Rick´s radar

The Dark Art of ‘Breaking Bad’ - NYTimes.com

2011-08-14T12:12:00.000-07:00

The Dark Art of ‘Breaking Bad’ - NYTimes.com: "“If religion is a reaction of man, and nothing more, it seems to me that it represents a human desire for wrongdoers to be punished. I hate the idea of Idi Amin living in Saudi Arabia for the last 25 years of his life. That galls me to no end.”

He paused for a moment and speared a few tater tots in a white plastic-foam tray perched on his lap.

“I feel some sort of need for biblical atonement, or justice, or something,” he said between chews. “I like to believe there is some comeuppance, that karma kicks in at some point, even if it takes years or decades to happen,” he went on. “My girlfriend says this great thing that’s become my philosophy as well. ‘I want to believe there’s a heaven. But I can’t not believe there’s a hell.’ ”"

The Elusive Big Idea - NYTimes.com

2011-08-14T11:57:00.000-07:00

The Elusive Big Idea - NYTimes.com: "It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy."

15 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent

2011-07-30T16:03:00.000-07:00

mental_floss Blog � 15 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent: "15 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent"

book notes

2011-07-27T11:15:00.000-07:00

The Psychopath Test - Jon Ronson

"TV is is just troubled people being bood these days"

"The right sort of mad are people who are a bit madder than we fear we are becoming, and in a recognizable way. We might be anxious but we aren't as anxious as they are" etc.

The Rosenhan experiment

Schumpeter: Great bad men as bosses | The Economist

2011-07-23T08:32:00.000-07:00

Schumpeter: Great bad men as bosses | The Economist: "Richard Tedlow of Harvard Business School argues that many “giants of enterprise” suffer from what Norwegians call stormannsgalskap, the madness of great men."

Summers on the Winklevoss Twins

2011-07-20T11:41:00.000-07:00

Google Reader (22): "�'One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o'clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they're looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case.'"

Bikers

2011-05-30T10:29:00.001-07:00

The F Word
Tags: SOUTH
PARK more...

Santorum

2011-05-17T10:10:00.000-07:00

Santorum: "santorum (san-TOR-um) n.
��1. The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter
��that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex."

Letter from Southern France: First Impressions : The New Yorker

2011-05-11T09:24:00.000-07:00

Letter from Southern France: First Impressions : The New Yorker: "The pathos of their workmanship—the attempt to copy something novel and marvellous by the dimming light of their existence—nearly makes you weep. And here, perhaps, the cruel notion that we call fashion, a coded expression of rivalry and desire, was born."

Hindsight bias

2011-04-30T21:01:00.000-07:00

Every writer on 1989 wrestles with an almost unavoidable human proclivity that psychologists have christened “hindsight bias”—the tendency, that is, to regard actual historical outcomes as more probable than alternatives that seemed real at the time (for example, a Tiananmen-style crackdown in Central Europe).1

Death map

2011-04-06T17:18:00.000-07:00

Book notes

2011-04-02T12:45:00.000-07:00

America aflame by David goldfield

Us only country that required civil war to abolish slavery

Darwin never used "survival Of the fittest" coined by Herbert Spencer

Japan's nuclear crisis and the 2011 earthquake tsunami: Let's cool the political meltdown. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

2011-03-14T10:07:00.000-07:00

Japan's nuclear crisis and the 2011 earthquake tsunami: Let's cool the political meltdown. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine: "The rate of direct fatalities per unit of energy production is 18 times worse for oil than it is for nuclear power"

Law of Poe

2011-02-27T12:36:00.000-08:00

Google Reader (3): "Law of Poe which states that the satirical expression of extreme views is indistinguishable from those that hold those views as truth when the expression is made sans some sign, symbol or “tell” (such as an emoticon) that lets the recipient know it is in fact satire."

book notes

2011-02-17T11:32:00.000-08:00

Cairo: The City Victorious by Max Rodenbeck

overcrowding, traffic and pollution all problems going back 3000 years.

p. 101 -- Cherries ferried by flock of doves from Lebanon, 980's

1099 ad, Crusaders revolutionized middle eastern war by slaughtering entire civilian population in Jerusalem

book notes

2011-02-11T08:39:00.000-08:00

All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly

When Nietzsche proclaimed God is dead, he believed that "it would be a long time before God's grounding role in the culture was no longer obvious or taken for granted"

Christian excellence: humility, love
Roman: duty
Greek: gratitude, wonder

Furies v. Apollo, old tribalism v. new reason, law

"The Chorus recognizes that the Furies notion of blood vengeance, creating an unending cycle of revenge, will destroy any culture that adheres to it."

book notes

2011-02-05T12:01:00.000-08:00

City of Thieves

"May your children shit in your soup"

"You have all the romance of a train station whore"

Hooray for Colorado!!

2011-01-26T11:39:00.000-08:00

The King's Speech: good movie, very bad history. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

2011-01-24T10:17:00.000-08:00

The King's Speech: good movie, very bad history. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine: "In a few months, the British royal family will be yet again rebranded and relaunched in the panoply of a wedding. Terms like 'national unity' and 'people's monarchy' will be freely flung around. Almost the entire moral capital of this rather odd little German dynasty is invested in the post-fabricated myth of its participation in 'Britain's finest hour.' In fact, had it been up to them, the finest hour would never have taken place. So this is not a detail but a major desecration of the historical record—now apparently gliding unopposed toward a baptism by Oscar."

Book notes

2011-01-23T16:30:00.000-08:00

Monsoon by Robert Kaplan

In gujarat, globalization spurs division between Hindu and Muslim

"whether it is the Nauruan empire in India or the achaemendin empire in Persia, for millions lifted out of poverty and recently educated, the bomb now summons forth these great kingdoms of anquity."

Book notes

2010-12-31T09:01:00.000-08:00

Sex at dawn

If prehistoric man lived such a stressful life, why does modern man react so poorly to stress. Should have been culled by natural selection

Life expectancy v life span

Low sexual dimorphism doesn't necessarily indicate monogamy. It could be low competition for females, as in chimps & bonobos

books notes

2010-12-15T09:17:00.000-08:00

Why the West Rules -- For Now by Ian Morris

Global cooling in 3800 BCE may have been the birth of the city -- monsoon rains in Mesopotamia dried up, forcing villages to centralize and specialize in orider to survive.

High end vs. low end state (taxes, bureaucracy, standing army)

1279-- Mongols break China just at the point where it was about to break into a an industrial revolution.

China at center + size of pacific discourage discovery of NA. Europe more desperate and closer

Perfection of gun with infantry breaks the nomads of Asian steppe in 17th, allowing old world to break out of old ceiling of social development -- no more raids and sackings.

Roanake founded as a pirates' lair for raiding Spanish gold shipments

P603 - h1n1 killed more people 50m than black death in a century Or aids in last 30 yrs

fatal dose to effective dose

2010-12-15T08:56:00.000-08:00

book notes

2010-11-18T10:49:00.000-08:00

The Places In Between by Rory Stewart

Discussion of how interpretation of Koran differs from interpretation of Bible

gay coffin

2010-11-18T07:46:00.000-08:00

Jesus killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military—By Jeff Sharlet (Harper's Magazine)

2010-10-05T08:12:00.000-07:00

Jesus killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military—By Jeff Sharlet (Harper's Magazine): "Only half of one percent of the military accepts the label “atheist” or “agnostic.” (Jews are even scarcer, accounting for only one servicemember in three hundred; Muslims are just one in four hundred.) Around 22 percent, meanwhile, identify themselves as affiliated with evangelical or Pentecostal denominations. But that number is misleading. It leaves out those attached to the traditional mainline denominations—about 7 percent of the military—who describe themselves as evangelical; George W. Bush, for instance, is a Methodist. Among the 19 percent of military members who are Roman Catholics, meanwhile, there is a small but vocal subset who tend politically to affiliate with conservative evangelicals."

