"I'll Be Back in an Hour. Are You Boys Sure You Know What You're Doing?"
There was a time when, perhaps more than Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice seemed to have the best shot at becoming the first woman or the first African-American to be president. But that was before she sounded public alarms based on faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, telling CNN, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." It was before a former top Bush administration colleague, David Kay, charged with finding unconventional weapons after the Iraq invasion, referred to Rice in Bob Woodward's "State of Denial" as "probably the worst national security adviser since the office was created."
And it was before furious Lebanese hung a huge banner depicting Rice's face, with blood dripping from her lips, from a bridge in central Beirut.
Labels: journalism
VENICE (Reuters) - A new film about the real-life rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers who also murdered her family stunned the Venice festival, with shocking images that left some viewers in tears.
"Redacted", by U.S. director Brian De Palma, is one of at least eight American films on the war in Iraq due for release in the next few months and the first of two movies on the conflict screening in Venice's main competition.
Inspired by one of the most serious crimes committed by American soldiers in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, it is a harrowing indictment of the conflict and spares the audience no brutality to get its message across.
De Palma, 66, whose "Casualties of War" in 1989 told a similar tale of abuse by American soldiers in Vietnam, makes no secret of the goal he is hoping to achieve with the film's images, all based on real material he found on the Internet.
"The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people," he told reporters after a press screening.
"The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against this war," he said.
De Palma and like-minded souls in Venice, Cannes, and Santa Barbara, of course, feel brave for making a film that portrays the young Midwestern privates and southern specialists and street-smart second lieutenants from Jersey on the frontlines as savages, capable and yearning to unleash unbearable cruelty.
As sweat drips in the eyes of soldiers and Marines as they attempt to bring peace to a land that has rarely known it, their enemies will be watching pirated and crudely-dubbed bootlegs of Redacted in training camps in Syria, in mosques in Saudi Arabia, and in homes throughout the Arab world, who already take a suspicious view of the American soldier in Iraq.
We will not see the pictures that would actually win the war, of an Iraqi father wrapping his arms around a suicide bomber to keep him from entering a mosque, or of the Iraqi interpreter who proudly dreams of becoming an American Marine. We won't see Americans saving Iraqi lives, or Iraqis saving American lives, or the brutality of those we fight.
Those, you see, are the pictures that Brian de Palma has redacted.
I’ve been excoriated on a number of occasions by anti-war types for pointing out what, to me, at least, is simply an empirical truism: that oftentimes the rhetorical aims of the anti-war camp reveal themselves in such a way that they overlap, intentionally or not, with the rhetorical strategies used by al Qaeda in its propaganda war against western hawks.
... But the fact remains that there have been overlaps, and that the phenomenon has become so pronounced that it has actually, at times, become a meta-phenomenon — with al Qaeda parroting back new formulations of their own propaganda as it has emerged, independently or not, from the anti-war west (leaving us with the surreal experience of al Qaeda leaders prattling on about “My Pet Goat,” or the failure of President Bush to sign on to Kyoto).
All of which I bring up by way of introduction to a rather long piece on tribal revolt in Iraq — one that I’ll quote from generously before leaving you with the following question to consider: at what point, precisely, does it become appropriate to call professional incompetence on the part of our press something a bit more than damning than mere ideological confirmation bias?
There he was, OBL, all tan and rested and on videotape (hey, did you get the feeling that he had a bootleg of my movie? Are there DVD players in those caves in Afghanistan?)
Labels: Brian de Palma
Here's what set me off: Craig's actions have been considered ample grounds for arrest for decades. Tens of thousands of gay men have gotten permanent records (quite often a fourth or fifth-degree felony), frequently losing jobs and going onto "sex offender" lists. Gay rights advocates have been furious about this for a long time.
If lefty bloggers feel the Minnesota police behaved outrageously, why haven't they said anything before? If Craig's arrest marks their introduction to this heinous practice, where's the outrage for all the victims? Writing "I don't see how he broke any laws," without understanding that society criminalized those actions long ago sounds naive. Do they really think no one has ever come to that conclusion before — or tried to change the practice and failed?
