US-Saudi politics far weirder than suspected

Let's all join hands with Teresa Neilsen Hayden and say it: I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.

Atrios observes that ''it was one of the oddest 'conspiracy theories' -- that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, while the American airspace was still closed to most air traffic, the Bush administration allowed a bunch of members of the Bin Laden family and other Saudi royals to fly around the country and then leave.'' Craig Unger fleshes out the story in an excerpt from his forthcoming book House of Bush, House of Saud on Salon, and it makes a John le Carre novel sound as clear in narrative and morality as an episode of Powerpuff Girls.

I really can't capture the story of the bin Ladens flying out of the US on 9/11 in a quote. It is weird, scary, and tangled. Go read it if you want to know.

On the other hand, I do want to give you Unger's amazing summary of the House of Saud as the fulcrum on which the bizarre relationship between Saudi Arabia and the US turns.

The House of Saud had somehow maintained control of Saudi Arabia and the world's richest oil reserves by performing a seemingly untenable balancing act with two parties who had vowed to destroy each other.

On the one hand, the House of Saud was an Islamic theocracy whose power grew out of the royal family's alliance with Wahhabi fundamentalism, a strident and puritanical Islamic sect that provided a fertile breeding ground for a global network of terrorists urging a violent jihad against the United States.

On the other hand, the House of Saud's most important ally was the Great Satan itself, the United States. Even a cursory examination of the relationship revealed astonishing contradictions: America, the beacon of democracy, was to arm and protect a brutal theocratic monarchy. The United States, sworn defender of Israel, was also the guarantor of security to the guardians of Wahhabi Islam, the fundamentalist religious sect that was one of Israel's and America's mortal enemies.

Astoundingly, this fragile relationship had not only endured but in many ways had been spectacularly successful. In the nearly three decades since the oil embargo of 1973, the United States had bought hundreds of billions of dollars of oil at reasonable prices. During that same period, the Saudis had purchased hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons from the U.S. The Saudis had supported the U.S. on regional security matters in Iran and Iraq and refrained from playing an aggressive role against Israel. Members of the Saudi royal family, including Bandar, became billionaires many times over, in the process quietly turning into some of the most powerful players in the American market, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in equities in the United States. And the price of oil, the eternal bellwether of economic, political and cultural anxiety in America, had remained low enough that enormous gas-guzzling SUVs had become ubiquitous on U.S. highways. During the Reagan and Clinton eras the economy boomed.

Surprising link credit

Joshua Micah Marshall's famous lefty journalistic blog Talking Points Memo brings this excellent article about Funyans to our attention.

It is a wonder we know about Funyuns at all. Frito-Lay, a subsidiary of PepsiCo, has proved time and again that it is more than willing to spend lavishly on advertising, promoting and branding its products. Frankie Muniz, Jay Leno and Enrique Iglesias have shilled for Doritos in recent months. Dana Carvey hawks all varieties of Lays potato chips. Several high-profile professional athletes have appeared in ads for Tostitos and Cheetos have their own animated spokescheetah. Funyuns are conspicuously absent from the mix.

On one hand, it is understandable that Frito-Lay has not similarly promoted Funyuns, because, quite simply, Funyuns are gross.

I knew I smelled a rat

Brad DeLong has a terrific radical critique of a rhetorical device that has dogged my steps in countless discussions about social democracy.

He (falsely) sees the debate between those who advocate equality of opportunity and equality of result as an intellectual battle to be settled by who has the better ideas. I think that is not what it is. I think it is something very different.

I first ran across the distinction between the (good) people who believe in “equality of opportunity” and the (bad) people who believe in “equality of result” when I was working my way through the 1960s and 1970s writings of Irving Kristol. It seemed to me that in so defining the issues Kristol was doing a masterful job of preparing the ideological terrain, and that virtually anyone who then entered that terrain was doomed to almost certain complete defeat.

In Kristol's conceptual vocabulary, the pinning of the label “equality of result” on the left was intended not as an intellectual argument but as an ideological police action. The point was to erase any difference between the tamest of levelling social democracy and High Maoism: even if it was an unrealistic political prospect now, those who wanted a progressive income tax were committed to a long-run future in which everyone ate the same meals and wore identical overalls or Mao jackets. In truth, nobody in the West ever believed in “equality of result.”

There's lots more. If you like this sort of thing, do go read it all. Then go check out what the Decembrist has to say about how slow hiring in the labor market reflects a breakdown of the liberal social democratic order.

