June 27, 2007
From Trees To Caves To Town
And speaking of primitive man, there're a couple interesting news items worth noting about our human ancestry, though perhaps somewhat contradictory. Last year, talking with Darren Naish, the zoologist, I asked about then fairly recent research suggesting that humans have evolved and continue to evolve locally. Naish thought the research significant — a hopeful sign for overall human evolution — though it is somewhat politically incorrect as it tends to validate our colloquial notions of race. In any case, that research is now making it into the mainstream, as reported in the New York Times. Separately, a German scientist has called into question the date of earliest human settlements, extending it by some 400,000 years. Now, I'm skeptical about such a jump and, moreover, if humans have been evolving as suggested above then 400,000 years would seem an excessive period of relative stability. Nevertheless, the current estimate of first human settlements having taken place only 10,000 years ago probably does need adjustment. It just doesn't feel right to me.
June 26, 2007
All Your Base Are Belong To Us
A couple Republican Senators tell Bush the war's lost. Watergate alert! Commentators are salivating all over the place at the parallels, at least insofar as it might affect war policy. Sorry, no dice. Watergate, as far as we are concerned, might as well have been a movie directed by John Feeney &mdash oops — Ford. Bush/Cheney isn't changing course for one, two, or half a dozen or more Republican Senators. Nor for poll numbers nearing rock bottom. (It's that weird confluence of money and belief.) Now, if the Congress were to rise up and assert itself, for once, and tell the administration what it's gonna do, that might make something happen. As many have pointed out, however, if you suspend your disbelief and impeach Bush you get President Cheney. Well, the logical response there is — and increasingly so as we see who's the real power — to impeach Cheney. Take out the symbiote, give the host a little rest. Experiment. The Tyrant sans symbiote might actually become more tractable. And politically, my feeling is that an effort at impeachment would be a win/win situation for the Democrats. While Republicans are still capable of countering restraints on the Tyrant as "playing politics" just about nobody, even among the great unwashed, cares one way or another what happens to the rictus from Wyoming. Nail him or fail, it won't matter. Just tie him in knots.
June 25, 2007
Knows For News
I tend to like Brian Williams. In my 'good old days' and well before he was the NBC anchor, one of his producers used to have me on occasionally to talk about Yugoslavia and/or U.S. foreign policy. He tended to ask good questions, he listened, and he delivered about as much as one could expect from a minute or two of sound bites. When he took over from Brokaw I expected Brian to do well, and he did. But in the past few months I've noticed a significant drop-off in the quality of his being the anchor (whatever the technical term for that may be). He's picking non-newsworthy stories, missing major stories, and often getting important parts wrong, incomplete, or misleading in what he does report. I've been puzzled by this, chalking it up, probably — this is entirely a guess as I have zero inside knowledge — to some odd combination of experienced staff being replaced by boot-lickers who don't know what they're doing and management insisting on further 'dumbing-down' of the news. But whatever, Brian should have had the smarts to try to fix things, or leave. Parenthetically, it's interesting to read this report on Brian's substantial decline in ratings, which assumes that a perfunctory check of 'story logs' explains relative performance among the networks isn't due to news per se, but to personality. More than slightly ironic that a supposedly serious news report on declining audience share for a news show has nothing to say about news quality. And a further demonstration that the high-class blogs just don't get it.
June 19, 2007
The New American Cold War
By Stephen F. Cohen
[From the July 10, 2006 issue of The Nation, re-circulated with the kind permission of the author, with a new introduction restating his analyses and arguments in the context of recent developments.]
Two reactions to this article were particularly noteworthy when it first appeared in The Nation almost exactly one year ago. Judging by activity on the magazine's website and by responses sent to me personally, it was very widely read and discussed both in the United States and in Russia, where it was quickly translated on a Russian-language site. And, unlike most Russian commentators, almost every American specialist who reacted to the article, directly or indirectly, adamantly disputed my thesis that US-Russian relations had deteriorated so badly they should now be understood as a new cold war--or possibly as a continuation of the old one.
June 10, 2007
An Honest Man Is Always In Trouble
A solid four of five stars. This is a quintessential "indie", or cult film, just too intelligent for the mass market. After watching it on DVD, and loving it, I hesitated to offer this review once I realized it had been pretty roundly panned — every review I read objected to the camera angles, lost the plot (or accused the director of losing the plot), and despised the character of Henry Fool, the spy, present throughout but only in person towards the end. They just don't get it. This is a surrealist comedy/commentary which can only be appreciated in a very right-brain way. It's not for nothing that the protagonist, Fay Grim (Parker Posey), is a woman, or that women are disproportionately represented in the production (read the credits). Hal Hartley, the writer/director, is not telling a strictly linear story — the bottom line here is that a single mom just wants to have a normal life while the world goes nuts around her. I guess how well one understands the film depends on how nuts, and funny, one sees the world being...
June 8, 2007
Or What's a Passport For?
If the Democrats' balking on Iraq got people mad, they just barely missed getting people a lot madder over immigration. It's a good thing, all around, that that awful attempt at legislation died quietly in the Senate yesterday. As Lou Dobbs keeps pointing out, what kind of sensible procedure is it to even consider legislation that will have a multi-trillion dollar impact without having hearings on it?! Or to propose "a deal" that has no real enforcement provisions? From what we know of this set of proposals, nothing about them was right and the Democrats should be thoroughly ashamed of bargaining with Bush to get them: because the bottom line was that the proposals only worked in the interests of big businesses that want cheap imported labor.
