AWOL

Dedicated readers of my blog may recall that I've praised Orcinus for keeping a weather eye on the Bush AWOL story. He has a new summary handy with the story so far.

The centerpiece of that summary is a quote from the beginning of a detailed analysis by Paul Lukasiak. I'll give you the key sentence.

An examination of the Bush military files within the context of US Statutory Law, Department of Defense regulations, and Air Force policies and procedures of that era lead to a single conclusion: George W. Bush was considered a deserter by the United States Air Force.

In brief: Bush skipped out, and pulled strings to avoid the consequences. Since then, there's been extensive tampering with records to cover it up.

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Update! Brad DeLong offers the helpful long summary that I didn't have time to prepare.

Independence Day

I consider this essay largely supplanted by my later, hopefully more astringent, version, but you may still find it interesting.

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Today is Independence Day in the United States.

Independence Day is the High Holy Day of American political identity. If you think about it, the Fourth of July is a strange choice of date. Consider the French equivalent, Bastille Day, which commemorates the storming of the Bastille and thus the event which demonstrated that the French monarchy was over. By similar reasoning, we should be celebrating when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown on 19 October, the battle of Lexington & Concord on 19 April, or (my favorite as an occasional lefty activist) the Boston Tea Party on 13 December.

But we don't. We celebrate the day that a bunch of guys signed a piece of paper.

I've posted before about how the American veneration of documents in our political culture reflects our Enlightenment conception of the nation as a human creation, composed of ideas, rather than any essential volkish link from country to nation. Nowhere do we see this more strongly than in our choice of the Fourth of July, the day men signed the Declaration of Independence.

It's easy to forget what an achievement the Declaration really is. But 1776 was a world of kings, and finding a way to think and talk about a political order without kings was very, very hard.

A look at Jefferson's intellectual sources shows how just hard the problem was at that time. Here's David Hume trying to find a moral theory for equality in world that only knew the divine right of kings:

Whatever actually happens is comprehended in the general plan or intention of Providence; nor has the greatest and most lawful prince any more reason, upon that account, to plead a peculiar sacredness or inviolable authority, than an inferior magistrate, or even an usurper, or even a robber and a pirate.

Here's John Locke trying to talk about individual human rights.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

Now here's Jefferson summing it up perfectly in the Declaration.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness --- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

Those are the principles, in two hundred and three words.

I'd like to say that you couldn't improve it by changing a single one of those words. It's very, very close. But those two uses of the word "Men" really stick out. I'm prepared to forgive Jefferson that one. He was a man of his time. He knew that the principles he describes meant that America was engaged in a terrible evil in the form of slavery. (Check out his rough draft of the Declaration: it's right there.) And so also, deep in the Declaration is the principle that all people are equal, and I suspect that Jefferson knew it without knowing it, but didn't know how to fit it into the language. Maybe not, but I prefer to believe in the Declaration as it should have read.

I gave you the best part, but hey, you really ought to take a few minutes in honor of the day and read the whole thing --- it's really good stuff.

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Bonus followup post: Hollywood movie stars and me ranting about liberal patriotism!

Brando

Marlon Brando
1924-2004

Greatest actor in American film

For a man who hated the job, Brando was a hell of an actor. He had all of the ingredients of talent as a film actor in vast measure. The most important, and inexplicable, was his screen presence.

I will grant that actorly craft can help to create screen presence. Consider all of those well-trained British actors who turn up in American films — Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, and so on — who are able to command the screen with their mastery of the craft. It's something you can learn.

But it's also a talent, a weird and inexplicable talent. It's a thing that can make actors with mediocre skills into great movie stars. Think of Katherine Hepburn or Keanu Reeves. They can't act all that well, but they have that thing. Brando was a great actor and he had that thing. He had as much of it as anyone else who ever worked in the medium. Probably more than anyone else who ever worked in the medium.

There's a scene in Last Tango in Paris where Brando is idly drumming his hands against the wall. That's all that's happening, and it lasts a couple of minutes. It's a scene of a man standing drumming his hands. It should be duller than a Jarmuch film and put you to sleep. But the scene is utterly hypnotic — more movie than you get from most entire feature films.

Talent. Magic.