Government, under the liberal consensus of the New Deal through the 1970s, did not redistribute income. Rather, government's greatest achievement was to create SECURITY — the kind of security that created the opportunity to join the middle class.

Krugman's thousand words redux

Did you go look when I told you?

It's witty, smart, political, and Tufte-licious. Go. Go. Go!

Ebert understands what a review should do

Okay, I'm never going forgive him for his positive review of Spawn. But Roger Ebert really understands that while it's often helpful for him to tell you whether or not he liked the movie, the point is to do so in service of making clear whether or not the reader will like the movie. On the way, he often offers you a witticism, an observation about life or art, encouragement to try something different from your usual movie fare, or some insight into how movies work. But helping you judge whether you will like a picture comes first.

Consider his recent review of Hidalgo.

This is a movie that has: Concealed pits in the sand with sharpened stakes at the bottom; exotic sprawling villas made with corridors and staircases and balconies and rooftops where countless swordsmen can leap forward to their doom; sandstorms that can be outrun by a horse like Hidalgo; tents as large and elaborately furnished as a Malcolm Forbes birthday party; blazing closeups of the pitiless sun; poisoned oases; tantalizing mirages; parched lips; six-shooters, whips, daggers, and ... no, I don't think there were any asps. Some will complain that Hidalgo magically arrives on the scene whenever Hopkins whistles, but Hidalgo knows that if he could whistle, Hopkins would be right there for him, too.

I have done my duty. Not a moviegoer alive will be able to attend Hidalgo and claim that I have not painted an accurate portrait of the film.

Whether you like movies like this, only you can say. But if you do not have some secret place in your soul that still responds even a little to brave cowboys, beautiful princesses and noble horses, then you are way too grown up and need to cut back on cable news. And please ignore any tiresome scolds who complain that the movie is not really based on fact. Duh.

He will be missed

Spaulding Gray
1941-2004

An American Original: Troubled, Inner-Directed, and Cannot Type

Thanks to him, if a djinni offered to make me into a talented performer I would wish to be a monologist.

Today's quote

Every politician has a natural format -- Clinton's was the State of the Union, Bush's the single-topic (war) speech -- and Kerry's is the debate.

The Decemberist

Since you asked

3Jake was kind enough today to remind me of the marvels of Cary Tennis' relationship advice on Salon.

Cary's First Law of Subjective Thermodynamics ... states that though the total energy in a system remains constant, it always seems like you're putting up with more crap than she is.

It is theoretically possible that your subjective view could be correct: Because energy and crap in the universe tend to cluster, it's possible that you're putting up with more than she is. But it's highly unlikely. What science has shown is that women put up with more crap than men, but they do it invisibly, using methods that can't be seen by the naked eye or even identified with telescopes.

You don't want to know all the crap she puts up with. You're better off not knowing.

Too true.

Word count

A few days ago, Brad DeLong argued that the 700 word format for Op-Eds is inherently lame while pointing to the Decemberist's fisking of one of David Brooks' more memorably loony New York Times articles. I didn't buy it at the time: Paul Krugman does pretty well in the same format.

But then today it turns out that Krugman needed a thousand words -- or the equivalent -- to tell a simple tale.

Buffer

Whaddaya know. It turns out that the human mind buffers about three seconds of experience.

We take life 3 seconds at a time. Human experience and behaviour is characterized by temporal segmentation. Successive segments or 'time windows' have a duration of approximately 3 seconds.

Examples:

• intentional movements are embedded within 3s (like a handshake)
• the anticipation of a precise movement like hitting a golf ball does not go beyond 3 s
• if we reproduce the duration of a stimulus, we can do so accurately up to 3 s but not beyond
• if we look at ambiguous figures (like a vase vs. two faces) or if we listen to ambiguous phoneme sequences (like Cu-Ba-Cu-Ba-.., either hearing Cuba or Bacu) automatically after approx. 3 s the percept switches to the alternative
• the working platform of our short term memory lasts only 3 s (being interrupted after 3 s most of the information is gone)
• spontaneous speech in all languages is temporally segmented, each segment lasting up to 3 s
• this temporal segmentation of speech shows up again in poetry, as a verse of a poem is embedded within 3 s (Shakespeare: 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day')
• musical motives preferably last 3 s (remember Beethoven's Fifth Symphony)
• decisions are made within 3 s (like zapping between TV channels)

Taxes, the economy, the media

Atrios has one of his long comments on the state of the economy and our allegedly liberal media.

