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Tuesday, February 28, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Stranger Than Fact... Don't look at this photo, because you will be disappointed after I quote its caption for you:
Anna Nicole Smith with her lawyer, Howard Stern, as she arrived for her hearing today at the Supreme Court. It is that Anna Nicole Smith, and that Supreme Court, but (sadly) not that Howard Stern. --Nic Duquette [link] Monday, February 27, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Good Habits are Bad Habits; Bad Habits are Good Habits... A new study throws more weight behind what I think will eventually be called the Schroedinger Propery of Public Health: everything a human being might do is positively or negatively associated with good health and well-being, but whenever you aren't actively looking, it's both.
Though no one has followed people for decades to see whether those with a "Parkinson's personality" are more likely to develop Parkinson's, Menza says the "weight of the evidence" supports the idea of a link. His list of traits associated with the disease include industriousness, punctuality, orderliness, inflexibility, cautiousness, and lack of novelty-seeking." Other doctors mention drive, ambition, altruism, cleanliness, and a tendency toward obsession with details. Cleanliness is next to godliness, so godliness is two slots away from Parkinson's Disease. Hence the last pope. But this paragraph is the one that struck me as the one with the most potential for medical surprise:
Research suggests that Parkinson's patients are only half as likely to smoke as the general population and are much less likely than average to drink coffee. It could be that nicotine and caffeine hold little appeal for those with a Parkinson's personality or that cigarettes and lattes actually act as shields -- the jury is still out. You heard it here -- well, in the Globe -- first. Within years, moderate consumption of cigarettes will be good for you. --Nic Duquette [link] Idaho... This document is one of the most wondrous pieces of legislation it's ever been my pleasure to peruse. That the state legislature of Idaho would even introduce, let alone pass unanimously, such a bill fills me with to the brim with good will toward man. It also suggests that there are no pressing issues in Idaho governance. Which is also great. Anyway, since it's fairly short, here is the full text of the bill I am heaping praise upon:
A CONCURRENT RESOLUTION STATING LEGISLATIVE FINDINGS AND COMMENDING JARED AND JERUSHA HESS AND THE CITY OF PRESTON FOR THE PRODUCTION OF THE MOVIE "NAPOLEON DYNAMITE." Be It Resolved by the Legislature of the State of Idaho: Was that so hard? Hey, California: if you passed a bill commending every film set in California, you'd have a double-A bond rating now. Quit the fiscal hanky-panky and start handing out fancy ribbons. --Nic Duquette [link] Weekend Edition, February 25-26, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire God Save The Spleen... The Sex Pistols tell the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame to fuck off in a grand style.   Death Star Belgrade... 10,000 ralliers lined the streets of Belgrade to object to rumored hand-over of General Ratko Mladic -- the Butcher of both Sarajevo and Srebenica -- to The Hague for war crimes prosecution. That's sweet, to have a fan base like that. But such nostalgics do little favor for their hero in terms of keeping the open secret of his residence in the former Yugoslavia "low-profile." Imagine placards in Buenos Aires, in 1960, reading, "Hands Off Eichmann!" or "Hey Mossad, This Ain't Fair - You Wouldn't Want to Check In There!" I've long known that fascism, like Goya's Saturn, devours its own children. What I didn't know is that it makes the "Drudge siren" all up and down its brood's hideaway address. "Mladic is the pride of the Serbian nation and not those who have been in power," said SRS MP Natasa Jovanovic.Quite the charmer. I bet he says that to all the victims of genocide. --Michael Weiss [link] The Persian Version... See, now Iran's President Ahmadinejad has got a face worth covering up. So do all the clerics and mouth-breathing young reactionaries tenuously holding together the decrepit mullahocracy over which he perches, like some rough beast out of apocalyptic imagery. Yet they would all have you believe that it's features like these which need to take the veil in Iranian society: 
Sir Bob on Khrushchev's Big Moment... Yesterday marked the fifty year anniversary of the infamous "secret speech" delivered by Khrushchev and highlighting some of the Georgian Gorgon's greatest hits in the uses of terror, torture and what it is no recourse to metaphor to call economic genocide. One of the ironies of Khrushchev's status as a kind of tragic anithero of the post-Stalinist era is that he helped orchestrate the Ukrainian famine, which really did, to coin a cheap and misused term of the totalitarian indictment, "kill his own people." (Stalin was a provincial who became a "great Russian chauvinist" and then paid tribute to this conversion by killing multiple millions of Russians.) Khrushchev was also always thought of as the village or peasant idiot, the least threatening in the inner sanctum to the grim status quo... One of the few Western academics who saw through the forgeries and euphemism and pravda -- metaphysical truth, as opposed to istina, which connotes empirical fact -- of the Soviet "experiment" was Robert Conquest. He once fired a shot in the Spanish Civil War, in behalf of some friendly Anarchists he met backpacking through Europe. (Yes, welcome to the old English Curiosity Shop of great men: Backpacking through Europe during a period characterized by one of Auden's best poems, one that was promixately about the struggle against Francoism, "Spain": "Today the deliberate increase in the chances of death / The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder.") Yet the only real vanguard to which this extraordinary historian still proudly proclaims membership is that of the United Front Against Bullshit: Stalin had nurtured his heirs very carefully to prevent any solidarity among them that might lead to mutiny, and this highly quarrelsome group continued to distrust each other even after he died. The speech was, in this context, an attack by Khrushchev on his rivals. It served his purposes to denounce some of the Soviet past, to blame the safely dead Stalin and to implicate some of his surviving heirs. Like him, they had been dragged through years of terror and stupefaction. The following years saw Khrushchev defeating one coup detat but later being ousted by another. In Russia itself, the speech prompted the beginnings of a thaw, but one that did not last. And among a portion of the population there remained, and remains even now, a favorable attitude toward Stalin, which is sometimes seen as the result of centuries of submission to tyranny. For others, the secret speech massively undermined the Stalin regime. But the machine he had built, or inherited from Lenin, survived for a third of a century. And, by an odd paradox, much of the parasitical apparat remains to this day, long after its ideological justifications have gone, like a cartoon character Wile E. Coyote or Mr. Magoo walking on after his plank has disappeared.Auden really does capture the rhythms of the twentieth-century better than any other poet. This is from his sonnet series, "In Time of War": But hear the morning's injured weeping, and know why:(Hold your Straussian intrigues on that last line. The "noble lie," which is what pravda implicitly means, has been around for quite a while.) --Michael Weiss [link] Woke Up This Morning, After Two Years Hiatus...  What kind of a world is it, you may ask, in which proud Italian-Americans contrive to stop Native-American calumny on Christopher Columbus by threatening to "go public" with the truth that famed anti-pollution activist Iron Eyes Cody, whose commercially televised tear was meant to have come straight from the infamous trail of that description, is actually -- part Sicilian. Or where glock-packing hip-hop moguls, heirs to unrecouped Motown fortunes, take justice against their fathers' Jewish and Italian payola robber-barons from the 50's by threatening to -- go to court?
This is not to discount the sociopathy for which The Sopranos is famous. The whackings, the wife- and girlfriend-beatings, the grand larceny, the therapy. One of the reasons sociopathy has such a welcome home in the popular cultural imagination is that, by definition, its sufferers tend to be as charismatic as they are cavalier about their depravity.
I think it's more than fair to say that David Chase is responsible for the best dramatic series, ever -- whether network television, premium cable, or long-wave radio out of Antarctic way stations is the medium under discussion. In the past few weeks, I've on-demanded nearly the whole kit and kaboodle (all six seasons), which I'd seen already, as prep-time for the new episodes scheduled to air next at the end of next month. This interview with the Times has only redoubled the jones:
HIGH on the wall of the otherwise-nondescript conference room inside the production offices of "The Sopranos" hangs a small, framed photograph of a man with his face half shadowed by a fedora. Ambling by in his lumbering gait, slowed by a slight limp from a recent leg injury, James Gandolfini stopped to take a look at the photo. "Who's that?" he asked. "Fellini," said David Chase.Yes, it would be Fellini, wouldn't it? And how do the hysterics over at Anti-Defamation HQ like that? What do their dismal protests and cease and desist letters amount to now? Italians reprehending the depictions of Italian-American syndicalism: imagine the French reprehending incomprehensible New Wave cinema because of similar negative "stereotypes" of nationality. ("When Godard says the woman turns her head this way and it doesn't mean anything, it is like a second Waterloo to us.") And never mind that the mafia genre is actually a full-blooded American industry. The Sopranos tells us more about our own history of violence than it does about a Mediterranean franchise that continues to churn out titles like Cinema Paradiso and Il Postino, and where if you're not a callyptgian free spirit splashing through a fountain in Rome, you haven't really lived. We're now in that cycle of creativity where the post after postmodern feels refreshingly straightforward and lucid, and yet it can still indulge in clever allusions (the kids call these "inter-textual references") to the past which gratify but do not overwhelm. And this is in a genre where the offer to wink at the The Godfather is one that can and should be refused at all costs. And yet... The elevator shot of the mortician in the episode where Tony's mother dies. Requisite and perfect. But as Mr. Chase said, the show "has been engineered" around Tony's point of view. Nothing illustrated that more, and more helped differentiate the series from any previous gangster saga, he said, than the scenes between Tony and his therapist, Dr. Melfi (played by Lorraine Bracco.) "They opened up this whole feminine side of Tony," Mr. Chase said. "The thing with his mother, and the thing with the shrink. It had all been about men before. Here he had this other aspect to him." Mr. Gandolfini labeled his scenes with Dr. Melfi "a Greek chorus." He said: "You go to the therapist and he explains what is happening to him. And you see how it is affecting him. I'm not sure without that the show would have been successful."I actually enjoy the idea of Tony's therapy more than I do the therapy itself. For one thing, he's too methodical and calculating a don for Freudian analysis, and this is something, you sense, that he would have gelled to about mid-way through the first season. No, what this crime boss needs is behavioral psychology, which, as the Times will also attest, is the next big thing in palliative headshrinking. "Fuggadabout ya mudda, ya miserable cocksucker! Mine broke my balls, too! Now take these fucking index cards home and practice your instantiation exercises! We're changin' brain chemistry ova hee-ah!" --Michael Weiss [link] UPDATE: NEW YORK SOLIDARITY WITH DENMARK RALLY... The response, via HitchensWeb and elsewhere, has been tremendous for hosting a New York version of Solidarity With Denmark. I will be in touch with the Danish consulate this weekend (to see how they'd prefer we coordinate things), and post Sunday about the details. I've contacted Hitch, and he offers his encouragement. Check this space for updates. Thanks to all who have written to offer support. --Michael Weiss [link] Friday, February 24, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Pictures Up... From the rally: 
Once In A While In The New York Times... A passage like this comes along: The subjects of his books included the Kronstadt naval base rebellion of 1921, an uprising of sailors against the Bolshevik regime that left more than 10,000 dead or wounded; the Haymarket Riot of 1886, in which seven Chicago police officers were killed by a bomb thrown at a workers' gathering; and the Sacco and Vanzetti case. He interviewed hundreds of adherents of the movement for one book, "Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America."Paul Avrich, CCNY historian of anarchism and the Russian revolution, is dead at 74. The Old Left is steadily moving to the final stage beyond old. --Michael Weiss [link] More Speech Regulation Nonsense... Ken Livingstone compared a Jewish Evening Standard reporter to a Nazi death camp guard and he's been suspended from his job at mayor of London as a result. A three-man tribunal made the decision, with no recourse to plebiscite. Coercive installation of V-chips is looking more sanguine than the current state of affairs in Europe: Brian Coleman, the deputy chair of the [Conservative] assembly, said he should "hang his head in shame" for failing to apologise and avoid the situation. "He's now got a month to sit at home in Cricklewood in his front room and ponder the damage he's done to London, the damage he's done to the office and, most importantly, the damage he's done to community relations," he said.The mayor of one of the most important and oldest cities in the world, ladies and gentlemen. He gets a time-out. --Michael Weiss [link] NYT Slip... Wasn't this an Ali G joke on Rumsfeld?
 Irony Watch... Are you fucking kidding me?