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and Republicans Surprise Push for Gay Rights - The Daily Beast

2010-09-11T11:01:00.000-07:00

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and Republicans Surprise Push for Gay Rights - The Daily Beast: "There is a small but growing number of Republicans who recognize that staying true to the values of limited government and individual liberty means believing in a world where gays and lesbians are treated equally.
This is why, for the first time, a majority of Americans believe gays and lesbians should have the right to marry and almost 80 percent say they should be allowed to serve our country openly in the military.
If we see a return of the rational right, LGBT equality may finally transcend petty partisanship. This new brand of Republicans is the only group that can influence the GOP’s mainstream. If they do, we may see a day when fundamental beliefs in American fairness and equality are applied to all citizens regardless of their orientation."

Same Sex Marriage Poll

2010-08-14T11:15:00.001-07:00

book notes

2010-08-13T16:15:00.000-07:00

A World Without Islam by Graham E. Fuller

Most revered female figure in Islam -- Virgin Mary (mentioned more times in Qur'an than New Testament)

Qur'an has Jesus coming back on Judgement Day

Religions tend to be more tolerant of antecedent religions than newer ones.

Despite Islam's origins as a ruler's religion (and Christianity as an outsider's religion), Western Christianity has a much greater history of involvement with the state.

The Eastern Christian empire actually preferred to fall to the Muslim Turks than the Western Catholics because they would still be able to practice their religion under the Turks.

book notes

2010-08-13T16:14:00.000-07:00

Get Capone

Real McCoy came from bootlegger with high-grade product.

Getting Capone for tax evasion rather than bootlegging appears to have been not a result of having more proof but rather a result of juries being much more willing to convict a person of tax evasion than booting legging, since most jurors obeyed the tax law but not Prohibition.

The dispute over the "Ground Zero mosque" is an object lesson in how not to resist intolerance. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

2010-08-10T17:50:00.000-07:00

The dispute over the "Ground Zero mosque" is an object lesson in how not to resist intolerance. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine: "This kind of capitulation needs to be fought consistently. But here is exactly how not to resist it. Take, for example, the widely publicized opinion of Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. Supporting those relatives of the 9/11 victims who have opposed Cordoba House, he drew a crass analogy with the Final Solution and said that, like Holocaust survivors, 'their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.'"

Got Medieval: Professor Newt's Distorted History Lesson

2010-08-07T09:49:00.000-07:00

Got Medieval: Professor Newt's Distorted History Lesson: "In 962 Abd-er Rahman III was succeeded by his son Al-Hakim. Owing to the peace which the Christians of Cordova then enjoyed [...] the citizens of Cordova, Arabs, Christians, and Jews, enjoyed so high a degree of literary culture that the city was known as the New Athens. From all quarters came students eager to drink at its founts of knowledge. Among the men afterwards famous who studied at Cordova were the scholarly monk Gerbert, destined to sit on the Chair of Peter as Sylvester II (999-1003), the Jewish rabbis Moses and Maimonides, and the famous Spanish-Arabian commentator on Aristotle, Averroes.
So it's easy to see why a group of Muslims creating a community center in the heart of a majority Christian country in a city known for its large Jewish population might name it 'The Cordoba House' They're not, as Gingrich hopes we would believe, discreetly laughing at us because 'Cordoba' is some double-secret Islamist code for 'conquest'; rather, they're hoping to associate themselves with a particular time in medieval history when the largest library in Western Europe was to be found in Cordoba, a city in which�scholars of all three major Abrahamic religions were free to study side-by-side."

best selling books of all time

2010-08-01T15:25:00.000-07:00

Other than religion and Harry Potter, the best selling books of all time are:

Little Red Book
Chinese-English Dictionary
And Then There Were None
Lord of the Rings
DaVinci Code
Catcher in the Rye

The Iraq Tragedy - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

2010-07-09T11:53:00.000-07:00

The Iraq Tragedy - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan: "What has neoconservatism achieved? In Afghanistan, the best possible option is a country dominated by an increasingly Islamist and nuclear-armed Pakistan. In Iraq, the best possible option is a country dominated by Shiites far more aligned with Iran than many Sunni Arab states. And so the upshot of the Bush-Cheney years is an empowerment of both Iran and Pakistan, the two Muslim countries either with or close to nuclear capacity. That is the end result of a policy designed above all to prevent WMDs getting into the hands of terrorists. I mean: you couldn't make this up."

David Boise on Prop 8 trial

2010-07-09T11:48:00.001-07:00

La Familia, the violent drug cartel, takes inspiration from Colorado Springs: Holy moly! - Denver News - The Latest Word

2010-07-01T08:55:00.000-07:00

La Familia, the violent drug cartel, takes inspiration from Colorado Springs: Holy moly! - Denver News - The Latest Word: "And plenty of men have signed on for that battle, with Eldredge's book selling more than 2.5 million copies. A few of which have made their way into the hands of La Familia Michoacana, the newest, most violent of the drug cartels -- whose leader, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez (El Mas Loco), has made Wild at Heart required reading at his training camps, according to a Mexican justice department report."

quotes

2010-06-30T10:02:00.000-07:00

Macchiavelli: This is the tragedy of man. Circumstances change, and he does not

South Park money chimp

2010-06-30T08:14:00.000-07:00

book notes

2010-06-21T21:43:00.000-07:00

Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Orkent

Brewers and distillers broke of because the brewers thought the distillers were selling crap while the distillers thought the brewers were stoking prohibition with their saloons.

South shied away from prohibitionists before Civil War because of their association with abolition. Warmed to the prohibitionist after Civil War in part because they saw liquor as playing in what they viewed as Negro insubordination.

Klu Klux Klan new emphasis in the 20's against Catholics and Jews was a strategy to expand out of the South (highly successful)

Wet vs. Dry was also Urban vs. Rural, immigrants vs. nativists, ethnics vs. Northern European Protestants. Nativists made immigration quotas in 20's based on the 1890's Census and blocked Congressional redistricting based on 1920's Census -- which would have given urban ethnics proportional representation.

Daniel Okrent's Last Call revisits Prohibition. - By Johann Hari - Slate Magazine: "Many people understandably worry that legalization would cause a huge rise in drug use, but the facts suggest this isn't the case. Portugal decriminalized the personal possession of all drugs in 2001, and—as a study by Glenn Greenwald for the Cato Institute found—it had almost no effect at all.* Indeed, drug use fell a little among the young. Similarly, Okrent says the end of alcohol prohibition 'made it harder, not easier, to get a drink. ... Now there were closing hours and age limits, as well as a collection of geographic proscriptions that kept bars or package stores distant from schools, churches and hospitals.' People didn't drink much more. The only change was that they didn't have to turn to armed criminal gangs for it, and they didn't end up swigging poison."

book notes

2010-06-18T11:04:00.000-07:00

Jesus Wars by Phillip Jenkins

5th Century monks kind of acted like Nazi brown shirts, busting heads in the streets. They would also go to war against the monks of an opposing bishop.

Since Jesus was probably born in May, his baptism may have been conflated with his birth to get the Dec. 25 date -- baptism was often celebrated at Jan. 6 & early Christians thought Jesus took on divinity at his baptism.

marker between the pre-modern and modern world -- someone else's wrong beliefs could bring God's wrath onto you or your community.

book notes

2010-06-09T09:17:00.000-07:00

The Icarus Syndrome by Peter Beinart

Great takedown of Wilson's self regard as a disinterested pedagogue to the world.

Early 20th Century Progressivism really did have a precept contrary to a founding precept of the U.S. -- that human nature improves with improving material circumstance.

Kennan: Wilson and Stalin both sought to impose an abstract ideal as a universal onto a messy, diverse world.

