Jimmy and Me

Past President Jimmy Carter is a nice man. He is a thoughtful man and tries very hard to be a good man. Sadly, the thoughtful part doesn't seem to work out very well for him and most of the things he thinks are wrong. Realizing this, it always makes me nervous to find that I agree with him on a contentious issue, and it has happened again. Jimmy supports President Bush on the issue of allowing a United Arab Emirate owned company to buy the company that handles the commercial operation of six east-coast US ports -- and so do I.

Finding myself on the other side of the issue from pretty much everybody with whom I generally agree, it was something of a relief to read this editorial opinion from the Wall Street Journal that nicely outlines my position.

Some of us are scratching our heads all right, but we're wondering why Mr. Graham and others believe Dubai Ports World has been insufficiently vetted for the task at hand. So far, none of the critics have provided any evidence that the Administration hasn't done its due diligence. The deal has been blessed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a multiagency panel that includes representatives from the departments of Treasury, Defense and Homeland Security.

Yes, some of the 9/11 hijackers were UAE citizens. But then the London subway bombings last year were perpetrated by citizens of Britain, home to the company (P&O) that currently manages the ports that Dubai Ports World would take over. Which tells us three things: First, this work is already being outsourced to "a foreign-based company"; second, discriminating against a Mideast company offers no security guarantees because attacks are sometimes homegrown; and third, Mr. Graham likes to talk first and ask questions later.

Besides, the notion that the Bush Administration is farming out port "security" to hostile Arab nations is alarmist nonsense. Dubai Ports World would be managing the commercial activities of these U.S. ports, not securing them. There's a difference. Port security falls to Coast Guard and U.S. Customs officials. "Nothing changes with respect to security under the contract," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday. "The Coast Guard is in charge of security, not the corporation."

In a telephone interview yesterday, Kristie Clemens of U.S. Customs and Border Protection elaborated that "Customs and Border Protection has the sole responsibility for the cargo processing and cargo security, incoming and outgoing. The port authority sets the guidelines for the entire port, and port operators have to follow those guidelines." Again, nothing in the pending deal would affect that arrangement.

This issue offers the politicians in Congress an irresistable opportunity to appear hawkish on the War on Terror by demanding that nothing whatsoever be done about it. By giving the impression that port security is the responsibility of the private company running the Port Authority, and not of the Customs Agency and the Coast Guard, they can make political capital without the painful outlay of financial capital that would be involved in properly financing the agencies actually charged to do the job. If anything, having the UAE company running the port may make us safer by making it clear to the voting public that port security is the job of the US government and not of the contractor running the port.

And what is more disappointing is that opinion leaders who like to talk endlessly about finding ways to build relationships with the moderates in the Arab world, when faced with an actual opportunity to do so in a way that represents real cooperation and an element of trust, are leading the xenophobic charge. Confronted with organization of Arab businessmen, many of the usual UN-apologist, internationalist-leaning pols have constructed efigies of Jihadist madmen and are carrying them flaming up and down the halls of Congress.

There has been quite a bit of discussion -- rather too much, actually, some of it here -- about the damage that the Danish Cartoons have done to relations between the West and the Islamic world. But the people who are rioting over the cartoons are already beyond the reach of any appeal we might make. People marching with signs that read "God Bless Hitler" are not likely to be among the "moderates" to whom we seek to reach out. I have heard it said that President Bush has made a political blunder with his support for the ports deal. Perhaps he has made a domestic political blunder but, I would argue, he has done so to avoid the major geopolitical blunder of telling one of our best allies in the Arab world that, despite what we say when we are asking them for things, we don't trust them enough to do business with them.

At least that's how I see it. Me and Jimmy, God help me.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an Islamic dissadent. She is a Somali expatriate living in the Netherlands where she is an MP. She recently gave a speech in Berlin that, I think resonates with the photo above which I found in the Brussels Journal. Here's the end:

I think it is right to make critical drawings and films of Muhammad. It is necessary to write books on him in order to educate ordinary citizens on Muhammad.

I do not seek to offend religious sentiment, but I will not submit to tyranny. Demanding that people who do not accept Muhammad’s teachings should refrain from drawing him is not a request for respect but a demand for submission.

I am not the only dissident in Islam. There are more like me here in the West. If they have no bodyguards they work under false identities to protect themselves from harm. But there are also others who refuse to conform: in Teheran, in Doha and Riyadh, in Amman and Cairo, in Khartoum and in Mogadishu, in Lahore and in Kabul.

The dissidents of Islamism, like the dissidents of communism, don’t have nuclear bombs or any other weapons. We have no money from oil like the Saudis. We will not burn embassies and flags. We refuse to get carried away in a frenzy of collective violence. In number we are too small and too scattered to become a collective of anything. In electoral terms here in the west we are practically useless.

All we have are our thoughts; and all we ask is a fair chance to express them. Our opponents will use force to silence us. They will use manipulation; they will claim they are mortally offended. They will claim we are mentally unstable and should not be taken seriously. The defenders of Communism, too, used these methods.

Berlin is a city of optimism. Communism failed. The wall was broken down. Things may seem difficult and confusing today. But I am optimistic that the virtual wall, between lovers of liberty and those who succumb to the seduction and safety of totalitarian ideas will also, one day, come down.

It is an excellent speech. It has the same sense of the moment and the same ringing tone as Churchill at his best. Read the whole thing here.

The Brussels Journal piece is also worth reading. In it Paul Belien quotes an unidentified Danish letter-writer as saying

I feel that currently my beloved country is being pissed upon rather too much. Denmark has not been neglecting its duties on the international stage. We have supported poor people with acts and advice, we have worked for peace, we have sent soldiers, policemen and experts to all the far flung corners of the world. We have democracy, a rule of law and a welfare state. Not all is perfect, but we harbor no malice towards our fellow men.

And yet Denmark is being pissed upon. The spokesman of the US State Department is pissing on Denmark, the British Secretary of Foreign Affairs is pissing on Denmark, the President of Afghanistan is pissing on Denmark, the Government of Iraq is pissing on Denmark, other Muslim regimes are pissing on Denmark. In Gaza, where Danes for years have provided humanitarian aid, crazed Imams encourage people to cut off the hands and heads of the cartoonists who made the drawings of Mohammed for the Jyllands-Posten newspaper.

Excuse my choice of words, but all this pissing is pissing me off.

Read the whole thing here.

Imposing Sharia in Jante

Consider the following ten axioms which might describe a Danish multiculturalist's position on relations with the Islamic community in Denmark. As you read please bear in mind that I a describing a set of ideas that I do not myself believe.

1. Native, non-Muslim Danes should not think that they are special. Danes are by nature a deeply egalitarian people but Danish culture is not without its elements of racist and cultural exceptionalism.
2. Danes should not assume that they are of the same standing as the Muslim minority.Without consideration of differences of opportunity and the history of past oppression a simple comparison of social standing and achievement would be grossly unfair.
3. Danes should not think that they are smarter than Muslims. The idea that differences in achievement between Muslim and non-Muslim Danes can be explained, even in part, by differences in intellectual capacity is unacceptable.
4. Danish culture is no better than that of the Islamic community. If there were to be a core principle of multiculturalism this would be it.
5. Danes should not assume themselves better educated than the Muslims. Comparison of levels of education between groups with different ethnicity and different culturally-based standards is frustrated, and ultimately rendered pointless, by the impossibility of evaluating the importance of the skills and information imparted.
6. Danes should not think that they are more important than Muslims. Denmark is a small country and the Islamic world community is vast. The Danes have much to gain and much to lose depending on their relationship with Islam.
7. Danes should not feel that they, as a people, are uniquely good at anything. Danes tend to be quietly proud of their abilities. While their reticence about putting themselves forward speaks well of them they should still remember that they see their own accomplishments through the filter of their culture and others may view them differently.
8. Danes should not laugh at Islam. Islam is a serious religion and the Danes a serious people. It mars the dignity of both for the Danes to ridicule Islam.
9. Danes should not think that the world cares especially about them. National alliances are weak and the EU and other Western nations are too pressed with other concerns to worry about the Dane's internal problems with their Islamic community, and what is more, the other Western powers are in many cases pursuing approaches that give them some real or imagined advantage, but are not necessarily good for Denmark.
10. Danes should not assume that they can teach the Islamic community anything. The Danes have a long history and a rich culture but so does the Islamic community. It would be presumptuous of the Danes to insist that immigrants become somehow Danish just to live in Denmark -- presumptuous and a waste of the advantages that diversity could give to a small country in an increasingly Islamic world.