What I find more astonishing is the definition of "disorderly conduct." By this reckoning, ten years and thirty pounds ago, I had disorderly conduct foisted upon me approximately...let's see...15,923 times.
Per week.
Give or take.
But, even if they're unwanted advances, that's the natural order of things, right? Whereas men have to be protected from the unwanted advances of men at all costs (why? because they're worried they just might succumb to a particularly persuasive piece of foot telegraphy?).
Given the constant, daily harassment women endure (come on now, don't tune out; stay with me, here) -- harassment that makes us compress our daily activities into daylight hours, that circumscribes where we go, who we go with, and even what we wear; intrusive harassment, ruin-your-day, make-you-feel-powerless/angry/depressed harassment -- the overzealous prosecution of the toe-tapper really pisses me off.
As with China and Harry Potter, America was a hotbed of literary piracy; like China's poisonous pet-food makers, American factories turned out adulterated foods and willfully mislabeled products. Indeed, to see China today is to glimpse, in a distant mirror, the 19th-century American economy in all its corner-cutting, fraudulent glory.
Labels: Alberto Gonzales, Unblogging
Too old for military service when his country entered World War II in 1941, he devoted his time and energy to writing new patriotic songs, such as "Any Bonds Today?", donating the proceeds from This Is the Army to the army itself, and entertaining the troops with a road company of that show, in which he was a member of the cast. After performances in the United States, the show played in London in 1943, at a time when the city was still under air attack from Germany. After a tour of the British Isles, the show went on to North Africa and then Italy, playing in Rome only weeks after that city was liberated. Next came the Middle East and the Pacific, where performances often took place in close proximity to battle zones. In recognition of this important and courageous contribution to troop morale, at war's end Berlin was awarded the Medal of Merit by President Truman.
Labels: "God Bless America", patriotism
Are we an imperialist power? The only people who seem to care are those who wish to call us “imperialists.” For the rest of the world, the US is a fact of life, a force of nature. And, I might add, a welcome sight when the boogyman is knocking at the door or Mother nature goes on a bender.
Can we do it while acting more humbly? Must we be so “arrogant?” Next tyrant we overthrow, we should be sure to apologize before having our military rip his regime a new one. Maybe that will satisfy those who see anything relevant at all in this stupid argument.
The flood authorities reckon that 4 feet of water will be in my little one story house by breakfast time. The house will be a total loss – not even worth rebuilding. At any rate, it will be uninhabitable for weeks.
An extensive survey by The Associated Press and MTV found that people aged 13 to 24 who describe themselves as very spiritual or religious tend to be happier than those who don't.
Sociologists have long drawn a connection between happiness and the sense of community inherent to most religious practice. Lisa Pearce, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, said religion could indeed contribute to happiness, but she cautioned that the converse also could hold true.
"It's easier for kids who are happy and have things going well in their life to find the time and energy to participate in religion," said Pearce, co-principal investigator for the National Study of Youth and Religion. "It could be kids who have bad experiences in church end up leaving and being unhappy with religion."
Now the rapidly growing [Hizb ut-Tahrir] movement has been emerging from the shadows in the Palestinian territories as well, capitalizing on public unhappiness with the recent bloodshed between the mainstream Hamas and Fatah movements that has split the Palestinian cause in two. A recent rally in the West Bank drew a crowd estimated in the tens of thousands. Days later, the centre of Ramallah is still covered in dark red posters praising "The Caliphate: The Coming Force," and Palestinians are flocking to mosques to hear preachers with an angry message.
"Why are we watching infidels prosper in this world and not stopping them?" Sheik Abu Abdullah, a young-looking man sporting a black turban and a neat black beard, asked a silent crowd of 50 people gathered at the al-Faruq mosque in Kfar Aqab last night. The audience, all men, most middle-class professionals, sat in silence as a battery of ceiling fans sliced through the humid night air.
This election is unlike any we have faced before. The stakes are higher. And the challenges we face as a nation are greater than at any time in memory.
We as a nation must choose whether to do what America has always done in times like these -- change direction and move boldly into the future for the sake of our children, if not for ourselves, or wander in the same stale direction we have traveled in our recent past.