The Republicans predicted that the Clinton tax increases would bring on an economic armageddon. They didn't, but if the economy had tanked or failed to recover for whatever reason, in 1996 every Republican would have blamed it on the tax increases, because as we all know tax increases are bad for the economy.
...
no matter what happens with the economy this year, the media will never allow the narrative to be ''the Bush tax cuts caused the poor economy'' the way ''the Clinton tax increases caused the poor economy'' would have been the narrative in 1996 if it had been the case. Why? Because, ''we all know'' that tax cuts are good for the economy and tax increases are bad for the economy. The media has internalized this as a basic fact, even though there's no reason to think it to be true. The golden years of the US economy, 1945-1973, coincided with the period of record high top marginal tax rates.

Throw another meme on the barbie

Remember the post I made about Darque Dungeon? Thanks to darque and delightful Trueheart, I can now report a sequel, God Hates the Scene, which adds some gangsta memes to the mix. (Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics)

There's no such thing as too much genre crossover!

Innocence and despair

Checking out the Langley Schools Music Project site is worth it for the celebrity testamonials alone: David Bowie, John Zorn, and Neil Gaiman, for starters. But the music itself does well and truly boggle the mind.

The Langley Schools Music Project is a 60-voice chorus of rural school children from western Canada, untrained but captivated by melodic magic, singing tunes by the Beach Boys, Paul McCartney, David Bowie, The Bay City Rollers, and others. The students accompany themselves with the shimmering gamelan chimes of Orff percussion, and elemental rock trimmings arranged by their itinerant music teacher, Hans Fenger.

Fenger writes of 9-year-old Sheila Behman's version of the Eagles' ''Desperado'' on that record: ''She sang it without a trace of sentimentality, a literal reading. She had no idea about the romantic cowboy stuff; she just heard it as sad, the way a child does.''

The definition of terrorism

Orcinus has another terrific post keeping a weather eye on domestic right-wing violence, and our leaders' failure to grapple thoughtfully or effectively with this — or any other — form of terrorism.

It's starting to become clear that, to the Bush administration -- and their corporate and media cohorts — the definition of a “terrorist” is “someone we don't like.”
....
I've described previously how the Bush administration's emphasis on the “war on terror” bears all the earmarks of a political marketing campaign, precisely because it exclusively focuses on Arab nations as the source of terrorism, and when dealing with its domestic aspect, is only concerned about Muslim extremists operating clandestinely here. The existence of far-right, white-supremacist domestic terrorism as a dual threat undercuts such a strategy.

On the way, he quotes from Robert Wright's landmark essay on the emergence of the general terrorist threat.

For the foreseeable future, smaller and smaller groups of intensely motivated people will have the ability to kill larger and larger numbers of people. They won't have to claim that they speak on behalf of a whole religion. They'll just have to be reasonably intelligent, modestly well-funded, and really pissed off. It may be hard to imagine a few radical environmentalists, or Montana militiamen, or French anti-globalization activists, or Basque separatists, or Unabomber-style Luddites, killing 100,000 people. Yet what makes this plausible is exactly what makes radical Islam such a formidable long-term threat: two enduring aspects of the evolution of technology.

---

Update: A word from me about a proper definition of terrorism.

Art

I quite like these paintings. I can't tell you why. And yeah, it's not your imagination, a lot of them allude to Myers-Briggs type indicators.

I also like this guy's work.

Sounds like MY job

Maybe Tufte is right and PowerPoint really is a tool of Satan.

The most remarkable thing is the form of the ''memo'' that is being drafted for Bush: it is a seven-page Powerpoint presentation plus nine pages of charts. 659 text words total. That's one text word for every ten billion dollars that is going to be spent on Social Security over the next decade, and one word for every hundred billion dollars that is going to be spent on Social Security over the next half century. Hell is briefing someone like George W. Bush on a complicated issue like Social Security reform.

Brad DeLong

Today's quote

I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.

J. Edgar Hoover

What they don't teach in school but should

For your convenience, an index of the logical fallacies on the web.

Complex Question

Definition:
Two otherwise unrelated points are conjoined and treated as a single proposition. The reader is expected to accept or reject both together, when in reality one is acceptable while the other is not. A complex question is an illegitimate use of the ''and'' operator.

Examples:
You should support home education and the God-given right of parents to raise their children according to their own beliefs.

Do you support freedom and the right to bear arms?

Have you stopped using illegal sales practises? (This asks two questions: did you use illegal practises, and did you stop?)

Warren Ellis is thinking about the future

Super-cool Warren Ellis, whose more reputable inventions include Transmetropolitan and Planetary, has a knockout rambling essay about the future and, um, stuff.