By this point any Danes, Norwegians or students of Scandinavian culture will have recognized my ten axioms as a trivial rewording of Janteloven (Jante Law) which is described in Wikipedia thusly:

The Jante Law (Danish and Norwegian: Janteloven Swedish: Jantelagen Finnish: Jante-laki) is a concept created by the Danish/Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose in his novel A refugee crosses his tracks (En flygtning krysser sitt spor, 1933), where he portrays the small Danish town Jante, modeled upon his native town Nykøbing Mors as it was in the beginning of the 20th century.

There are 10 different rules in the law, but they are all variations on a single theme and are usually referred to as a homogeneous unit: Don't think you're anyone special or that you're better than us. The 10 rules are:

1. You shall not think that you are special.
2. You shall not think that you are of the same standing as us.
3. You shall not think that you are smarter than us.
4. Don't fancy yourself as being better than us.
5. You shall not think that you know more than us.
6. You shall not think that you are more important than us.
7. You shall not think that you are good at anything.
8. You shall not laugh at us.
9. You shall not think that anyone cares about you.
10. You shall not think that you can teach us anything.

In the book, those Janters who transgress this unwritten 'law' are regarded with suspicion and some hostility, as it goes against communal desire in the town, which is to preserve social stability and uniformity.

Most Danes will deny, with varying degrees of indignation, that Jante Law has anything to do with them, or with the Danish psyche, but the fact that these "laws" from a novel written over seventy years ago are still being discussed [mild profanity] suggests that Sandemose may have been on to something.

While few Danes will agree with the ten points of Jante Law as written, if you state them the other way around -- "I should not think the I am special; I should not think that I am smarter than they are; etc." -- you will find them nodding along, at least for the first few until they catch on to what you are doing. While they can generally see that Jantelowen is repressive and stifling when applied to other people they still see many of the precepts as guide to how they themselves should act.

I mention all this to offer a possible answer to a question that a number of people are asking: Why did the "cartoon" crisis erupt in Denmark, of all places? The Danes are natural multiculturalists, not so much because they value diversity more than other peoples or are less xenophobic (neither of which is particlarly true) but because they tend to be reserverd and private and they have an aversion to putting themselves forward. This means that when groups from other culturs emmigrate to Denmark the Danes make very few demands that they integrate into Danish society as a whole. Given that they have a large degree of autonomy, why is the Danish Islamic community making so much trouble?

My theory about this question is that the Danes, and other Scandanavian peoples, who like to be left alone and expect others to be the same, failed to give fair warning to the Islamic community that there were aspects of the local culture that they feel strongly about. One often hears this idea expressed in terms of the perception of weakness and a determination on the part of the Muslims to exploit it. My notion is slightly different; As I see it the Muslims have come to the conclusion that they can simply demand that Sharia be imposed incrementally on Denmark since they (the Muslims) feel strongly about it and the Danes don't seem to have any strong opinions about it one way or the other.

There are some signs that the Muslims may have overplayed their hand with the cartoons. The cartoons, once you get to see them, are surprisingly mild and tasteful, despite the furor that has sprung up around them. They fall well within the boundaries of alowable commentary in any modern Western culture. They do violate some aspects of Islamic law but Denamrk is not an Islamic theocracy and even from an Islamic point of view there is some reason to question the ban. Representations of God and the Prophet are forbidden because of concerns about idolatry and so, unless one imagines that the Danes are going to bow down to a picture of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban, it is hard to see the problem they pose. Of course, they do violate the Islamic law that states that "Islam cannot take a joke" which, come to think of it is not that different from rule number 8 in the Janteloven

See teleoscope: Cartoon Fun. for an animation with small versions of the cartoons and a link to a source for larger ones.

Huge, Lily-Scented Worm Found as Reuters Burys Lede

Discovery News has reported the finding of a rare earthworm.

Feb. 10, 2006 — A gigantic white worm that smells like lilies was recently unearthed in the state of Washington.

The invertebrate, called the giant Palouse earthworm because it can grow to around three feet long, had not been seen in nearly two decades and is believed to be extremely rare, according to a University of Idaho press release.

Slightly later the Reuters News Service reported the release of the election reports in Iraq in a story entitled Car bomb kills nine as poll results released.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A car bomb outside a mosque in Baghdad killed nine people on Friday as poll results confirmed the new political dominance of
Iraq's long-oppressed Shi'ites.

Interior Ministry sources and police said initially that the mosque in the violent Doura district of Baghdad was Shi'ite. They later said the bomb exploded outside a Sunni mosque nearby.

There have been numerous killings [... ]

As electoral commission official Adel al-Lami read out the results at a media briefing in the heavily fortified Green Zone, 10 km (six miles) to the south the car bomb exploded, hurling worshippers to the ground.

The scientist who found the giant earthworm has not yet commented on the Reuters story but she was quoted as saying that she noticed the worm immediately because "it's very white and the anterior part is pink near the mouth. She reported that she did not notice the pleasant, lily-like odor said to be associated with her rare earthworm, an odor also coincidentally missing from the Reuters story.

Cartoon Fun.

The images embedded in the animation above have been much discussed in the news but very few people have actually seen them. The endless discussion of how 'offensive' these cartoons are, combined with the refusal on the part of much of the press to run them so people can form their own opinions, has given the impression -- I would argue the false impression -- that they are animated by a hate-filled, far right xenophobia that would offend the sensibilities of anyone with good taste. I have put up this animation featuring small images of the cartoons to give people a sense of what the cartoons are like. My images are too small to see details and are mostly too small to read the captions (most of which are not in English anyway) but they suffice, I think, to give the general sense of what they are about. I found the images at this site that displays them in more detail.

Update: Michelle Malkin has a better formatted page to see the original cartoons.

Oscars

Do you recognize the fish? They are Oscars -- Golden Oscars, as it happens. They seem a suitable illustration for a piece about the nominations for the 78th Academy Awards. These Golden Oscars have nothing do do with movies and, for a large part of the moviegoing public neither do the other ones.

In Oscars and the New Hollywood Triviality on the conservative film blog Libertas Jason Apuzzo continues his argument that Oscar nominees are increasingly chosen for their politics and tend to be independent films that fewer and fewer people have actually seen.

I must confess that I am beginning to respond to speculation about Oscar-worthiness in a film review in much the same way I respond to claims that a breakfast cereal is healthy. A few claims that a cereal is "good for you" or a "nutritious part of a good breakfast" are to be expected -- but when the ad copy is mostly about how healthy a cereal is I begin to expect texturized pine fiber nuggets flavored with flax seed oil. Similarly, when all I hear about a film is how likely it is to win Oscars I expect it to provide more heavy-handed left-leaning political pummelling than lively entertainment. This is unfair in many cases -- many of the films nominated are fine films -- but it is fair in enough cases that I have trouble freeing myself of the predisposition.

To examine Mr. Apuzzo's theory that nobody ever sees the films that get nominated for Oscars these days I offer the following scientific survey of one person randomly chosen among those sitting in my chair right now. The nominees are here if you want to follow along.