Kosovo set the stage for Iraq by:

-- setting precedent for U.S. force without U.N. approval

-- discrediting the Europeans

-- re-crediting preventative war

"In 1939, few American politicians believed that a Nazi takeover of Warsaw constituted a grave danger to the United States. By 1965, many believed we couldn't live with a North Vietnamese takeover of Saigon. In the 1980s, Americans lived peacefully, albeit anxiously, with thousands of Soviet nuclear warheads pointed our way. By 2003, many Washington commentators claimed that even Iraqi biological or chemical weapons put us in mortal peril."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/14/AR2010071404223.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns

book notes

2010-06-05T10:28:00.000-07:00

Book Review - The Invisible Gorilla - By Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons - NYTimes.com: "Chabris and Simons also propose an “illusion of potential”: the belief that “vast reservoirs of untapped mental ability exist in our brains, just waiting to be accessed.” They use this to introduce a fascinating review of urban legends of modern psychology, including well-publicized claims that watching certain videos, like the Baby Einstein series, will make your child smarter; that classical music makes everyone smarter (the so-called Mozart effect); that older adults can keep their minds limber by doing Sudoku and crossword puzzles; and that people use only 10 percent of their brains. It turns out that none of this is true."

Climate denial activists’ parallel to anti-relativity movement of 1920s | Joss Garman

2010-05-28T16:57:00.000-07:00

Climate denial activists’ parallel to anti-relativity movement of 1920s | Joss Garman: "“This world is a strange madhouse. Currently, every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation.”

So wrote Albert Einstein in a letter to his one time collaborator, the mathematician Marcel Grossmann in 1920."

TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect

2010-05-17T19:07:00.000-07:00

TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect: "I'm not really a fan of beauty contests, but the tone and substance of the fever swamp's reaction to an Arab-American winning a beauty contest is at least useful for pointing out how some people's political opinions aren't based so much in questions of policy as anti-Muslim animosity. The level of anger is just so plainly disproportionate to the matter at hand as to be self-implicating. These people aren't worried about terrorism -- they're offended by the idea of Muslims being integrated into the most mundane and banal aspects of American society"

Jobs: Apple Offers 'Freedom from Porn' | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

2010-05-17T16:19:00.000-07:00

Jobs: Apple Offers 'Freedom from Porn' | News & Opinion | PCMag.com: "'Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away.'"

The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment | The New York Review of Books

2010-05-17T10:49:00.000-07:00

The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment | The New York Review of Books: "Many of Israel’s founders believed that with statehood, Jews would rightly be judged on the way they treated the non-Jews living under their dominion. “For the first time we shall be the majority living with a minority,” Knesset member Pinchas Lavon declared in 1948, “and we shall be called upon to provide an example and prove how Jews live with a�minority.”

But the message of the American Jewish establishment and its allies in the Netanyahu government is exactly the opposite: since Jews are history’s permanent victims, always on the knife-edge of extinction, moral responsibility is a luxury Israel does not have. Its only responsibility is to survive. As former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg writes in his remarkable 2008 book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes, “Victimhood sets you�free.”"

The man behind Abercrombie & Fitch - Salon.com

2010-05-15T09:20:00.000-07:00

The man behind Abercrombie & Fitch - Salon.com: "Mike Jeffries, the 61-year-old CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, says 'dude' a lot. He'll say, 'What a cool idea, dude,' or, when the jeans on a store's mannequin are too thin in the calves, 'Let's make this dude look more like a dude,' or, when I ask him why he dyes his hair blond, 'Dude, I'm not an old fart who wears his jeans up at his shoulders.'"

Well, These New Zuckerberg IMs Won't Help Facebook's Privacy Problems

2010-05-13T17:21:00.000-07:00

Well, These New Zuckerberg IMs Won't Help Facebook's Privacy Problems: "According to SAI sources, the following exchange is between a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and a friend shortly after Mark launched The Facebook in his dorm room:
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They 'trust me'

Zuck: Dumb fucks."

Op-Ed Columnist - Divorce and Abortion - Red States and Blue States - NYTimes.com

2010-05-10T06:07:00.000-07:00

Op-Ed Columnist - Divorce and Abortion - Red States and Blue States - NYTimes.com: "The teen pregnancy rate in blue Connecticut, for instance, is roughly identical to the teen pregnancy rate in red Montana. But in Connecticut, those pregnancies are half as likely to be carried to term. Over all, the abortion rate is twice as high in New York as in Texas and three times as high in Massachusetts as in Utah.

So it isn’t just contraception that delays childbearing in liberal states, and it isn’t just a foolish devotion to abstinence education that leads to teen births and hasty marriages in conservative America. It’s also a matter of how plausible an option abortion seems, both morally and practically, depending on who and where you are."

book notes

2010-05-06T15:34:00.000-07:00

Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad ... By Stephen Fried

Part of the reason people liked to slaughter buffaloes en masse was to deny Indians their food supply

Pullman exclusively hired dark-skinned black men to provide service on his train cars. The idea seemed to be that these men would blend into the furniture in this enclosed environment. For blacks, these high-paying jobs provided the first entree into middle class.

book notes

2010-05-01T09:54:00.000-07:00

Book Review - Ill Fares the Land - By Tony Judt - NYTimes.com: "But enough of the fact-slinging. The central problem with “Ill Fares the Land” is a classic fallacy of the liberal-left intelligentsia, more in Europe than in the United States. Call it the “Doctor State Syndrome.” The individual is greedy, misguided or blind. The state is the Hegelian embodiment of the right and the good that floats above the fray. But the state does not. It is a party to the conflict over “who gets what, when and how,” to recall Harold Lasswell’s definition of politics. It makes its own pitch for power; it creates privileges, franchises and clienteles. This is why it is so hard to rein in, let alone cut back. The modern welfare state creates a new vested interest with each new entitlement. It corrupts as it does good."

book notes

2010-04-28T12:12:00.000-07:00

The War Lovers by Evan Thomas

Colorful uniforms went away with the advent of smokeless gun powder, which bright colors conspicuous on the battle field.

Roosevelt's father didn't serve in the Civil War (in part because his wife was a frail Southerner whose brother were fighting for the Confederacy) -- fueling TR's need to prove himself in battle.

Roosevelt in 1889 letter to Cecil Spring Rice -- "Frankly, I don't know that I should be sorry to see a bit of a spar with Germany; the burning of New York and a few other seacoast cities would be a good object lesson on the need of an adequate system of coastal defenses"

book notes

2010-04-27T08:29:00.000-07:00

Havana Nocturne by T. J. English

The 1942 apprehension of (7?) German saboteurs in the Harbor of New York was made possible by a deal with Lucky Luciano in which Luciano gets released from prison in exchange for ordering his port mobsters to turn government informants.

Batista's overconfidence really played into Castro's hand (as Kennedy's would later) -- first letting Castro free from a 30 year prison sentence and then claiming that he had been killed in a battle, setting the stage for Castro to re-emerge in the famous New York Times 3-part profile.

The multi-racial music scene in Havana was making it the international cool place of the 50's -- a potentially powerful reposte to North America's racial segregation.

magazine notes

2010-04-20T11:02:00.000-07:00

"An individual with a story is on higher ground than an individual with an argument" -- Morris Mott quoted in 4/19/10 New Yorker by Peter Hessler (Go West)

Sarah Palin's ignorant imperialism. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

2010-04-20T10:18:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin's ignorant imperialism. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine: "The British hawks, like Palin, saw self-restraint as wimpy and dangerous. If Britain retreated from the tax policies that had provoked the Tea Party, they warned, the colonists would take this as 'Proofs of our Weakness, Disunion and Timidity.' Miller writes, 'Few Englishmen believed that the mother country could retain its sovereignty if it retreated in the face of such outrage: it was now said upon every side that the colonists must be chastised into submission.'