When I first told my folks about discovering Brando, about seeing this scene, they both became angry. He cheated us, they said. He should have made more films. Maybe so.

But could he ever have made enough films?

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Salon has a dazzling feature with pages and pages of quotes about him by everyone cool who ever met him. Check it out.

Microsoft and security

Bruce Scheneier argues that Microsoft is unwilling to do what's necessary to meet their alleged goal of enhanced security with their products.

The security of your computer and network depends on two things: what you do to secure your computer and network, and what everyone else does to secure their computers and networks. It's not enough for you to maintain a secure network. If other people don't maintain their security, we're all more vulnerable to attack. When many unsecure computers are connected to the Internet, worms spread faster and more extensively, distributed denial-of-service attacks are easier to launch, and spammers have more platforms from which to send e-mail. The more unsecure the average computer on the Internet is, the more unsecure your computer is.
...
Initial news stories reported that Microsoft would make this [security-oriented] upgrade available to all XP users, both licensed and unlicensed. To me, this was a smart move on Microsoft's part. Think about all the ways the company would benefit. Licensed users would be more secure and happier. Worms that attack Microsoft products would be less virulent, so Microsoft wouldn't look as bad in the press. Microsoft would win, its customers would win and the Internet would win. It's the kind of marketing move about which best-selling books are written.

Then Microsoft said the initial comments were wrong; SP2 would not run on pirated copies of XP. Only legal copies of the software could be secured. This is the wrong decision.

Not surprising to me. Microsoft makes their money by selling you software that creates problems for you, then selling you software which solves those problems ... but then gives you new problems, so they can sell you software which solves those problems ... but then gives you new problems ... and so on.

Now that Windows is fairly reliable, they need to get us into some serious pain over security so that they can ride in on a white horse and fix that problem. We're just not in enough pain yet.

Heroic art

So I stumble across this online art gallery, which describes itself as providing "The Finest in Contemporary Romantic Realism."

Which turns out to mean lots of Heroic Figures. I have a soft spot for this kind of stuff. I know it's kitchy, and I don't really want to have any of it in my home, but I do think it's often the right sort of thing for public spaces: think of all that great 1930s WPA art.

But looking at the gallery, the relentlessly Exultant Figures of Human Aspiration start to get faintly creepy, and the descriptive text doesn't help.

My goal is to portray the heroic and romantic in human nature and human achievement in a realistic style and a modern setting.
...
Art that points a way forward to the limitless aspirational possibilities of life-affirming and mind-affirming conscious existence.

I start to think about Leni Riefenstahl, but that's not quite it. Then one of the pieces makes it click --- these are like the paintings and sculpures that Ayn Rand described Howard Roark admiring. And sure enough, you can buy prints of cover art for Ayn Rand's books!

Pants on fire

Just in case you needed one handy, the Poor Man reminds us in specific detail about how the President of the United States has lied on a host of issues, and why it's important to say "liar" in so many words.

These are all lies, told by the President himself. This doesn't include any distortions, half-truths, or exaggerations, or any lies told by senior figures in the administration. These lies are big and small.

But hey, he hasn't lied under oath about his sex life, and isn't that the important thing?

Spiderman Two

I'm not going to get to see it for a few days at least, but Spiderman 2 opens today. Though I guess if you care, you don't need me to tell you.

The first sentence of Ebert's review tells me what I need to know: “Now this is what a superhero movie should be.”

You go, Roger. I suspect that's even a little wink in there for the true geek cinephile: Pauline Kael's review of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan begins, “Now that's more like it.”

Very clever, Mr. Bond

While looking for a quote about Leni Riefenstahl, I stumbled across an article that looks closely at the incredibly weird opening title sequences in James Bond movies. The article argues that they were inspired by Riefenstahl's style.

While neither of the original title designers, Robert Brownjohn, who set the style and Maurice Binder who developed it, credit Leni Riefenstahl or her body aesthetic in the Olympia film as an influence in their Bond title sequences, the correspondences in image, symbolism, even action are intriguing and worthy of examination for their ideological meaning and filmic intertext.

It's a tempting idea. Whether or not you buy it, the article provides a suprisingly interesting history of the evolution of the titles.

Binder’s female form title credits had become Bond film ritual. Expectations followed with each successive film as to how far he might push the limits with regard to nudity, sexual content, and implication. Billy Wilder even cited Binder’s work as “superior to the films themselves.”