Teleoscope: Can I ask you a few questions about this year's Oscan nominees?
BigLee: I'm kind of busy right now...
Teleoscope: No you're not. You are blogging.
BigLee: Wellll... OK.
Teleoscope: Of the films with Best Actor nominations how many have you seen?
BigLee: I've been meaning to see "Walk the Line".
Teleoscope: That's none, then.
BigLee: Yes, none.
Teleoscope: Best Actor supporting?
BigLee: Nope.
Teleoscope: Best Actress?
BigLee: I saw "Pride and Prejudice".
Teleoscope: One of the five, then. Best actress supporting?
BigLee: Um, no. Not actually.
Teleoscope: Best Animated Feature?
BigLee: Two of the three.
Teleoscope: Ahh. Art Direction?
BigLee: Three of five. King Kong deserves it but it won't win.
Teleoscope: Why not? I don't think of Art Direction as being that political.
BigLee: The thing is, members of the Academy vote in their own specialty. This award gives the Art Directors their big chance to show that they hate Republicans, too. I think "Good Night, and Good Luck" has a good shot at the Oscar.
Teleoscope: Cinematography?
BigLee: One of five.
Teleoscope: That would be the Batman film...?
BigLee: Yes, how'd you guess?
Teleoscope: I got lucky. Costume Design?
BigLee: Two of five.
Teleoscope: Best Director?
BigLee: Go fish.
Teleoscope: Documentary?
BigLee: Surprisingly, I've seen one of them. March of the Penguins deserves the Oscar -- in spades. It's tragic really that they won't win. If the script had just mentioned the threat that "Global Warming" poses to the penguin's breeding grounds they'd have been a shoe-in, especially what their with being French and all...
Teleoscope: Ummm. Let's pick up the pace. Documentary Short? Editing? Foreign Language Film?
BigLee: Nope. Nope and nope.
Teleoscope: Best Picture?
BigLee: Zero.
Teleoscope: Animated Short? Live Action Short?
BigLee: None of them. Bit surprised I haven't seen the Pixar short.
Teleoscope: Sound Editing?
BigLee: Two out of three.
Teleoscope: Sound Mixing?
BigLee: Three of four.
Teleoscope: Visual Effects?
BigLee: All three of them. This is the only category where I have seen them all.
Teleoscope: I notice that you score higher in the more technical categories. How do you respond to the idea that you may just be a "special effects" geek?
BigLee: That could be, I suppose, but I don't think so, or at least not completely. Special effects are enablers. They allow the filmmaker to tell a story that would not have been possible to tell as well without them. C.S. Lewis wrote in a letter that he didn't think that live action films should be made from his Narnia books since the talking lion would appear silly and spoil the story. The new Narnia film is wonderful -- not because we get to see a talking lion but because "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is a fabulous story and it can finally be filmed. I don't think I am any more attracted to the films because of their special effects than the films are ignored by the Academy for being too busy telling stories to address "social issues".
Teleoscope: That was your longest answer yet. Pushed your buttons, did I?
BigLee: Ummm.
Teleoscope: So let's finish up. Original Screenplay? Adapted Screenplay?
BigLee: Nada and zilch.
Teleoscope: So, by my rough count there are something like sixty different films represented. And of those you have seen...
BigLee: Eleven.
Teleoscope: And in the big four awards -- Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Picture?
BigLee: I have seen only "Pride and Prejudice". One in eleven. There are several of them I have been planning to see... once they get to the second-run theaters. They tend to be films that I think I ought to see but am not that excited about... and now that they are nominated for Academy Awards it will be that much harder to work up any enthusiasm.

Jihad, the Musical

CLick on the image to the left to hear the latest release from Al Qaeda -- a sample song from their upcoming musical "It's in the Koran". The release of this MacroMedia Flash Sing-Along version of the title song was timed to occur just after the Palestinian elections.

Turn your sound on and up for this one. Caution: This is squeaky clean but lacks the degree of political correctness that many workplaces require.

HatTip: Jonah Goldberg in The Corner at National Review Online.

[I would provide a non-fictitious credit for the creator of this bit but he or she appears to prefer to remain anonymous (for reasons that are quite likely entirely sensible.)]

Update: I had to find another source for the flash video -- guess the people who run the other site are alergic to cordite.

Bessie Smith

A few weeks ago I decided that one of my friends -- who is rather into music -- had a gap in his repertoire when it came to light romantic popular music from early in the 20th century -- those songs which most everyone finds vaguely familiar but for which nobody tends to know the words unless they have a 'thing' for elevator music lyrics or they sing in a barbershop quartet. This suggested a Christmas present for my friend and I went out and bought him CD in which Danny Wright's excellent piano perfomance shows off many of these sturdy, if tired, songs to their best advantage.

Looking at the CD I had just bought it seemed a bit too much of a white-bread present for my friend so I also bought a Bessie Smith CD for balance and wrapped it up with the other CD. In the process I noticed that the Bessie Smith bin had several used CDs at attractive prices and I bought a couple of them as presents to myself.

For most people Bessie Smith is a familiar name but they have trouble remembering her songs. Those few who know the songs will still tend to remember someone else's performance of it since most of Bessie's successful songs were covered by other artists later and, having the benefit of less primitive recording technology, these covers tend to be the version that gets played. This is really too bad since Bessie Smith had something -- something that few other Blues singers have at all, and nobody else has quite as much of it as Bessie.

When women sing the Blues they generally are singing about "their man" and how he mistreats them (often expressed as "done me wrong"). Bessie is no different in that respect. But, with the others there is always an element of puzzlement, if not some irritation, on the part of the listener that these women allow themselves to be victimized with no attempt to take control of their situation. With Bessie, on the other hand, one gets the sense that, while her man may be the immediate cause of her problems, the real cause is her bad decisions driven by appetites that are at least the equal of his.

Another reason Bessie doesn't get a lot of airplay is that some of her best songs are rather explicit, even by today's standards. Consider this section from "Empty Bed Blues [mp3 excerpt]"

He came home one evening with his spirit way up high
He came home one evening with his spirit way up high
What he had to give me, make me wring my hands and cry

He give me a lesson that I never had before
He give me a lesson that I never had before
When he got to teachin' me, from my elbow down was sore

He boiled my first cabbage and he made it awful hot.
He boiled my first cabbage and he made it awful hot.
When he put in the bacon, it overflowed the pot

Ooof! There's a good example of how a well chosen metaphor can take an indelicate subject and make it lewd.

One thing that strikes me about Bessie's songs is that, while most of them are about sex -- or at least about relations between the sexes -- the notion of procreation is entirely absent. You'd think that since her songs were recorded in a time when there weren't many options for contraception the idea of pregnancy, or the risk of it, would appear somewhere among the list of woes to be cataloged. But it doesn't. The words "mama" and "papa" appear often enough, but always as terms of endearment; they are never used in a literal sense. Most of her songs were written by men and maybe that explains the omission to some extent.

One may be justified in thinking that the apetites expressed in Bessie's songs make them to some extent auto-biographical. One of her few songs that is not about sex as far as I can tell -- Gimme a Pig Foot and a Bottle of Beer [mp3 excerpt] -- nonetheless expresses a fondness for unrefined fun that may explain some of her reputatuion for showing up at club dates too drunk and out of control to perform. But she was always sober for her recording sessions and her performances in her prime are wonderful. Gimme a Pig Foot is a particular favorite of mine. She wails. She stomps and growls. It is the least ladylike song I can think of. It's a marvel.

One song that Bessie did write herself is Black Water Blues [mp3 excerpt]. It's not her best song but it is intersting for a couple of reasons. First, it shows how she could use the same music for very different songs. It has almost exactly the same tune as Empty Bed Blues but it is a very different song. The second thing about it that strikes me is that it is the perfect theme song for Hurricane Katrina.

When it thunders and lightnin' and when the wind begins to blow
When it thunders and lightnin' and the wind begins to blow
There's thousands of people ain't got no place to go

Why we can never know anything.

The New York Times ran a story this morning quoting an unnamed "official in the Interior Ministry" as saying that a tanker truck stuffed with forged ballots was intercepted entering Iraq from Iran at the border town of Badra.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the Iranian truck driver told the police under interrogation that at least three other trucks filled with ballots had crossed from Iran at different spots along the border.

No sooner than the Times story was released comes the Reuters story saying that the Times story is untrue.

The head of Iraq's border guards denied police reports on Wednesday that a tanker truck stuffed with thousands of forged ballot papers had been seized crossing into Iraq from Iran before Thursday's elections.

"This is all a lie," said Lieutenant General Ahmed al-Khafaji, the chief of the U.S.-trained force which has responsibility for all Iraq's borders.

"I heard this yesterday and I checked all the border crossings right away. The borders are all closed anyway," he told Reuters.

Iraq's frontiers are closed for the period of the election.

"I contacted all the border crossing points and there was no report of any such incident," Khafaji said.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabor also denied the reports, which the New York Times ran prominently, quoting a single unnamed Interior Ministry source, and said it was an attempt to discredit the election process.