Shares of H&R Block Inc. sank Friday after the nation's largest tax preparer said it was having problems with its own taxes...--Nic Duquette [link] Shadowy Oilgarchy Cabal Tugging Strings Both Ways, I Guess... Saudi forces foiled an attack on oil infrastructure this morning by Al Qaeda. I knew Zawahiri et al wanted to bomb the oil fields as a way to bring down the House of Saud (and score collateral economic damage on the West), but until they actually tried I'd never actually wondered: how can the USA and Al Qaeda alike both see the Saudi oil industry as a problem with respect to their own face-off? If Aramco is just a proxy for the terrorists/crusaders/Wahhabi Islamofascists/Zionist elders, why does the other side think so too, only the other way? Maybe we should put aside our differences with Zawahiri and, together, bomb and strafe the oil fields that supply the Islamists with cash/the infidels with an economy. Or maybe this is one of those Milo Minderbender mindbenders wherein two sides at war are so economically intertwined through the backchannels that our constituent parts are subcontracting the destruction of our own respective sides. Fuck it, I'm moving to Canada. No, not because of Bush, because it's a net oil exporter. I hear the streets of Calgary are paved with US dollars (shellaced for the snowplows, of course). --Nic Duquette [link] Repeat Performance... It's excellent that today's rally outside the Danish embassy in Washington looks as if it's going to attract a lot of people and attention. I floated the idea that New York should engage in a similar display of solidarity, and Union Square has long been in need of rescuing from the LaRouche zombies... If anyone is interested in such a project e-mail me at mike@snarksmith.com. I know the New York Press people stormed out of their offices when their bankrolling brass refused to run the Mohammed cartoons. I'll be in touch with them. And I bet our friends at the New Criterion wouldn't mind pulling themselves away from the Wodehouse for a couple of hours, to keep the world safe for democracy and gentlemen's personal gentlemen and all that. Let's see whom else we can round up. --Michael Weiss [link] Thursday, February 23, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Support Solidarity With Denmark... Hitch has organized one outside the Danish embassy tomorrow at noon. Sullivan will be there. Could be a real event. I'd go if I lived in DC. --Nic Duquette [link] Whither A Bellweather... Bill O'Reilly can always be counted upon to take a tough stance for the opinions most Americans hold at the moment. It seems that now includes immediate withdrawl from Iraq.
During the February 20 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Bill O'Reilly suggested that the United States "hand over everything to the Iraqis as fast as humanly possible" because "[t]here are so many nuts in the country -- so many crazies -- that we can't control them." O'Reilly then claimed that the "big mistake" was actually "the crazy-people underestimation." I'm reminded of the beginning of Bowling for Columbine when Terry Nichols' brother, an enthusiast for homemade ordnance of the federal building-destroying caliber, conceded that the government should take steps to contain the spread of WMD because "there's a lot of crazy people out there," before putting a revolver to his head just to freak out Michael Moore. "Crazy people underestimation" is already my top pick for phrase of the year. Mike and I agree that bringing liberty and prosperity to Arabia is the only real long-term strategy for elimination of Islamism, but we disagree about the necessity of remaining in Iraq. I have been turning more pessimistic about the prospects for Iraq for months, and if the anger at the Golden Mosque bombing boils over, we may be better off abandoning the project and diverting those military resources to Afghanistan and Special Forces ops. Unfortunately, there are crazy people everywhere; if undercounting them is reason to withdraw from Iraq, it's also reason to stay indoors and have the groceries delivered. --Nic Duquette [link] Now The Germans... Frankly, I've always been of the opinion that the Egyptian-produced documentary "based" on the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion ought to be airred in the United States -- preferrably as a lead-in to South Park or The Daily Show. I also think every American schoolchild should be given Mein Kampf and Stalin's works on nationality to read at a tender, impressionable age. Every citizen has a responsibility, not just a right, to know what pathological ideology looks and feels and smells like, and one needn't subscribe to what others have labelled an equally deleterious system of analysis -- Freudianism -- to appreciate that repression never leads to anything good. So it's rather dismaying to hear that German politicians are trying to pull Turkey's In the Valley of the Wolves -- Iraq from Teutonic theatres. (Americans are depicted as genocidal death squaddies, and Jewish doctors as organ-stealing wholesalers -- naturellement: how else is the liver pate of Gentile babes going to find its way onto our matzah hor d'erve?) "I urge the cinema owners in Germany to pull this racist and anti-Western hate film immediately," said Edmund Stoiber, Bavaria's conservative premier and one of Germany's most recognized politicians, in an interview with the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag last weekend.So then better to create an even greater sensation with a kybosh-campaign, and better to have bootlegged copies of the film find their way into celluloid samizdats and then into the DVD players of countless Turks living in Berlin or Heidelberg. I never did gel to the "Because I said so" or the "I'll tell you when you're older" theory of touch-and-go epistemology. Pony up the rancid wares, and let people decide for themselves. Somehow I doubt Gary Busey or Billy Zane will be driving the Black Marias of the next Eurasian pogrom. They can barely afford cab fare to pawn shops in West Hollywood. --Michael Weiss [link] All Right, Dan... Getting a little big for your breeches, ain't-cha? Confidential to everybody: "Pearl necklace" is out. "Cheney" is in. Pass it on.Next up: Poor guy or girl who has to sleep in the wet spot is "Chertoffed." --Michael Weiss [link] Bush Knew... The Cheney Commission's findings are conclusive: In a Presidential Daily Briefing given to Bush in August 2005, the CIA warned that the vice president was a potent threat to the senior population at large, and in particular "possessed the capabilities and intentions to spray a senior citizen with projectiles fired from a shotgun or other weapon." A second brief identified the population at risk as those "between 70 and 80 years of age," and warned that the vice president posed the greatest threat to "seniors in close proximity to the vice president when he is armed."--Michael Weiss [link] Snark Watch... Maybe this blog isn't as snarky as it could be, but it would be a dereliction of duty for me not to reprint this mordant quip on the Summers resignation:
Cambridge venture capitalist Howard Anderson wants to nominate Che Guevara as Harvard's new president.--Nic Duquette [link] Secret Vacation Time... This is one of the most interesting empirical results I've seen coming out of economic research in a long time. And one of the authors, Mark Aguiar, works just over a cubicle wall from me. Good job, Mark.
The easiest way to measure leisure is to take survey data on how many hours a week people spend at work and subtract. Since 1965, the number of hours the average American works for pay has not changed much. By this simple measure, then, leisure has also stayed the same...This is a topic I know nothing about, but I would be curious to see what the "effective leisure" of different socialist systems is. My impression from friends who'd know is that the French put a lot of those spare hours into cooking, and the Norwegians into keeping their cars running, and that the lack of service jobs is a big reason for the high unemployment in the immigrant ghettos of Paris and the German cities. Even if Europeans have more leisure time than we do, this estimate is a testament to the power of technology to make a meaningful change in quality of life. --Nic Duquette [link] Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire The Umpteenth Brumaire of Nicolas Sarkozy... The shoe-in next president of France, aged to a nice vintage in the sclerotic cask of Chiracism, is tre Third Way, and either not at all what he seems, or all of that and more. Or something: One thing Sarkozy does not resemble in the slightest is a traditional French politician. "I am a man of the right," he says over breakfast, "even if I'm not a conservative in the traditional sense." This is an extraordinary admission. No presidential hopeful in decades, even in the UMP created by Jacques Chirac in the wake of De Gaulle's RPR, has ever accepted the label. Never in his political life has Jacques Chirac made a similar statement. From his time as prime minister in the mid-seventies, when he described his goal as the creation of "a labor movement ΰ la franηaise," to his recent New Year's address, in which he again attacked American-style capitalism, Chirac has taken many positions, but none of them on the "right." Since Sarkozy's profession leaves him liable to accusations in the French press that he is the favored candidate of Americans or free-marketeers, he is anxious to spell out exactly what he means by a "temperament of the right." It is something he has obviously thought about a lot. "First, the primacy of work; second, the need to compensate personal merit and effort; third, respect for the rules, and for authority; fourth, the belief that democracy does not mean weakness; fifth, values; sixth, . . . I'm persuaded that, before sharing, you have to create wealth. I don't like egalitarianism."The rioters hate him, our State Department doesn't, he's philo-Semitic and he steals votes from Le Pen without resorting to Howard Dean-like fugues of bien-pensant political morality ("Why can we not have zee how-you-say rouge-neck wis zee Vichy flag voting for UMP?") What's French for "What's not to like?" --Michael Weiss [link] The World Won't Listen... I still find Cat Stevens making the rounds on iTunes every now and again. And while I knew Morrissey was good for nothing beyond the music and the odd Wildean quip, I never thought I'd have to sneer to hear. That all changed when I read this: I find myself opposing barbarism, that's all. People like Blair and Bush have proved that in order to succeed in politics you must be cruel and morally bankrupt. I see no difference between Blair or Bush and Saddam Hussein - all egotistical dictators. Perhaps the only difference is that Blair and Bush do it with a smile. Murder and smile .... as Shakespeare said.Now you are a was, big boy. --Michael Weiss [link] Too Late For Us To Change Our Name, Too... As long as James Wood can find it in his heart to cite the prefix of this blog in an essay about no less of a figure than Edmund Wilson, so shall our flame for rebarbative anti-Eggersian criticism burn bright. Meet Snarkaholic, the Guildenstern to our Rosencranz. come on! did you really think I'd change the name without getting another url?? There is, however, a tad more to the end of the name experiment, and, in the effort to be transparent, I'll tell the tale: Via a link on Slate I found Snarksmith. Penned by Michael Weiss and Nic Duquette (who's orignally from The Middle of Nowhere), Snarksmith is doesn't engage in what would normally be considered "snark." There's very little sense of catty plastiscene Joan Rivers urging insults. Rather, there was commentary that had the "what the heck were they thinking?" tone, with the majority of the stories smart and sharp in their observations. So, to the critics who pretty much told me that I have no right to call this blog Snarkaholic--go take a look at Snarksmith (yeah, and then you can tell me how much I have no right to do what I'm doing because I've never been a managing editor...yadda, yadda, yadda, I'm not listening...I'm a David flinging stones at the Establishment Goliaths, so get over it.) And a funny coincidence....our blogs came about around the same time. As to the chicken-egg argument, who knows. I had no idea these guys existed before yesterday, and I doubt they even know who I am. But they are Commrades in Smart Snark. And that's what counts the most. Who knows...maybe there's a way for the lowly amateur snarker to work with these august snarkers? (never know unless you pitch it) Oh, they also have a great definition of snark--which kind of adds to the contention that it ain't what so many Joan Rivers wannabees and finger-snapping fashionistas think it is.Nic really does come from the Middle of Nowhere. All his hometown has is the Basketball Hall of Fame. And all mine had was Spiderman, Joey Ramone and David Horowitz. (Two out of three superheroes ain't bad.) --Michael Weiss [link] Bloglash And Its Mounting Discontents... There's been a lot of link-and-Fiskage over this Financial Times story by Trevor Butterworth about the over-televised non-revolution of the blog. I posted the following on the FT-erected Reader Feedback Blog. I suppose I sell my own stock-in-trade short, but as Woody Allen once had it in a slightly mutated form and context, I may hate myself, but it's not because I'm a blogger: An enviable piece, and I thought it was rather clever of you to poll on whether Marx and Orwell would have resorted to blogging had they been given the chance... I'd say no on both counts. The interminable mouse clicking would have gone over at the British Museum about as well as the 12-hour distraction from reading would have done in Marx's historical consciousness. And Orwell too much relied on a first-hand engagement with events, and a reasoned impressionism of them, which for bloggers runs the gamut from what their adorable puppy spat up this morning to how badly the NY Times fucked up this hour. Who are the exceptions here? Michael Totten and maybe a handful of others who become field-investigative or correspondent bloggers? I'd say that the Internet in itself, as an on-demand resource for writers, has changed the still very entrenched trade of print (or even digital) journalism immeasurably, especially with services like Lexis-Nexis and the Amazon book search engine (making plagiarism even more easy to detect and the savor of media scandal that much sweeter.) But I think the Blog Revolution Test is simple enough: Can you recall ANY memorable insight or phrase or original argument about regime change in Iraq (which really was the most important debate when this technology was still in short pants) that had its provenance on any permalinked and immediately archived post? Actually, all right, I do remember one: Kos saying that the industrial contractors in Falluja, whose corpses were notoriously mutilated and put on public display, were "mercernaries... fuck them." Truly have the Insta-Paines of the 21st century arrived... Even Sullivan's best stuff continues to be his "professional" punditry, where he has more room to stretch out and develop his thoughts. (OK, damn it, another blog blurb, if only because it was reprinted in George Packer's Assassins' Gate: After the fall of Baghdad, in response to signs brandished by Iraqis thanking the US, Sully wrote, "You're welcome." Now, would anything that self-righteous or cringe-worthy, as Packer rightly represented it in his book, have made it past a kind editor at the Times Online, or Time magazine -- or even past Sully's own deadline-harried reconsideration?) Blogs work best in the labor of the negative; as swarm criticism that forces the 800 pound gorillas of the mainstream media to better behave themselves, or at least to watch their steps more closely. But even in this you still have another variation on the theme of the "democrat's pornography" -- to borrow Ian McEwan's definition for daytime television. The first draft of history is still somehow nobler than the scribbled, easily misplaced notes of it.