We seem to be currently in the grip of what me and novelist Alex Besher call ''future fatigue''. It's what Bruce Sterling is talking about when he playfully advocates switching the word ''futuristic'' with the word ''futurismic.'' The future as we have imagined it seems tired, boring, ordinary. The Space Shuttle is a classic car now, as aesthetically historic as a finned Fifties car.
...
We're living in a science-fictional world now. Someone reminded me that JG Ballard once said ''the future will be boring,'' and damn if old miseryguts wasn't right all along.
...
I saw Stewart Brand lecture, a few years ago. Standing there like he'd just wandered in from a foresty log cabin, Swiss Army knife and compass mounted on his belt, he talked about how we'd become a workaround society. We have become entrained to step outside the stated rules of a device's operation in order to get it to do what we want.

Shorter Rabbi Daniel Lapin

Protesting Passion

It is hypocritical for Jews to support artistic freedom and then describe why an antisemitic movie disturbs them.

(''Shorter'' invented at D-Squared Digest and brought to fullness at Busy Busy Busy.)

For the record

I am a vigorous defender of the separation of church and state, and am clear that the Framers of the Constitution intended to create one. I am opposed to ''In God we trust" on the money. I am opposed to ''under God'' in the pledge of allegience. I am opposed to posting the Ten Commandments in schools or courtrooms, unless paired with, say, the Hammurabi Code. I am opposed to the opening prayer in the Senate.

I even envy the secular culture of Western Europe, with Existentialists as far as the eye can see saying that God is dead. I'm sorry they had to learn the lesson through the butchery of two generations of 20th century young men in stupid wars, but I'm glad they learned the lesson, and wish we could catch on here in the US. The kind of people who think that American culture is under assault by evil secular humanists would definitely call me a secular humanist.

But let's be clear: This is not what I advocate.

A law banning Islamic headscarves in France's public schools was overwhelmingly adopted Wednesday in the Senate despite protests by many French Muslims that the measure is discriminatory.
...
President Jacques Chirac ... said such a law was needed to protect the French principle of secularism.

The law forbids religious apparel and signs that "conspicuously show" a student's religious affiliation. While Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses would also be banned, authorities have made clear that it is aimed at removing Islamic headscarves from classrooms.

AP, 3 March 2004

This is an abrogation of personal liberty. We ''secular humanists'' don't want a completely secular public sphere, free of religious observance, just a secular government.

Religion good, government advocacy of religion bad. Okay?

John Kerry is the Democratic candidate

Josh Marshall is hopeful about the implications for the Democrats.

The Kerry-Weld race was supposed to be, and in many respects was, the fight of Kerry's political life. And going into it there was good reason to believe that Kerry would lose. But he kept in it and fought and fought and fought and eventually won the race. His persistence and tenacity were impressive.

By national standards, it was a pretty clean race. But it was extraordinarily hard-fought. And since then Kerry's always struck me as someone who was a fighter, someone who'd never give up, give in, let himself get hit without fighting back or flag in the home stretch.

That gives me some confidence about this race.

Guided by infalliable logic

MKB just turned me on to this cool interview with video game design legend Eugene Jarvis, creator of Defender and Robotron 2048. His favorite quote was

You have all these fantasies about how people are going to play your game and all the depth you put in there and your great moral story and everything and it seems like actually what people really do is they just enjoy shooting guys in the nuts.

but I stuck on the bit where he says

Is there really anything in Windows that you couldn't do any better on your old computer? Just now it takes 30 seconds to boot up your word processor. [But] it makes work fun because you're playing a video game at work, clicking on boxes and stuff.

Today's quote

''Every ambitious work of literature was written either by someone who had insomnia or by someone who was supported by their family.''

pseudopodium

Passionately snide

Yeah, I still haven't posted my long review of The Passion of the Christ. I'm working on it.

Fortunately for all you Passion fans, Orcinus has published a darkly funny email he received on the subject:

The film is only anti-Semitic if you consider it anti-Semitic to portray Jews as an unruly crowd of evil, hook-nosed Christ killers.

The main miracle in the life of Jesus is apparently the miraculous amount of blood that his body contains.
...
Jesus wears really heavy sandals. Because every time he puts his foot down, it is like Godzilla walking through Tokyo. Boom, Boom, Boom. They must weigh like a ton.

Plus, I've got a Mel Gibson screenplay generator handy, if you need one.

Behind Greenspan's Social Security comment

A few days ago Alan Greenspan spoke up about the need to cut Social Security benefits due to looming budget deficits.

