The Agonist - Review (book, film, etc.)

Google Chrome OS

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 03:15:43 -0800

It works but slowly.

Definitely alpha level of development.

I Confess, I Read The Times

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:45:52 -0800

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...

The first is "Hark! The Voters Speak!", published November 4, at
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/opinion/05collins.html

In Ohio, citizens marched to the polls on Tuesday and voted to allow gambling casinos in the state. This was obviously a message to President Obama that independent voters are not happy with the way the health care bill is going.
Also, we have heard a lot about the fact that Corzine’s campaign made sport of his rather chunky opponent, Chris Christie. It was not until Wednesday morning that it became obvious that Christie’s victory was actually an outcry by average, pudgy Americans against a president who has to continuously battle against a tendency to lose weight.

The second is "Weekend Sports Lineup", published November 6, at
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/opinion/07collins.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1257602925-LPyNxS6WUtiMLGLdlqiODw

Here we are at the big Health Care Bill Weekend! ...
Meanwhile, there’s nothing but confidence and serenity among the right-wing tea-party types. They cannot get over the triumph in upstate New York, where thanks to their really extraordinary efforts, a completely safe Republican seat went to the Democrats. Think how far their movement has come! Only a few months ago, they barely had the power to disrupt a town meeting. And soon they will be able to destroy anything in their path, including their own party, like conservative locusts.

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

USC prof's new book: 'Americans like lonesome'

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:39:11 -0800

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.

Rooted in our spiritual and religious life, lonesomeness is a vessel in which we pour parts of ourselves.

He writes: "... Lonesomeness offers to those given it a nontraditional, informal encounter with an unnamed 'otherness,' always inviting, always receding. If only we could peer deeply enough into it that we could 'see' through the feeling of it the 'otherness' plain!"

Lewis argues that this transcendent expression of lonesomeness exists alongside organized religion.

"This is part of the American cultural matrix for me, and as a religionist, as a practicing, believing, confessing, Calvinist, Protestant humanist Christian, I want to make sure that no one is offended by this on the traditional religious side," he said. Conversely, he is also determined that the book isn't taken as "an airhead spirituality guide for the perplexed."

Lewis has been captivated by the concept of lonesomeness for nearly two decades, sparked in part by a re-reading of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

Mark Twain's tale of Huck and the runaway slave Jim rafting down the Mississippi River is the consummate American story, rife with the contradictions of a people struggling with the idea of freedom and what it means.

"There is a passage where Jim and Huck, these archetypal black and white Americans, are rafting down the river," Lewis recalled. "In early dawn they pull up on the shore, and they tether the raft and put their fishing lines in, catch a couple fish, build a fire, and there is this wonderful moment of calm for them. Huck hears the sound of an axe chopping wood across the wide Mississippi. He sees the flash so far away, and the sound, there was this little delay, and he says it was solemn lonesome."

To be lonely is not the same as lonesome, Lewis said. Perhaps, he suggested, there is a whiff of self-pity about the lonely, an isolating, bitter phenomenon, but "there is nothing really good about lonely."

While the two words have been used interchangeably, lonesome is employed "to express this something extra," Lewis said. "I call this feeling-perception. It is not only an emotion, but to me it is something that relates to something you perceive."

The lonesome in American culture is "transfigured," he said, through an expansion of the spirit and in the unspeakable yearning for this "feeling-perception."

He quotes Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, two of the greatest 19th-century American poets who worshiped at the altar of solitude. Whitman speaks of the "joys of the free and lonesome heart," while Dickinson writes of the "lonesome Glee" that "sanctifies the mind."

Collapse

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:03:58 -0700

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

So who's in charge?

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:14:59 -0700

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.’’

Foxtail is a grandma

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 04:24:57 -0700

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

~ edited to add

Quite a Week in the "Genteel" Sports

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:51:25 -0700

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.