--Michael Weiss [link] Civil War Talk Is Hasty... There's a very good chance that today's destruction of the al-Askari dome in Samarra was perpetrated by the Zarqawist wing of the so-called "insurgency." There's also an excellent probability that the most depressed person alive right now is Osama bin Laden, who has repeatedly entreated his unhinged comrade in Iraq to batten down the eruptions of anti-Shiism. So as historically despicable as desecration of this magnitude may be (and yes, even atheists and secularists deplore the erasure of centuries-old architecture and art), it is yet another sign of the weakening of Zarqawi's hold on the "hearts and minds" of Iraqis. Even the fury is precision-calibrated against the actual criminals, not against the wider Sunni community: "If I could find the people who did this, I would cut him into pieces," said Abdel Jaleel al-Sudani, a 50-year-old employee of the Health Ministry, who said he had marched in a demonstration earlier. "I would rather hear of the death of a friend, than to hear this news." Still, many Shiites expressed hope that their friends and neighbors would not resort to violence, and said that they would follow their religious leaders, who called for calm. "It was a cowardly act," said Emad al-Watani, a 37-year-old employee at a sports club. "The terrorists believe this will move us to act," he said, sitting on a couch with his small son at his knees. "They are wrong."In a news conference after the attack, Tarik al-Hashimi, the head of the Iraqi Islamic Party, one of the country's most prominent Sunni Arab political groups, said that more than 25 Sunni mosques had been burned, taken over or attacked with a variety of weapons, and that their party headquarters in the southern city of Basra was attacked.The only one who has spoken out of turn, and uncharacteristically, is Ayatollah Sistani. He's calling for a three-day government shutdown out of mourning. That's not even excessive; it's wrongheaded, secto-centric, and in contravention of his own vigorously advocated separation of mosque and state. --Michael Weiss [link] Sectarian Strife in Iraq... Iraq isn't necessarily going to devolve into civil war, but it just edged closer to it: last night Sunni Islamist militants blew up a major Shia holy site in Samarra. Before:
 After:
 If there's any consolation, it's that the mobs of furious Muslims are now furious at our enemies, not unwitting Scandanavians. --Nic Duquette [link] Tuesday, February 21, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Free The Scoot!... The Scooter Libby Legal Defense Trust. No kidding. So I guess we can rubbish Fukuyama's disavowal of neoconservatism in the New York Times magazine this weekend. He's on the advisory board, which neither Pat Buchanan nor Alexander Cockburn could better. Everytime a Paypal rings, a Kristol gets his wings. --Michael Weiss [link] Ratko Mladic Arrested? Yes, No?... The BBC says no, The Guardian begs to differ. Be a nice Tuesday surprise if he were. All because Belgrade wants into the EU. Pamuk Orhan will walk in Turkey for similar reasons. Who would have thought, fifty years ago, that one-worlderism would be such a carrot-and-stick enticement? Note to parents with recalcitrant kiddies and spanking qualms: Spare the Maastricht, spoil the child. --Michael Weiss [link] Economist Editor Quits After 13 Years, "Santorum" Letter to Savage Love... As Gawked today, Bill Emmott, dapper Saville Row-ed arbiter of what you want your friends to think matters to you worldwide, has skeedaddled from The Economist, whose stateside popularity has ballooned since he took it over, to concentrate on a literary career and intra-Asian economic affairs. Pip-pip cheerio, mate, and a bucket of pension and all that, but we can't help but wonder if Emmott's recently dispatched letter to Dan Savage, acknowledging the free marketeer parsability of "santorum," was either 1. cause for this hasty defection, 2. a creepy but fascinating concomitant of it, 3. sign that between now and Clear Out Your Desk day, things are going to boogie at the mainstream conservative weekly even your dentist claims to read. --Michael Weiss [link] You Don't Have To Like Him To Let Him Out...  Since Konigsberg technically falls under Austrian demesne, and since it is chiefly remembered for being the birthplace of the formulator of the categorical imperative, let's attempt a small thought experiment in universal justice. All diplomats and statesmen hailing from Muslim countries, whose official state policy is to question or deny that Judeocide was part and parcel of the aims and accomplishments of Hitler's Third Reich, are be to expelled from Austria at once. Would this not at least be consistent with Austria's criminalization of Holocaust denial, and with its ridiculous imprisonment of brownshirt historian David Irving on just these grounds?
Ah, but see, fascism comes in many shapes and colors, and the worst of the bunch is no longer any problem beyond the odd revisionist text or sinister rhetoric -- or surprise Austrian electoral victory. Whereas to "inflame" or incite Muslim outrage according to idiotic speech laws... well, that would be insensitive.
As late as 2002, Jφrg Haider, erstwhile leader of the reactionary "Freedom" party, was able to quit national politics for good, without the inconvenience of a declared volte-face on his nasty ideas, which never landed him in the Carinthian pokey. And this despite his open allegiance to neo-National Socialist Saddam Hussein, and his misty nostalgia for the days of Nazism, in whose cask he can be unequivocally said to have matured, as his parents were both loyal followers of Hitler and as the SS is still spoken of as having consisted of "men of honor" around the Haider household.
Instead, and because Europe is just that much fun these days, David Irving (who hymns what he knows to be a lost cause) becomes a martyr, while the more urgent threats against democracy (who still see themselves on the winning side of history) are automatically apologized to and asked what can be done to get them to calm down.
Way to pay back Kant for all his trouble.
--Michael Weiss [link]
Speaking of Post-Trotskyist Liberal Hawkishness... Hitch is mounting a solemn display of solidarity with Denmark, outside the embattled country's embassy in Washington. And he's inviting everybody to join him. I feel terrible that I have taken so long to get around to this, but I wonder if anyone might feel like joining me in gathering outside the Danish Embassy in Washington, in a quiet and composed manner, to affirm some elementary friendship. Those who like the idea might contact me at christopher.hitchens@yahoo.com, and those who live in other cities with Danish consulates might wish to initiate a stand for decency on their own account.Perhaps a Union Square demonstration is in order next? Any takers? E-mail me. --Michael Weiss [link] Advertise on Snarksmith... We're now part of BlogAds, thanks to our newfound friends at Hotel Chelsea Blog (please hold all "giving me head on the unmade bed" comments until the next Leonard Cohen lunar cycle). Advertising with us is very cheap. It's only $10 per week and $40 per month. We generally get about 1,500 visits per day, but with a feature like Nic's "How Much Is Your Blog Worth?" we managed to attract 15,000 -- which is Nick Denton terrain if, say, he started up a new site dedicated to post-Trotskyist liberal hawkishness in the tri-state area. So come pimp your wares with us by clicking on the box to your left. Thanks. --Michael Weiss [link] Summers' Winter... After just five years in the job, Larry Summers is quitting as president of Harvard University.
Dr. Summers will likely take a yearlong sabbatical and then return to Harvard as a distinguished professor of economics and public policy, the university said in a prepared statement. Note to Harvard's arts and sciences faculty: when Lawrence Summers comes off as more of a class act in public than you do -- and he just did -- it's a big warning sign. In the end, Summers was done in not by a sweeping debate about the role of women in the hard sciences, but by provincial politics regarding a dean who was edged out. --Nic Duquette [link] Weekend Edition, February 18-19, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Wodehouse in India... It's getting to be shameful that India lacks a seat on the UN Security Council, and that it fails to meet the requirement for inclusion into what Robert Conquest sees as an "Anglosphere" of permanent alliances. For one thing, they've got the "Anglo" bit down pat: The clubs president in the mid-1980s, Thomas Abraham, is now president of Penguin Books India, the countrys largest Wodehouse publisher. Weve all grown up with Wodehouse, he says. Its a phenomenon here. When one of his books goes out of print, everyone goes ballistic. My publishing counterparts in the UK are very amused.Same groaning displays of outmoded idiom, same canting mannerisms... Like New Yorkers who think Zabar's is located "somewhere east of Suez," Indians have become plus anglais que l'anglais. --Michael Weiss [link] Friday, February 17, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire What You're Finding Us For... Another exciting installment (our second) of WYFUF, wherein our webstats machine tells us the Google search string that delivers you, gentle reader, to our cyber doorstep. snarksmith..... 6 2.2 %Lionel Trilling and 70's pimp - can we mix high and low like the Partisan Review crowd, or what? --Michael Weiss [link] Blog: The Motion Picture...  Well, no, not yet. But a culture of already intense navel-gazing has spawned its own adorable outie of mega-solipsism with this New York magazine cover story on The Blog. And as an inveterate C-lister, with a brief if forgettable soar through the firmament of Dentonia, I can't help but get to the latebreaking news after it's become week-old Fishbowl-wrapping. It's awful lonely at this bandwidth.
Still, I prefer Nic's regression analysis (which yielded us the most hits in a day, ever) to Clark Shirky's "network theory."
To analyze the disparities in the blogosphere, Shirky took a sample of 433 blogs. Then he counted an interesting metric: the number of links that pointed toward each site (inbound links, as theyre called). Why links? Because they are the most important and visible measure of a sites popularity. Links are the chief way that visitors find new blogs in the first place. Bloggers almost never advertise their sites; they dont post billboards or run blinking trailers on top of cabs. No, they rely purely on word of mouth. Readers find a link to Gawker or Andrew Sullivan on a friends site, and they follow it. A link is, in essence, a vote of confidence that a fan leaves inscribed in cyberspace: Check this site out! Its cool! Whats more, Internet studies have found that inbound links are an 80 percentaccurate predictor of traffic. The more links point to you, the more readers you have. (Well, almost. But the exceptions tend to prove the rule: Fleshbot, for example. The sex blog has 300,000 page views per day but relatively few inbound links. Not many readers are willing to proclaim their porn habits with links, understandably.) When Shirky compiled his analysis of links, he saw that the smaller bloggers fears were perfectly correct: There is enormous inequity in the system. A very small number of blogs enjoy hundreds and hundreds of inbound linksthe A-list, as it were. But almost all others have very few sites pointing to them. When Shirky sorted the 433 blogs from most linked to least linked and lined them up on a chart, the curve began up high, with the lucky few. But then it quickly fell into a steep dive, flattening off into the distance, where the vast majority of ignored blogs reside. The A-list is teensy, the B-list is bigger, and the C-list is simply massive. In the blogosphere, the biggest audiencesand the advertising revenue they bringgo to a small, elite few. Most bloggers toil in total obscurity.Also, just to rub it in for the rest of us, Peter Rojas' line, I didnt intend to become a millionaire, but I wound up there anyway, is repeated twice. Here and here. We can't even get you people to foot our hosting fees. --Michael Weiss [link] Rummy Mad As Hell, Not Going To Take It Anymore... Not to mix and match cultural references, but if Albert Brooks searches for comedy, does that make the dapper Defense Secretary the new William Hurt of pro-Western agitprop? And what a better name that would be for him, too. In a speech to the Council of Foreign Relations, Mr Rumsfeld said some of the US' most critical battles were now in the "newsrooms". "Our enemies have skilfully adapted to fighting wars in today's media age, but... our country has not," he said.It's true. When Saddam's number two shot someone in the face, it was always broadcast live and with plenty of lead time. --Michael Weiss [link] Oh, They Mean Antennae... The Globe made it sound like the Menino's Phallus would be Petronesque, but in fact it'll just have some dinky lightning rods:
So the "bold vision" that will "trumpet the city's future" is, in fact, a knockoff of a fallen retailer's grand gesture in a 1970's decaying urban core. --Nic Duquette [link] Boston Mayor Wants Bigger Hancock... Thomas Menino -- taking a break from seizing his subjects' tee shirts and old folding chairs -- decided to get all Chicagoey today. He wants to build a new skyscraper which would be the biggest skyscraper in Boston.
Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino today called for construction of the city's tallest building ever -- a 70- or 80- story tower on the site of the existing Winthrop Square parking garage in the downtown Financial District -- to trumpet the city's future. What future? In twenty years, nobody will be living in Boston except billionaire snowbirds and degenerate college-enrolled children of foreign petrocrats. What are we going to call this thing, One "Might As Well Return To Ireland" Place?
"We will insist on bold vision and world-class architecture," Menino said of the tower envisioned by City Hall planners. Here's what old Scollay Square looked like downtown; this is the windy modernist nightmare they replaced it with. As parking garages go, the one at Winthrop Square isn't too offensive, and I worry what might be put in its place.
In a rendering of the city's skyline, the tower extended with two spires high above the city's other tallest structures downtown, the 46-story One International Place building and One Financial Center. Oh. Well, that's never been done before. --Nic Duquette [link] The Real Life of Sebastian Light... Not that I ever intended it this way, but Fridays are shaping up to be Slate amour propre days. More auto-hugging, this time of Jody Rosen, our in-house music critic. Her quarry: Belle and Sebastian. The current long-player, like all of Belle and Sebastian's albums, inhabits a hermetically sealed universe, shut off from both 21st-century pop production values and adult life. The songs are set in a quaint hipster-fairyland: art student types falling in and out of love in a city of rain-lashed cobblestones.Rain-lashed cobblestones. That was good. Very Brideshead. Of course B&S have -- like Wodehouse, like Waugh, The Smiths, The Simpsons and The Sopranos -- to be rescued from their fans, whom they ineluctably resemble most by trying to run away from. Their discography is on loop for what I like to call the V-neck-and-Rimbaud crowd, an oscillating periphery of which operate as BUGs (Bisexuals Until Graduation). That said, "Step Into My Office, Baby" is better than anything Morrissey has recorded in the last ten years. Which I guess is a hazard of getting your "De Profundis" in early, and splintering your "Late" career onto the rocks of middle-aged contentment. "You've made a happy man very old," he said at his last concert. This is why Wilde martyred at forty. --Michael Weiss [link] The Kinkiest Show Not On HBO or Showtime... Novelty Country singer, independent Texas gubernatorial candidate and self-identified Jew Kinky Friedman has a TV show debuting on Country Music Television tonight at 11, which will apparently include guest appearances by Bill Clinton and Willie Nelson, as well as other persons I assume are country music-related. Friedman is very funny, so the show could be very good, but I wonder whether it isn't a violation of the Equal Time Rule, which requires channels to give away or sell equal time to competing political candidates. Does this law only apply to federal candidates? Or can we look forward to shows like Rick Perry Clumsily Tuning a Piano or Everybody Hates Scottie? --Nic Duquette [link] Gerecht on the Cartoon Fracas, and More... What vertiginous times we inhabit when the American Left can unselfconsciously rush to the defense of a venal CIA agent -- guilty of employing her husband as an urgent intelligence-gatherer because of his "warm" relations with a tinpot African dictatorship -- yet where an ex-CIA analyst can draft vigorous polemics in defense of democracy and the unapologetic spread of liberalism (and comedy) in the Muslim world. You won't come across better than Reuel Marc Gerecht's brilliant essay in the Weekly Standard: With dictatorship giving way to democracy, Muslims of various stripes will make their best case to their brethren on why they should be given a chance to govern. The religious radicalization of the Muslim body politic, which has gained ground under autocracy, will likely lose speed, if not rapidly reverse itself. Young men who feel most acutely the injustices of their societies and have the testosterone-driven determination to do something about it will have broader personal experience and a wider range of political options than to embrace just the mosque, where Muslims have usually found brave and tenacious popular heroes when they could find them nowhere else. Let us be frank: For every Said Eddin Ibrahim, a courageous secular liberal who has seen the inside of Egypt's prisons, there are several religiously motivated dissidents who are willing to question President Mubarak's rule. Few of the Arab liberals and progressives one meets at conferences appear to have the intestinal fortitude of fundamentalists who are similarly opposed to their regimes. What we have seen happen in the Islamic Republic of Iran under clerical dictatorship--the conversion of the most anti-American holy-warrior society into the least anti-American, probably most pro-democratic culture in the region--will likely happen elsewhere but even more rapidly if Sunni fundamentalists are given a chance to gain power democratically and demonstrate to their fellow Muslims how their interpretation of the Holy Law and Islamic history will improve their lives. Correctly understood, anti-Americanism when it accompanies the loosening of political controls in the Middle East is a sign that the status quo that gave us bin Ladenism and 9/11--the perverse marriage of autocracy and Islamic extremism--is coming apart. Under dictatorship, Muslims cannot evolve politically. They will not be able to confront the "baggage" that all Middle Eastern Muslims have with the West, especially the United States, and come to a livable consensus on how they are going to absorb Western ideas, influence, and money. Even in Iran, where the bankruptcy of a virulently anti-American clerical dictatorship has done wonders for the democratic ethic and the prestige of the United States, a functioning democracy is probably the only way the Iranian people will find a sustainable, peaceful modus vivendi with their complicated love-hate for America. It is democracy, not dictatorship, that can best take Muslims through the difficult religious reformation that is well under way among both Shiites and Sunnis. (Correctly understood, bin Laden is an ugly expression of protest against the region's rot.)As bin Laden, on most days, will readily attest himself. Gerecht's thesis is not just one of thrashing optimism, or some blindfolded game of Pin the Tail on the Desirable Arab Revolution. If anything, the victory of Hamas in Palestine will bear it out as the months transpire: Will such madrasa-spun "liberation theorists" find life under Sharia law all that agreeable, or even less stifling than under Israeli occupation, which at least didn't impose dress codes on women, or ban literature, music and dancing as intrinsic threats against Jewish statehood? The canned and faux-weary response to a question like the one above -- to which I don't presume to have a clear answer -- is that if Hitler was electable in Germany in 1933, and if Germany was a highly advanced, civilized and industrial country, then what of the clever hopes of democracy expiring in such a shelled-out and wretched polity as that which currently resides in the West Bank or Gaza? Well, does anyone think that Hamas will succeed in destroying Israel, or that it has a better chance, ab initio, of doing so than fascism did of engulfing of all of Europe? Apart from vertiginous, these are also historically quickened times, in which a country like Afghanistan can see revitalization almost -- and here the telescopy of 20th-century modernism really is useful -- "overnight," and where Iraq can elect a Kurdish president with burnished Marxist credentials who is something of a hat trick of uncharacteristic good fortune for the region: secular, opposed to capital punishment (even of a man like Saddam Hussein) and already a decade-long participant in parliamentary democracy. Would such a prospect even be conceivable on September 12, 2001? We see already Hamas' recourse to pragmatism in its call for hudna, which, even as a shambolic overture to the shortest term peace or armistice with Israel, indicates an understanding that the hosannahs for messianic anarchism don't seem quite as persuasive once it is your own faction that retains control of the state -- and intends to keep it. This is by no means a warrant to play the fool or let down one's guard against what openly, and with usually less double-dealing than Western nightmare regimes used to get up to, advertises itself as an aggressive, totalitarian ideology. Yet now that such an ideology governs by popular decree, it has to be confronted at face value, and with as much self-assurance as possible. There is an old Czeslaw Miloz strophe which runs as follows: Learn to predict a fire with unerring precisionLet fundamentalism in Palestine entertain evidence of its being on the winning side of history for even half a second, and see where that leaves those who have traditionally be in thrall to fundamentalism only as the most convenient expression of the perpetual victim and underdog. (Let alone where that leaves moderates and progressives who have abominated it from day one.) The lessons of Iran are there for all to witness. Let Hamas burn its own house down and fulfill its own prediction. But pray don't give in to diffidence when it comes to those values and institutions which will necessarily emerge from the ashes. This is what qualifications about "offending" Muslim sensibilities or exacerbating anti-Americanism amount to: an unwitting pledge for Islamic reaction to hang on just a little while longer, as if growing older will make it more, not less, sedate. It already contains the seeds of its own undoing, and it is a Western, not to say global, responsibility to encourage their fruition whenever and wherever possible. In a way, I'm glad of the Danish cartoon irruption. It has shown just how easy it is for "a thousand new bin Ladens" to spring up, even temporarily, and without the presence of a single new American soldier stepping foot on Middle Eastern soil. Are we to tred so lightly from now on, then, that even our editors are to wear iron masks? And to what eventual end? Not tredding at all. --Michael Weiss [link] Want Ali Fries With That?... You can't draw Mohammed, but you can eat his floral arrangements.