The choice we must make is as important as it is clear.
It is a choice between looking back and looking forward.
A choice between the way we've always done it and the way we could do it if we dared.
A choice between corporate power and the power of democracy.
Between a corrupt and corroded system and a government that works for us again.
It is caution versus courage. Old versus new. Calculation versus principle.
It is the establishment elites versus the American people.
It is a choice between the failed compromises of the past and the bright possibilities of our future. Between resigning ourselves to Two Americas or fighting for the One America we all believe in.
As always, at these moments, the choice we make is not for us, but for our children and our great country. And this time, like no other time, the consequences for our children are truly profound.
Will we halt global warming, protect our environment and humanity from the cataclysmic consequences of inaction and leave our children a livable world rich in the resources that were left to us?
And now, if they would listen - as I suppose they will not - I would address a few words to the Southern people.
I would say to them: - You consider yourselves a reasonable and a just people; and I consider that in the general qualities of reason and justice you are not inferior to any other people. Still, when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us a reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than outlaws. You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to "Black Republicans." In all your contentions with one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation of "Black Republicanism" as the first thing to be attended to. Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable prerequisite - license, so to speak - among you to be admitted or permitted to speak at all. Now, can you, or not, be prevailed upon to pause and to consider whether this is quite just to us, or even to yourselves? Bring forward your charges and specifications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or justify.
I cannot deliver that promise to the youth of this land tonight, but I am doing my part. I am standing the blows; I am hearing the charges hurled at me from the four quarters of the country. It is the same fight which was made against me in Louisiana when I was undertaking to provide the free school books, free buses, university facilities, and things of that kind to educate the youth of that State as best I could. It is the same blare which I heard when I was undertaking to provide for the sick and the afflicted. When the youth of this land realizes what is meant and what is contemplated the billingsgate and the profanity of all the Farleys and Johnsons in America can't prevent the light of truth from hurling itself in understandable letters against the dark canopy of the sky.
Now, when we have landed at the place where homes and comforts are provided for all families and complete education and training for all young men and women, the next problem is what about our income to sustain our people thereafter. How shall that be arranged to guarantee all the fair share of what soul and body need to sustain them conveniently?
Labels: Cultural Literacy and Illiteracy, Cynicism, Graham Greene, media, Politics, The Emperor's Clothes, Timewasters
OGDEN, Utah - The Ogden School District needs a big eraser. After naming a new school "James A. Madison Elementary School" in May, a history teacher pointed out this month that the fourth president of the United States didn't have a middle initial.
"I'm blindsided," school board member John Gullo said. "I hate being embarrassed."
The board voted May 23 to approve the school name as "James A. Madison." The majority of board members chose Madison because the school borders Madison Avenue. Several board members also said they feel James Madison was a great president.
Labels: James Madison
Put simply, there is no reasonable way to compare the use of military force by the U.S. to any other country on the planet. We spend more on our military than every other country combined. We spend six times more on our military than China, the next largest military spender.
Ruling the world that way through superior military force -- starting wars even when our national security is not directly at risk -- is the definitional behavior of an empire.
Labels: Glenn Greenwald, pacifism
In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.
Labels: Anne Shakespeare, Editing Decisions, Germaine Greer, Just Checking, Past Blasts, People's Pasts, Remember?, The Summer of Love, Things I Love
Demanding that the current crop of dunderheads in the Iraq parliament cobble together a grand unified theory of Iraqi constitutional law is at best shortsighted, at worst feeding the "fatal conceit" that in a tribal country like Iraq, decisions should nevertheless be made from the top down. Rather, democracy and freedom should begin from tribe to tribe, then spread to village, town, and city. It cannot be imposed from above when the only experience Iraqis have with top-down government is the crushing Baathist and Saddamite repression.
Labels: Blogging, Blogosphere, heds, media
Labels: 2008 Campaigns, Bill Richardson, Bloggers, heds, media
'Are you lonesome tonight?'Love the final sentence of RAA's post; really, folks: Isn't that the point, after all is said and done?