Michael Jordan Elected to Basketball Hall of Fame

No surprise here. Everyone knew Michael Jordan would be elected at the earliest point of eligibility. What was surprising was the speech he gave discussing what motivated him during his career.

During this 20 minute talk Michael Jordan listed the names of coaches, teachers, mentors, and managers who had dismissed him sometime during his career. These were men who promoted somebody else over him because that person had been on the team longer, or who wouldn’t select him consistently for the starting line-up, or who told him some part of his game was weak and he could never fix it. Jordan took each of these instances as a dare and challenge, and he channeled his disappointment and anger into motivation to put in the intense work necessary to prove that person wrong.

The result was one of the most intense and competitive players in the NBA during the 1990s, when Jordan led the Chicago Bulls to six NBA championships. The opposition learned to keep their mouth shut on the court when facing off against Michael Jordan; trash talking the man only resulted in humiliation as Jordan stepped up his game and began to perform his wizardry.

His best known trick was a gravity-defying lunge up the middle to the basket. As his opponents leapt up to block him, Jordan would crouch down, still in mid-air, contort his body and spring out unexpectedly from the side, his left or right arm surging toward the basket and a goal. This bit of MJ magic became known as Air Jordan, as were the Nike basketball shoes he endorsed that made him a millionaire.

When Michael Jordan was hot he could sink 20 baskets in a night and as many free throws. An off night found him performing only half as well. Still, even at his best, there was no guarantee the Bulls would win that night. It took Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson some intense coaching with Jordan to realize that championships would not result from his talents alone. He had to learn team playing, which involved the art of passing the ball to find the optimal shot, not the maximum shot for MJ.

Once Jackson obtained a team performance from the Bulls, with Michael Jordan as the star forward, the door was open to one championship after another, and dominance of the league throughout the 1990s. No team since then has achieved the Bulls’ won-loss record, nor has anyone come along who can energize a sell-out crowd at an away game like Michael did. Michael Jordan became a global brand name, carefully rationed out to sell only certain types of products, and also exploiting Jordan’s warm smile and personality in the commercials. He was, in the 1990s, the most recognized male anywhere on the globe, so powerful was his personal franchise.

This was another part of Michael Jordan’s education: learning to live in a fishbowl, surrounded by bodyguards, judiciously maintaining a curtain over his personal and family life (which eventually led to a divorce), choosing endorsements with care for the impact on his image and the reliability of the company product; and choosing the right money manager when hundreds of millions of dollars began to pile up in the bank.

No wonder Michael Jordan was the first athlete Tiger Woods consulted when he first broke into international fame. No one on the planet was better able to counsel Tiger what was in store for him.

Tiger the Brand

When Tiger Woods walks up to the tee in a tournament he has his golf cap adorned with the Tiger Woods logo – a mixed T and W. His clothes are carefully set out in advance by his advisers, so that the sewn logos will receive maximum exposure on the cameras, justifying the millions of dollars spent by the advertisers to convince Tiger to wear them. Tiger’s clothes are color-coordinated for maximum affect on camera; Tiger always wears a particular red shirt on the last day of a tournament, partly to bring him luck.

His shoes, his golf club collection, his monogrammed golf balls, tees, and other accoutrements are all sold at stores and clubhouses around the world. He earns vastly more from the clothing and equipment franchise than from playing golf, and he has become the first sports billionaire, able to fly from one tournament to the next in his private plane with entourage.

As with any billionaire in the public eye, he has learned to keep his family off-limits to the press (the fewer pictures of them the better, from a security standpoint), You rarely see even his wife at a tournament, He selects his charitable appearances carefully, doling out his smile and drawing power to only a handful of causes each year. In that regard, he is more stingy than other top athletes, and people hope at the end of his career he will turn into a Bill Gates and set up a foundation to disburse his billions.