The maddening thing about this sort of thing is that while the two stories contradict one another they are both equally credible. There is simply no question that Iran would do something like that if they thought they could get away with it. On the other hand it is entirely possible that some Sunni sympathizer working at the Interior Ministry might wish to discredit the expected Shiite success in the polls by circulating a story of truckloads of forged ballots from Iran. Somebody is telling lies, that much is clear, but exactly who it is we will never know. Both versions of the story are now out there -- one is a fact the other a factoid. In the end we will all simply have to decide who we wish to believe.

My choice? I think the Times was taken. The part about the driver saying that three other trucks had gotten through is too carefully crafted to create doubt to be true. The other three trucks change the story from "Iran attempted to fix the election and the border guards thwarted them" to "Iran has successfully fixed the election and the border guards have belatedly detected it."

It will be interesting to see what, if anything, the Times does with the denials.

Hat Tips to both Drudge and the Instapundit.

Photo Credit: The truck is a Stahly AeroSpread manure spreader.

Epiphany

I heard a joke the other day. It was told to me by someone I know slightly as we were leaving a meeting of a technical-related organization. He seems to be a nice person and he warned me ahead of time that the joke was rather crude.

It goes something like this:

George Bush stole the election. He falsified evidence on weapons of mass destruction, lied to the American people and got us into a illegal, pointless and expensive war. Now if someone would only give him a blowjob we can have him impeached!

Haw!! Thats a good one, isn't it? ... Is it? ... Ok, me neither.

I tried to act like I enjoyed his joke but the best I could manage was a sort of non-committal Ummmmm. I don't think I fooled him since he called me later to apologize for the joke because he was afraid he had offended me. As I said, he is a nice guy and I enjoy working with him, so I assured him I wasn't offended, saying "I am sure I tell a number of jokes that are funny to Republicans that you wouldn't like that much either."

What is funny is that when he called to apologize I am sure he thought I was offended by the "blowjob" part. Finding out that I am a Bush supporter must have been quite a surprize for him.

3:37

 LE:E  I woke up briefly this morning during that spooky minute of the night when the digital display of my clock radio shows my name upside down. My lovely wife and I had seen March of the Penguins and I was dreaming that I was on the outside of the group and the howling Antarctic wind was freezing off my tailfeathers. I was awake only for the few seconds it took to glance at the clock and tug back my share of the covers from my wife who may have been having a dream similar to mine except for involving more success at keeping warm.

If you haven't seen March of the Penguins yet I can highly recommend it. If, like me, you tend to wait to catch nice-to-see films at the second-run theater the time has come. It's a wonderful film and quite an accomplishment given the conditions under which it had to be made (midwinter in Antarctica.) Morgan Freeman's reading of the narration is very fine and the writing is quite good. They managed to make an engaging narrative out of their footage without excessively anthromorphizing their subjects.

The photography is uneven but always acceptable given the circumstances under which it was shot. In the underwater scenes, for instance, one is aware of the limitations of the video camera used by the robot that shot them -- but, on the other hand how often do you get to see penguins feeding under the Antarctic ice shelf? In the footage of the southern lights it was also apparent that they were right on the edge of what their equipment could do. But these are minor things that remind you that you are, after all, watching a documentary. Over all the cinematography was excellent, and at its best it was amazing. Especially delightful is the closeup photography of the birds. Emperor Penguins are astonishingly beautiful animals close up. One sees lots of photos and video that show the appealingly clumsy way they walk but the iridescence of their feathers is a revelation.

So, as I said, go see it if you haven't yet. But put another blanket on the bed.

Veterans Day

Today is Veterans Day. When we hear the word veteran we tend to think of previous generations. But sometimes veterans are our kids.

Alien

I worry a bit
that we worry too much
that we might be showing prejudice
when we see a man in a robe
or a woman in a burqa
and we think to ourselves
"Now, there is someone
who is not like me -- someone
who makes me nervous
because I don't know
what he is thinking,
or what she is thinking of me."

There are other kinds of people
who make us just as nervous
but correctness does not require
that we worry that
our nervousness may be based
in prejudice.

I have had a beer
in a cowboy bar
where people wear boots
and Stetson hats
and nurse a private sadness
for the passing of a day
that never was.
I understand that sadness --
to a certain extent --
but it is not the same as mine.

I have eaten a burger
in a biker bar
where scary men
and substantial women
gather to worship their God:
Harley Davidson --
the American motorcycle.
Bikers have a bad reputation,
which they carefully nurture,
but do not deserve.

I have eaten tofu and sprouts
in a stylish semi-vegan place
near my daughter's college.
I chose my words with care
because I knew
if I said the name Jesse Helms
a bit too loud
in the wrong tone of voice
conversation would stop
and people would stare at me
until I went away.

I have slipped a dollar
under a garter
in a bar where women dance
nearly nude on a stage
while men gather in corners
watching football on TV --
rather confused about
what testosterone is for --
worshiping a diety
I will never understand.


This was originally posted as a comment on a posting on Sunbreak City. His posting -- As I Stepped Out One Evening -- is a stream-of-consciousness, blank-verse musing on multiculturalism and Islam in America.

Halloween

United Nations Day

It's United Nations Day!

In 1947 the General Assembly of the U.N. passed a resolution:
that October 24 shall hereafter be officially called United Nations Day, and shall be devoted to making known to the people of the world the aims and achievements of the United Nations, and to gaining their support for the work of the United Nations.

OK then, the "goals and achievements of the U.N." on this the 54th United Nations Day.

U.N. Then (goals):

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime, has brought untold sorrow to mankind and
To reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
To promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

AND FOR THESE ENDS
To practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and
To insure, by acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and
To employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples

HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS.

Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations, and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.

June 26, 1945

Preamble to the U.N. Charter

U.N. Now (achievements):

THE United Nations withheld some of the most damaging allegations against Syria in its report on the murder of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, it emerged yesterday.

The names of the brother of Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, and other members of his inner circle, were dropped from the report that was sent to the Security Council.

The confidential changes were revealed by an extraordinary computer gaffe because an electronic version distributed by UN officials on Thursday night allowed recipients to track editing changes.

The mistaken release of the unedited report added further support to the published conclusion that Syria was behind Mr Hariri’s assassination in a bomb blast on Valentine’s Day in Beirut. The murder of Mr Hariri touched off an international outcry and hastened Syria’s departure from Lebanon in April after a 29-year pervasive military presence.
...
But the furore over the doctoring of the report threatened to overshadow its damaging findings. It raised questions about political interference by Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary- General, who had promised not to make any changes in the report.

One crucial change, apparently made after the report was submitted to the UN chief, removed the name of President al-Assad’s brother, Maher, his brother-in-law, Assef al-Shawkat, and other high-ranking Syrian officials.

The final, edited version quoted a witness as saying that the plot to kill Mr Hariri was hatched by unnamed “senior Lebanese and Syrian officials”. But the undoctored version named those officials as “Maher al-Assad, Assef Shawkat, Hassan Khalil, Bahjat Suleyman and Jamal al-Sayyed”.
...
Mr Annan had pledged repeatedly through his chief spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, that he would not change a word of the report by Detlev Mehlis, a German prosecutor. But computer tracking showed that the final edit began at about 11.38am on Thursday — a minute after Herr Mehlis began a meeting with Mr Annan to present his report. The names of Maher al-Assad, General Shawkat and the others were apparently removed at 11.55am, after the meeting ended.

Oct 24, 2005

Excerpt from TimesOnline news story.

THREE CHEERS for the U.N. on United Nations Day! Hip hip! meh...

Wetbacks

photo credit

This posting identifies some dots in the connect-the-dots picture that forms the background for my thinking about illegal immigration. I make no claim that these dots, when connected, present a clear or accurate picture of anything in particular. I rather doubt that they do, but they are all that I have to offer.

.dot...

A number of years ago I returned from a family vacation to Florida on the night train. I had less time-off from work than my wife so she and kids dropped me off at the train station in Winter Haven Florida on Sunday night and a friend from work picked me up at the Raleigh North Carolina station Monday morning.