Particularly fun is the way it talks about the last few pictures, which have evolved into parodies of themselves. I remember that the opening titles to Goldeneye made me laugh out loud.

Women wielding sledgehammers chop away at statues of Marx and Lenin, strut their stuff on falling and breaking hammer and sickles. In a nod to Binder, there is a phallic moment when a pistol emerges from the mouth of one of the women.

And of course, eventually he cannot resist the magic word “postmodern.”

Die Another Day (2002) finally does take Bond into the postmodern world, both in the pastiche and self-aware narrative and with regard to the cinematic style. The title credits do not separate the film into a triptych structure in the classical Bond manner. There is no abrupt change, the mini-adventure does not stand alone, and the credits continue the narrative into the body of the film. .... The images fracture across the screen and re-form, foreshadowing the identity morphing in the film’s plotline.

Even James Bond has fragmented postmodern identity!

Today's quote

I've been doing some research to support a motorcycle shopping expedition.

The same whirring, clanking, whining, chuffing and shuddering that delights ears accustomed to the longitudinal V-twins can convince CBR600 owners that something is horrifyingly, expensively and inexorably wrong.

From a review of the Moto Guzzi V11, the least practical but most beautiful bike I'm seriously considering.

Microsoft and development tools

My human readers may want to sit this one out. But the article in question really is interesting, so you may want to be brave.

Joel Spolsky has a really interesting analysis of Microsoft's current situation.

Microsoft's crown strategic jewel, the Windows API, is lost. The cornerstone of Microsoft's monopoly power and incredibly profitable Windows and Office franchises, which account for virtually all of Microsoft's income and covers up a huge array of unprofitable or marginally profitable product lines, the Windows API  is no longer of much interest to developers. The goose that lays the golden eggs is not quite dead, but it does have a terminal disease, one that nobody noticed yet.

Now that I've said that, allow me to apologize for the grandiloquence and pomposity of that preceding paragraph. I think I'm starting to sound like those editorial writers in the trade rags who go on and on about Microsoft's strategic asset, the Windows API. It's going to take me a few pages, here, to explain what I'm really talking about and justify my arguments. Please don't jump to any conclusions.

.... which makes it difficult to excerpt his article meaningfully. Do check it out; it's one of those things where even if you don't agree, along the way he says some provocative stuff that will get you thinking.

Postcards from the metaverse

This one's for you, MKB and Clive Thomson.

Second Life is a recreational virtual environment. It's a simulated 3D world, where your probably-but-not-necessarily human-looking “avatar”—a representation of you—can wander around, talk to other avatars, and presumably see cool stuff and have cool adventures.

If that sounds silly and boring, I think I agree with you. In his talk The Point Is, which I keep trying to get y'all to read, Brian Moriarty claims that this whole idea is boneheaded.

In the cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, there is a very exclusive virtual night club called the Black Sun. One of the things that makes the Black Sun so exclusive and special is that, unlike the low-rent portions of cyberspace where avatars pass through each other freely, patrons of the Black Sun must walk around each another or collide. I read this description and thought it was a witty satire. Unfortunately, many would-be engineers of shared illusion have read Snow Crash and adopted it as a specification. The heresy needs to be spoken: The cyberpunk conception of virtual reality is not really very interesting. Only a hacker would find the problem of avatar collision interesting.
....
Space and time are not intrinsic properties of virtual presence. Space and time will not exist in virtual presence unless we bring them with us. Space and time are boring. Let's not invite them.

But what do I know? EverQuest has hundreds of thousands of players, in spite of being saddled with the the ultimate dorkiness of being a swords-and-elves game. Human nature being what it is, it's well known that many of those EverQuest players aren't much interested in the game, and just go to socialize.

Indeed, EQ users hoard virtual posessions, as Clive Thomson documents for us.

The Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be $2,266 U.S. per capita. By World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia.