Palin thinks American power is above apology because it's 'a force for good throughout this world.' But Britain saw itself the same way. In their own eyes, Miller explains, Englishmen,
the terror of the evildoers of the world, could no longer sit still while a knot of agitators and firebrands in their own colonies sought to destroy the empire. If England were to continue to hold up her head in Europe as a great power, she could not permit 'a petty little province, the creature of our own hands, the bubble of our breath,' to hurl defiance across the Atlantic with impunity."

The Terrorist We Keep Killing - Page 1 - The Daily Beast

2010-04-20T08:05:00.000-07:00

The Terrorist We Keep Killing - Page 1 - The Daily Beast: "But al Qaeda was quick to see where Bush was going. Zarqawi moved into Iraq after he and the rest of al Qaeda’s network of terrorists were expelled from Afghanistan in late 2001. He worked carefully and successfully to prepare and build an infrastructure to attack the American occupation force once it overran Iraq in 2003—including networks of supporters in the Muslim diaspora in Europe and all over the Islamic world to funnel volunteers, many of them suicide bombers, into Iraq once the occupation began. In short, al Qaeda prepared for the occupation of Iraq far more effectively and efficiently than did the Pentagon.

On February 11, 2003, Osama bin Laden sent an open letter to the Iraqi people warning them that Bush was getting ready to attack their country. Bin Laden blamed the conspiracy on the Crusaders and Zionists who wanted to “install a stooge regime to follow its masters in Washington and Tel Aviv to pave the way for the establishment of Greater Israel.”"

Tim Leifield suicide

2010-04-19T15:59:00.000-07:00

My letter to the Daily Camera on covering up Tim Leifield's suicide and Daily Camera's response

By Rick Cendo

On April 5, the Daily Camera reported,

"Timothy Leifield, well-known for his work on behalf of Boulder's nonprofit and gay communities, died last Tuesday at his Boulder home. He was 55.

"The Boulder County Coroner's Office hadn't ruled Sunday on his cause of death, although no foul play is suspected."

In fact, no one really knows for sure what day Tim Leifield died. He was found dead in his home on Saturday, April 4, and, presumably, the coroner estimated his day of death to have been the previous Tuesday. He left an extensive suicide letter, widely shared on the Internet, which is probably why "no foul play is suspected."

The Daily Camera chose to not report the death as a suicide, presumably in deference to the wishes of his friends and family, and instead decribed him as "the life of the party," in the words of a "longtime friend".
Daily Camera
This is an ironic deceit. It harkens back to the days when young men died from complications due to AIDS, and newspapers censored this information in deference to the wishes of friends and family. The irony is that Tim dedicated his life to bringing AIDS out of the closet, encouraging its open confrontation as director of the Boulder County AIDS preoject and STOP AIDS NOW.

Furthermore, Tim's long suicide letter expressed no shame in his decision to kill himself nor any admonishment to sweep this under the rug. His only admonishment is to "be kind, be kind, be kind."

And that's a good one! Most people want to be kind, including me.

But then there's the question of what is truly kind. An immediate impulse is to shield one's friend from the cruel, gossipy world (Was he gay? Did he have AIDS? Is he mentally ill? Did he commit suicide?).

But in doing so one creates the implication that what this person is, or has, or did, is shameful -- something unspoken.

There are two problems:

First is the violence visited upon the individual deemed to be shameful, whether for homosexuality (me and Tim), or mental illness and suicide (Tim), or AIDS.

Tim expressed no shame in his mental illness nor in his decision to commit suicide. To quote Tim's suicide letter:

"I have sought out help, and been on any number of drugs. Most scripts were for the wrong reasons, SSRIs for depression. It wasn’t until 2007, when I saw a new psychiatrist who diagnosed me as having Atypical Bipolar Disorder, that I started on a new combination of drugs and felt better than I had in a long time. I went back to work and was doing pretty good. But I couldn’t sustain the energy needed to be happy and productive fulltime. For the past two years it’s just been a matter of running out the clock. And the bank.

(Please do not for an instant think that the drugs have led to this decision. They kept me alive three years past my five year plan.)"

Treatment did not work, ultimately, for Tim. But it does work for millions of other Americans who suffer from mental illness, including 10's of thousands who have suffered severe trauma serving our nation in Iraq and Afganistan. If you feel you may suffer from a mental illness, don't deny it. Get help. The phone number for the Boulder County Mental Health Center is (303) 443-8417.

Second is the stigma impressed upon everyone else.

Let's say you read in the Daily Camera that a 55-year-old just happened to have died, suddenly, cause unknown. And then you learn through the grape vine or Internet that this was not so much a mysterious death as a suicide, brought on by a lifetime of struggling with a bipolar disorder.
The message I receive is that suicide is shameful.

Ditto mental illness.

That is exactly the message people inferred 25 years ago about AIDS or 50 years ago about homosexuality.

Homosexuality. AIDS. Mental Illness. Suicide. These are all part of the human condition -- things we should acknowledge without shame. If you are hiding these things, you are not helping.

Shame can be useful (Tiger Woods and Jesse James come to mind). But it is counterproductive for AIDS and homosexuality (we know) or mental illness and suicide (we're learning).

In the words of the early AIDS movement, which Tim championed, "Silence = Death".

boulder weekly

Response:

Mr. Cendo:
Kevin Kaufman the editor of the the Camera here.

First, I wanted to thank you for your submission, however, I'm not inclined to run it at the moment. Here's why, which I hope also will explain some of our decision making in covering Mr. Leifield's death and the facts as reported to date. We certainly didn't conspire to keep anything secret or to deceive.

Our general policy is to not report on suicides, except in a few cases, such as it being in an extremely public place, witnessed my many. While some may not feel suicide carries a stigma, many in our society and community still do. And we particularly wish to be sensitive to the families of the deceased, who often are overcome with grief, which also often is exacerbated by the fact that their loved one committed suicide.

We only covered Mr. Leifield's death because he was such a well known person in our community. Had he not been so known, there would not have been any mention of his death unless the family placed an obituary or death notice. In those notices, which are paid notices, families then decide how they wish to address or not address cause of death..

Regardless, we felt Mr. Leifield life and contribution to the community rose to the level that we needed to report that he had died.

In such a case, we rely on the county coroner to determine when the person died. That determination is the official date reported on the person's death certificate. It really is the only way we can know date of death, which is a relevant fact that we need in our basic reporting. I do not know what all facts or tests the coroner did to determine that date, but I'm confident they did their best to be as accurate as possible -- our coroner, while he indeed has his weaknesses, is a real stickler for detail and accuracy.

Regarding the cause of death, we were not at all attempting to deceive and surely you know that.
At this point, we still have not yet received a definitive cause or if it was suicide. While we did indeed have friends of Mr. Leifield tell us they believed that it was suicide or that they'd heard it was a suicide, we must rely on an official determination.

And while you suggest that Mr. Leifield had no shame in his suicide -- I have read the purported suicide note you speak of and no it doesn't appear to me Mr. Leifield felt his act was anything to be ashamed of -- I do not know the authenticity of the note, if in fact his death was a suicide, or if it was how family feels about that fact being publicly reported. And, frankly, I am more concerned with what his family wishes than his friends' desires. (Also of note, Mr. Leifield seemed very deliberate in his act, to the point of supposedly providing his note to family and key friends to distribute. He apparently chose not to include the Camera or other media as a recipient of that, so I can only assume that in doing that he meant the knowledge of his suicide and his thinking leading to it to be kept among them, although that's only my assumption.)

Anyway, since we do not as a policy routinely report suicides, because such an official ruling has not been issued and because I don't know the family's feelings about that being made public, I don't feel it would at this time be appropriate to publish your piece.
Should some of those circumstances change, then I'd be more apt to consider it.