That question is never as lovely as when it's half-whispered, half-sung into your ear by the man you know you're falling in love with. A crisp uniform and the scent of clean manliness are all that separates you. And who knew Elvis sang gospel? It's even possible that our son's first name stuck in my husband's head from hearing "Swing Down Sweet Chariot" innumerable times.
Labels: Elvis, Falling In Love, RAA, The Next Chapter
Labels: Henry Hager, Jenna Bush, Shallowness, Trivial Thoughts, White House Wedding
The Bush administration has approved a plan to expand domestic access to some of the most powerful tools of 21st-century spycraft, giving law enforcement officials and others the ability to view data obtained from satellite and aircraft sensors that can see through cloud cover and even penetrate buildings and underground bunkers.
Only a handful of people in the theater knew that Miller had a fourth child. Those who did said nothing, out of respect for his wishes, because, for nearly four decades, Miller had never publicly acknowledged the existence of Daniel.
He did not mention him once in the scores of speeches and press interviews he gave over the years. He also never referred to him in his 1987 memoir, Timebends. In 2002, Daniel was left out of the New York Times obituary for Miller's wife, the photographer Inge Morath, who was Daniel's mother. A brief account of his birth appeared in a 2003 biography of Miller by the theater critic Martin Gottfried. But even then Miller maintained his silence. At his death, the only major American newspaper to mention Daniel in its obituary was the Los Angeles Times, which said, "Miller had another son, Daniel, who was diagnosed with Down syndrome shortly after his birth in 1962. It is not known whether he survives his father." Citing the Gottfried biography, the paper reported that Daniel had been put in an institution, where Miller "apparently never visited him."
"But even now it's difficult. Even in the six years from 1997 in which I was doing my research, I'd often hold back from asking questions. I'd play back the tapes and know that I ought to have asked a certain question, but sometimes I just couldn't: it would have been too cruel. I'd have a kind of a block."
Labels: 2008 Campaigns, ATT, Chavez, iPhone, Karl Rove, Petraeus, Scott Beauchamp, TNR, Truthiness
To be upfront and honest, I thought TRex's "vlog" was very funny. Also, I hadn't thought of Buster Poindexter in quite a long, long while.But then, I also thought the hed on Althouse's post was one of her best ever. When it comes right down to it, what the hell do I know? No matter: Sometimes it's fun as all get out just to sit back and watch the show(s) from the peanut gallery.
If I didn't know better, I might think that skeins of performance art were being cooperatively interwoven into entertainment for us all (and, of course, for the benefit of the bloggers involved).
Perish the thought (yet fancy that!)!!
Labels: Althouse, Bloggers, Blogging, Buster Poindexter, Flame Wars, New York Dolls, Performance Art, Pop Culture, TRex
Labels: Elvis, Falling In Love
Private Goings, the gunner in the Humvee I rode in, threw one box of cookies after another. Kids and their parents received them ecstatically. We did this all morning, for four hours. Aside from a 20 minute dismounted patrol near a palm grove, all we did was drive around and throw cookies.
American soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division shared the small outpost with Iraqi Army soldiers who lived, worked, and slept in the building next door.
“You mean the Iraqi Army unit here has been infiltrated?” I said.
He nodded grimly and took a pull from his cigarette.
"That's a bad reason for us not to be mortared," I said.
"Yeah," he said and laughed. It was obvious, though, that he did not think it was funny.
“How do you know this?” I said.
“Heard it from intel,” he said. “Getting information out of them is like pulling teeth, but sometimes they say stuff.”
The lesson that both thinkers took from the Greeks was that you could subtract the gods and their stories from Greek religion without taking away the most important thing. This thing had its primary reality not in myths or theology or doctrine, but in rituals, in moments that stand outside time, in which the loneliness and anxiety of the human individual is confronted and overcome, through immersion in the group—an idea that was later to be made foundational to the sociology of religion by Durkheim.