It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn't even exist.
....
WITHIN MONTHS OF ULTIMA ONLINE'S LAUNCH in 1997, the game spiralled into a currency crisis. The developers woke up one morning to discover that the value of their gold currency was plummeting. Why? A handful of sneaky players had discovered a bug in the code that allowed them to artificially duplicate gold pieces (called “duping”). The economy had been hit by a counterfeiting ring. Inflation soared, and for weeks, players would log in each day to find their assets worth less and less.
....
Three years ago, a company called IGE, whose sole function is to buy and sell virtual goods, launched. I met one of the company's founders, Brock Pierce, at a gaming conference in New York. A fresh-faced, blond twenty-three-year-old who is based in Boca Raton, Florida, he said IGE has “thousands of suppliers” who scout the games all day long to find cut-rate goods. He has a hundred full-time staff members at an office in Hong Kong to handle customer service. On any given day, he says, they handle “several million dollars’ ” worth of virtual inventory.

Maybe the folks at There.com—another subscription virtual environment, like Second Life—are not in fact crazy to hope that they will make money selling us virtual Nike sneakers.

Now consider: a moblog is a blog that consists of pictures taken with the camera on your phone: interesting things you've seen in your meanderings. Many moblogs consist just of the pictures; others have commentary. I've dipped my toe into those waters myself.

So in a strange fusion of two elements of online culture, there's a guy who has figured out a hack to moblog from Second Life.

Despite my initial disdain for moblogging (mobile weblogging), I should soon have some moblog entries here. More specifically, I am in the process of setting up a moblog to display “live” screenshots and commentary documenting my Second Life travels.

The system will allow me to take “photos” in Second Life and send these along with comments from within SL to an external email account—this is a standard SL function whereby users can send their friends e-cards. The email is collected by the blogging system and stripped of text I don't want, leaving only my message and a picture. Hopefully I'll have this implemented soon, the technical aspect is all handled by the blogging system, and it's not too hard. The end result will be the ability to report “live” as events happen in Second Life. Pretty cool!

Perhaps, as Moriarty would say, “only a hacker would find this interesting.” I'm pretty sure that Sandy Stone would have something interesting to say about it. Does that make her a hacker? I just rambled on about it at length—perhaps, in spite of my best efforts, I'm a hacker after all.

Cumshaw

I have a strange weakness for military humour. Strange because of my total lack of a temperament congruent with military service. Here's a droll example from Uppity Negro.

Seabees: We need concrete.
Marines: You're not in our budget. Talk to the Navy.

Seabees: We need concrete.
Navy: If it's for a Corps project, talk to them.

Seabees: Do you guys have any concrete?
Air Force base guard: Yeah. Why?
Seabees: Merely engaging in conversation, fellow soldier! Say, isn't that Saddam Hussein over there?
Air Force base guard: What? Where? (runs off)
Seabees: All too easy. Hey, they got generators!

Mind you, this did sometimes lead to awkward situations.

Marines: Wow, you guys do good work. But how do you always end up with more material at the end of a project than when you started?
Seabees: ... the little baby Jesus.

What's in this can?

So I recently encountered this very strange Japanese product. It's a little can with a pull-top in a cardboard box. The can has a photograph of famous Japanese movie monster Gamera, “friend to children everywhere.”

The Western mind may never know what this can contains, since my colleagues and I dreaded to open the pull-top, fearing what we might unleash. But there is this important clue:

It looks like nutrition information to me. Which suggests that in Japan you can actually buy Gamera meat!

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Update: It's true! Waterbones has already discovered a website which reports that this mystery substance is actual meat of Gamera. Shades of Warren Ellis' story in Planetary #2, “Zero.”

Takara will be releasing a set of twelve different canned “Gamera” meats — One for each kaiju: Gamera'99, Gamera'96, Gamera'95, Irys, Legion, Super-Gyaos, Barugon, Gyaos, Guiron, Viras, Jiger & Zigra. Eat Gamera-meat and you will “become strong like Gamera!!”

A hearty recommendation. I want to be strong like Gamera!

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I offer you the Mystery Science Theater 3000 “Gamera Song”:

Gamera! Gamera!
Gamera is really neat.
Gamera is filled with meat.
We've been eating Gamera!
Shell
Teeth
Eyes
Flames
Claws
Breath
Scales
Fun!

Hello!

Statcounter tells me that I have readers in Illinois, North Carolina, and Texas. Nice to have you here.

But who the heck are all you people? Drop me a line!