I called my ride when I arrived and had a bit of a wait until he picked me up. It was a pleasant morning and, since the Raleigh Amtrack station is only so exciting, I sat outside to wait. Across the street from the station was a roadside shelter where day laborers are picked up for odd jobs. Most of those in the shelter appeared to be hispanic (probably Mexican) and they sat quietly until a pickup truck would arrive. The next laborer in line would walk out, talk to the driver briefly and signal back to the rest how many were needed. The required number would get up, climb into the truck and it would drive off.

There was one individual in the shelter who was obviously not hispanic. He sat a little apart from them and he would occasionally go out and talk to a prospective employer too. I couldn't hear the Mexicans but I could hear him. "Sevun dollllars uh hour!" he yelled at one point, obviously drunk despite the early hour, "I don't work for no sevun dollllars a hour!" He would stagger back to the shelter. One or two of the Mexicans would then get into the truck and the drunk would yell abuse as they drove off. By the time I was picked up most of the Mexicans were gone but he was still there.

..to.dot...

I don't remember exactly where I was. It might have been I-85 near Atlanta. The traffic was heavy but moving smoothly and quickly. I was trying to move with the flow of traffic which was moving at about 63 miles an hour despite the 55 mph national speed limit the Carter administration had imposed. Looking down the interstate ahead, and in my rear-view mirror, I could see two-, maybe three hundred automobiles on the road including three Highway Patrol Cruisers. Each and every one of them was breaking the law. As was I.

..to.dot...

Among my friends and associates, the ones who have the strongest negative feelings about illegal immigrants are themselves immigrants. They have jumped through a number of hoops to enter the country legally and are sputteringly indignant about those who bypass the process. Many of them tell awful stories of the incompetence and callousness of the INS but most of their anger is somehow redirected at the illegal immigrants who never had to deal with the INS.

..to.dot...

When I had my house built fifteen years ago the back yard required some contouring to get the drainage right. After the guy with the backhoe had established the general slope a landscaping crew came in to finish the job. The guys with the rakes were all Mexican and, of all the workmen who had worked on the construction they impressed me as the hardest-working. On several occasions I saw them bend down to pick up a rock and throw it into the woods. This doesn't sound like a big deal but when you contrast it with the attitude of most construction workers -- who seem to regard each site as an informal landfill -- it stands out as an unusually good work ethic.

..to.dot...

There was a time, years ago when the local post office would be packed on Saturday mornings with hispanics waiting in line to send their pay back to their families in Mexico and Central America. Recently I see fewer of them there. I think this may be associated with signs I see in the windows of hispanic grocery stores. "Envie Dinero a Mexico Aqui. / Western Union." (Send money to Mexico here.) Wiring money costs more but it gets there sooner.

I have heard this flow of money from illegals working in the US to their families in Mexico described as a de-facto subsidy of the Mexican economy. I guess that's a fair statement, but we subsidize the economies of lots of countries. We give hundreds of millions every year, for instance, to Israel and even more to Egypt. I don't remember seeing that many Israelis hanging sheetrock in this country, or laying sod, and I'm pretty sure I don't remember any Egyptians picking up rocks in my back yard.

..to.dot.

Immigration has been much in the news lately. Post-9/11 nervousness about our porous borders has made a number of people, myself included, re-examine their stands on immigration law and enforcement. I find myself reluctantly persuaded that we need to tighten up enforcement on our borders. That's where my head is but, I must confess, my heart isn't in it. When I hear stories of people who ford the Rio Grande and hike across forty miles of desert, just to get a job flipping burgers for minimum wage, or nailing shingles in the hot sun, I have trouble being properly indignant. I suppose my impression may be colored by the fact that North Carolina is quite a distance from the nearest border. The illegal immigrants who make it this far are likely to have come looking for work -- not for handouts. Most of them work hard, live cheaply and send most of their pay to their families back home. It may all be illegal but it still seems like enterprize to me.

The Spiders have woven a Disney Store around us.

OOPS. I wasn't paying attention and I seem to have accidentally become a Disney Store. A few years ago when my wife and I unhandily found that we were both unemployed at the same time I put both our resumes up on one of my web sites. We have since both found jobs and I forgot that the page was out there. There was little enough interest in the page back when we were both looking for work and recently the only ones to visit it are internet spiders -- programs that follow random links on the web looking for this and that.

A spider looking for information to go on this list of local disney stores in our area came across my wife's resume, noticed that it contained 1) the words "Disney Store", 2) an address and 3) a telephone number, and put two and two together. Hey! Presto! It made us a Disney Store.

We got a call this morning from a very nice young lady who had done an online search which identified us as the Disney Store in Cary. (Actually, the Cary store closed several years ago and the nearest Disney Store is the one in Raleigh, 20 miles away.) She told me that she had gotten our phone number from the Disney Store's official store-locator site. I was curious about this and tried to do the query myself but I found that all the official Disney web sites do not mention the in-mall Disney Stores at all. A Disney Store in a mall? No such thing! The very idea!! (Disney corporate is quietly phasing out the in-mall stores -- at least most of them -- a fact which they will neither confirm nor deny publicly.)

If you let your search-engine nudge you off the "official" Disney sites and into the Disney-hanger-on'er sites, such as the one I linked to above, you can find mention of the local stores although the information may be a bit dodgy.

When the spiders made me a Disney Store they failed to provide me with any merchandise. In particular, I cannot sell you the friendly, lovable, blood-sucking bear illustrated above. I'm not even sure I could find the page again where I snagged the image. I seem to recall that the prices were in Yen so it may only be available in Japan and it may also not be this years merchandise. [Update: try "Vampire plush pooh" in eBay. ]

Sunnis Discover Horse of a Different Color

The Sunnis in Iraq have decided to support the new Constitution after a few minor last-minute concessions were made. According to an AP news story: "Iraqi negotiators reached a breakthrough deal on the constitution Tuesday, and at least one Sunni Arab party said it would now urge its followers to approve the charter in this weekend's referendum.
...
Under the deal, the two sides agreed on a mechanism to consider amending the constitution after it is approved in Saturday's referendum. The next parliament, to be formed in December, will set up a commission to consider amendments, which would later have to be approved by parliament and submitted to another referendum."

This is the point in the process where the Sunni leadership can no longer ignore the fact that, as the group with no oil in the part of the country they control, they have a strong interest in keeping the country together and the proposed constitution represents their best shot at doing so. Todays "breakthrough" agreement gives the Sunnis much needed cover allowing them to cave in while saving face. If we can have another referendum in a year, they can say, well then, that's a horse of a different color!

There is nothing wrong with this, of course. The US constitution was ratified after similar last-minute wrangling and we have the Bill of Rights to show for it.

Update 13 Oct 2005:

IRAQ THE MODEL is a good blog to read for an insiders view of Iraqi politics. Click the link for his take on the accord.

Cronyism

People have been writing that Prez Bush picked Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court because of "Cronyism." That's cold, dude. I mean, like, she's no spring chick -- but I don't think she looks like a crone and I don't think Dubbya picked her just because she is old and wrinkled. She does sorta look like one of my mom's friends at church when I was a kid -- the older lady who always brought the three-bean salad to the Wednesday night pot-luck supper in the parish hall. She was Mrs. Somebody (I don't remember her name) and there never seemed to be a Mr. Somebody around so she might have been a widow, or she might have been divorced, or maybe Mr. Somebody didn't like three-bean salad. I never wondered about it then and its too late to wonder about it now. It doesn't matter. The thing is that in her hair-sprayed, funny-smelling way she was a good person -- and I'm sure Harriet Miers is too.

</silly>

OK, I do know the meaning of the word "Cronyism" and I can see how it applies -- but I must admit I have always thought it to be an overrated vice since it is the opposite of credentialism which is worse. I'll talk more about the Miers nomination in a minute, but first a non-sequitur.