Thinkers like Dawkins and Hitchens conclude that religion is the cause of this violence and sexual obsession, and that the crimes committed in the name of religion can be seen as the definitive disproof of it. Not so, argues Girard. Religion is not the cause of violence but the solution to it. The violence comes from another source, and there is no society without it since it comes from the very attempt of human beings to live together. The same can be said of the religious obsession with sexuality: religion is not its cause, but an attempt to resolve it.
Labels: religion
Night was coming soon and it was getting colder outside. Birzo and I started to get shifty. We needed to get moving.
“Thank you so much for meeting with me,” I said and firmly shook Baba Sheikh’s hand.
“All people in the world should be brothers,” he said. “You are always welcome here for the rest of your life.”
But by the time Erikson died (at 92, in 1994), his reputation had all but evaporated. What happened? His theories were often analyzed critically but it wasn't his critics who did him in. He was betrayed by history. For one thing, psychoanalysis went into decline everywhere, partly because of its dubious success record, partly because analysis cost so much and took so long, and partly because Freud and his followers presented themselves originally as scientists but never developed a scientific method to judge their work.
More important, as Burston says, the world changed, radically. Youth, Erikson's great subject, was transformed by the media, by new attitudes to sex, by changed views of authority -- and by prescription drugs. To Erikson's generation of therapists, an adolescent crisis offered a way to explore family history and social context, then carefully ease the patient back to health. "In that dimly remembered long-ago time," Burston writes, "psychotropic drugs were viewed as a treatment of last resort." Nowadays they are every MD's panacea. The chance to grasp what a disturbed adolescent is communicating can be drowned in pharmaceuticals.
Femme Fatale's central contention is that "it is difficult to imagine a woman less likely . . . to be able to engage in clandestine activities than Mata Hari." She was a star, and "while she was certainly seductive, which might be viewed as useful for a spy, she was never on any occasion invisible"; in fact, she was "a ridiculous candidate for a job that required clandestine behavior." Yet her persecutors "believed firmly that Mata Hari was guilty because she slept with many men and traveled widely in wartime. Such a woman must be a spy." A kangaroo court agreed, and on Oct. 15, 1917, at the age of 41, she was executed. Shipman reports that many years later, the prosecutor, André Mornet, talked to a writer about the case and said "with a supreme indifference, 'Between you and me, there wasn't enough [evidence] to flog a cat.' "
Telephone numbers used to begin with two letters, which were an abbreviation for a word. For example, there was a Glenn Miller song called PEnnsylvania 6-5000, and Liz Taylor made a movie called BUtterfield-8. I'm just barely old enough to remember that my phone number at home when I was 5 or so started with SYcamore 4, or SY4. These were telephone exchanges, and had exchange names -- PEnnsylvania, SYcamore, KLondike, etc.
A 47-year-old man who apparently tried to rescue people nearby after his van plunged into the Mississippi River when the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed was among three victims pulled from the wreckage Thursday.
Peter Hausmann, a father of four from Rosemount, survived the collapse and escaped from his van into the murky, turbulent waters, according to a source involved with the investigation. In the resulting chaos, he apparently swam toward victims in another vehicle in an attempt to render assistance, the source said.
Hausmann’s body was recovered late on Thursday morning, according to the Hennepin County medical examiner.
Labels: Heroes
HYDERABAD, India - Dozens of Muslim protesters led by three lawmakers attacked an exiled Bangladeshi writer at the release of her book in southern India on Thursday, calling her “anti-Islam,” and telling her to go back to her country.
About 100 people burst into the Press Club in Hyderabad, shouting insults at Taslima Nasrin and ransacking the place, throwing chairs in the air and overturning tables.
... Nasrin fled Bangladesh in 1994 when Islamic extremists threatened to kill her after an Indian newspaper quoted her as saying changes must be made to the Islamic holy book, the Quran, to give women more rights.
She has vehemently denied making the comments but still faces death threats from Islamic hard-liners in Bangladesh, where one of her books is banned.