All of this would be for naught if Tiger Woods couldn’t continue to perform on the golf course at an exemplary level. There was some question that his career had peaked after Tiger was forced off the tour to undergo knee surgery. He has one of the most elegant and careful driving shots in the game, but it is also one of the most powerful. He torques his body up like a corkscrew in under to unleash a a highly controlled, propulsive whack to the ball. His swing can generate routine drives off the tee of 325 yards, giving him often a pitch-up on an average par 4 hole in order to get on the green. More than most players, he can shape a ball’s direction in flight to the left or right, in order to avoid trees or sand traps or water hazards. His short game around the greens is also first-rate, and when his putting is at its best, no one can beat him. But all this stress on his body has taken a claim on his health, especially with his knees and back where the stress is the greatest. The golf world has been waiting to see if Tiger has recovered fully, and if he could pull all his talents together again as in the past.

We got the answer this week at the BMW Championship at Cog Hill golf course in suburban Chicago. Tiger has played here many times and won four previous championships. He says he loves the course as it suits his style of game. On Friday he put on an incredible display not only of error-free golf, but of golf that was risk-taking when necessary, and beautifully positioned at all times to generate birdies and the occasional eagle. His drives were long and true, avoiding any hazards along the way. His approach shots to the green most often found the ball lagged up within ten feet of the hole. At this distance, Tiger was devastatingly accurate with his putter. He made all but one of these putts all week, generating one birdie after another when the opportunity arose. On Friday he shot a 62, nine under par for the course, and tying the all-time record low score on the course. By Sunday’s finish, he was 18 under par for the course, with an eight stroke lead over anyone else. It was the sort of dominating performance Tiger put on years ago at the Masters tournament, when he first announced his presence on the golf circuit. This week, following a year off from surgery for a sore knee, Tiger was announcing “I’m back!”

When Tiger attends a tournament, over half of the paying crowd chooses to walk along with him hole by hole. The rest of the golf course seems devoid of spectators. I’ve joined along on occasion with these crowds, and what you see, off in the distance, is a very intense, focused young man, whose mind is constantly turning over the possibilities for the next shot. Tiger doesn’t banter with the crowd or even smile. He is all business, He seems to have been working out in a gym, because his physique is lean and muscular, carried with a military bearing. He leans carefully over a ball to pick it up or inspect a putting line; he never hunches over or shows the slightest lack of military precision. He will take multiple practice swings, then spend some time addressing the wall until he lets go with the perfectly placed shot. He shows visible displeasure if he feels he mis-hit the ball, even if it luckily lands five feet from the cup. He has been known to finish his golf game for the day, leading a tournament, and then spend an hour or two on the practice holes working on some perceived flaw in his swing.

In the 1960s golf had its first mega-star in Arnold Palmer. He too attracted tens of thousands of followers to the course. I followed him around back then and remembered having a very good time. Arnold did not have a picture-perfect swing. He would wrench his shoulders and hit what looked like an amateur shot, only to see the ball soar majestically forward 285 yards (a big drive those days). He would struggle every so often with his putter or wedge, and you could see the pain of disappointment on his face when he hit a poor shot. But he loved chatting with the spectators, signing autographs, making jokes, and having a good time at what was after all a game. The whole business of endorsing products came later for Arnold, after he retired from the game, and it certainly made him a millionaire.

What Arnold had that Tiger Woods lacks is charisma – a relation to the crowd that generates excitement and warmth, and a sense for the spectator that they are part of something fun. The sense from the crowds that follow Tiger Woods is one of awe and reverence. No one dares breathe while Tiger is ready to take a shot, for fear of interrupting his concentration, thereby affecting Something Really Important. Indeed, on occasion Something Really Important does happen and the crowd is satisfied to have witnessed an incredible shot.