Today's quote

By way of DeLong, Larry McMurtry in the New York Times:

I doubt myself that Bill Clinton's sex life has been all that different from anybody else's: pastures of plenty, pastures of less than plenty, pastures he should get out of immediately, and not a few acres of scorched earth.

Ain't it the truth.

Metaphor

With a delicious excerpt, Michael Bérubé rescues three paragraphs of an an excellent New Yorker article about our recent foreign policy madness that has already disappeared from the web.

Once, a group of travellers were on a perilous journey, in the course of which they had to cross a river. Unluckily, their guide forgot the location of the bridge, so the party had to ford the river, which, at the place they then found themselves, was shallow but very wide. After several minutes of wading through the icy water, the travellers began to grumble, “This guide is worthless! Let us abandon him and find another!” Sensing the discontent of his charges, the guide cleverly led them into a deeper part of the river, where the current was stronger and the footing more treacherous. “Help us!” the travellers cried. “Esteemed guide, do not abandon us!”

Someone needs to explain to The New Yorker that you put the archives on the web, since you can't sell them, but not the current issue, which you can sell — not the other way around!

Update: Evidently someone did tell them: behold.

Guilty as charged

I am embarassed to admit that I have personally contributed to the impending snark shortage, as reported on Daily Kos.

Science Friday: Liberal Blogs in Crisis

Liberal bloggers are facing a snark shortage that may have serious implications in the coming months, experts say. Blog readers are being warned to expect rationing and long lines at their favorite liberal blogs — and that some blogs may not make it through the current crisis.

Strategic Snark Reserves ‘Dangerously Low’; Increased Consumption Blamed

Experts report that the United States Strategic Snark Reserves have been severely depleted, and absent new discoveries of snark may run dry within three years.

‘Liberal bloggers have been using snark at an exponentially expanding rate, but it's not a renewable resource’ said Lawrence Peters, head researcher at the American Blog Studies Group, a liberal think tank. ‘Once it's gone, it's gone.”

Thanks to the lovely Waterbones for alerting me to the crisis.

Fire And Motion

Famed software development philosopher Joel Spolsky has a little observation about how you get things done.

When I was an Israeli paratrooper a general stopped by to give us a little speech about strategy. In infantry battles, he told us, there is only one strategy: Fire and Motion. You move towards the enemy while firing your weapon. The firing forces him to keep his head down so he can't fire at you. (That's what the soldiers mean when they shout “cover me.” It means, “fire at our enemy so he has to duck and can't fire at me while I run across this street, here.” It works.) The motion allows you to conquer territory and get closer to your enemy, where your shots are much more likely to hit their target. If you're not moving, the enemy gets to decide what happens, which is not a good thing. If you're not firing, the enemy will fire at you, pinning you down.

I remembered this for a long time. I noticed how almost every kind of military strategy, from air force dogfights to large scale naval maneuvers, is based on the idea of Fire and Motion. It took me another fifteen years to realize that the principle of Fire and Motion is how you get things done in life. You have to move forward a little bit, every day.

The rest of his essay is about procrastination and software development, if you like that sort of thing.

Key blogosphere issue

Matthew Yglesias has interesting comments on an important subject consuming the political blogosphere.

We have a serious collective action problem here. Free marketers like Sullivan and Volokh are too blinded by ideology to see the compelling need for government intervention. A temporary regulatory solution could help us resolve this mess. For the next five years, say, straight women must ‘insist on only dating hot guys’ (we'll have to empanel a ‘Federal Hot Guy Commission’ consisting of ‘shallow, beauty-obsessed [gay] males’ to rank everyone) and see if the hot guy supply increases in response.

I think Matt's still sounding like a Republican insisting that businesses can regulate themselves with just a little friendly advice. What are the tax incentives and funding that he intends to include in his plan? Policy is in the details.

There's a thought

Brad DeLong has an interesting little fantasy:

There's still time for the House and Senate Republican caucuses to go to Bush and force his and Cheney's resignations. Then Hastert and Stevens can decline the job, and the presidential succession passes to Colin Powell.

....

It's what would have already happened to any political leader in a parliamentary system.

Now that's interesting. One of the things I wish I knew more about is how different forms of respresentative government work in practice. There's a few hundred constitutions out there — surely someone has done a longitudinal study?