Now I'm the first to say that I don't believe that Social Security will last long enough for me to collect on it. The rapidly approaching demographic crisis of long-lived Boomers is going to kill the system as we know it. At the crudest level, I agree with Greenspan: we should bump the retirement age out a few years and start means-testing benefits.

But the first order of business in dealing with growing budget deficits is to fix the nutty Bush administration tax cuts, and Greenspan has so far held his tongue on that point. What's going on here?

As usual, Paul Krugman makes the murky clear.

If anyone had tried to sell this package honestly -- ''Let's raise taxes and cut benefits for working families so we can give big tax cuts to the rich!'' -- voters would have been outraged. So the class warriors of the right engaged in bait-and-switch.
...
The right-wing corruption of our government system -- the partisan takeover of institutions that are supposed to be nonpolitical -- continues, and even extends to the Federal Reserve.

Ten rules

Via Teresa Nielsen Hayden: Elmore Leonard tells us all how to write well. Rule Ten is my favorite: ''Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.''

Now if only he explained how to create Elmore Leonard characters.

Early thoughts about Mel's Passion

I posted earlier about looking forward to getting a look at Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ. Saturday I dragged some long-suffering friends to see it. I'm 1600 words into trying to articulate my thoughts about the picture and still going. In the meantime, let me offer a quick take.

There are a few things to like. The lead actors all have terrific screen presence, with the curious exception of Caviezel as Jesus. The pieta shot is truly magnificent, and there are some other lovely touches -- the opening shot of the night sky, the spooky androgynous Satan shadowing Jesus' steps, mother Mary clutching at the ground in her grief, Jesus' first miracle in the film.

But I'm reaching for nice things to say, because I disliked this picture on so many levels.

The violence is pornographic. The craftsmanship of the film is often clumsy and cheap. The antisemitism is there, mitigated only by the general misanthropy being even greater. The absence of the animating ideas of Christianity is disturbing. It adds up to a disconcerting Manichean view of humanity, where sympathy for Christ's suffering is the core of Christianity, while unbelievers are cold, or cruel, or both.

I made a point of going to a theater where I would be in an audience of believers, many of whom were clearly moved. I wanted to be sympathetic to their experience, but found it impossible. I am baffled by how many of these same folks undoubtedly rejected, with anger, Scorscese's The Last Temptation of Christ, a beautiful, deeply spiritual film which engaged seriously with the language and ideas of Christianity. And there were dozens of children in the audience: twelve, ten, eight years old, and younger. How could anyone think that was a good idea?

The title is true, really

It's called work-safe pornography and it's very, very clever.

Speaking of McNamara

If you've seen Fog of War (and you should see it), check out Alexander Cockburn refusing to let McNamara off the hook for his sins and then coming back to the well to take him to task for screwing up at the World Bank.

McNamara rode into the Pentagon on one of the biggest of big lies, the bogus “missile gap” touted by Kennedy in his 1960 campaign against Nixon. It was all nonsense. As Defense Secretary McNamara ordered the production of 1,000 Minuteman strategic nukes, this at a time when he was looking at US intelligence reports showing that the Soviets had one silo with one untested missile.
...
[As head of Ford] McNamara did push for safety options -- seat belts and padded instrument panels. Ford dealer brochures for the ’56 models featured photos of how Ford and GM models fared in actual crashes, to GM’s disadvantage.

But Morris could have put to McNamara what happened next. As Nader describes it, in December, 1955, a top GM executive called Ford’s vice president for sales and said Ford’s safety campaign had to stop. These Ford executives, many of them formerly from GM, had a saying, Chevy could drop its price $25 to bankrupt Chrysler, $50 to bankrupt Ford. Ford ran up the white flag. The safety sales campaign stopped. McNamara took a long vacation in Florida, his career in Detroit in the balance, and came back a team player. Safety went through the windscreen and lay in a coma for years.
...
The Gulf of Tonkin “attack” prompted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, whereby Congress gave LBJ legal authority to prosecute and escalate the war in Vietnam. McNamara does some fancy footwork here, stating that there wasn’t any attack by North Vietnamese PT boats on the US destroyer Maddox on August 4, but that there had been such an attack on August 2. It shouldn’t have been beyond Morris’s powers to pull up a well-reported piece by Robert Scheer, published in the Los Angeles Times in April, 1985, establishing not only that the Maddox was attacked neither on August 2 nor 4 but that, beginning on the night of July 30, South Vietnamese navy personnel, US-trained and -equipped, “had begun conducting secret raids on targets in North Vietnam.” As Scheer said, the North Vietnamese PT boats that approached the Maddox on August 2 were probably responding to that assault.