For me, I would rather take the bonhomie and gentlemanly banter of an Arnold Palmer. He turned 80 this week and received a lot of birthday congratulations from people at the BMW Championship. If you know a friend of a friend you can still call up Arnold Palmer and ask for a game of golf with him at his club in Pennsylvania. Likely as not, he’ll join you in a foursome, make some terrific and not-so-terrific shots, crack some jokes, have a Long Island Tea at the ninth hole (a drink he popularized), in general have a good time, and make sure you had a good time. To Arnold Palmer, golf is still a game, not the road to a billion dollar franchising empire that requires the utmost seriousness at all times. Long may he continue to remind us of that.

Swiss Precision

One of Tiger Woods’ close buddies is Roger Federer, the Swiss tennis superstar. Federer dominates tennis like Woods and Jordan have dominated their sport. He holds the most grand slam tournament victories. He has an incredible number of records relating to the number of matches he has gone without being broken, the succession of semi-finals and finals he has achieved, most tie breaks won, etc. He is still reasonably young and can be expected to drive his grand slam victory mark to around 20 during his career, a number that will be very difficult to match for any future player. The only significant complaint about Federer is that his play is spotty, and there was certainly evidence of that this Monday when someone impersonating Federer appeared to show up at the US Open final and take a chink out of his reputation for greatness.

It’s not that Federer is playing a weak field. His nemesis, Rafael Nadal from Spain, kept Federer for years from winning the French Open. It was only when Nadal went off the tour due to injury that Federer was able to grasp this missing title this year. Federer himself has been injured and forced out of play due to a bout with mononucleosis. He is now scrupulously careful about his health and conditioning, because there has been an alarming increase in career-destroying injuries in professional tennis. The equipment being used is vastly more powerful than the wooden rackets of thirty years ago, and the swing being used involves the same sort of torque that is employed in golf and which can play havoc with back, thigh, and leg muscles, not to mention the knees. Nadal plays each stroke with such a ferocity that no one on the tour was surprised when both his knees gave out this year, necessitating surgery from which he may never fully recover.

Part of the secret to Federer’s longevity is his style of movement. His forehands and backhands are models of economic motion. The speed and spin put on the ball matches that of any other professional player, but Federer appears to exert far less energy than his competition. He seems to glide from point to point on the court, barely out of breath when other players are sprinting and hacking their way up and down the court. With apparent little effort, he can reach virtually any ball and still get off a classically proportioned stroke.

When he combines his mobility with his incredible accuracy in placing his shots in corners and on the base line, Federer is able to maneuver his opponents back and forth across the court, further and further to the left or right, until the time comes to deliver the ball to where the opponent ain’t. That’s what high level tennis is really about – a strategic game of maneuvering your opponent to a fatally out-of-place position. This takes some chess-like thinking ahead, and no one is better at this than Federer.

His highlight this week was the penultimate point played in his semi-final match with Novak Djokovic. Federer was chasing down an overhead lob, his back to the net, when he leaned down to catch the ball beneath his legs and drive it over the net for a winner. This type of circus shot is used by many pros, but hardly anyone is ever successful at it, and then only to give themselves time to handle the return shot from their opponent. What Federer did that was so unusual was not simply hit a winner, but hit it with real force, as if it were an offensive shot, not a defensive one. It’s the sort of athleticism that makes other professionals gape in awe, and if you haven’t seen it, check out this You Tube link.

The only way for Federer to top off what was a perfect week would have been to demolish his opponent in the finals, 20 year old Argentinian Juan Martin del Potro. He had, after all, beaten him in all previous six matches. The performance put on by Federer was amazing, all right, but for all the wrong reasons. His playing was an embarrassment of double faults, weak serves, errant ground strokes, and volleys plowed into the net. Who this Federer was is not clear, but even in his struggles with Rafael Nadal, he performed better than this.

Tennis as a match sport is ruthless when it comes to mental collapses like this. Unforced errors and double faults are counted up and displayed on the screen for everyone to comment on. In golf, Tiger Woods can have a bad day (and often does), but there are 70 other players out there for the camera to follow. Michael Jordan got to sit on the bench out of public view if his game was off. Tennis pros are exposed for two or more hours to scrutiny of their every failure.