Trickster

Warren “die puny humans” Ellis offers us a dialogue with Don Bastardos of the Amazon Basin.

A:
I want you to teach me.

D:
Yes. For Don Bastardos is very clever.

A:
I bring tribute. I'll stay as long as we have to, to be deemed worthy of the ayahuasca.

D:
Don Bastardos calls bullshit on you. Does this look like some guru temple to you? You want to get off your face on jungle drugs and see visions. Do not shit Don Bastardos.

Don Bastardos likes to get fucked up on ayahuasca and talk about old television shows. What did you think, scrawny white man?

Perhaps only funny if you've read a lot of Castaneda.

Popkultur disaffection

Snapped with my phone, on a slummy stretch of Market Street here in SF:

Then it hit me

I’m not going to be famous

I won’t get to be a rock star

I am going to be stuck on the payroll doing work that doesn’t interest me for a very long time

Apparently this poster also turns up as a mural in Fresno.

Of course, this rhetoric has been around for a long time. You saw it on the streets of Paris 36 years ago.

Blogger Tom Coates has a rebuttal which claims that blogs give the lie to this sentiment. I'm not convinced — but then I don't want to be that kind of famous, anyway.

Garfield

It turns out that Garfield isn't a bad comic strip that got heavily merchandized. It was originally conceived as a marketing exercise.

The film is an example of the kind of product that Garfield creator Jim Davis likes to attach his product's name to: Predictable, unfunny, and eminently forgettable. The movie won't take the nation by storm --- in fact, it will probably vanish very quickly --- but it will make a tidy sum in theaters and on DVD
...
From the beginning, Davis put as much energy into the marketing of the strip as he did into creating it. (It's telling that he's been inducted into the Licensing Merchandiser's Hall of Fame but not the hall of fame hosted by the International Museum of Cartoon Art.)
...
Davis admitted to spending only 13 or 14 hours a week writing and drawing the strip, compared to 60 hours a week doing promotion and licensing.

It never occurred to me, but once said, it's obvious.

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Update:

It’s Not Just You: Garfield Is Not Meant to Be Funny

Unlike New Yorker cartoons, in which, you are actually missing the joke, Garfield is in fact not even designed to be funny

Happy Bloomsday!

Today is the centennial of the events in James Joyce's Ulysses. Right about the time I'm posting this, in Dublin, re-enactments are in progress.

A geek test

Yeah, yeah, you've seen it all before, you're way past this kind of thing, but it's a clever example of the type, and some of my readers will actually take it. You Know Who You Are.

And since you asked, it said I'm a major geek, which is in the middle of the range. I don't know whether to be ashamed or proud ... or whether I should feel that way because the rank is high or low.

Reagan

Now that an appropriate interval has passed, it's time for some antidotes to the treacle. For a quick hit, check out this terrific cartoon my mother passed on, or these fourteen things that David Corn at The Nation asks us to remember:

• getting cozy with Argentine fascist generals
• tax credits for segregated schools
• disinformation campaigns
• “homeless by choice”
• Manuel Noriega
• falling wages
• the HUD scandal
• air raids on Libya
• “constructive engagement” with apartheid South Africa
• United States Information Agency blacklists of liberal speakers
• attacks on OSHA and workplace safety
• the invasion of Grenada
• assassination manuals
• Nancy's astrologer

That's just a sampling, actually — Mr. Corn has fifty-two more if you're interested.

Readers with stronger stomachs and more patience may wish to wander over to Salon for a couple of good articles on Mr. Reagan's legacy. One from Rick Perlstein:

Reagan soon became one of the hottest tickets on the anti-Communist lecture circuit — where sunny optimism was not the order of the day. “We have 10 years,” he would say in just about every speech. “Not 10 years to make up our mind.” (He was referring to the choice as to whether to embrace the Republican right or the march of communism, among whose avatars he numbered, in a famous 1960 letter to Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy.) But “10 years to win or lose — by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free.”

....

It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly. In 1964, observers horrified by Barry Goldwater pined for the sensible Robert Taft, the conservative leader of the 1950s. When Reagan was president, liberals spoke fondly of sweet old Goldwater.

Nowadays, as we grapple with the malevolence of President Bush, it's Reagan we remember as the sensible one. At the risk of speaking ill of the dead, let memory at least acknowledge that there was much about Reagan that was not so sensible.