Iranians love Danish pastries, but when they look for the flaky dessert at the bakery they now have to ask for "Roses of the Prophet Muhammad." Danish pastries, incidentally, weren't invented in Denmark, but in France. Similarly, French (freedom) fries reportedly originated in Belgium. Belgium has waffles, but what we call Belgian waffles are more like a waffle that originated in the Netherlands. The Dutch oven doesn't seem to be from the Netherlands, but from either the Pennsylvania Dutch. The Pennsylvania Dutch, of course, were from Germany. --Nic Duquette [link] Thursday, February 16, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Creepy Radical Chic... It was at a book party at a former Bush administration official's house last October that I ran into a comrade of mine from the Brookings Institution. Some usual chitchat -- Syrian defense minister committs "suicide" by shooting himself in the head eight times; George Galloway's impending OFF indictments, etc. -- and finally we hit upon the favored subject of these DC soirees: Congressional filth. Everyone by now knows the real definition of "santorum," as hurtled down the slipway by some enterprising reader of "Savage Love." But does anyone know what it's like to be guest editor of that erstwhile anal sex joke repository Wonkette and a policy wonk of Middle Eastern affairs at a major liberal think tank, discussing said definition in front of the good senator's chief of staff? I thought not. The look on that poor woman's face as she reached for a canape and frothingly introduced herself will be with me forever. The mere mention of her boss's name had her up-shifting into Hostile Mode in a way that no amount of sheet-staining sexual byproduct ever could do. Somewhere close to that skeevy mark is this aren't-I-hip letter to Dan Savage from The Economist editor Bill Emmott: Dear Dan Savage: I was flattered to hear that you and your readers had picked up our reference to santorum in The Economist, but I just wanted to disagree withor hope to disagree withyour reader who ventured that they were unusual in reading both Savage Love and The Economist. I hope very much they are not. Although nonreaders often think of us as a conservative magazine, we've actually always been socially highly liberal, whether on immigration, gay rights, or many other things, including favouring the legalization of drugs. The Economist was among the first mainstream publications, on either side of the Atlantic, to advocate legal recognition of gay partnerships when I ran a cover on the subject in 1996 and then another in 2004. Our readership is younger than that of other current-affairs or business publications, and I like to think that, like us writers, they are thoughtful, intelligent folk. But you were right: It is not only gay activists who use the term santorum in that way. Maybe being edited in London explains why we got that wrong. Bill Emmott, Editor--Michael Weiss [link] Brilliant... Harold Pinter can get a Nobel, why oh why can't they? RAMALLAH, WEST BANKAfter his militant Islamic party took the majority in Palestine's recent elections, Ismail Haniyeh called for a "giant summit with all living Israelis" Monday, rekindling international hopes for peace in the war-torn region. Enlarge ImageHamas Calls For 'Giant Summit' With All Israelis. Haniyeh characterized the one-day summit as "the final solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute," and invited every Jewish citizen of the world to attend. Haniyeh said he expects more than 5 million participants from Israel alone.--Michael Weiss [link] Close Gitmo?... The Guardian summarizes a new UN report which advocates making Guantanmo Bay go the way of Alcatraz: "After four years Guantαnamo has become a byword for abuse and an indictment of the US government's failure to uphold human rights in the 'war on terror'. The US authorities should immediately close down the camp and either release prisoners or bring them before proper courts on the US mainland. Manfred Nowak, who co-wrote today's report, said the US must now accept that international human rights law was applicable to Guantαnamo Bay. "Those persons are arbitrarily detained and therefore have to be released or brought to an independent court for being charged and convicted," he said, adding that combined interrogation techniques, explicitly authorised by the US defence secretary, amounted to degrading or inhuman treatment. He said in some cases it amounted to torture.Everyone by now has reached that point of awareness about Gitmo that proves Orwell's famous observation about nightmare imaginings of physical or psychological abuse being nowhere near the mark of real sadistic ingenuity. Even die-hard defenders of the administration more or less concede, "Yes, we torture," by their elisions and evasions and qualifications of things like the amount of time a man's head can be dunked under water before American civilization has officially regressed into barbarism. So what gives, then? Why is Gitmo still up and running? Not that I think we've quite reached such a hinge moment in our history, but it's worth remembering that chapter one of the French revolution involved the storming of a legendary prison complex, the idea of which had occupied a place in the public perception somewhere between Grimm fairy tale and cordoned off sliver of Inquisitional medievalism. Yet the Bastille, when it fell, housed only a handful of wretched occupants, all living not quite so terribly as had been thought. No matter. It was the mere symbolism of the place that quickened the revolutionary ferment of society, and its destruction at the hands of the people that redoubled the pace of such a ferment. Now while I don't see a kind of Bizarro Bay of Pigs (with our own government as principal target) being played out anytime soon, it's clear that Gitmo has developed a conscious taint that nothing short of its closure and preservation as relic of self-critical history can wash clean. (It's also clear that the condition of its present occupants could give the 18th century a run for its money.) The UN is right on this one. --Michael Weiss [link] C'est La Vie... For those of you who may have misplaced children or attempted regime change with inadequate personnel or body armour -- here's a treat, courtesy of the NYPD: As of last night, a helicopter and police officers had not yet found the dog on the 4,900-acre airport complex or in the adjoining marshland. The dog, whose full name is Bohem C'est La Vie but is also known as Vivy, disappeared around noon from the cargo area of Delta Air Lines as she was being loaded onto a flight to return to California with her owners.A helicopter and police officers: how many boys in blue do you think that pluralizing "s" represents? And all for a mutt that, judging by the name, must look like Will Farrell from Zoolander. Because if assholes don't get sniffed en masse at least once a year in a celebration of fur-trimmed eugenics*, the terrorists have already won. *This line is timestamped to expire upon publication of the "Savage Love" column that renders the Westminster version un-unique. --Michael Weiss [link] Wednesday, February 15, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Fighting One Cave-Dwelling Billionaire Vigilante with Another... For all the talk of multilateralism and America's image in the world, the truth is that Islamist terrorism can only be defeated by a superpower unilaterally taking matters into his own hands to break heads without respect for toothless community law enforcement. That's right: the Batman is going to fight the good fight.
[Frank] Miller proudly announced the title of his next Batman book, which he will write, draw and ink. Holy Terror, Batman! is no joke. And Miller doesn't hold back on the true purpose of the book, calling it "a piece of propoganda," where 'Batman kicks al Qaeda's ass." [...] The article makes Miller sound like the equidistant point on the line between Michael Chabon and Paul Wolfowitz, but Miller's previous work makes a compelling case that Holy Terror will be really fucking good. In addition to his most famous work, Sin City, Miller is the author of The Dark Knight Returns, which gave Batman back the black costume and brooding testicularity he'd been lacking since the Comics Code and Adam West turned Bruce Wayne into a cheerful pointy-eared eccentric with a garage full of "bat"-prefixed vehicles and ordnance. (Quick, to the Bathovercraft!) Miller is also indirectly responsible for the recent series of dark and improbable Batman films, but he can't be held responsible for that. I have high expectations for this book. --Nic Duquette [link] Tuesday, February 14, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Turkish Delight... Sam William Marshall is as pallid a character name for an American everyman as Graham Greene would have had howling nightmares about even thinking of using himself in even the most anti-American of "entertainments." And yet that hasn't stopped the glittering Zigfield-like follies of Turkish cinema from deploying it in Valley of the Wolves - Iraq, a record-breaking blockbuster action flick about a US commando who committs genocide, and a Jewish doctor who steals organs from helpless Iraqis and distributes them on the black markets (at least I think they're black markets; though why stop the verisimilitude there, really? perhaps the innards go up on eBay or line the shelves of K-Marts) in New York, London and Jerusalem. A few IMDB trivia points to bear in mind here: 1. The title suggests an ongoing "Valley of the Wolves" series, so we can next expect to see Bashar al-Assad portrayed as a Steven Seagal/Hard to Kill type ("I'm going to take you to the bank, Senator Coleman... To the Zionist blood bank.") 2. Sam William Marshall is played by Billy Zane, who professes to be a "pacifist," against "all kinds of war," yet is suspiciously silent about the collateral damage of grevious self-loathing idiocy for foreign pay. 3. Gary Busey plays the Hebraic kidney-thief, which must be both the role of a lifetime and not much of a challenge in demonstrating his paranoid range. The New York Times, as ever, takes the nutbags at face-value and doesn't bother to investigate beyond that: Outwardly, the two countries are committed partners in fighting terrorism. But Turkey has been fighting with Kurdish separatists seeking independence since the 1980's, and the United States, along with the European Union, lists the Kurdish Workers Party, known as the P.K.K., as a terrorist organization. With the invasion of Iraq, however, the United States military has been reluctant to act against the P.K.K., allowing them to operate freely in northern Iraq, which has distressed many Turks. "No matter how good our official relations are, the P.K.K. issue is a wall against all our bilateral efforts for the better," said Egemen Bagis, foreign policy adviser to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister. "Capture of the rebels by the American forces in Iraq would demolish this wall overnight, and cause U.S. popularity to surge."The P.K.K. has all but disarmed itself, with even its neo-Stalinist chief Abdullah Ocalan having been tried and imprisoned under conditions that would outbid Abu Ghraib at any auction of human rights violation, and having also toned down his rhetoric and called for a "peace offensive." This is how terrorists in Anakara perish. But what Turkish special forces are doing in Iraq -- on celluloid or on CNN -- in the first place is apparently beyond the scope of such a puff piece. --Michael Weiss [link] Saddam's Hunger Strike... It's cheap, it's effective, and it elides the death penalty, which the democratically elected president of Iraq opposes categorically anyway. I say, go for it, Saddam. ('Course, knowing him, he'll cheat with the odd NutterButter from Ramsey Clark.) --Michael Weiss [link] Islamic Sitcoms... I once found myself on the business end of a Fark Photoshop contest (no link available, not that I tried too hard to find one) for saying something ungallant about Mr. Rogers, who was the Dartmouth Commencement speaker for my graduating class. I still thought what they "did" to me was pretty funny and evident of technical wizardry, and now I'm glad I didn't take the cyber-skewering so hard:  And Now For Something Completely Different... John Banville's fine essay on Philip Larkin in the New York Review of Books. It's been almost a decade since Larkin was derogated by names easily forgotten -- Terry... Bird-something, wasn't it? -- and rescued by such worthies as Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens and (though he came to the struggle slightly later) Clive James. With the death of multiculturalism by fiat, and other assorted nightmares of the millennial hysteria, there has been a refreshing spate of good writing done on the best postwar poet, and one of the best twentieth-century poets, we were lucky enough to have: We do not judge Shakespeare's plays because he willed to Anne Hathaway his second-best bed, or Gesualdo's music because he murdered his wife. In time, when the dunces have been sent back to their corners, what will remain is the work. For all his careful posing as the homme moyen, Philip Larkin was a poet to the tips of his nerves. When the muse virtually deserted him in the mid-1970she wrote only a handful of poems after those collected in High Windows, published in 1974, although that handful included his final masterpiece, "Aubade"he made light of it, saying that he had lost the ability to write poems in the same way that he had lost his hair, but in reality he was devastated, and much of the pain and rage of his final decade is surely directly attributable to this loss. Probably no one in that dunces' corner appreciates the ghastliness of the predicament of an artistic genius who can no longer produce art. There was much ugliness in Philip Larkin's character, but what mattered most to him was beauty, and the making of beautiful objects. In this lay his greatness.You can imagine the terrain limpingly, though necessarily, retrod before this paragraph. Banville deftly shows how being a minor prick in one's private life does nothing to distract from being a major poet in the public or "canonic" perception. Larkin could get nasty with the best of them (and it pays to remember that "them" was representated by the remaining duo of the funniest, unholiest triumvirate of Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest). However, he knew enough not to let his toxicity get into what mattered, what he'd be leaving behind. Even his most cantankerous stuff is what he was young enough to appreciate as "inner-directed." True, there are some "clues" in the verses, the most eyebrow-raising of which I have not seen dealt with by gravedigger or defender. I shall never feel fully comfortable with the biographer of "Posterity": Jake Balokowsky, my biographer,It had to be Balokowsky, didn't it? And it had to be Tel Aviv, and - since "Theater" is spelled the way it is - a bleeding American, recalling Kingsley's line about sea to shining sea stuffed with "hick[s] or Jew[s]." Still, the joke's on Old Toad himself, who might just as easily have made "the money sign," and in fact did do, on innumerable occasions, to the great exasperation of his friends and lovers. (He was "psychopathically cheap," said Amis fils.) "One of those old-type, natural fouled-up guys" -- that alone is worth all of Eagleton's and Jardine's collective labors. Has any of us never spoken in such a way that he'd shudder at the very thought of being repeated elsewhere or in print? As Martin put it, we are all of us racist to some degree; our children will be less racist than we, and their children still less than they, and so on and so forth... Larkin's generation had nothing to do with political correctness, and it's perfectly fatuous to speak of him or his work in such terms, particularly -- and by way of exculpation -- by referring to either as "pre-PC." (This would be like saying pre-postmodern instead of just modern.) Larkin endures because he knew how, which is a lot harder than keeping the right opinions about everything. --Michael Weiss [link] Stupid Veep Tricks... Funnier than any of the shlock zingers engendered by Cheney's shotgunning of his friend would have been the sad looks of beamish expectancy on the faces of comedy writers yesterday morning. A sampling of what America has to tide you over with until The Onion comes out on Wednesday: Late Show with David Letterman, CBS Good news, ladies and gentlemen, we have finally located weapons of mass destruction: Its Dick Cheney. But here is the sad part before the trip Donald Rumsfeld had denied the guys request for body armor. We cant get Bin Laden, but we nailed a 78-year-old attorney. The guy who got gunned down, he is a Republican lawyer and a big Republican donor and fortunately the buck shot was deflected by wads of laundered cash. So hes fine. He took a little in the wallet. The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, NBC Although it is beautiful here in California, the weather back East has been atrocious. There was so much snow in Washington, D.C., Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fat guy thinking it was a polar bear. Thats the big story over the weekend. ... Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter, a 78-year-old lawyer. In fact, when people found out he shot a lawyer, his popularity is now at 92 percent. I think Cheney is starting to lose it. After he shot the guy he screamed, Anyone else want to call domestic wire tapping illegal? Dick Cheney is capitalizing on this for Valentines Day. Its the new Dick Cheney cologne. Its called Duck! The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Comedy Central Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a man during a quail hunt ... making 78-year-old Harry Whittington the first person shot by a sitting veep since Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, of course, [was] shot in a duel with Aaron Burr over issues of honor, integrity and political maneuvering. Whittington? Mistaken for a bird. Now, this story certainly has its humorous aspects. ... But it also raises a serious issue, one which I feel very strongly about. ... moms, dads, if youre watching right now, I cant emphasize this enough: Do not let your kids go on hunting trips with the vice president. I dont care what kind of lucrative contracts theyre trying to land, or energy regulations theyre trying to get lifted its just not worth it.--Michael Weiss [link] Iranian Jews... are opening their mouths about Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial. The chairman of Iran's Jewish Council has strongly criticised the country's hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for saying the Holocaust was a myth. In a letter to the president, Haroun Yashayaei said the leader's remarks had shocked the international community and caused fear in Iran's Jewish community.I don't recall seeing the memo authorizing Elder Yashayaei to issue any protest against the state before the coming of Gozer... What effect will this have on quarterly copper pricing? Anyone? Many Iranian brothers will know what it is to be roasted in the depths of the Slor for this outrage. --Michael Weiss [link] Hitch Defends BHL... A bit late, but with exact change: Yellow-dog Democrats like Keillor spend a lot of time whining about how America's standing in the world has declined of late, but this is how he treats a guest who spends half his time combating anti-Americanism in France. Simply because BHL mentions a fact that has actually caught other eyes (the tendency of Americans to become riotously fat) he is addressed like this: "Thanks pal. Thanks for coming. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. For your next book, tell us about those riots in France, the cars burning in the suburbs of Paris. What was all that about? Were fat people involved?" One moans for shame that such a vulgar jerk is thought of, and even known overseas, as some kind of national entertainer.Pretty much. I suffered a little dyspepsia too over Keillor's slack-jawed tribute to himself... Al Franken used to joke that his physical resemblance to the Prairie Home Grimm Troll was sadly confusing for the already overtaxed audiences of press club and correspondents dinners the Capitol over. The resemblance isn't just physical. At least some of the impulse to brandish his anti-xenophobia credentials must have come by way of Hitch's complete waste of time sharing a podium last Thursday with the collapsible parody Playthell Benjamin, a New York radio chat show host you've never heard of for good reason. Not only was the other guy late to a gig in his own fucking hometown, he spent the better part of the evening claiming to be black, proud and a real salt-of-the-earth type as against Hitch's swishy Balliol gentleman. Try cringing uninterrupted for 90 minutes for the people of Iraq, the advertised subject of the "debate." Poor Hitch. I love the guy, but he's got to start turning down some challenges. --Michael Weiss [link] I'm Just A Love Machine...  Monday, February 13, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Humorists' Prayers Answered... Not since Viagra has the stand-up material more easily written itself. You'll notice Saddam's "let's have a duel" chatter has quietened down a bit. --Michael Weiss [link] How Pathetic Are Red Sox Fans, Anyway?... Or at least, how pathetic is the Globe's sports page? I have four Fenway tickets for the second home game. I'm a fan. But this slide show of a truck is more photos than the Celtics would get if they won the NBA Championships. --Nic Duquette [link] Friday, February 10, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire They Sign My Checks, And So My Love Is Wholesale... Slate media critic Jack Shafer on the Bill O'Reilly/Nicholas Kristof contretemps: Plagued as he is with elephantiasis of the ego, Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly relishes attacks from the New York Times or any other A-list media. So, when New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof swiped Fox on Dec. 11 ($) for its many reports and commentaries on the alleged "war on Christmas," you could almost hear O'Reilly's psyche crack, its outer protective area slough off, and expand two days later as he evened the score by calling Kristof one of the "usual committed left-wing ideologues."That's up there with "Paris Hilton Sheds Skin In Central Park." --Michael Weiss [link] Thursday, February 9, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire West Coast Apparently Worth Attacking, Too... The president is picking up big headlines for asserting today that international police work foiled a plot to crash commercial jets into the tallest building in Los Angeles in 2003. This fact is being used to imply that the NSA warrantless wiretapping has provably helped national security, even though the wiretapping scandal is a legal issue, not a security issue, and even though he hasn't directly said that information from the program foiled the plot. Maybe my cynicism about this president has hit rock bottom, or maybe my head cold is making me cranky, but I am far from credulous about this 9/11 sequel plot, and the presidents' motives for revealing it. As a defense of policy, showing that egg-breaking led to an omelet is a good idea, but this looks more like a merengue. Even the president's staunchest defenders will admit that he and his team are masters at the game of politics. If a plot to crash into Los Angeles was foiled in 2003, why didn't he mention this as an October surprise in 2004, when he was on the verge of losing his job? Why hasn't he been trumpeting this success every chance he gets? Was the LA plot much farther from active planning than this news account suggests? Was there a national security reason not to mention this sooner? Doesn't KSM have any other ideas for mass murder on an indie budget? I am sorry for the parade of question marks, but with midterm elections, a lobbying scandal, and plummeting approval bearing down on the administration, this announcement strikes me as more cause for suspicion than rejoicing. (On the other hand, there haven't been any attacks in America since 9/11. Bush and his team surely deserve credit for that, although they could do much better.) --Nic Duquette [link] How Out Of Touch Is The New York Times?... The "Styles" editor is the mom of a friend, so I want to tread lightly, which, we learn from this editorial, there apparently is no longer any need to do: The baffling results came from a $415 million study of almost 49,000 women age 50 to 79 who were tracked for eight years, with repeated exhortations to the low-fat dieters to stick to the regimen. In findings announced this week, the almost 20,000 women on low-fat diets had essentially the same incidence of breast cancer, colorectal cancer, heart disease and stroke as the 29,000 women who followed their normal eating patterns. The results clearly surprised the investigators and may sound the death knell for the belief that reducing the percentage of total fat in the diet is important for health.Right -- because low-fat living is to ward off cancer and disease, not squeeze you into that size-6 two-piece for the beach... There are dietary potato chips on the market which refer to "anal leakage." Right on the package. What are their quarterly sales reports, do you think? NutraSweet products mention lab rats and cancer, yet the Sweet n' Low bins at Starbucks are always the ones that run out quickest. Prediction: now that we know wasting ailments are equally as likely with fewer fat grams, frozen yogurt, Olestrated crisps, etc. are going to do even better. Even if you consume more calories than make the low-fat regimen beneficial, the cancer will at least keep you thin. --Michael Weiss [link] All Over But The Rationalizin'... As the fires in the Danish embassies of Beirut and Damascus are reduced to smoldering reminders that freedom of speech is apparently a homicide pact in certain parts of the world, you can quite safely hold your breath before the sinister rationalization commences: "While I condemn the violent acts of... nevertheless offended ... readily sympathize with...even Voltaire... responsibility... let the healing begin." Enter Reza Aslan, an Iranian reformist and true believer, much more to the liking of those who might appreciate Azar Nafisi's Nabokovian Ring Cycles, but not her happy and acknowledged reliance on the occult Leo Strauss for living "as if" her native country weren't governed by illiterate fascist thugs demanding to be loved alone. No one doubts that the press should be free to satirize. But freedom of the press cannot excuse the promotion of noxious stereotypes. Jewish groups were furious when the Chicago Tribune published a cartoon in 2003 that portrayed a hunched and hooknosed Ariel Sharon salivating before a pile of money doled out to him by George W. Bush, ostensibly as an incentive to maintain the peace process. ("On second thought," the avaricious Sharon is depicted as saying, "the path to peace is looking brighter.") And rightly so. As international human rights law recognizes, in any democratic society freedom of the press must be properly balanced with civic responsibility, particularly at a time when the world seems to be engaged in a "war of ideology," to use President Bush's words. Extremist groups and some political leaders in the Arab and Muslim world are eager to exploit any opportunity to propagate their belief that Islam is under attack by the "West" and thus rally Muslims to their murderous cause. The cartoons were published months ago, in September 2005; the protests against them turned violent only after extremists began circulating fabricated and far more offensive cartoons of the prophet (for instance, Mohammed with a pig's snout), which were not part of the original Jyllands-Posten bunch. Until then, the protests had been mostly contained to Denmark and the Netherlands and had taken the form of a reasonably peaceful and highly effective economic boycott.Ah. As a matter of fact, I recall an even worse depiction of Ariel Sharon, daubed by a Jewish cartoonist who then went on to win the British Political Cartoon Society Award for his effort, which had the future founder of Kadima represented as Goya's Saturn devouring his own son. There was the usual back-and-forth about this gruesome recourse to ancient blood libel (although nowhere near as loud or omnipresent as the current kerfuffle, and mostly confined to cyberspace), along with the usual verbal hysterics about Kristallnacht reborn from the Anti-Defamation League and the American Zionist Organization. But you know what was conspicuously absent from this "row"? Fire bombings, deaths, jackboot-besotted Union Jacks, and invitations to the crude artist's beheading. Civic responsibility, then, seemed to be with the offended. Not so in the present circumstance, which has caused Aslan to make the fatal mistake of assuming that democratic society can or should have any truck with elements that view rioting and murder as legitimate "outlets" for their cultural grievances. Also, mark the cadences of willowy capitulation in Reslan's voice when he talks about the initial "reasonably peaceful" reaction that met with the Jyllands-Posten cartoons. And look who is called "extremist" in her vocabulary! So all it took was some unsubtle counter-protesting, with heightened caricatured scorn for Islam, to set those Danish and EU flags alight, and to materalize those placards which even less subtly declared holy war on all of Europe and those who don't hold Mohammed in particularly high esteem? These are not the hallmarks of a "democratic society" in which freedom of the press can afford to deploy muted shades of emphasis or anticipate public reaction to words and symbols. If cartoons can engender this sort of hideous behavior, anything will do. Of course, the sad irony is that the Muslims who have resorted to violence in response to this offense are merely reaffirming the stereotypes advanced by the cartoons. Likewise, the Europeans who point to the Muslim reaction as proof that, in the words of the popular Dutch blogger Mike Tidmus, "Islam probably has no place in Europe," have reaffirmed the stereotype of Europeans as aggressively anti-Islamic. It is this common attitude among Europeans that has led to the marginalization of Muslim communities there, which in turn has fed the isolationism and destructive behavior of European Muslims, which has then reinforced European prejudices against Islam. It is a Gordian knot that has become almost impossible to untangle.No, they're not and there's no such irony. The irony is to see educated and progressive Muslims like Aslan take to whimpering exculpation of his co-religionists' wounded feelings, if not their attendant acts of vengeance for them. I see no stereotype of Muslims, partly because I know for certain that there are underwhelmed and unimpressed readers of both the Koran and Jyllands-Posten who don't qualify for nightly news coverage. But I do see a stereotype of the Western graduate school curriculum (more noxious than any tenth-rate "Doonesbury") in the above paragraph: the use of the non-term "marginalization," the implicit talk of cycles of violence, as if Muslims and Europeans navigate some historical sine curve of mutual enmity, and as if individual minds can be defined by the lump of factitious category. Notice, too, how these categories contract or expand, depending upon who is angry over what feverish incident, or whom deserves blame for what latest folly of community. Muslim v. European, Jihad v. McWorld, Sunni v. Shiite, Sistani v. Sadr... Tribalism must be the most fluid phenomenon on the planet because even its dime-store sociologists can't keep their dichotomies straight any more. Do I equate some mouth-breathing member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo with a clean-shaven, punk-appreciating 18 year-old in Tehran? Of course not. Do even the lamest "stereotypes" hold up upon cursory inspection of these two distinct elements? Of course they don't. Islam has no place in Europe? With the flip of a switch, Turkey will be part of the European Union, and in fact, this highly tempting prospect is precisely what is making the necessary global mockery of the trial of Orhan Pamuk -- accused of similar pathetic "offenses" against his state, whose real 20th century history he dared to speak of in public -- and what is precipitating necessary reform in Ankara. So the Gordian knot miraculously becomes untangles the more and more Islamic sensibilities are ruffled and riled, while its Aslan's logic that is the most twisted and untraceable. Imagine that. Keep the Danish presses rolling. Solidarity with Denmark! --Michael Weiss [link] Page Six: The Magazine... Yup, I miss all the late-breaking headline shit on Wednesdays and Fridays. The good news is, the premier New York gossip sheet will retain its inimitable sense of humor ("Tom Wolfe, who is arguably the best living novelist," etc.) as it transitions into glossified, smudgeless toilet lit: We wanted to make sure no one mistook us for The New Yorker, Mr. Johnson said. We avoided stories jumping from page to page. I dont think theres anything more than two pages.I often mistake the two, to be honest. At first I thought the whole Abu Ghraib hype was about Cheb Mani's married bassist getting a blowjob from a groupie. Then came this whole torture and humiliation thing and I was like, what-ever. --Michael Weiss [link] What Would Jesus Drive?...  Evangelical Christians have been the most progressive when it comes to calling attention to genocide in Darfur, and stopping the spread of AIDS in Africa, and -- since we often forget that U2's "Gloria" was not about a girl of that name -- relieving third world debt. Now they're tackling environmental degradation. Unwanted fetuses, the end is nigh.