Federer was so discommoded in the finals he even had a rare outburst at the umpire. Maybe he was taking lessons from Serena Williams, who had a far worse breakdown a few days earlier in the women’s semi-finals.

The Williams Dynasty

For nearly ten years Serena and Venus Williams have dominated women’s tennis. They rank one and two in title victories, Serena being the more accomplished of the sisters. They have taken turns ranked as World No. 1 in the sport. They were the first to introduce a more forceful style of play to the women’s game, as they took advantage of improvements in racquet technology. They also took weight and endurance training to new heights, with a demonstrable improvement in their games. Within the tennis world, they are as much appreciated for their skill as double partners, a part of the game that gets little camera attention but is viewed as equally demanding as singles play.

Both sisters have had trouble with leg and knee injuries, a common motif in sports like tennis and golf where aggressive play has sidelined Tiger Woods, Rafael Nadal, and other top players. Serena entered this month’s US Open with a knee brace on one leg, and somehow managed to advance to the semi-finals despite obvious pain when playing. It was in the semi-finals that her game blew up.

Serena Williams was down a set to Kim Clijsters and losing in the second. She faced elimination and had been serving poorly all night, while Clisjters was on top of her game. At a crucial second serve, Williams was called by the line judge for a foot fault, causing her to double fault and leaving her with one last chance to stay alive in the tournament.

Something motivated Serena to protest vociferously to the line judge. Her protest was loud, crude, prolonged, and worst of all, involved the threat of jamming the tennis ball down the line judge’s throat. Of course, Serena didn’t mean she would literally do this to the line judge. She was speaking out of anger. She was also violating a major rule that forbids intimidation of a judge or referee.

Instant replay showed the line judge was in error – there was no foot fault. But a closer review from another angle showed that Serena Williams’ foot had indeed touched the court before her racket touched the ball. That is a foul that cost her a point, and then her outburst cost her another point and the match. A stunned crowd watched her walk over to the other side of the court to congratulate Clijsters on her victory.

This was a bizarre way to lose a match. Conjecture was immediately made that she did this on purpose, since her play was poor in the first place and she was bound to lose. This is not very convincing. Serena could have easily and with no loss of face withdrawn due to injury. She has been such a competitor over the years that it is difficult to imagine the thought of throwing the match crossing her mind.

She said afterwards that she used to be much worse with her temper, and she left it at that, trying to “move on” from an embarrassing incident without admitting any culpability. The tennis authorities assessed her a $10,000 fine, small change from the $350,000 paycheck she received for reaching the semi-finals.

A number of tennis pros felt that Serena was treated way too lightly by the USTA, and that she should have been suspended from play rather than allowed to compete with her sister in the doubles final. They made the point that no other sport, not even hockey or football, would tolerate anything approaching this behavior to a referee or umpire, especially involving intimidation or threats. They are almost certainly right about that. The integrity of sport breaks down if the arbitrators are not free to make impartial decisions.

What happened to Serena Williams was a mental collapse, not unlike Roger Federer’s, expressed in part in her athletic performance, and also in her courtside behavior. A past master of these sort of outbursts – John McEnroe – was one of the commentators on television, and it was odd hearing his colleagues talk about his previous disgraces (as they put it), with him saying nothing in defense and unwilling to comment about Serena. It does make you wonder what he thinks about his behavior thirty years ago as a young tennis star.

No doubt, like John McEnroe, Serena Williams will want to be remembered for her trophies and her tennis records. Unfortunately, we now have You Tube and permanent access to her Foot Fault Frenzy, a lasting stain on her record. Tennis, like golf and basketball, is said to be much more a mental game than other sports, and what we saw this week with both Williams and Federer was just how much mental strain these athletes are under. No wonder Tiger Woods paces the golf course like an automaton, holding every ounce of negative emotion in check.

