my head against the wall, but I know in my bones that our corrupt, hypocritical and self-defeating "War on (Some) Drugs" is one of the key moral and policy failures of our era. Only the military industrial complex has done more to pervert and corrupt the American project.

More in the full entry:

Ian Olds has chosen to make a film full of the kind of fear that seems to inhabit international centers of power in Afghanistan today. The film's nervous visual style is strikingly different from the clean-cut look of Occupation: Dreamland, his earlier documentary about American soldiers in Iraq. Critics will surely have much more to say about Fixer's importance as a film. It has already won a raft of prizes, including firsts at Documenta Madrid and the Pesaro (Italy) Film Festival, and Olds took home a Tribeca award this year as the best new documentary filmmaker.

SNIP

"Fixer" is simply and appropriately subtitled The Taking of Ajmal Nashqbandi. It's a tribute to a trusted colleague. But watch the film yourself and you'll be immersed in duplicity: Officials manipulate the truth, citizens fear to tell it, Americans can't bear to look it in the face. Watch the film and maybe you'll understand how hard it has become, here behind the Hescos where history is being re-spun, to size anything up, pin anything down, recognize an enemy, or help a friend.

OSAMA BIN LADEN'S son Omar first realized the depth of his father's evil when his beloved dogs were taken away and gassed in a chemical warfare experiment, he says in a new memoir { Growing Up Bin Laden. }

Omar also confirms what U.S. officials have long believed - that his father was tipped off to a 1998 U.S. attempt to kill him.

He writes that Bin Laden got a secret communication and fled his Afghan camp two hours before cruise missiles struck it.

He does not identify the source of the tip, which the U.S. suspects was Pakistani intelligence.

Omar's book, "Growing Up Bin Laden," written with his mother, Najwa - the Al Qaeda leader's first wife - describes the ultimate dysfunctional family.

The Bin Ladens lived austerely as their father staked his horrific claim as the world's most wanted man. His son eventually concluded Bin Laden hated his enemies more than he loved his family

Read more: nydailynews

related: OSAMA IN AMERICA: THE FINAL ANSWER - New Yorker

We all like to escape from reality, through a good book, the movies, or television. But how about escaping to reality? That’s what 17 year old Mike Perham has been doing as he attempts the youngest solo circumnavigation on a sailboat. What’s it like being all alone on a sailboat facing the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans? Mike will tell you; he has all the latest satellite-connected equipment to send videos out to a growing audience, and keep up a blog on the challenges, dangers, and joys of navigating a boat by yourself around the world.

I’ve been following Mike’s journey for about half a year now. He left his home in England sailing south to Brazil, cut across the South Atlantic to reach the Cape of Good Hope, traversed the Indian Ocean stopping off eventually in Tasmania, and has just now crossed the Pacific and is ready to sail through the Panama Canal.

Apparently a company named The Pond Inc. sells a product called "Subtle Butt". It's a fart neutralizer and, if you ask me, it's a science breakthrough that's long overdue. So serve up the beans and burritos. A few 5-packs delivered to your "long winded" friend and you'll never be gassed again. (Oh, it might be a very good idea to make that an anonymous gift.)

A mere 9.95 for the fart busters, but the company's demo is priceless.

Forty years ago, I travelled to Medellin, Colombia with my father, carrying with me a cassette player and a handful of cassettes. Among them was a Jimi Hendrix tape. Playing it for the kids there, one enthusiastically related; "Ah! Yes! Cha cha cha!" Not even "rock and roll!", but 'cha cha cha'... (??!) That really clued me in on a very unexpectedly wide cultural chasm, albeit bridged nonetheless. Mostly.
    This came to mind as I learned tonight of 'Afghan Star'... -Only I was the one figuratively saying 'Ah! Yes! Cha cha cha!'...

Sean Paul is back! And he’s jet lagged. Which means for the next two weeks he’s going to be awake at 3:00 a.m. with nothing to do but catch up on late night American TV. Imagine what he’s missed in just one year – the shock could be overwhelming. As a public service for Sean Paul and other insomniacs, I am providing you with a quick introduction to late night TV, American style – but be warned! Late night television is inhabited by people who want your money, and what could be more American than that?

Buy! Buy! Buy! (But first look at these Boobies!)

There was a time when late night TV would entertain you with old movies or reruns of sitcoms. That’s all gone now; everyone has sold out to the infomercial, that peculiar blend of cheesy production values and gripping personal stories of desperate people who discovered the secret to wealth and who are so civic-minded that they want to share this secret with you for $39.95 (plus shipping and handling).

Sean Paul will be unable to avoid a namesake of his, the ubiquitous Jeff Paul and his $hortcuts to Internet Millions. In this half hour infomercial you don’t meet Jeff Paul right away, because first you want to feast your eyes on Carmen and Stacey, two beautiful girls who are our hosts for half an hour at a fabulous resort somewhere in Southern California.