June 6, 2007
How To Make Outstanding Pancakes
Pancakes, Yum! One of my favorite foods — which I have memories from childhood of really great pancakes served in diners or restaurants, for some reason harder to find these days. Actually, pancakes are kind of tricky: Easy to make, even easier to make wrong. Over the years I've experimented with all sorts of ways of making pancakes. From scratch may well be the best, but I always have trouble getting the proportions right. On the other hand, straight from a mix doesn't, as a rule, produce an optimal result either. The problem there is that to calibrate the mix correctly takes much more time and trouble than the manufacturers are willing to admit to on the label, even for the best mixes. What one wants ideally — I think — is a light, fluffy, slightly moist, cake-like pancake that's done a light golden brown, sturdy enough to stand being drenched in maple syrup and butter. To make a real meal out of pancakes one could have bacon and poached eggs on the side, but great pancakes stand up for themselves quite well without that. (Though having pancakes with a cup of good coffee is probably required.) What follows works for me, your mileage may vary.
June 5, 2007
Remember the USS Liberty
That Jay Leno quiz thing — it's amazing how little people seem to know. Now, I'd hope most of you are familiar with this, but just in case not here's the short story: On June 8, 1967, the USS Liberty, a spy ship, was cruising in international waters off the coast of the Gaza strip. It was the fourth day of the Arab-Israeli war, now known as the "six day war" (only recently from declassified U.S. government documents attributed pretty much unequivocally to Israeli aggression). That morning, the Liberty was somewhat interested in intercepts indicating that the Israelis were busy massacring a large number of Egyptian prisoners of war. Also, intercepts indicating the Israelis planned an offensive to take the Golan heights. After being buzzed in the morning a few times by Israeli planes — no big deal, the Liberty was flying an unusually large U.S. flag and knew it was in no danger of being misidentified — in the early afternoon the Liberty came under sustained attack (approximately 75 minutes) by Israeli planes and torpedo boats. Thirty four U.S. servicemen died, one hundred and seventy four were wounded. The ship almost sank. President Johnson belayed an order to send carrier aircraft to assist; nevertheless, the Liberty did not sink (a miracle) and made it back to port. The government of Israel excused itself by claiming mistaken identity. The U.S. Congress never investigated. The U.S. government ordered surviving crew to keep their mouths shut.
June 4, 2007
Sarko and the Ghosts of May '68
Kouchner's Media Medicine
By Diana Johnstone
PARIS — In the last major speech of his successful presidential campaign, Nicolas Sarkozy launched into a bizarre attack on May 1968. "May 1968 imposed intellectual and moral relativism on us all," he declared. The heirs of May '68 imposed the idea that there was no longer any difference between good and evil, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness. "The heritage of May 1968 introduced cynicism into society and politics."
The Genocide Business
It's interesting that, according to the Department of Energy's most recent country brief, Sudan's proven oil reserves — always a squishy concept among oil producers — rose from about 563 million barrels last year to about 5 billion barrels early this year. Implied in that sudden rise is the possibility that vast potential reserves remain as yet undiscovered. Consider also that China gets 6-7% of its oil imports from Sudan and is steadily increasing its investment there. (China and Japan together purchase almost all of Sudan's oil exports.) Thus, one should maintain a skeptical view of humanitarian rhetoric over Darfur in assessing Washington's reverie regarding regime change in Khartoum. Instead, weigh the oil. Indeed, quite possibly its direct economic value may be exceeded by its strategic importance in U.S.-China relations.
June 3, 2007
Little Drummers
Last week, reports the Jerusalem Post, Israel's former Sephardi chief rabbi, Mordechai Eliyahu, wrote a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert informing him that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Gaza. What good news for Ehud! And the rabbi's son, Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of Safed, helpfully elaborated regarding what's needed to prevent the Palestinians from launching rockets into Israel: "If they don't stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand," "...and if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop." Thank you, Shmuel, for setting us straight. The Palestinians, however, do see things a bit differently. Ali Abunimah writes for Electronic Intifada from Chicago about this latest outrage. On a related note, people should try to watch John Pilger's outstanding (somewhat recent, 2002) video on the Palestinian situation. [Caution: powerful, extremely graphic images.]
Let's You and Him Fight
Another milestone in the collapse of modern civilization: the Tyrant has persuaded Russia (possibly) to re-introduce nuclear weapons along its border, targeted at Europe. Well, how else should the Russians respond to the flagrantly provocative U.S. act of putting up a new anti-missile shield in Europe, purportedly to defend against Iran? What the Europeans don't understand — at least not yet (because they don't fully appreciate the debased nature of America's leadership) — is that by instigating strife between Russia and Europe the Tyrant gains military leverage over both. The danger, of course, is that any proliferation of the next generation of intermediate range ballistic missiles cannot help but create serious instability, in Europe and elsewhere. These are hair-trigger weapons, suitable only for an environment of deadly confrontation. Given all our other problems, for the U.S. to now capriciously force nuclear proliferation higher up on the list makes no sense whatsoever.