Labels: Taslima Nasrin
Essentially, the book shatters a taboo in up-ending the widespread French assumption that in America “culture” is reserved for a happy few (generally rich) cultivated people while the rest of the country has a steady diet of no culture or cartoonish low-brow pop culture. Martel contests this picture of what happens in America, painstakingly documenting a situation in which key living cultural experiences and values are fostered in the U.S. system to reach a vast public throughout a very culturally diverse nation. In cataloguing the myriad of ways that culture reaches audiences and rewards creators in the United States, Frédéric Martel, 40, a former French cultural attaché in Boston, carefully demonstrates how this American approach brings “culture” to a wide public, including marginal groups of the population who are often excluded from mainstream experience. And Martel constantly underscores how American culture flourishes without ever having to depend on government help and without ever becoming vulnerable to the vagaries and bureaucratic distortions of a state-administered system.
An unspoken message has been carefully planted by Martel in his work: that key features of the American approach would be easy for France to adopt in a way that made the French system more adaptable and perhaps more sustainable.
Working with an eye to the idea of transplanting American techniques to France, Martel describes in detail – thanks to hundreds of interviews – the mainstays of the institutional landscape in the United States. Starting with the history of private patronage and endowments, Martel carefully catalogues public-private partnerships between museums and corporate sponsors. He describes how cultural policies in the United States are totally decentralized thanks to local cooperation between cities and private foundations. He dwells on the theme of how Americans learn about the arts, as performers and as public, from early childhood right through university, from institutions of learning that function on their own without any direction, from a single cultural arbiter laying down a monolithic vision from the top.
Labels: France
The most nauseating aspect of the campaign is the way we are repeatedly told that the Iraqi interpreters worked for "us".
Who exactly is meant by "us"? In common with millions of other Britons, I did not want the Iraq war, an illegal invasion of a sovereign state engineered and egged on by a tiny minority of fanatical neoconservatives whose first loyalty was not to Britain but to the cause of Pax Americana.
... The interpreters did not work for "us", the British people, but for themselves - they are paid around £16 a day, an excellent wage in Iraq - and for an illegal occupying force. Let's not cast them as heroes. The true heroes in Iraq are those who have resisted the invasion of their country.
As Seumas Milne wrote in yesterday's Guardian: "More than any other single factor, it has been the war of attrition waged by Iraq's armed resistance that has successfully challenged the world's most powerful army and driven the demand for withdrawal to the top of the political agenda in Washington."
If more Iraqis had followed the example of the interpreters and collaborated with British and American forces, it is likely that the cities of Iran and Syria would now be lying in rubble.
... There is a simple answer to that "practical military issue": let's do all we can to keep the British army out of war zones. And in the meantime, let's do all we can to keep self-centred mercenaries who betrayed their fellow countrymen and women for financial gain out of Britain.
If that means some of them may lose their lives, then the responsibility lies with those who planned and supported this wicked, deceitful and catastrophic war, and not those of us who tried all we could to stop it.
Labels: anti-war, Britain, Guardian, Iraq, No Friend Forgotten
Look, generally the way these things work is you try to be cordial to the person you're with, and so you don't want the picture to be kind of, you know, ducking it out. Okay, put up your dukes. That's an old boxing expression.
Last year Pew, a pollster, found that one-third of blacks believe immigrants take jobs from Americans—more than any other group. ... One survey of Durham, in North Carolina, found that 59% of Latinos believed few or almost no blacks were hard-working, and a similar proportion reckoned few or almost none could be trusted. Fewer than one in ten whites felt the same way.
Fifteen years ago such prejudices hardly existed in Durham, for the simple reason that there were hardly any Latinos. Like much of the South, the city was biracial, with roughly equal numbers of blacks and whites. Then came a building boom that drew workers from Mexico, many of them illegal. By 2000 one in 12 residents of Durham was Latino—up from one in 80 a decade earlier. By 2005, one in eight was. ...
That storm has broken most heavily on the poorest parts of Durham, which happen to be black. It is in largely black neighbourhoods that wooden shacks have been converted into call centres and carnicerias (and it is, inevitably, often blacks who have robbed new arrivals of their weekly wages). In this, Durham is typical. By 2000 blacks in all ten of America's biggest metropolitan areas were more mixed in with Hispanics than with whites. In Los Angeles, former ghettos such as Watts are now biracial.