Intimidating the Regulators

Sport is not divorced from trends in society at large. A tremendous amount of advertising dollars has found its way into golf, basketball, tennis, football, etc. The stars of the game become instant multi-millionaires, and superstars like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods earn hundreds of millions of dollars more in commercial endorsements. Managing their image becomes as important as managing their game. They have large entourages to feed, a brand to nurture, contracts to live up to, lease payments to make on their private jets, and mortgages to meet on their multiple homes. Technology has given them racquets and golf clubs that make it easy to break established records, but also require that they brutalize their body and risk major and career-threatening injuries.

We see the results in spectacular and unprecedented performances. We see records broken routinely. We also see these heroes and heroines sidelined time and again with injuries, and on occasion, we see a breakdown in the steely composure they employ when at their work.

Have we seen a limit being reached in these developments? Are the advances peaking, and are the strains becoming too much for these athletes? I suspect so. I suspect there is some general, though weak, connection with what is happening with professional sports and what has happened with other industries like banking and health care that have been polluted by too much money. Standards get compromised, and egoistic, selfish behavior is tolerated or even encouraged. Eventually even the regulators are dragged into the corruption through intimidation and cooption.

This is, however, about as far as I want to go with the social generalizations. When all is said and done, it is sport as big business, but sport also as entertainment that is involved here. We continue to be entertained by some extraordinary athletes, and quite possibly we are living in an era that will not be repeated in our lifetimes. We should enjoy these athletes and their performances while we can.

Krugman: A Brief 8-Page History

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:00:17 -0700

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

From Asia Times:Palestinian problem hopeless, but not serious

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 13:44:56 -0700

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]
The article's conclusion is not one I've heard before:

The Palestinians cannot form a normal state. They cannot emigrate to Arab countries without accepting a catastrophic decline in living standards, and very few can emigrate to Western countries. The optimal solution for the Palestinians is to demand a state and blackmail Western and Arab donors with the threat of violence, but never actually get one.

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

Islamist Terrorism, Past and Present

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 20:28:34 -0700

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.

Instead, he calls our attention to a middle ground between micro and macro explanations – social networks. It is within networks of émigrés from a particular locale, student groups, mosques, and internet communities that young men and increasingly young women, become jihadists. And it is these networks that provide fighters and plan and execute acts of terror.

His profile of jihadists is intriguing and often counterintuitive. They are not poor. They are most often from middle-class backgrounds, though the trend since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 is toward poorer origins. They are not deeply religious. Indeed, many had relatively secular upbringings. As for the madrassa students we see swaying rhythmically as they recite the Koran, he notes that they tend to stay in their locale or perhaps go off to fight for the Taliban, who though militants, are not usually terrorists. Jihadists are not failures. Many have education and responsibilities to colleagues and families. Nor do they typically have criminal backgrounds, though there is an increasing trend toward criminal activity as fledgling terrorists get money for their attacks however they can. Inasmuch as the funds were once supplied by al Qaeda contacts, this suggests that the West has been successful in disrupting money flows.

So, jihadism is not based on psychological problems, social context, religiousness, or ignorance. Jihadism, Sageman finds, is based on moral outrage at injustices heaped upon fellow Muslims, chiefly in Palestine, Bosnia, Chechnya, and more recently, Iraq. Significantly, the initial US invasion of Afghanistan did not elicit outrage among Muslims, but the invasion of Iraq two years later, did.

Terrorist attacks today rarely come from foreign jihadists infiltrating a western country to attack, as with the September 11th events. The danger is more with homegrown terrorists, as attacks in Britain and Spain indicate. Europe faces more such terrorists than the US does – and for reasons that Sageman articulates. After the widespread death and destruction of the Second World War, Europeans brought in large numbers of Muslims (and other minorities) from their colonies to help rebuild. Foreign workers, many from Arab countries of North Africa, were unable to assimilate into European societies even after decades, and instead lived in urban ghettoes, generally disliked by the surrounding people. The US had no such postwar immigration; Muslims coming into the US are usually middle class if not professional; and most see the US as offering greater acceptance and advancement. For them, the American Dream is both attractive and attainable.