Hopefully that will work for you at this point. Also, if you have family contact information we'd certainly appreciate it.
... kk

*****

Suicide Letter

30 March 2010

Dear Friends and Family,

I imagine there are many among you who are shocked and saddened and angry. How could he do this? What happened? Could I/we have stopped this? I will try to explain and elaborate and hopefully lessen the pain that I know I will have caused. I also hope that I have avoided any birthdays or personal holidays, so future events won’t be clouded with this anniversary.

First of all, let me say that my suicide has nothing to do with Stephen Henderson’s. (For those of you who do not know of Stephen, he was a good friend who died on November 27th.) However, his suicide did affect my timing and plan. He delayed my action; I had originally planned to kill myself in early December. I know that this would have saddened holiday plans, but I thought that it would also have kept folks from having to travel twice. Families would already have been together for Christmas.

From Stephen’s death, and his lack of having left a more detailed note, I learned that I had to try to describe what has been going on with me and how I came to this conclusion. I would guess that the existing consensus would be that I was a happy, healthy individual. The truth is that I’ve been unhappy and sick for quite some time. Which is not to say there haven’t been good times.

But for as long as I can remember, I’ve had times when I just felt too sad to get out of bed. I assumed these were normal, that everyone had these periods of melancholia. And they are normal, except perhaps for the frequency. I imagine everyone thinks about suicide, probably once a month or so. But for the past 25 years I’ve been thinking about suicide on a weekly basis. For the past 15 years, probably on a daily basis. For the past five years it’s been hourly. I’ll find myself at a dinner party thinking this will be that last one with this group. I’ll be on a hike, thinking this will be the last time I see the Continental Divide. It’s not with sadness that I’ll have these thoughts, more just a notation. For as long as I can remember this has been inevitable.

I’m enclosing/attaching a column I wrote for my college paper in February of 1977. It’s titled “Dark Thoughts” and deals with depression and thoughts of suicide. My summary at the time was to concentrate on the good times to get through the bad. And yes, there are still many good things: dinners with friends, walking the trails with our dogs, a round of bridge. But for me the darkness has been just too heavy. I’d go home and collapse and want to be done with it. The utter hopelessness of everything would just wash over me.

I know it will be hard to understand what I’ve been going through, and how it intensifies. Outward appearances can be deceiving, and you don’t want to be a buzzkill, so you often mask what’s going on in your brain. I think growing up gay laid the foundation for excellent over compensation skills. In my case, I never wanted to be “found out,” so I became quite proficient at having girlfriends and doing just enough sports, of watching my gestures and speech, of wearing the right clothes.

I have sought out help, and been on any number of drugs. Most scripts were for the wrong reasons, SSRIs for depression. It wasn’t until 2007, when I saw a new psychiatrist who diagnosed me as having Atypical Bipolar Disorder, that I started on a new combination of drugs and felt better than I had in a long time. I went back to work and was doing pretty good. But I couldn’t sustain the energy needed to be happy and productive fulltime. For the past two years it’s just been a matter of running out the clock. And the bank.

(Please do not for an instant think that the drugs have led to this decision. They kept me alive three years past my five year plan.)

I know that some of you have known of my suicidal ideations and tried to come to my aid. I appreciated your efforts, but I really just wanted to be dead. For all, I apologize for not having said goodbye. The trouble is, in our current society, you cannot announce your plans for suicide without people feeling an obligation to do something to stop it.

I’ve never been one to have a “life is all” approach; that we must rally to fight off death with every ounce of our being. I don’t know why this is. Perhaps it’s because I don’t fear death. (I do fear dying; the pain, the possibility that I’ll screw it up and be crippled or wind up in a coma.) I don’t have a clear belief about what comes next. I certainly don’t buy the heaven and hell scenario. I feel there’s energy and energy doesn’t just stop. Beyond that, who knows.

This may seem to be a rather cavalier, nonchalant attitude, and an affront to those who are struggling to stay alive. I would willingly trade my body for theirs, keeping my mind, but it doesn’t work that way. I’ve considered shooting myself in a parking lot of a hospital that takes organ donations, but the risk of being “saved” is too great.

In reviewing my life I have to acknowledge so many blessings. I believe I grew up in the last golden age of the United States. I’ve had a happy, healthy family with seven siblings and twelve nieces and nephews. I’ve wanted for nothing. And I’ve been surrounded by dear friends my whole life.

I hope that I have left my little corner of the world in a better place than when I arrived. I hope that I didn’t hurt anyone’s feeling through words or actions. I hope that I will be remembered as a guy who showed up for his friends. Please forgive me for the pain I am causing; please let your current anger – over time – be replaced by joy at the memories of our times together.

Be kind, be kind, be kind,

Willie Nelson stoned on Larry King

2010-04-17T08:59:00.000-07:00

Cleese takes half-day cab ride for $5,100 | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Headline | International News

2010-04-17T08:53:00.000-07:00

Cleese takes half-day cab ride for $5,100 |
News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News
| Headline | International News: "British actor John Cleese of Monty Python fame opted for a daylong cab ride halfway across Europe after the dust plume from an Icelandic volcano left him stranded.

Cleese paid $5,100 for a Mercedes taxi Friday from the Norwegian capital, Oslo, to Brussels, said Kjetil Kristoffersen, managing director of Publicom, his agent in Norway. Cleese was in Oslo to appear on the talk show Skavlan."

'Ratzinger is the Perfect Pope' by Richard Dawkins - The Washington Post - RichardDawkins.net

2010-04-12T17:15:00.000-07:00

'Ratzinger is the Perfect Pope' by Richard Dawkins - The Washington Post - RichardDawkins.net: "'Should the pope resign?' No. As the College of Cardinals must have recognized when they elected him, he is perfectly - ideally - qualified to lead the Roman Catholic Church. A leering old villain in a frock, who spent decades conspiring behind closed doors for the position he now holds; a man who believes he is infallible and acts the part; a man whose preaching of scientific falsehood is responsible for the deaths of countless AIDS victims in Africa; a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence: in short, exactly the right man for the job. He should not resign, moreover, because he is perfectly positioned to accelerate the downfall of the evil, corrupt organization whose character he fits like a glove, and of which he is the absolute and historically appropriate monarch."

book notes

2010-04-10T07:54:00.000-07:00

The big picture: money and power in Hollywood‎ by Edward Jay Epstein

The Hollywood added subtitles at Talkies in the 30's, most Europeans were illiterate or didn't have glasses.

Godzilla was originally an anti-nuke monster, emerging from the same area in the 1950's Pacific where the U.S. was testing nukes, and then, of course, destroying Japanese cities.

Against ‘Pro-Israel’ - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com

2010-03-24T05:45:00.000-07:00

Against ‘Pro-Israel’ - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com: "Foxman said the perspective attributed to Biden and Petraeus “smacks of blaming Jews for everything.”

Foxman’s claim may seem hyperbolic, but look at it this way: If he can convince us that blaming any Israeli policy for anything is akin to blaming Jews in general for everything, then anyone who criticizes an Israeli policy will be deemed anti-Semitic — and fear of that label will keep everyone from criticizing Israel. And by virtue of never criticizing Israel, we’ll all be “pro-Israel.” And that’s a good thing, right?"

Tear down the wall of silence in the Roman Catholic Church. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

2010-03-22T10:50:00.000-07:00

Tear down the wall of silence in the Roman Catholic Church. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine: "Almost every week, I go and debate with spokesmen of religious faith. Invariably and without exception, they inform me that without a belief in supernatural authority I would have no basis for my morality. Yet here is an ancient Christian church that deals in awful certainties when it comes to outright condemnation of sins like divorce, abortion, contraception, and homosexuality between consenting adults. For these offenses there is no forgiveness, and moral absolutism is invoked. Yet let the subject be the rape and torture of defenseless children, and at once every kind of wiggle room and excuse-making is invoked. What can one say of a church that finds so much latitude for a crime so ghastly that no morally normal person can even think of it without shuddering?"

book notes

2010-03-18T05:47:00.000-07:00

Demonic Males by Richard W. Wrangham

Eating roots may have been the adaptation that allowed hominids to transition from woodland to savannah, also explaining the thicker tooth enamel humans have compared to other apes.