Another from mighty Joe Conason:

The millions of words of hagiographic copy uttered and written this week will make scant mention of the scandal epidemic that marred Reagan's presidency (aside from the Iran-contra affair, which few commentators understand well enough to explain accurately). Disabled by historical amnesia, most Americans won't recall — or be reminded of — the scores of administration officials indicted, convicted or expelled on ethics charges between 1981 and 1989.

However historians will assess Reagan's responsibility, the record is what it is. Gathering dust in the news archives are thousands of clippings about the gross influence peddling, bribery, fraud, illegal lobbying and sundry abuses that engulfed the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon, to name a few of the most notorious cases.

I could give you a hundred other links and quotes, but I'll resist the tempations. I managed to come up with two nice things to say about President Reagan. Sixty-six bad things from Mr. Corn.

Fair and balanced, that's me.

Ray

Ray Charles
1930-2004

National treasure

I just found out. Words fail.

Try Stanley Crouch at Slate, who says "he used every second" of his 73 years, or Charles Taylor at Salon, who starts by talking about the recording that should be our national anthem.

Winning the Cold War

The American Prospect argues against the assumption that American conservatism won the Cold War, in service of the claim that it won't do us well against Islamist terror either. It's a long, strange, fascinating, and not entirely convincing argument. I'm not prepared to blame conservatives for the limits and frustrations of a containment policy, as the article does. (Indeed, when I get around to it, I'm going to post an entry about how containment would have been a good answer to Saddam Hussein.) But it makes a strong point that it was lefty anarchists who caught on first that the Soviet state was a lousy idea.

The whole article's worth a read, even though it's long. But if you don't have the time, just bask in this paragraph about how liberal values were the real winners in the Eastern Bloc.

Liberals should take pride in the end of the Cold War. [The conservative magazine] Commentary was reluctant to acknowledge the Eastern European forces of freedom that courageously took to the streets to overthrow communism, in part because the surprising phenomenon represented the three great antagonists of conservatism: the youth culture, the intellectuals of the ’60s generation and the laboring classes that still favored Solidarity over individualism. American neoconservatives like William J. Bennett are haunted by the crisis of authority at home and see knowledge threatened by skepticism everywhere. In Why We Fight, Bennett claims that we are in Iraq to take a stand for truth and to rescue “moral clarity” from the quicksand of liberal “pseudosophisticated relativism.” But in Eastern Europe, intellectuals took a stand for courage without certainty. “For my generation, the road to freedom began in 1968,” recalls the historian Adam Michnik, who wrote of the members of the Solidarity union movement in his Letters From Prison. The playwright Vaclav Havel, associated with Charter 77 and the Prague Spring, took his bearings from the metaphysical anxieties of Martin Heidegger and the existential meditations of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. Against totalitarianism such writers stood for skepticism, irony, uncertainty, and a refusal to believe in and yield to an authority that prefers to possess truth rather than pursue it. Soviet communism ended the way American liberalism began: “Resist much; obey little,” as Walt Whitman wrote.

Or, as I would say, moral certainty is the enemy.

Pie

Witty local pornographer Thomas Roche, editor of the magnificent Noirotica anthologies and author of countless clever and racy stories, is also the author of four funny pie charts that are worth a couple hundred seconds of your attention.

Exercise

Don't go to the gym! Play video games!

John Scalzi has a terrific picture of his five-year-old leaping through the air while playing a video game, and argues that it must be mostly good for her.

Anyone who thinks video game playing leads to sedentary children has never seen Athena play video games.

....

I suspect her game playing may have actually helped her when she did her kindergarten assessment tests, which the Bradford schools have each incoming kid do so they can figure out how to tailor their programs for the next year. If I recall correctly, one category related to visual-motor skills, i.e., what we called hand-eye coordination back in the day.

Meanwhile, Clive Thomson observes that Dance Dance Revolution is serious exercise, and quotes a testamonial from an entire website about losing weight with DDR.

I lost about 140-150lbs with the help of DDR and a weight bench. But before I found DDR I tried walking and a weight bench and I only lost 20lbs, then after DDR it melted off in under a year.

Check out the comments section after Clive's post, too ...