Despite opposition from some of their colleagues, 86 evangelical Christian leaders have decided to back a major initiative to fight global warming, saying "millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors." Among signers of the statement, which will be released in Washington on Wednesday, are the presidents of 39 evangelical colleges, leaders of aid groups and churches, like the Salvation Army, and pastors of megachurches, including Rick Warren, author of the best seller "The Purpose-Driven Life."The Purpose-Driven Life takes the carpool lane. Who knew? --Michael Weiss [link] Bush's Sermonizer... Presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson can turn a phrase -- "the soft bigotry of low expectations;" "the graveyard of history's discarded lies;" "axis of evil" -- as much for memorability as for controversy. Having the King James version emblazoned onto his frontal lobe helps: He said that the Sermons influence on his writing, and on Bushs thinking, is far more profound than its influence on mere policy. Bushs vision of democratic universalism owes much to Wilson, and Jefferson. But Gerson suggests that Bush is sure of his path because God is the God of justice. He even suggests that Bushs leadership styleand his oratorical ambitionsare informed by the example of Jesus. The ideal thats set out in the Book of Matthew is a high one, Gerson told me, and the Sermon on the Mount has played an extraordinarily challenging role in the history of the world. And you notice that it didnt have a realist, pragmatic understanding of what is possible. So maybe this is an attribute of leadership, to help imagine a different world.It's hard to snigger at this kind of thing when you remember that James Baldwin fused the New Testament, Baptist oratory and street-corner black slang with Henry James, and did so as "canonically" as anything that had preceded him; that Lincoln and Grant deployed the idea of Providence as a rhetorical flourish which made Unionist hairs stand at firmer attention than that to which either man paid religion or, as some have speculated, a belief in the Almighty at all. However, is it too much to ask that one day soon we'll have a graduate of the Darwinian school crafting soaring executive expressions, and ones that will have the added virtue of not being carried on the wings of bogus Bronze Age phantasms and mythical angels? --Michael Weiss [link] Sully's Point About Dante... The blogfather of us all writes, A reader wonders if the West will continue to be able to publish Dante: "In the discussion over Islam, cartoons, and religious intolerance, has anyone chimed in about Dante? Or have the fanatics already boarded buses and planes for Italy? In any case, in Canto 28, Page 237, line 30, Mohammed must spend eternity tearing himself apart, for that is his punishment in Hell. Consistent with medieval Christian thinking, in which the Muslim world was viewed as a hostile usurper, Dante depicts both Mohammed and his cousin and son-in-law Ali as sowers of religious divisiveness. Dante creates a vicious composite portrait of the two holy men, with Mohammed's body split from groin to chin and Ali's face cleft from top to bottom." Berlusconi needs to offer an apology, no? Or will the mobs now descend on Rome?Actually, this raises an interesting point about the double standards (and stupidity) of the cartoon kerfuffle: Edward Said mentions Dante's lousy real estate deal for Mohammed as a prime example of early Orientalism in the book that made famous that hermeneutic of Western condescension and fetishization of the East. Does Said's allusion rank with any newspaper's textual or visual reiteration of the offending Danish cartoons? If so, and in keeping with Andrew's thought-experiment, should his classic text also be considered fair game for the violent obloquy of Islamic fundamentalists? I'd love to hear the apologists -- who toss around "callous" and "understandable" like the beneficiaries of such terms do severed heads -- explain this one... --Michael Weiss [link] Death of the Feminine Mystique... And I'm not talking about the late Betty Friedan, but rather Scarlett Johannson, who bathed in the effulgent halo of old-fashined Hollywood glamour for roughly five weeks. The march of time: Match Point, November 2005:
 Elle, January 2006:
 Vanity Fair, yesterday:
 It took Ingrid Bergman longer than that to assemble a zygote. --Nic Duquette [link] Monday, February 6, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Like Harry Potter for Wonks... I thought USA Today was kidding:
One of the year's only-in-Washington events has arrived. People lined up in the cold outside the Government Printing Office several blocks from the Capitol to buy the massive four-volume budget documents, this year wrapped in a green and beige cover. That's going to cost you $264.00 for the complete set. You can pass it on to your grandkids! At least the 9/11 Commission report was a sleeper before it was a hit. --Nic Duquette [link] Irony Watch... A British Muslim who protested the insensitivity of the Danish cartoons by dressing as a suicide bomber has apologized for his insensitivity. "Omar Khayam, 22, from Bedford, 'wholeheartedly' apologised to the families of the 7 July bombings."
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night The Soft Fascism of Low Expectations... Is there anything more pathetic than the smoker who professes to be "glad" of the New York City smoking ban because it keeps his habit under control for him? This is the same poor specimen that will, in thirty years time, be claiming that his chemotherapy is a blessing is disguise because all the vomiting keeps him thinner than an Atkins regimen. Welcome to the depraved world of Bloombergia. Fasten your safety belts (no, seriously, it's the law.) On his weekly WABC-AM radio show yesterday, Bloomberg voiced support for placing devices atop taxis and private vehicles that would light up when motorists exceed the speed limit, making speeders easy prey for cops. He mentioned seeing such alarms in Singapore. "We all want the laws enforced. And when we have technology [that] can let us enforce the law and save us money in doing so, what's the argument against that?" Bloomberg mused...Mused. Bloomberg muses. Did you know he did that? I didn't know he did that. "What is clear is whether you like it or not, there is going to be more and more intrusion into your privacy," he said, citing cameras in the subways and cell phones that have the potential to track a user's whereabouts.Whether you like it or not. Who the hell does this guy think he's talking to? Adam Krug in Bend Sinister had a less of a rough go with a sniveling adult victim of bullying who thought the world was his matrix for vengeance. Gawker's on the mayor's case, too. --Michael Weiss [link] Malcolm In The Middle... The publishing world's haute gourmet mashing up phenomenological comfort food for the masses is the artist formerly known as Cannuck Reactionary. Malcolm Gladwell used to get a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty with the Mellon-Scaifies over at the American Spectator -- and I did mention he was best buddies with David Frum? Neither did Rachel Donadio: Gladwell, a self-described "right-winger" as a kid he had a poster of Ronald Reagan on his wall during college notes that his politics have changed over the years. When he was growing up, Canada was "essentially a socialist country" so "being a conservative was the kind of fun, radical thing to do," he said. "You couldn't outflank the orthodoxy on the left the way that people traditionally did when they wanted to be rebels. There was only room on the right." Now, he plays the flip side: "I hate to be this reductive, but an awful lot of my ideology, it's just Canadian. Canadians like small, modest things, right? We don't believe in boasting. We think the world is basically a good place. We're pretty optimistic. We think we ought to take care of each other," he said. "And it so happens that to be a Canadian in America is to seem quite radical."Being Canadian in America is to seem quite SNL cast member. Radical, did he say? I sense an imminent ideological transformation coming on, more in accordance with the non-controversial pragmatism that demarcates the thin red line separating $40K-a-pop speaking fees and life in a van down by the river. Am I right or am I right? "If I could vote (and I can't because I'm Canadian) I would vote Democrat. I am pro-choice and in favor of gay marriage. I believe in God. I think the war in Iraq is a terrible mistake. I am a big believer in free trade. I think, on balance, taxes in America particularly for rich people ought to be higher, not lower. I think smoking is a terrible problem and that cigarette manufacturers ought to be subjected to every possible social and political sanction. But I think that filing product liability lawsuits against cigarette manufacturers is absurd. I am opposed to the death penalty. I hate S.U.V.'s. I think many C.E.O.'s are overpaid. I think there is too much sex and violence on television."Well isn't that the picture of clean-cut respectability. Those pitbulls Malcolm defends take more chances than he does. --Michael Weiss [link] Way To Harsh On The Woman's Mellow... Isabelle Dinoire, the 38 year-old mother of two who received the world's first face transplant, is doing fine. Has that stopped the stare-and-point reportage on how she has "brave[d] the media glare," or how she speaks with "slurred" speech with her lower lip hanging "pendulously"? Naturellement pas. As the Onion would phrase it, "If I squint hard enough, my daughter looks beautiful." "I can see how courageous this woman is, and how she was able to gamble, to take a leap into the dark - a leap into the dark because the face transplant might have failed, and may still fail," he told BBC World. "The body may reject it. And she will have an increased risk of cancer as a result of it."Uh, thanks, Doc. Now doesn't this human feature story just eviscerate the notion that a textual rendering of a visual -- Mohammed with a bomb-turban, a post-op patient -- is better than the visual itself? --Michael Weiss [link] He's With Busey... Ever wonder how the state of Turkish cinema is these days? Neither did I -- until now. ISTANBUL (Reuters) - When he hears about the treatment of Turkish commandos detained by the U.S. military in Iraq, Polat Alemdar decides to take revenge to restore his country's honor. But on his quest, the intelligence agent encounters U.S. forces conducting a string of atrocities -- a massacre of wedding guests, the torture of prisoners and ethnic cleansing. Almost single-handedly he takes on America's military might. Alemdar is the hero of "Valley of the Wolves - Iraq," a new Turkish action film that capitalizes on a rise in anti-American sentiment in Turkey since the Iraq war and turns a spotlight on relations between the NATO allies. The two countries enjoy warm ties but many Turks are ambivalent about the United States, enjoying its culture and products while distrusting its foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. The movie, which has a Turkish record budget of $10 million, opens with a depiction of the real-life arrest of Turkish special forces officers in north Iraq in July 2003. The image of U.S. troops putting hoods over the commandos' heads stirred public anger and at the time Turkey's military chief condemned it as an attack on the nation's honor. One newspaper dubbed it the "Rambo Crisis." "This attack is not against us, it is against the Turkish nation," says one of the soldiers in the film's depiction of the incident, which occurred three months after Ankara refused the U.S. army permission to use Turkish soil for its Iraq invasion. American actor Billy Zane stars in the film as Alemdar's nemesis, a powerful U.S. intelligence agent who is determined to sow discord among Iraq's Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens. He said he was not worried by the film's anti-U.S. slant. "It was definitely slanted," he told reporters from his seat at the front of the cinema after the screening. But he added: "I'm a patriot. That's why I made this film." Gary Busey appears in the film as a Jewish-American doctor who carries out organ transplants on unwitting Iraqi casualties, sending the organs off to Israel and the United States.You know, I often say, if there's one country that can teach me about ethnic cleansing, it's Turkey. Gary Busey is perfectly cast, though probably not as his producers intended. And Billy Zane's career has been at a perpetual dead calm, so hey, it beats turning tricks at Sundance (again). --Michael Weiss [link] The Good, The Bad And The Ugly... The Good: The Danish cartoons have engendered at least one example of self-criticism. The Bad: It's at the BBC. That international perspective was also an important consideration for the news website, according to Steve Herrmann, editor of BBC News Interactive. "We recognised that among our users there is a wide range of different cultural sensitivities and that the images would cause genuine offence to some," he said. I believe we provided sufficient context for our users to be able to understand the story clearly Steve Herrmann Editor, BBC News Interactive "We described the cartoons in detail in our stories and provided links to the newspapers' websites so readers who chose to could find out more and see the cartoons for themselves. "Visually we showed a picture of a reader looking at one of the newspaper pages and linked to TV news reports in video which incorporated brief shots of the pages and the images on them. In doing all this, I believe we provided sufficient context for our users to be able to understand the story clearly." Mr Herrmann said it was also important not to exacerbate the controversy by publishing potentially offensive images, rather than simply reporting on it.What Mr Herrman might have said to more sympathetic ears was that he and his valuable media conglomerate don't wish to find themselves among the quarry of theo-fascist militants, especially in a country with a particularly plangent minority of them. Add another word to the Lexicon of Cartoon Row Bullshit: "exacerbate [v]: to take any journalistic measure which would leave one's ass precariously uncovered." The Ugly: While Anglo lower lips tremble over the question of whether to reprint or not to reprint, the BBC apparently has no problem showing these images of Islamic crazies torching the Danish embassy in Beirut. As a Voltairean democrat and atheist, I find these remarkably offensive, enough to send my laptop windmilling across the room. 