Primitive humans today are very similar to chimps in size of communities, size and behavior of raids, and patri-lineal organization.

The hominid antecedent was probably were chimp-like in its behavior, including war. (which begs the question of whether its uniquely war-like behavior was what made it the only species to jump into self-aware intelligence_

"The motivation of a male chimpanzee who challenges another's rank is that he forseesmore matings, better food or a longer life. . .The temperamental goal is to intimidate the opposition, to beat them to a pulp, to erode their ability to challenge. Winning has become an end in itself."

Discussion of sexual mimicry among female hyenas -- females may mimic males as an adaptation to avoid conflict with other famales.

Spotted hyenas are always born as twins -- with the stronger twin killing the weaker or more vulnerable one because of limited mother's milk. As an adaption, infants emerge from the womb with fully formed teeth and strong jaws.

"Demonic males gather in small, self-perpetuating, self-aggrandizing bands. They sight or invent an enemy "over there" . . . The nature of the divide hardly seems to matter. What matters is the opportunity to engage in the vast and compelling drama of belonging to the gang, identifying the enemy, going on the patrol, participating in the attack."

The New Commandments | Culture | Vanity Fair

2010-03-14T10:18:00.000-07:00

The New Commandments | Culture | Vanity Fair:
Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color.
Do not ever use people as private property.
Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations.
Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child.
Do not condemn people for their inborn nature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them?
Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly.
Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.
Turn off that fucking cell phone—you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us.
Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions.
Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above. In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

book notes

2010-03-09T11:05:00.000-08:00

The Big Questions

Mathematics is irreducibly complex but cannot be the product of intelligent design (since design requires choice)

A history of media technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook. - By Vaughan Bell - Slate Magazine

2010-03-08T08:29:00.000-08:00

A history of media technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook. - By Vaughan Bell - Slate Magazine: "A respected Swiss scientist, Conrad Gessner, might have been the first to raise the alarm about the effects of information overload. In a landmark book, he described how the modern world overwhelmed people with data and that this overabundance was both 'confusing and harmful' to the mind. The media now echo his concerns with reports on the unprecedented risks of living in an 'always on' digital environment. It's worth noting that Gessner, for his part, never once used e-mail and was completely ignorant about computers. That's not because he was a technophobe but because he died in 1565. His warnings referred to the seemingly unmanageable flood of information unleashed by the printing press."

Washington Diarist | The New Republic

2010-02-18T07:54:00.000-08:00

Washington Diarist | The New Republic: "For a start, there are no unreal people. Even Mitch McConnell is real. Even Frank Rich is real. The invocation of “the people” sounds inclusive, but it is a technique of exclusion. (This was also the case in the preamble to the Constitution.) It is based upon a particular definition of “the people.” How do Palin and the partiers know who the real Americans are? The mystical certainty of her divisive intuition reminds me of what intellectual historians used to call the “epistemological privilege” of Marx’s proletariat, his reprehensible old idea that access to truth is a feature of class position."

book notes

2010-02-16T08:44:00.000-08:00

Game Change by John Heilemann, Mark Halperin

When McCain called up Bush to to ask for a White House meeting on the financial crisis that included McCain and Obama, Bush was against it saying it would introduce partisan politics into the crisis. McCain than went on TV to say he called for a White House meeting.

In Biden's debate prep, the fake Palin practiced first with a fake Biden before practicing with the real Biden.

Hitchens notes

2010-02-16T07:47:00.000-08:00

The most extreme nationalists are people from the periphery:

Napoleon -- Corsica
Hilter -- Austria
Alexander -- Macedonia
Irish Republicans -- Northern Ireland
Karadzic -- Bosnia

Video of Mike Wallace 1967 report on The Homosexuals

2010-02-14T16:47:00.000-08:00

President rankings

2010-02-13T20:37:00.000-08:00

Federalist Society - The Wall Street Journal Survey on Presidents

RANK NAME MEAN
GREAT
1 George Washington 4.92
2 Abraham Lincoln 4.87
3 Franklin Roosevelt 4.67
NEAR GREAT
4 Thomas Jefferson 4.25
5 Theodore Roosevelt 4.22
6 Andrew Jackson 3.99
7 Harry Truman 3.95
8 Ronald Reagan 3.81
9 Dwight Eisenhower 3.71
10 James Polk 3.70
11 Woodrow Wilson 3.68
ABOVE AVERAGE
12 Grover Cleveland 3.36
13 John Adams 3.36
14 William McKinley 3.33
15 James Madison 3.29
16 James Monroe 3.27
17 Lyndon Johnson 3.21
18 John Kennedy 3.17
AVERAGE
19 William Taft 3.00
20 John Quincy Adams 2.93
21 George Bush 2.92
22 Rutherford Hayes 2.79
23 Martin Van Buren 2.77
24 William Clinton 2.77
25 Calvin Coolidge 2.71
26 Chester Arthur 2.71
BELOW AVERAGE
27 Benjamin Harrison 2.62
28 Gerald Ford 2.59
29 Herbert Hoover 2.53
30 Jimmy Carter 2.47
31 Zachary Taylor 2.40
32 Ulysses Grant 2.28
33 Richard Nixon 2.22
34 John Tyler 2.03
35 Millard Fillmore 1.91
FAILURE
36 Andrew Johnson 1.65
37 Franklin Pierce 1.58
38 Warren Harding 1.58
39 James Buchanan 1.33

President Obama�has proposed�the largest defense budget since World War II. - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine

2010-02-12T09:13:00.000-08:00

President Obama�has proposed�the largest defense budget since World War II. - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine: "Still, $708.2 billion, the sum requested just for fiscal year 2011, is an extraordinary chunk of change. The Center for a New American Security (hardly a dovish think tank) calculates that, adjusting for inflation, this sum is 13 percent higher than the defense budget at the peak of the Korean War, 33 percent higher than at the peak of the Vietnam War, 23 percent higher than at the peak of the Cold War, and 64 percent higher than the Cold War's average."

Dan Choi -- gays in the military

2010-02-11T10:57:00.001-08:00

Sinatra Song Often Strikes Deadly Chord - NYTimes.com

2010-02-10T11:42:00.000-08:00

Sinatra Song Often Strikes Deadly Chord - NYTimes.com: "Others, noting that other equally popular tunes have not provoked killings, point to the song itself. The lyrics, written by Paul Anka for Mr. Sinatra as an unapologetic summing up of his career, are about a tough guy who “when there was doubt,” simply “ate it up and spit it out.” Butch Albarracin, the owner of Center for Pop, a Manila-based singing school that has propelled the careers of many famous singers, was partial to what he called the “existential explanation.”

“�‘I did it my way’ — it’s so arrogant,” Mr. Albarracin said. “The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer, as if you’re somebody when you’re really nobody. It covers up your failures. That’s why it leads to fights.”"

magazine notes

2010-02-08T11:08:00.000-08:00

John Mayer in Rolling Stone says that he can't have sex dreams without intrusion in the dreams by paparazzi.

Soldier father accused of 'waterboarding' daughter, 4, because she can't recite alphabet | Mail Online

2010-02-08T10:34:00.000-08:00

Soldier father accused of 'waterboarding' daughter, 4, because she can't recite alphabet
| Mail Online: "Tabor, a soldier at the Lewis-McChord base in Tacoma, Washington, was arrested after being seen walking around his neighbourhood wearing a Kevlar military helmet and threatening to break windows."