For example, there is one element which must always tend to oligarchy--or rather to despotism; I mean the element of hurry. If the house has caught fire a man must ring up the fire engines; a committee cannot ring them up. If a camp is surprised by night somebody must give the order to fire; there is no time to vote it. It is solely a question of the physical limitations of time and space; not at all of any mental limitations in the mass of men commanded. If all the people in the house were men of destiny it would still be better that they should not all talk into the telephone at once; nay, it would be better that the silliest man of all should speak uninterrupted. If an army actually consisted of nothing but Hanibals and Napoleons, it would still be better in the case of a surprise that they should not all give orders together. Nay, it would be better if the stupidest of them all gave the orders. Thus, we see that merely military subordination, so far from resting on the inequality of men, actually rests on the equality of men. Discipline does not involve the Carlylean notion that somebody is always right when everybody is wrong, and that we must discover and crown that somebody. On the contrary, discipline means that in certain frightfully rapid circumstances, one can trust anybody so long as he is not everybody. The military spirit does not mean (as Carlyle fancied) obeying the strongest and wisest man. On the contrary, the military spirit means, if anything, obeying the weakest and stupidest man, obeying him merely because he is a man, and not a thousand men. Submission to a weak man is discipline. Submission to a strong man is only servility.

The paragraph above is from G. K. Chesterton's What's Wrong with the World, Chapter IV. I had dimly remembered it as supporting a point I wanted to make but, having tracked it down, it is rather oblique for my purposes. Chesterton's prose is always a joy so I pasted it in anyway. My advice would be to follow the link above and read the whole Chesterton book before you finish reading this posting. I'll wait for you and you will be a better person for doing it.
. . .
Back, are we? (Or still here -- oh, well. Your loss.)

What I was looking for Chesterton to say was that the task of calling the fire brigade is merely a job -- that it would be a waste of talent for the best and brightest man in the building to stand by the telephone sniffing for smoke, and certainly that any time spent making sure that the best-qualified man was selected would be wasted effort since anyone who could operate a telephone would do fine. But that's not exactly what he said, so the task falls to me to say it. I have no reason to believe that Harriet Miers is one of the finest legal minds in the country -- she could be, for all I know, but I don't care. Sitting on the Supreme Court is, and ought to be, just a job, and I think that the justices we already have now are too clever by half.

The Constitution is neither a very long, nor a very complicated document, and I am not sure we are well served by having it interpreted by by jurists whose legal theory includes emanations, penumbras, string theory, quantum jurisprudence or relativistic tort-tunnelling at the constitutional event-horizon. I am not saying that intelligence is a bad thing in a Supreme Court justice -- several of them have built considerable structures of legal theory that are firmly rooted in the text of the Constitution -- but that having a bent for advanced legal theory does entail a temptation to build legal castles in the air which, not being firmly grounded, tend to sway and drift with the winds of politics and the passions of the day -- or the passions of the judge.

So the question that interests me is not whether President Bush has picked the best qualified candidate for the job -- using the usual metrics of legal eminence -- but whether he has picked an at-least-minimally qualified candidate who understands the proper limits of the courts. President Bush clearly believes that is what he has done and he very well may, in fact, have done just that. Since Ms. Miers has done very little writing on constitutional law it is difficult to say.

Many of the president's conservative supporters are angry about the Miers pick. They worked hard to put in place the political clout needed to force a showdown on the role of the court, which they (we) feel to be seriously out of whack. The president's choice of a "stealth" candidate feels like a betrayal -- their leader is pulling them back from the verge of victory. Robert Bork -- whose own failed nomination for the Supreme Court perfectly exemplifies the problems faced by a brilliant, outspoken legal scholar with a generally conservative paper trail -- is quoted in an AP story as expressing this frustration:

"It's a little late to develop a constitutional philosophy or begin to work it out when you're on the court already," Bork said on "The Situation" on MSNBC. "It's kind of a slap in the face to the conservatives who've been building up a conservative legal movement for the last 20 years."

There is no one whose opinions of the Supreme Court I respect more than Judge Bork. His book, The Tempting of America, is as good an analysis of the problems with the role of the Supreme Court as you will find anywhere. I share his sense that there is no more pressing domestic issue than correcting the role of the high court and I share his frustration that the Miers appointment does not further the process... and yet, and yet...

And yet Robert Bork is a judge and George W Bush is a politician. It would be wonderful to see a major societal change in which the notion of an activist judiciary is discarded and the virtues of strict constructionalist and originalist interpritation of the constitution are generally embraced -- wonderful, but difficult to accomplish. The chattering set, who rule based on their superior glibness, will fight to the last man, woman, and ambiguously-gendered individual to prevent it. It is not clear to me that that it is a fight we can win, even with the Presidency and a majority in the Senate. That is, we may well lose if we give the gifted talkers among the opposition anything to talk about.

That's why Miers is the perfect stealth candidate. She has very little published (or even known) opinion on constitutional issues and, what is more important, she is not particularly interesting. There's just not much there to talk about. She's a woman. She's a lawyer who has practiced law for decades. Like the President, she is from Texas. She's ... um ... Zzzzzzzzzzzz

The president has known her for many years, believes she shares his views on the role of the court and can put her on the court without much opposition. I imagine that he, too, would like to see a victory on a referendum on the role of the high court, but he doesn't seem to think that the Senate Republicans can deliver it for him so, instead of changing the mind of America about the role of the Supreme Court, he is settling for changing one-ninth of the opinion of the court itself. This is not as good -- in point of fact it is disappointing and frustrating -- but given the lack-lustre performance of the Republicans in the Senate lately it's not at all clear that he hasn't made the best compromise.

Serenity opens Tomorrow

Serenity Opens Tomorrow. It is Joss Whedon's directorial debut for the big screen and is a sequel to his television series "Firefly".

I saw it Tuesday at a preview showing for press and bloggers. It will be interesting to see if the rest of the movie-viewing world responds to it the way I did. It is something of a burning curiosity with me: What will the movie-going public make of Serenity? I dunno. I know what I thought of it but, since I am not necessarily typical in every way, I can't reliably predict what other people will think.

If you look at the film in objective terms -- the usual quality metrics that everyone agrees on but nobody really cares much about -- Serenity gets middle-of-the-road marks. The special effects are good -- but not unusually so. The art direction and cinematography are also fine, but the composition and editing seem a bit television-ish -- tightly framed and edited, seldom making use of a big screen's ability to pull back from the action and still keep the audience engaged.

The story may strike people as not particularly original. This comes, in large part, from the shorthand language Whedon uses in storytelling. He is very adept at using pop-culture stereotypes to tell a story in the most compact, efficient manner. His characters step out onto the screen and almost immediately, from their costume and their first few words, the audience knows pretty much who they are. They evoke other, similar, characters we have seen before. His plotting uses the same shorthand. Whedon can start his story right in the middle of the action because he knows that we will recognize the plot elements as the same sort of archetypes that help us understand his characters.

Of course, I may just be blowing smoke in all of this talk of pop-culture archetypes. I have seen every episode in Firefly, his TV show that Serenity continues, and it could well be that my sense of recognition is not so much because Whedon draws on the work of earlier directors -- notably Howard Hawks' westerns such as Rio Bravo -- as because of the seventeen hours of material about the characters and their situation that I have already seen.

And originality is somewhat overrated. It adds a degree of difficulty to writing a script and properly increases the score for a good performance, but it is not particularly a thing that is good in itself. The last altogether original film I remember seeing is Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees which was totally, mind-blowingly original and quite dreadful. IMDB.com suggests that the filmmaker has not made any films in the last ten years so we may be allowed to hope he got some help.

What worries me about Serenity, and its reception by the marketplace, is that while it is a Science Fiction film, and those seem to be well received, it is also a Western -- a genre that appears to have died. Without giving away too much about the film, these two pictures show what I am talking about here.


Serenity is Science Fiction. See, everything is blue in this shot and mostly made out of glass and metal. Science Fiction.



Serenity is a Western. Here we see two of our heroes shooting back over their sholders at the bad guys who are pursuing them out of town. Clearly a Western (although, to be fair, nobody runs out of bullets and throws his gun.)

Like I said, I am curious what people will think about the film. That curiosity can only be satisfied if people actually go to see the film so they can react to it one way or the other. Universal doesn't seem to be doing a lot of advertising -- or at least too little to suit me -- but their tactic of inviting bloggers to preview showings is novel and I'm curious to see how that works out as well. (I am doing my bit for them here.) In an effort to get people to go see the film I have discussed it here in very general terms. People who are already Firefly fans will go see Serenity no matter what I write here. I've tried to pique the curiosity of those who may not have been aware of the film without overselling it. Because I want to find out what people think of a Space Western.