You’ve seen Carmen and Stacey before, on other infomercials or other TV shows. For a while Stacey was Chuck Woolery’s sidekick on the game show Lingo, but she was let go, apparently for being a little too flirtatious with Chuck. Because Carmen and Stacey are at a luxurious resort, swanking it up around the swimming pool, they get to wear skimpy outfits that reveal their alluring boobies, which are collectively the four assets the two of them bring to this enterprise. Well, that’s not really fair – Stacey also has something indispensable in selling TV products to gullible Americans: a British accent! Never mind that she sounds like she is from somewhere down in the Antipodes; Americans think all Australians or New Zealanders sound just like Queen Elizabeth and must be as dignified.

Dexter Filkins | May 20

The New Republic

The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008
By Thomas E. Ricks
(Penguin Press, 394 pp., $27.95)

I.

From centrality to banality: perhaps no other event in modern American history has gone from being contentious to being forgotten as quickly as the war in Iraq. Remember the war? It consumed a trillion American dollars, devoured a hundred thousand Iraqi lives, squandered a country's reputation, and destroyed an American presidency. Given the retreat of the American press--the first American withdrawal from Iraq, you might say--one could almost be excused, in the spring of 2009, for forgetting that 140,000 American troops are still fighting and dying there.

That an undertaking as momentous and as costly as America's war in Iraq could vanish so quickly from the forefront of the national consciousness does not speak well of the United States in the early twenty-first century: not for its seriousness and not for its sense of responsibility. The American people, we are told, appear to be exhausted by the war in Iraq. But exhausted by what, exactly? Certainly not from fighting it. The fighting is done by kids from the towns between the coasts, not by any of the big shots who really matter. And they are not exhausted by paying for it, either: another generation will do that. No, when Americans say that they are tired of the war in Iraq, what they really mean is that they are tired of watching it on television, or of reading about it on the Internet. As entertainment, as Topic A, the agony has become a bore. "A car bomb exploded today in a crowded Baghdad marketplace, killing 53 and wounding 112." Click.

more

Inequality makes us ill. And depressed. And violent,

"Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better" by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

Reviewed by Will Kymlicka

If we look across the Western democracies, there are dramatic and puzzling disparities between countries in overall health outcomes, such as average life expectancy, and in other measures of human development, such as rates of literacy, teenage pregnancy or incarceration. For example, life expectancy is five years longer in Japan than in Portugal. Obesity rates are six times higher in the United States than in Switzerland. Mental illness is three times more likely in Britain than in Germany.

New York Review of Books
Volume 55, Number 14 · September 25, 2008

Guantanamo: Beyond the Law - a series of five articles by Tom Lasseter in the McClatchy Newspapers, June 15–19, 2008, available at mcclatchydc.com/detainees

The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight over Presidential Power
by Jonathan Mahler

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 334 pp., $26.00
Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact
a report by Physicians for Human Rights, with a preface by Major General Antonio M. Taguba

The May ENSO Diagnostics Discussion is out, and the Climate Prediction Center is proclaiming the Final La Niña Advisory.

During April 2009, the equatorial Pacific Ocean transitioned from La Niña to ENSO-neutral conditions, ending the 2008-09 La Niña. ... A majority of model forecasts for the Niño-3.4 region show that ENSO-neutral conditions will continue through the remainder of 2009.

The ENSO discussions are pretty cool, giving one once again the realization that we are all in this together (life & health of The Planet).

Janine di Giovanni | April 24

NYT - David Kilcullen is a former officer in the Australian Army, a strategist and a scholar. He is also an expert on counterinsurgency, or how to combat a rebellion, and one of the few brave souls who had the ear of people in the Bush White House and advised against the invasion of Iraq.

“It’s going to take a lot more than you seem to be willing to commit,” he told the Americans. No one listened. After the invasion, Kilcullen watched the growing mayhem with outrage and dismay. This time people listened.

The French writer on military affairs David Galula, who was known for his theories on counterinsurgency, particularly during France’s Algerian war, must have influenced Kilcullen while he was doing his Ph.D. in political anthropology. Galula’s thesis is that one aim of war is to support the local population rather than control the territory. Part of Kilcullen’s academic research involved living and working alongside villagers in West Java, trying to absorb the culture of Dar’ul Islam, a guerrilla movement hatched in the late 1940s (and later identified by some as an Indonesian clone and ally of Al Qaeda).

What Kilcullen wanted to do was to observe the movement the way the locals did — not from the “official version I could find in books.” So he lived in vil­lages and conversed with his curious neighbors about blue jeans and the Internet, until they trusted him enough to share ­information.

Check it out here.

UNESCO and 32 partner institutions today [2009.04.21] launched the World Digital Library, a Web site that features unique cultural materials from libraries and archives from around the world. The site includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, films, sound recordings, prints and photographs. It provides unrestricted public access, free of charge, to this material.

Mission
The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

New York Times, By Nicholas D. Kristof, April 15

Poor people have I.Q.’s significantly lower than those of rich people, and the awkward conventional wisdom has been that this is in large part a function of genetics.

After all, a series of studies seemed to indicate that I.Q. is largely inherited. Identical twins raised apart, for example, have I.Q.’s that are remarkably similar. They are even closer on average than those of fraternal twins who grow up together.

I've been waiting for a while to watch this, and it starts tonight.

From the award-winning PBS series American Experience comes
We Shall Remain, a provocative multi-media project that establishes Native history as an essential part of American history.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/weshallremain/