Andrew Young's Book Confirms Much of What We Already Knew About John Edwards -- Daily Intel

2010-01-27T08:13:00.000-08:00

Andrew Young's Book Confirms Much of What We Already Knew About John Edwards -- Daily Intel: "Made in USA: Young says Edwards is an Atkins-dieter who hated making appearances at state fairs where “fat rednecks try to shove food down my face. I know I’m the people’s senator, but do I have to hang out with them?” Before a SEIU candidate forum in Las Vegas, Young says Edwards made him cut out a “made in the USA” label from Young’s own suit to sew in place of Edwards’s “made in Italy” label."

book notes

2010-01-26T08:32:00.000-08:00

From colony to superpower: U.S. foreign relations since 1776 By George C. Herring

Foreign relations was a huge part of the U.S. from the very beginning, as colonists wanted to trade with England's enemies, including the colonies of its enemies, like French Canada.

Fredrick the great said that war is not a success if most people know that it is going on.

The French and Indian War or Seven Years War -- the "war that made America"

Even during the Articles of Confederation there was the jockeying between Northern commerce and Southern preservation of slavery and power -- debate on treaty with Spain that would cede access to the Mississippi for trade concessions.

Munich -- Hitler actually wanted war in '38 and was maneuvered into Munich, giving the weak allies a year to prepare for war.

"I mean who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25?" -- JFK on why he found foreign policy more exciting than domestic policy.

Hoist Your Pitchforks! | The New Republic

2010-01-25T16:44:00.000-08:00

Hoist Your Pitchforks! | The New Republic: "Their bill is still being written, but the ideas they're considering include prohibiting political spending by corporations that receive government money, hire lobbyists, or make most of their income abroad.

And shouldn't shareholders have the right to vote before a corporation spends money on politics? Do we want foreign-owned corporations, especially those owned by foreign governments, to exercise an undue influence in our politics? Imagine what an enterprise owned or influenced by the Chinese or Russian governments might try to do to a politician who campaigns too ardently for human rights?

My favorite idea: Requiring CEOs to appear in ads their corporations sponsor, exactly as politicians have to do. ('I'm Joe Smith, the CEO of Acme Consolidated Megacorporation, and I approve this message.')"

Clinton racism

2010-01-25T10:29:00.000-08:00

Game Change provides more evidence of the Clintons' shocking behavior during the 2008 campaign. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine: "After his wife's third-place showing in the Iowa caucuses, Bill Clinton telephoned Sen. Edward Kennedy in pursuit of an endorsement and, according to Kennedy's own account as given to a friend, said of then-Sen. Barack Obama: A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee."

Lexington: The fat plateau | The Economist

2010-01-24T10:46:00.000-08:00

Lexington: The fat plateau | The Economist: "each obese American racks up medical bills 42% higher than an American of normal weight, according to Eric Finkelstein and Justin Trogdon, writing in Health Affairs. Add to that the indirect costs of obesity, such as lost productivity due to sickness or premature death."

book notes

2010-01-24T08:55:00.000-08:00

Dancing in the Dark by Morris Dickstein

The beat writers harken back to the 30's -- ginsberg to micheal gold, kerouac to hobo literature.

Americans, unlike Europeans, didn't resort to militarism or totalitarianism in the 30's because they blamed personal failure on themselves -- the result of individualism and 50 years of Success evangelism.

Part of popularity of 30's gangster films is that gangsters were the only plausibly success entrepreneurs in the 30's. And the 30's monsters were sympathetic characters, whereas to 50's monsters were invaders.

Fitzgerald's talent was self-knowledge, which allowed him to write great fiction about himself at an early age. Fitzgerald's coining of The Jazz Age for the 1920's referred not to music but to anti-bourgeois culture.

The Day of the Locusts -- "Once there they disover that sunshine isn't enough. . .they haven't the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. . .the sun is a joke"

TSA plays solitaire

2010-01-14T14:24:00.001-08:00

book notes

2010-01-14T07:11:00.000-08:00

The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures By Nicholas Wade

Evolutionary importance of religion in warfare. Humanoids who would not risk lives for the group would be eliminated by groups that included members who would.

As humans evolved larger brains, they also increased their ability to calculate individual interests over group interests. Religion was required as a countervailing force to avoid social disintegration.

Selfishness beats altruism within groups, atruistic groups beat selfish groups

The main enemy of ants are other ants -- they have chemical signals and strong generic bonds to organize. Humans have religion (although this doesn't address why chimps don't have religion -- lack of cognitive ability and strict social hierarchy?)

Ancient and modern religion both have focus on survival -- this world in ancient, afterlife in modern

Pews were introduced to prevent ecstatic dancing, Islam uses military-like rhythmic movement in unison.

Of the 40 cities that Jushua is said to have conquered, only 3 have possible evidence of pillage at the right dates. "So if the Israelites never invaded Canaan, how did they come to occupy it? Because they were Canaanites and always had been" The Bible was a political strategy to regain Isreal after Assyria withdrew 640-630 BC. Around 722 BC Assyria had resettled 27,000 Israelites in Assyria and moved people from other parts of the empire to Samaria.

Mohammed appears to have legalized polygamy in xxxx because he had lost many men in war and wanted to maintain a high birth rate. Polygamy can make sense if a society wants many unmarried young men available for war.

The first crusade was created primarily because there were too many young male religious zealots in Europe, creating instability and a threat to religious order.

Muslim violence with serbs in balkans, jews in israel, hindus in india, buddists in burma, catholics in the phillipines

Natural selection in warfare has created a human character that is capable of extreme cruelty (to enemies) and extreme loyalty, love and trust (to comrades)

Protestantism emerged in part because German states had foreign policy interests different than the Latin states, just as Islam emerged because Arab states had interests different than Constantinople as it withdrew from the Middle East.

life expectancy vs. per capita spending on health care

2010-01-12T13:25:00.000-08:00

The catchphrase of the decade. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine

2010-01-02T20:37:00.000-08:00

The catchphrase of the decade. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine: "Fifteen minutes of fame has had its 15 minutes of fame. Way more than 15 years of fame, actually. And its original meaning has been subtly but ineradicably distorted. When Andy Warhol uttered it in his faux-naive way (or real-naive—I could never really tell; I'm not sure even he could), he meant it, at least in part, as a celebratory observation, not an anti-celebrity thing. When he said 'in the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,' he was pointing out how much fun that would be. Fame, in other words, would be as widely accessible a popular commodity as Campbell's soup. And, he implied, that's a good thing.
OK, maybe that didn't turn out to be true in all respects. Still, the phrase is inevitably used now with a disdainful sneer. A self-satisfied tone of elitist condescension. I mean, didn't you feel there was some of that in the sneering at the White House party crashers? How dare those little people, those nobodies, seeking their '15 minutes of fame,' aspire to be seated next to the truly important people in Washington who have done so much good for the nation? Who had to put in years of sucking up to get invited to a White House dinner, while these climbers waltzed right in?"

Andy Worthington: A Truly Shocking Guantanamo Story: Judge Confirms That an Innocent Man Was Tortured to Make False Confessions

2010-01-02T17:36:00.000-08:00

Andy Worthington: A Truly Shocking Guantanamo Story: Judge Confirms That an Innocent Man Was Tortured to Make False Confessions: "She then moved on to al-Rabiah's own explanations of how he came to make false confessions, noting that he had stated that, shortly after his arrival at Guant�namo, 'a senior [redacted] interrogator came to me and said, 'There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent.'

This is deeply disturbing, of course, as it indicates that at least one senior interrogator recognized that the Bush administration's refusal to recognize that there were innocent men at Guant�namo -- and it has been clear for many years that hundreds of innocent men were held, who had no connection whatsoever to any form of militancy, let alone terrorism -- had set in motion a system in which, whether voluntarily or not, all the innocent men at Guant�namo were expected to make false confessions, either so that they could continue to be labeled as 'enemy combatants' on release, to maintain the illusion that Guant�namo was full of 'the worst of the worst,' or, as in al-Rabiah's case, so that they could be tricked and transformed into terrorist sympathizers and facilitators."