What to do about Islamist terrorism? Sageman argues that our military responses were wrongheaded. They increase moral outrage, encourage recruits for terror networks, and make jihadists into romantic figures. Instead, networks in the West and the Islamic world should be fought by intelligence and police work followed by non-sensationalized trials that present defendants simply as criminals, not as agents of an epochal, global movement. Western societies should work to reduce prejudice and arbitrariness directed against Muslims in the diaspora. And finally, the author recommends a good faith effort to resolve the Palestinian issue, which lies at the center of much of Islamist outrage, in and out of the Middle East.

~ ©2009 Brian M. Downing
Brian M. Downing is the author of several works of political and military history, including The Military Revolution and Political Change and The Paths of Glory: War and Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam. He can be reached at brianmdowning@gmail.com.

Good Discussion on American Drug Policy

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:46:06 -0700

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:

Ethan Brown continues:

We have the most prisoners of any country in the world as well as the highest per capita rate of prisoners in the world, and we have extraordinarily punitive punishments for drug related offenses at the federal and local level, all at an enormous moral and financial costs. African Americans are incarcerated at six times the rate of white Americans and budgets for prisons and jails punch gigantic holes in the budgets of states which can ill-afford such spending during our current economic downturn. As Mike Krause wrote in the Colorado Daily recently, "the current opportunity cost of Colorado's extreme prison spending spree is a quarter billion dollars that could have been spent on health care and higher education."

...

Also: the speculation about increases in drug use that may occur with legalization is particularly unhelpful as there is no parallel attempt to measure the positive outcomes of legalization (what sort of reduction in drug use would we see if we allocated the billions we spend on prisons and jails and fighting the drug war in Mexico or Colombia to rehabilitation programs?; what would a legal market for drugs mean in terms of taming the Mexican drug cartels) or the damaging effects of prohibition (generations of African American children growing up with parents in prison). Indeed, a staggering 25% of African American children born in 1990 grew up with their father in prison). How do measure the "cost" of that?

Alexandar Napatoff adds:

Ryan titled his post "There is no such thing as drug policy." I think I know what he means by this--there is no moral, scientific, or even logical grounding for drug policy as currently practiced. But I also thought that this pithy line understates the potential contributions of the book. TIYCOD actually presents a pretty compelling picture of U.S. drug policy--de facto as well as intentional--as a key facet of social regulation more generally. In fact, as Ryan points out, we have lots of drug policy: "foreign policy is drug policy," and so is health policy, employment policy, education policy, policing strategies, and so forth.

...

Criminal justice is another story. TIYCOD depicts drug policy as culturally diverse, historically contingent, and cyclical. But its current criminal justice implications are more determinate and stark. We lock up an increasing number of African Americans and Latinos for drug use, notwithstanding the racial fluidity of actual drug use in the population. In other words, TIYCOD makes little mention of race when it discusses trends of drug use precisely because all Americans use drugs at approximately equal rates and for a wide variety of non-racial reasons. So how did this racially diverse picture of use and social regulation translate into a deeply racially biased criminal justice response? I don't think TIYCOD tries to answer this question, but this is probably one of the first things that comes to mind when people think of American drug policy. Indeed, if as Ryan asserts, the way we collectively handle drug use reveals something quintessentially American, then the racial divide between the social realities of drug use and the racial disparity in criminal treatment is also quintessentially American.

The Fixer

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:58:22 -0700

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.

Ann Jones is the author of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan (Metropolitan Books, 2006). She is in Kabul this summer, working with women's organizations, as she has done intermittently since 2002. This article first appeared at Tomdispatch.com

Please read this informative review.

Meet Omar bin Laden

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 02:48:09 -0700

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

Sail on! Mike Perham enters the last leg of his solo circumnavigation

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 23:17:26 -0700

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.

