December 29, 2009
Transplanting Memories (Part 4 of 4)
A Tale of Two Sci-fi Movies
Avatar cost about $300 million to make. District 9 cost 1/10 as much, about $30 million. Avatar is playing now in a movie theater near you; District 9 was recently released on DVD. Both movies have humans who turn into aliens but their similarity pretty much ends there. The plot in Avatar made no sense to me. District 9, I understood. I liked District 9 much better.
The technology that went into Avatar is awesome. It's definitely worth seeing just for its 3D special effects. I hadn't previously seen any of the current generation of 3D movies — I didn't expect a lot but I was completely blown away. The CGI itself is impressive too, but less so; plenty of other movies have better. Plus which, of course, it's always fun to see Sigourney Weaver. The rest of the movie, for me, is one big "Hunh"?? WARNING: Spoiler alert for what follows.
December 27, 2009
Democrats on Crack
Sam Smith feels conflicted about the Senate health care bill. "I've never waffled so badly," he says, "on any legislation." If a progressive activist as experienced and as wise as Sam feels conflicted, that tells us a lot about how people are responding to this proposed "reform."
It's a confusing bill, because it's meant to be. But here are a couple things to keep in mind, stipulating, at the outset, that I haven't read the bill and that I would rather not have to read it, ever.
December 26, 2009
Vampire Capitalism
By Werther*
A quote attributed to Mussolini says the following: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." While some historians have taken issue with the authenticity of this statement the sentiment it expresses is pithy and irrefutable.
December 22, 2009
Got CIA?
Last July, speaking to the Socialism 2009 convention in San Francisco, John Pilger credited Mr. Obama with being a proponent of "American exceptionalism" — "a myth the late Harold Pinter described as 'a brilliant, witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.'" Pilger is curious, in particular, about what Mr. Obama was doing in his first job out of Columbia, at Business International Corporation, "which has a long history of providing cover for the CIA with covert action, and infiltrating unions and the left." Pilger knows about BIC because it was especially active in his own country, Australia.
December 21, 2009
On Vacation (Mostly)
This week and next I'm taking time off to recharge. Our usual podcast schedule will resume on January 8th.
I may blog a little bit as I'm not going anywhere, mostly just reading (Joseph Wambaugh's latest, Hollywood Moon
December 18, 2009
Cigar Box Guitar Rag
December 13, 2009
Religious Fundamentalism and the Rise of the Corporate State
By Werther*
Historian Tony Judt has written an important essay entitled "What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?" [1] Much of the raw material for the writer's assessment is contained in his book Postwar, the best one-volume history of post-World War II Europe we have read and which we unhesitatingly recommend to the reader. In his essay Judt asks why the social democratic states in Europe, Britain, and the United States have declined following a period (roughly 1950-1975) of unprecedented shared prosperity and social stability. [2] The author concludes that the social democratic enterprise ran out of gas because it was a victim of its own success. A generation after the war the polities in these various countries began to forget the slide into the abyss that occurred in the 1930s, thus falling prey to the siren song of Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises who preached that the state is invariably oppressive when it is not rigorously limited. [3]
Continue reading "Religious Fundamentalism and the Rise of the Corporate State"...
Power, Authority, Legitimacy
An organization can wield a great deal of power yet have no authority, nor any legitimacy. Goldman Sachs, for example, controls the Treasury Department outright, Mr. Obama's economic team indirectly, and keeps the major financial players in Congress on retainer while holding the American economy hostage. But Goldman operates in secret or it doesn't operate at all. A step up from Goldman, a state can wield both power and authority, but without legitimacy its survival depends upon raw force. When, for example, the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991 the state still had both plenty of power and plenty of authority, but enough people disobeyed Moscow such as to require a choice: either the state could assert its authority through overwhelming violence or accede to change. Mikhail Gorbachev bravely chose the latter course. Everywhere, it's a simple fact: legitimacy is the cornerstone of modern states.
December 12, 2009
Gang Aft Agley
Religion may well do more good than ill though it also gives people the wherewithal to take themselves far too seriously. Big Thinkers, for example, like Reinhold Niebuhr, take religion beyond the pale — when we get into human sacrifice for principle's sake, bereft of context, we may as well start feeding beating human hearts to the sun. Yet harness intelligence (or intelligent rhetoric) to the sacred cause and Christian Realism defies the words to bring it to account.
December 10, 2009
A Slippery Reid
At first blush, reports of Senator Reid's "compromise" with conservative "Democratic" Senators seem interesting. The big incentive being that some people — no detail yet on requirements — age 55-64 could buy Medicare coverage. To certain "liberals" (like Howard Dean) this is a step forward towards the goal of expanding Medicare to everybody. And I must admit, I like the sound of it personally, being 53 and without health insurance. But if you think about it a little bit Reid's "compromise" could just as easily take us in the opposite direction. By setting a precedent of a largish class of people paying for Medicare, conservative "Democratic" Senators could at some future point insist that everybody covered by Medicare pay something for it. Whether you like Reid's "compromise" boils down, really, to whether you trust Reid. I don't.
If I were in Congress I'd vote against whatever monstrous "compromise" this round produces and hope for real reform further down the road.
December 5, 2009
When I'm the President
December 4, 2009
EP Hacked
For about a half an hour this evening EP was off-line. Sorry about that. Somebody had hacked in and was using the site to send spam. BlueHost tracked the problem down and fixed it quickly. (An old script, hadn't been used in years, wasn't patched, was accidentally opened which triggered the hack — it was a very minor breach limited to a flurry of outgoing spam.) Everything should now be back to normal. Thanks for your patience!
December 3, 2009
More on Minarets
With the comments about minarets spooling up I figured I ought to try to defend my position in a podcast. So I asked Roger Hardy, BBC's Islamic Affairs analyst, for an interview but he politely declined. Roger did, nevertheless, recommend Jytte Klausen, of Brandeis. The name was familiar — it's pretty unusual — so I checked and yes, indeed, a month or so after I'd started the EP podcast in 2006 I'd asked Jytte for an interview, but hadn't then managed to make it happen. Well, this was a good time to try again, and this time I succeeded. Jytte was very kind to talk with me just on the day she was off to London to present her latest book to a parliamentary group. So following the podcast of the 18th, and after I have my vacation, this will be the podcast when we pick up again on January 8th; all those who disagree with my views on minarets will be heartened to know that they have some expert support. The whole story, however, gets complicated.
December 1, 2009
Cloud cuckoo land
The six point speech. No, wait, the three point speech. Or was it the four point speech?? From initial enthusiasm you could see (and practically smell) gradually yet steadily fading interest among the cadets and their officers. Eyes glazing over. Disbelief. A disconnect between the speaker and the assembly. I've spoken to enough live audiences — hell, I've spoken at West Point — and I know when that rapport breaks. The BS didn't fly. His policy amounts to cut and run on a timetable... so every one of those cadets is wondering why, if we're going to cut and run, should we delay? After he'd finished he waded into a throng of cadets to shake hands. More than a few turned their backs. On television. I almost feel sorry for the poor deluded fool.