Harry Lime in “The Third Man"

2009-12-23T16:05:00.000-08:00

“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.

“In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

book notes

2009-12-23T12:50:00.000-08:00

The Coming of the Third Reich

Precursors of Nazism included the secular youth movements before WW1 that embraced nature, German heritage and adopted the swastika

German children and teenagers during WW1 got all the propaganda about the glories of war but none of the realities. (p73)

During the inter-war years in Germany, peacetime always referred to pre-WW1. (What a contrast to WW1 as the war to end all wars.)

Nazism took the class struggle ideology of socialism and replaced it with race struggle

p.179. A movemrnt that begins in the criminal couerts ends in the criminal courts.

Amazing how the Communists and National Socialists outnumbered the Nazi's all the way up to '32. The Communists (who had their own storm troopers) appeared to have pulled back to let the Nazi's and National Socialists fight it out (so similar to Lenin seeing WWI as a capitalists destroying themselves and Stalin seeing WW2 as capitalists destroying themselves, right up until Hitler invaded Russia)

2009-12-13T18:29:00.000-08:00

Googled by Ken Auletta

Contrast between Page/Brin and Mel Karmazin on whether advertising should be efficient. Karmazin wants advertising ti be inefficient so that he can sell more ads at higher prices. Page and Brin "fuck with the magic"

Many books have been written about Google, even though we’re all pretty familiar with the company to begin with, but what makes Ken Auletta’s Googled interesting is that it’s a history of the company as told by the incumbent sociopaths. These are the people Auletta has spent his life covering: the media moguls who tried to acquire and conquer their own empires of content and delivery. And to them what’s most shocking and galling about Google’s incredibly rapid rise is that instead of being engineered by a fellow sociopath, it was largely done by normal, decent people plainly applying the forces of new technology.

Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” review : The New Yorker

2009-12-02T19:17:00.000-08:00

Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” review : The New Yorker: "For the moment, Obama and Palin divide the electorate, and are bound by a strange symmetry: born in the nineteen-sixties, the only candidates from outside the Lower 48 ever to grace national tickets, and the beneficiaries of powerful social movements that they were too young to have participated in (civil rights in Obama’s case, women’s liberation in Palin’s). Just as Obama, with his “post-racial” affect and his Ivy League pedigree, made an older African-American political figure like Jesse Jackson seem the relic of a vanished era, so Palin—with her lustrous mane and form-fitting skirts, her coddling of her infant son in the full glare of TV cameras—presented a new model of the spontaneous woman politician, free of the overmanaged self-discipline that constrains Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi."

How's That Iraqi Surge Faring Now, General? - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

2009-11-30T07:58:00.000-08:00

How's That Iraqi Surge Faring Now, General? -

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan: "All the surge did was provide a face-saving way for the US to create enough temporary security to leave. Given the chaos of the first four years of occupation, this was an achievement. But the achievement was in preventing total humiliation for the US, not anything close to victory or success stable enough to leave with anything but another civil war as the likeliest outcome. But the US didn't leave, Obama took the neocon advice, and is still hanging on to the notion that a stable, democratic, self-governing Iraq is possible after only six years of occupation, tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, 5,000 dead Americans, countless wounded and disabled vets, and up to $3 trillion in taxpayers' money."

book notes

2009-11-20T20:17:00.001-08:00

This Is Your Country on Drugs

The decline of alcohol in the U,S, starting in the 1830's coincided with the increased use of opium.

Heroin was a named coined by its manufacturer, Bayer, to connote that Heroin made its users feel heroic.

George F. Will - George F. Will: Fossil fuels belie environmentalism - washingtonpost.com

2009-11-20T19:51:00.000-08:00

George F. Will - George F. Will: Fossil fuels belie environmentalism - washingtonpost.com: "In 1914, the Bureau of Mines said that U.S. oil reserves would be exhausted by 1924. In 1939, the Interior Department said that the world had 13 years' worth of petroleum reserves. Then a global war was fought, and the postwar boom was fueled. In 1951 Interior reported that the world had . . . 13 years of reserves. In 1970, the world's proven oil reserves were an estimated 612 billion barrels. By 2006, more than 767 billion barrels had been pumped, and proven reserves were 1.2 trillion barrels. In 1977, scold in chief Jimmy Carter predicted that mankind 'could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.' Since then the world has consumed three times more oil than was then in the world's proven reserves."

The Evolution of the God Gene - NYTimes.com

2009-11-15T10:01:00.000-08:00

The Evolution of the God Gene - NYTimes.com: "But group selection has recently gained two powerful champions, the biologists David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, who argued that two special circumstances in recent human evolution would have given group selection much more of an edge than usual. One is the highly egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherer societies, which makes everyone behave alike and gives individual altruists a better chance of passing on their genes. The other is intense warfare between groups, which enhances group-level selection in favor of community-benefiting behaviors such as altruism and religion."

book notres

2009-11-13T06:55:00.000-08:00

The Cold War: A New History By John Lewis Gaddis

Ironly ofr Ford of the Helsinski accords -- on one hand, recognition of easrern european borders liad the ground work for the gaffe in the bebate with Carter that cost him the Presidnecy. On the other hand, the accords maing the Soviet Union recognize universal human rights laid the ground work for the insistance of human rights by its own people and its evenual demaise.

Vietnam -- The Soviet Union didn't really want to rub the US in Vietnam but was pulled into it by its Asian allies, primarily China.

Nixon in China really was a masterstroke reallignmewnt that very much took the Soviet Union by surprise and shook it up.

One of the big reasons that Tito was ablle to resist the Soviets was that the U,.S. Sixth Fleet had been reassigned to the Meditarean after WW2 to block Svviet naval expasnion beyond the Black Sea, with Turkey blocking tham at the Bosphorus.

Reagan saw that détente was meant to institutionalize the Cold War and that the end way to end the Cold War was to end détente

Reagan the Cold War subversive

The 1980's convergence of the great actors of the Cold War: Reagan, Thatcher, John Paul, Lech Walesa, followed in reaction by Gorbachev.

If Reagan had been shot successfully in '81, Bush would never have challenged detante and its institutionalization of the Cold War.

book notes

2009-11-12T07:20:00.000-08:00

Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz

Dogs have to cones -- blue and green. No red. Many more rods as well as a higher flicker rate.

Police: Marine reservist attacks visiting Greek priest

2009-11-11T08:18:00.000-08:00

Police: Marine reservist attacks visiting Greek priest: "Bruce grabbed a tire iron from the trunk, hit Marakis four times over the head and chased him about three blocks before pinning the priest, police said.

In a 911 call, Bruce made a derogatory comment about a man he said was a terrorist and was trying to rob him and had grabbed him in a sexual manner, police spokeswoman Laura McElroy said.

When officers arrived, police say, Bruce told them he heard the man say 'Allahu Akbar' – Arabic for 'God is great.'

'That's what they say before they blow you up,' Bruce said, according to police."

Why Neanderthals Really Went Extinct: Begley | Newsweek Voices - Sharon Begley | Newsweek.com

2009-11-07T08:27:00.000-08:00

Why Neanderthals Really Went Extinct: Begley | Newsweek Voices - Sharon Begley | Newsweek.com: "About 30,000 years ago, the vast forests of Eurasia began to retreat, leaving treeless steppes and tundra and forcing forest animals to disperse over vast distances. Because they evolved in the warm climate of Africa before spreading into Europe, modern humans had a body like marathon runners, adapted to track prey over such distances. But Neanderthals were built like wrestlers. That was great for ambush hunting, which they practiced in the once ubiquitous forests, but a handicap on the steppes, where endurance mattered more."