He already holds the record as the youngest person to sail the Atlantic Ocean alone. That gave him the confidence to attempt a circumnavigation at age 16 (he’s 17 now). It’s not enough to be an expert sailor to accomplish this feat; you need adult management skills because there is a team of people behind him that are crucial to his success. His parents, of course, encourage him and have helped raise money for this venture. His sailboat, for example, is named for the UK internet lender, Totallymoney.com. He has a weatherman who communicates with him almost daily about low pressure systems on the horizon, wind and current patterns, and dangerous atolls or shipping lanes which may be in his path. Aboard his sailboat are all manner of navigational and communications equipment.

These things are important aids, but 99% of the success of such a project rests on Mike and his sailboat. That he’s been successful so far is a testament to some extraordinary personality and physical traits that Mike possesses. He does not, for example, sleep on his boat in the conventional sense. He has trained himself to take 40 minute catnaps, mostly through the night as the boat is put on the equivalent of auto-pilot. Even then, he tends to sleep with one eye open, because terrible things have happened to his boat when least expected.

How do you store enough food on a sailboat when you are several months at sea? Where do you get fresh water? What do you do for electricity? What happens in an emergency? Mike tells you all about these things in his blog. It’s nice to know, for example, that he can’t stand swimming in salt water with his eyes open – but he had to do just that when one of his sails cut loose, fell in to the ocean, and wrapped around his rudder. He was thrown to the roof of his cabin one night when a freak wave rose out of the sea, lifted his boat into the air, and deposited it on its side facing in another direction. Fortunately the boat righted itself instantly, and Mike has every movable component on the boat locked down just in case such an emergency arises.

Real life adventure seems so alien to us that it is a rare pleasure to read Mike’s blog as he pursues real adventures daily. You have to envy him the rewards that compensate him for the challenges: sitting on deck in the South Pacific as the sun sets, turning the sky, sea and his sailboat pink; watching dolphins and sea turtles frolic in his wake for hours; appreciating the immense power of a full moon to illuminate the entire ocean; counting the Milky Way, individual stars, and constellations as your daily companions; or racing along at 13 knots, covering nearly 300 miles a day when the winds are strong.

The oceans, one discovers, have personalities. The Atlantic is filled with fishes, while the Indian Ocean offers albatrosses for diversion, especially when they come close to his boat for inspection. Curiously, he has seen no marine life across the entirety of the Pacific, though he has seen plenty of evidence of man’s sorrowful contributions to the oceans: drifting trawler nets, floating files of garbage, and the ever-present bobbing of plastic bags and bottles. As immense as the Pacific Ocean is, there apparently is no part of it free from the detritus of human civilization.

Mike is especially wary when he is near land, because there he has to cross sea lanes. The entry into Panama City this week has been notably treacherous and has kept him up several nights in a row. He broadcasts his presence as loud as he can on all communications channels, but ocean tankers can’t see him and his maneuverability has its limitations.

It is when he is back on the open sea, with a strong wind behind him, that Mike is at his happiest. But the interesting thing about his blog is that he is never truly unhappy. He doesn’t describe his problems with anger or disappointment; they happen to be challenges to deal with. He is by no means careless, reckless, or even intrepid. He has the quality of sang froid - coolness under pressure, which he combines with alertness at all times and an abundance of exhilaration at the pleasures of sea travel in a reliable and responsive sailboat.

In a few days he will be passing through the Panama Canal and into the Caribbean and familiar waters of the North Atlantic. He is on course to set the record as the youngest person to sail the globe alone. How long this record lasts is open to question; there are other teenagers attempting the same thing. Even if his claim to fame is short-lived, the ability through the wonders of satellite communication and the internet to follow along almost in real time is a fabulous treat. Treat yourself to some real adventure – check out Mike’s progress on http://www.totallymoney.com/sailmike/

The perfect gift for someone you probably know?

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:54:25 -0700

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.