And, as for me -- what did I think of Serenity? Best F***ing SF film in years!

But that's just me.

Torque

"Man said to be Zarqawi's No. 2 killed" says the Reuters Headline. It runs with a photo of a smoking automobile. Was Zarqawi's guy in the car? I click on the picture to bring up the related story. Nope, just another random car bomb. Why did Reuters run that photo? Don't they have a photo of Abu Azzam, the man said to have been killed? Hmmm.

I close the photo window and return to reading the main story. "BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Al Qaeda's second-in-command in Iraq, Abu Azzam, was shot dead in Baghdad this week, the U.S. military said on Tuesday, a potential blow to the group at the heart of Iraq's insurgency." Again, Hmmmm -- a potential blow? I wonder what an actual blow would be like?

A few paragraphs later: "The death may mark progress against militants but attacks continued unabated." This is a prime example of the al Reuters classic butt-spliced compound sentence. The form is this: <qualified good news> but <unqualified bad news>. The deaths may mark progress ... but the attacks continue unabated.

Next paragraph, another way to look at the story as bad news: "It is uncertain how much intelligence Azzam's killing will deliver, particularly since it appears he was shot without being interrogated."

A bit later: "Zarqawi, a Jordanian, is allied to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network. His group has claimed many of the deadliest attacks in Iraq, and has pledged all-out war against Iraq's majority Shi'ite population, an effort to provoke civil war and drive the country further into chaos." This one is subtler, can you find the spin in this one? It's the word "further" in the phrase "to ... drive the country further into chaos." The implications being that even without Zarqawi's civil war (which I don't think he has the leverage to start) Iraq is already in "chaos". This is a running theme of Reuters coverage -- that the situation in Iraq is spiralling out of control -- chaos.

If you look at the photo that Reuters chose to run with the story you will see a nice metaphor for the situation in Iraq and Reuters coverage of it. In the foreground is the smoking ruin of one car blown up by the terrorists. In the background, two Iraqi fire trucks, several Iraqi firemen with hoses and a crowd of rubberneckers standing on the sidewalk. The photo focuses on the burning car -- and the fire trucks, firemen and people are just background. Reuters focuses on the individual acts of violence and ignores the background of political progress and an Iraqi populace who increasingly look to the new government to deal with the growingly-isolated terrorists.

People say that Reuters ignores good news from Iraq, but this is far from the truth. The news service has a special office just for dealing with positive stories from Iraq. In the office is a single desk holding a computer in an airtight glass box. In the box with the computer is a torque wrench and a supply of adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions. When good news arrives from Iraq a highly-trained operator slides his hands into the rubber gloves on the side of the box and uses the wrench to affix qualifiers to the story. Only after enough words and torque have been applied to spin the story properly can the box be opened and the story removed.

Serenity

A word from our sponsor...

Joss Whedon, the Oscar® - and Emmy - nominated writer/director responsible for the worldwide television phenomena of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, ANGEL and FIREFLY, now applies his trademark compassion and wit to a small band of galactic outcasts 500 years in the future in his feature film directorial debut, Serenity. The film centers around Captain Malcolm Reynolds, a hardened veteran (on the losing side) of a galactic civil war, who now ekes out a living pulling off small crimes and transport-for-hire aboard his ship, Serenity. He leads a small, eclectic crew who are the closest thing he has left to family -– squabbling, insubordinate and undyingly loyal.

... Ok, maybe that was a bit more than one word but it's over now and we can return to our regular, irregular blogging.

Joss Whedon's first film as a director comes out next Friday and you should plan to see it. Whedon is best known as the creator of the television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Angel. He also created the television show Firefly, which struggled to grow its audience and was cancelled after one season which was unfortunate because Firefly was one of the best written and most interesting Science Fiction television shows ever.

Whedon has a real talent for dialog and character development, and a proven track record of creating believable, endearing characters in television shows with appallingly silly premises. His first big success, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was a television spin-off of an amusing but lightweight movie about a high school girl who, in addition to school and homework, must save the world from an outbreak of vampires. Given that unprepossessing premise, there is no particular reason why Buffy should have been one of the best written, and most enjoyable shows on television -- but it was.

Firefly's premise was a bit less problematic; it was set in a future world that had a number of parallels to the western United States just after the Civil War. The show's protagonist had fought on the losing side of a war of succession. He seeks out-of-the-way places where he, his spaceship, and his crew can make a living and try not to attract attention. That last part -- not attracting attention -- turns out to be difficult and provides most of the basis for the plot.

Firefly was very well written and vastly entertaining. The characters were very engaging and the plot had a strong arc to hold the individual episodes together. This is something that Whedon struggles with sometimes -- losing track of where he is going with a series. But if Whedon seemed lost sometimes in Buffy and Angel -- not really knowing where he was going with the story from episode to episode -- he seemed to have the problem under control with Firefly. It was Whedon's best, most mature and most satisfying work to date.

But it had a fatal flaw. If you've been reading closely you might have caught it. Firefly was a Western -- a Space Western -- and for some reason Western's just don't work right now, especially on television. When you bear in mind that it was a Western, you see that it was gutsy of Fox to have backed Firefly at all and small wonder that they pulled the plug.

Once the series was neatly and finally cancelled it could be released as a box set on DVD. The Firefly box set sold quite well and its success doubtless played a role in Whedon's ability to get backing to make a movie based on the series. Serenity opens Friday. I am quite hopeful about it.

If you are a blogger and you are interested in attending a preview showing before the actual release of Serenity you can agree to write about it in your blog and attend a special showing for bloggers. More information is available in this posting on TownHall.com. Maybe I'll see you there.

Update: 9/25 6:30pm
Apparently all the spaces available for bloggers in the preview showing have been spoken for. If you aren't already on the list you will have to wait the extra four days.

Art Sale for Hurricane Victims

Joel Haas, Raleigh area sculptor and friend of mine, is selling bas relief resin panels of angels at auction with all profits going to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. The image above is a detail from one of the pieces. Joel is using his blog as a venue for the auction -- each item is a posting and all bids are made by attaching comments with name and amount bid. The process is described in more detail in Joel's blog. If you are interested in bidding but find the process intimidating, feel free to contact me and I will help. My email address appears on the right-hand side of this blog.

Joel is a good guy and these panels are beautiful. If you are possessed of the right combination of good taste, civic spirit and financial sufficiency you can help the victims of Katrina and get a lovely piece of art at the same time. Click on the image of the angel (or here) to go to Joel's blog.

Daily Tarheel May Have to Close

After over a century of publication, the University of North Carolina's student newspaper, the Daily Tarheel, faces a crisis -- one it is not clear they can survive. Recent events suggest that there may soon be no one left to write for them.

The crisis started with the publication of an opinion column by Jillian Bandes, a new daily columnist writing her third column for the paper. Her first two columns had been generally well received; both were humorous pieces on innocuous topics -- female body image and the campus "Greek" experience, notably sorority "rush" week. There were, to be sure, a few letters to the editor from insulted sorority sisters, but the young Turks of campus journalism have no time for the Greeks and there was no real controversy. As for the body image piece, fat chicks on campus apparently had another slice of pizza and decided to get over it. Jullian's first two columns were fine. Her third column was trouble.

Jillian's third column was a clear example of why a newspaper should have an editor. She decided to write a humorous piece on racial profiling of Arabs in airports. In it she took the perfectly defensible position that even Arabs should support such racial profiling. She has a point there. While it is inconvenient to be singled out to be searched, it is even more inconvenient to watch an airplane disintegrate around you as you begin the six-mile fall to the sea. Where Jillian went astray is in her rather ill-advised humorous take on the subject. I'm sure you could write an article that suggests that body-cavity searches can be fun, but it's probably best not to do so in a piece about Arab-American relations and racial profiling. In a happier world an editor would take the writer aside and tell her that her piece was, sadly, slightly too long, and indicate to her the parts that she could cut to save a column-inch or two... and her reputation.

But that would be censorship so nothing of the sort was done. Her piece ran as written and she was not immediately fired. She was, to be sure, fired -- and before her next column ran -- but, says editor Chris Coletta, it wasn't because of the content of her piece. Ms. Bandes was let go because of "Journalistic Malpractice," and her firing had nothing to do with her expressing an opinion that is anathema to the almost-exclusively liberal UNC community. "I fired her," said Coletta, "because she strung together quotes out of context. ... Bandes didn’t inaccurately quote anyone. (I have her notes as proof.) But you don’t necessarily have to make things up to get them wrong or to mislead the reader. ... Bandes told the three people quoted in her column ... that she was writing an article about Arab-American relations in a post-9/11 world. ... Racial profiling was, in fact, part of their conversation. But it wasn’t their entire conversation."

So there you have it. Bandes wasn't fired because of the content of her piece. The Daily Tarheel was reluctantly forced to let her go because she had violated their journalistic standards. Clumsy, ill-advised attempts at humor; interviewing people at length and quoting them selectively; telling your sources your general topic but not your particular focus; leaving your sources feeling a bit used -- these are all offences that get a student journalist fired on the first offence at The Daily Tarheel. They have no place at a student newspaper. So far only Bandes has been fired. No announcement has been made about when the rest of the writing staff will be let go or what use will be made of the space in the Carolina Union currently occupied by the Tarheel.

Tragedy

Some years ago I was driving down a busy street and I saw a young lady standing on the sidewalk. Her face was red and had a look of open-mouthed horror. She was holding a short dog leash that terminated in an empty collar. A few feet away in the heavy traffic was the remains of what had been a puppy. When I think of the word Tragic that young lady comes readily to mind.

Around the same time I overheard a group of women talking about a cat that had been run over. Since the owner of the cat was not present, one of the women felt free to voice her opinion: Well, that's what you get when you let your cat run around loose, she said. She seemed quite angry at the cat's owner for not taking more care to control the animal. To her the story of the cat was not at all a tragedy. It was all about bad management and she was rather cross about it.

In Greek drama "Tragedy" is meant to instruct. Tragedies are cautionary tales that show that innocence and good intentions are not sufficient. The hero can still have hamartia -- a lack of balance or "fatal flaw" that causes him, although blameless, to act wrongly, leading to his destruction. For the lesson to be properly learned it is important for the hero to be without blame. If we are angry at the hero then we will distance ourselves from him, and from his problems, and we will not be forced to examine our own phyches for the subtle errors that tragedies explore.

It is important to remember that tragedy focuses on the results of our actions -- not merely on unfortunate events. I have owned a cat who would reliably make a dash for the door whenever I came in carrying a bag of groceries, knowing that being so burdened I would find it difficult to perform the manoeuvre needed to keep the cat inside -- kicking the cat and slamming the door in one continuous motion. That cat eventually disappeared and I have no doubt that like the cat in the conversation above, she was hit by a car. Tragic clearly, but much of the "fatal flaw" was to be found in the cat herself.

You might think that, since tragedy concerns itself with the results of one's own actions, it would follow that events totally outside of one's control would not be tragic. If someone is walking down the sidewalk and he is is struck by a giant meteor, or someone eles is sitting in her office when a terrorist flys an airplane into the window, where is the action that caused these events? What is the "fatal flaw" that marks the event as a tragedy? There is one. It is a flaw that we all have, in varying degrees. We like to forget we are mortal. We don't always do the most important things first and, if we are suddenly reminded of our own mortality, they often never get done at all.

I think that we, as a society, are afflicted with a petulant refusal to experience tragedy, simply as tragedy and, as a result, we fail to learn the lessons that tragic events can teach us. We insist that our lives go smoothly and, when unfortunate events happen we immediately look for someone with whom we can become angry. If we are personally affected by the tragic events we look for someone else to blame so we don't have to deal with our own lack of preparation -- physical, financial or spiritual -- and, even if we do blame ourselves, self-directed anger is neither a fair nor a helpful response. If we are not personally affected we have an irrational tendency to blame the victim. Well, that's what you get if you let your cat run around loose, we think. It saves us from the pain of empathy and allows us to refuse to come to terms with the fact that our cats might prefer a shorter life in the sunshine, or that our own children might make mistakes and come to harm.

One of the ways we shield ourselves from experiencing the instructive pain of tragic events is to insist on a false dichotomy -- that an event must be either a "tragedy" or an "outrage" but that it cannot be both. If we can find the smallest trace of culpability we will focus on it, and the comfortable, soothing anger it affords us, and ignore the larger part which, being merely tragic, we don't like to think about. We do this so reliably that, when dealing with an event that actually is more of an outrage than a tragedy, pundits can safely assume that in calling it a tragedy they will be understood as saying that the victims themselves were largely to blame.

DragonCon

I have a number of terribly important, if slightly ponderous, postings sitting as half-done drafts -- but they will have to wait. I have bought myself a flickr.com pro account as a more convenient way to serve images and I have loaded up some photos I took over the Labor Day weekend to try it out. So, a bit of photo-blogging about DragonCon.

DragonCon is a huge SF / Media / Comics / Gaming / etc. convention held yearly in Atlanta in the later part of the summer. DragonCon gets bigger every year and this year, despite the high price of gasoline, it seemed bigger than ever. Some fans, who concentrate on a particular area, may tend to disparage DragonCon for its sprawling lack of focus. Those who are mostly interested in written Science Fiction, for instance, may tend to prefer the smaller, more bookish, World Science-Fiction Convention that rotates from location to location rather like the Olympics (this year it was in Glasgow and next year L.A.).



One answer to that is that DragonCon is so large that if you take just the written-sf program items and ignore the rest you have a decent World Con. This, for instance is a very World-con-esque photo of Anne and Todd McCaffrey who read excerpts from a novel they haven't quite finished.



Anne Crispin hosted a memorium session to remember Andre Norton, a very popular fantasy writer who died this year after a writing career that spanned over 60 years. [See teleoscope: Andre Norton RIP]



Also on the Andre Norton memorium panel was my long-time frind Brad Linaweaver, a writer who lives in California. Brad is currently collaborating with ...



... actor Richard Hatch, shown here discussing a plot element from one of the Battlestar Galactica novels on which he and Brad are working.

One of the chief pleasures of DragonCon for me is the opportunity to see my old frinds, like Brad (above) or Bill Ritch (shown here announcing that the performance of the play he had written would be slightly delayed while they got the sound system to work.)



Bill is a computer programmer who lives in Atlanta and spends his free time producing radio drama with the Atlanta Radio Theater Company ...



... (shown here performing an adaptation of A E Van Vogt's Weapon Shops).



Bill also writes and directs plays for the Mighty Rassilon Art Players.





MRAP (pronounced Em-Rap) usually put on one play during the convention and this years offering -- Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter -- is a musical...



... and actually quite good.

Another attraction of DragonCon is the large number of attendees who make some sort of costume to wear at the con. Some of the costumes involve many people and hundreds of hours of work...



... such as this one which won first place in the Masquerade.

Other costumes are "hall" costumes which people wear around the convention.

 



Some of the hall costumes are amazing examples of craft, aesthetics and hard work.





... and other costumes consist mostly of attitude...



... or of paint (for which you will have to view my slide show). [Warning: not work safe.]

And, of course, DragonCon is a good place to meet new people.



Well, that's all I have time for. I tend to spend much too much time tinkering with my images. [One of the photos above had a partial figure removed, can you guess which one?] And all the tinkering slows me down. But I do enjoy it. Consider the following image from Romeo and Ethel. The subjects were moving and blurred and the light was a bit dim for proper autofocus so the original image was quite blurred. But I kinda liked it. I liked the motion and the way the blurring abstracted the images. But I also knew that if I posted it to a photo blog it would just look like a crappy picture. So, I tinkered a bit more...

Must-View Photoblog

A young man from New Orleans has put up a slide show with commentary that documents his experience of the huricane in New Orleans. You simply must read it.

It is amazing that one guy with a digital camera and a Kodak EasyShare account can provide ten times as much information about Katrina and New Orleans as all the major media put together.

Update: 19 Sept 2005.

Someone pointed out to me that the slideshow had moved to a new address. I have updated it and it should work again.