 All The News That's Fit To Reprint... From the Washington Post piece on Iran's referral to the Security Council: In the end, just three countries -- Syria, Cuba and Venezuela -- voted against the measure."So come brothers and sisters, for the struggle carries on..." Recent provocative remarks by Ahmadinejad -- including questioning the Holocaust, saying Israel should be "wiped off the map" and offering to transfer nuclear know-how to other Islamic countries -- have increased concern about Iran's intentions and raised the pressure for the IAEA board to demand tougher confidence-building measures.Now which words in that sentence would you italicize? --Michael Weiss [link] In Their Own Words... Heads of state and bureaucrats respond to the cartoon row. Know thine enemy. If it's just another Manic Monday and you're too busy to get through the full text of all of these, here's a tip for most of the Muslim countries: wherever "freedom of speech/opinion/expression" appears as a clearing of one's throat, ignore it. The meat of the message lies right behind it. As for our own puddy, pusillanimous boy genius Sean McCormack, Hitch makes a small meal of him at Slate. And note that Hamid Karzai's is the only sentence he has uttered since 2001 that would have been completely kosher in Kabul before that year. Clio, as ever, has the last laugh here: COPENHAGEN/ PRAGUE: Denmarks parliament on Thursday decided to send 200 more troops to the NATO-led international force in Afghanistan. The troops are to leave in May or June and will be based in Afghanistans troubled south, where NATO will take over peacekeeping from US forces. The parliament approved the move by 107 votes in favour to 10 against, with 62 members absent. NATO-member Denmark currently has 160 soldiers based in the Afghan capital Kabul.Yeah, thanks, Hamid. Without further ado: "So while we share the offense that Muslims have taken at these images, we at the same time vigorously defend the right of individuals to express points of view. Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images or any other religious belief... We have to remember and respect the deeply held beliefs of those who may be, who have different beliefs from us... But it is important that we also support the rights of individuals to express their freely held views." -- Sean McCormack, US State Department President Jacques Chirac released a statement today defending free speech but also appealing "to all to show the greatest spirit of responsibility, of respect and of good measure to avoid anything that could hurt other people's beliefs." "Freedom of opinion, expression and of the press, which we guarantee and respect, cannot be used as an excuse to insult sanctities, beliefs and religions."Sources: BBC, NYT, Pakistan Daily Times. --Michael Weiss [link] Friday, February 3, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Where The Hell Is Whit Stillman When You Need Him?...  The movie was called Barcelona, not Caracas, but some of the dialogue nonetheless seems serendipitous:
Ted: Maybe you'd like an analogy. Well, take... take these ants. In the U.S. view, a small group, or cadre, of fierce red ants have taken power and are oppressing the black ant majority. Now the stated U.S. policy is to aid those black ants opposing the red ants in hopes of restoring democracy, and to impede the red ants from assisting their red ant comrades in neighboring ant colonies.The same week in which John Negroponte spoke ominously of dictatorial power-consolidation in Venezuela, and Donald Rumsfeld spoke stupidly about what this reminded him of, and Cindy Sheehan -- well, held herself to the same level of intellectual and moral "authority" to which she has always done, Hugo Chavez expelled an American naval attache stationed in Caracas for being a "spy." No doubt a member of the notorious "AFL-CIA." Sorry if the seaman takes it personally. Ev-ree-body lim-bo. --Michael Weiss [link] You're Not Your Fucking Pokemon Lunchbox...  I've lost all powers of summation, so here it is unfiltered:
A 38-year-old bald "Star Wars" geek who called himself The Emperor formed a fight club on his Staten Island school bus - encouraging kids to descend into the dark side and beat their classmates, authorities said yesterday.A Pulitzer for "descend into the dark side," and another for the stone-faced earnestness with which it was written. The Sith Lord of the bus known as "the Death Cheese" will elsewhere in this Daily News piece be described as "stocky" and, by his own mother, "a working slob." His "Yoda-sized penis" is only speculative at this point. The wanna-be storm troopers pounded on weaker kids, dished out noogies and even cut up one another's clothing with scissors.All part of growing up. It feels like only yesterday I had my first noogie dished out to me by a willing subaltern of Liono, the Thunder Cat leader of the F line. --Michael Weiss [link] Thursday, February 2, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Another Entry In The "Least-Of-Their-Problems" Annals... Two boys in Zimbabwe were put in the pokey for wearing loincloths, apparently out of nostalgia for pre-colonial African wardrobe. This has yielded yet another cultural kerfuffle, in yet another a land with bigger nightmares to worry about -- namely, those involving its wretched dictator.  Fascist Arab-Baiter Walks In UK... The idea that sinister diatribes against racial or ethnic minorities can get you tossed in jail in England is not one that should be met with equanimity in this country, where a preoccupation with free speech often borders on kitsch. Especially in the wake of a scandalized Danish newspaper (which at least had the virtue of putting across necessary satires on a religion), nobody's tongue should be fettered by civil or criminal statue. However, Nick Griffin, the evocatively named leader of the British National Party (BNP) and heir apparent to the working-class brownshirt demagogy of Oswald Mosley, has been (temporarily) cleared of the crime of "race hatred," at least until he's retried for it in the coming months. A BBC reporter, posing a BNP recruit, caught Griffin on tape saying unsavory things about Britain's large Arab and Muslim immigrant population, which started the whole affair. Mr Griffin told reporters: "I was speaking the truth to an audience of decent working people in West Yorkshire who in some cases are facing terrible problems, including the grooming of their children by paedophiles." Amid cheers from supporters, he went on: "The prosecution could not get a conviction ... they failed because we are innocent of incitement to racial hated." He said he and his party did not hate any ethnic minority or asylum seeker who wanted to do the best for themselves. He said: "The people we hate are the politicians who have turned this society into a multiracial mess."All the tones of a bad-news budding fascist are in these quotations, from "decent working people" to "multiracial mess." But should such a person face a prison sentence for what was essentially "gotcha" tabletalk -- or for any tabletalk, for that matter? How's this for a non-litigious solution: Swap Griffin for Orhan Pamuk. The former more deserves Turkey, and the latter more deserves the sceptr'd isle, with or without silly speech laws in place. --Michael Weiss [link] Mr. Chomsky's Neighborhood... This is pretty funny. From Postmodern Haircut:
 Good For The BBC... According to Harry's Place (our very own Rosa Luxemblog: thank you, I'll be here all week) and The Scotsman, the BBC is planning to broadcast the Jyllands-Posten cartoons that have caused the usual jihadist hebephrenia and flag-burning throughout the Muslim world. Even though some butt-covering disclaimer about "context" is going to be tacked onto the broadcast, it's good of state-owned media to do its job and report the news, especially when uncomfortable imagery attends it. This comes right after another shabby rosetta was added to the Arc D'Capitulation in Paris when the brave editor of France Soir was sacked by the French-Egyptian owner of the paper. Kudos also to Wikipedia for keeping fuck-proof copies of the offending cartoons up. And since no one reads us anyway, I feel a surge of inner strength coming on: 
Puppies Full of Drugs... Like cuddly little pinatas of high.
Colombian drug dealers smuggled heroin into the United States by surgically implanting the powerful drug into puppies, the Drug Enforcement Administration said on Wednesday.The adorable mules:
Easily the most shocking example of cute drug-running since the National Zoo discovered that reproductive futility was caused by several kilos of intrauterine panda opium. --Nic Duquette [link] Pennsylvanian Rat Worshippers Indifferent About More Winter...  Punxsutawney Phil predicts six more weeks of a winter. Yeah, I'm not sweatin' it either.
According to the Groundhog Club, Phil has now seen his shadow 96 times, hasn't seen it 14 times and there are no records for nine years.Jesus H. Christ, how old is this fucking varmint? Somebody give him Andie MacDowell's number already and put him out of his misery. --Michael Weiss [link] Lindsay Lohan's Unintentional LiveJournal... Poor sexy guttersnipe. She lost her diary and it was returned with pages missing. According to Gawker and Velvet Rope Whore, the (unsubstantiated) contents of said pages include: - Lindsay had just taken a © [Lohan for blow?] and felt a little woozy. - She contemplates her needs and wants just like all of us pathetic slobs. But unlike us, she wonders whether or not she wants Jared Leto - There are issues with the former Jordan Catalanos, um, member being a bit too large; sex is suffering. - Lindsay likens the size conflict to the feeling of squeezing into tiny new Jimmy Choos. [Ed: I swear to fucking God]I'd say that the Jimmy Choo bit is a red flag daintily planted into a heaping pile of the stuff, but let's not forget how Paris Hilton entered Albert Brooks' elephantine younger brother into her misplaced Sidekick: Dave, Super--Michael Weiss [link] And Looks Not a Day Over 12...  While historians of music understandbly deplore Milos Forman's license-taking biopic Amadeus, one thing they're dead wrong to object to about that film was the emphasis placed on Mozart's permanent adolescence. No less of a figure than Benjamin Franklin once published collection of enlightened juvenalia called "Fart Proudly." There is nothing inappropriate about constantly reminding ourselves that we all once scratched our bellies on the same wet pond silt and are thus given to harmlessly base observations about other wet things, too. Philip Larkin, in his private life, was one prolonged case of toilet training gone awry. Byron was a regular cloaca-diver. Pushkin couldn't lay off the word "cunt" as a synecdoche for everything having to do with the fairer sex. Mozart wrote letters to his wife that included phrases like "shit trickling down your nose," etc. Good. It's a refreshing dose of idol-shattering for the rest of us because
Real greatness causes discomfort. You'd think it would make people feel better--you look up at someone's achievement and think, gee, the human condition isn't as hopeless as I suspected. But greatness is nervous-making. And it can be, in a way, depressing. Charles Gounod said, "Before Mozart, all my ambition turns to despair."Bill Kristol on the maestro's 250th birthday. For Bloom, Mozart's music was "an antidote to all the seductions of nihilism present in our world." Does Bloom here run the risk of trying to make Mozart's music edifying? Of course he knew that great music does not necessarily make its listeners better human beings. And he was aware that the leading nihilists of our age, the Nazi regime in Germany, tried to make a big production of the 150th anniversary of Mozart's death. But it didn't quite work. Mozart resists political appropriation.Interestingly enough, Amadeus was shot in Prague (cheaper than Vienna) during the wobblier days of Communism. Filming of one of the opera scenes was concluded on July 4, whereupon a giant US flag was unfurled on-stage -- behind where Figaro normally scrubbed floors and trilled his sturm und drang something awful -- for the benefit of the mainly American cast and crew. It was a yawning commonplace that the production was rife with Soviet and Czech secret police, who proceeded to make themselves obvious by being the only ones on set to fail to stand for the "Star-Spangled Banner." Just once, then, it was okay to "appropriate" Wolfgang for political purposes. --Michael Weiss [link] Paraphrase of the Day... From yet another BBC dispatch about this absurd cartoon row: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak warned that the decision by some European papers to publish the cartoons could encourage terrorists.Whereas the multi-part Egyptian televising of a series that gives credence to the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion encourages... what, exactly? Shall we say, harsher IDF retaliation against Palestinians? Keep the presses rolling and the sacrilege coming. --Michael Weiss [link] Some Improvement in Mosul... Iraqi police and military forces are growing more competent and disciplined, and violence is down. Still, the improvement is modest. The Washington Post:
While those who work regularly with Iraqi troops say their professionalism and skill have improved over the past several months, a joint U.S.-Iraqi mission into Mosul showed that the Iraqis still have a long way to go. After U.S. armored vehicles had sealed off the ends of a two-lane street in the Jamiilah Circle neighborhood, American troops fanned out with practiced speed, carefully sweeping the rooftops, windows and doorways on both sides of the road with the muzzles of their rifles. The Iraqis milled around in the middle of the street, chatting, while curious residents watched from the sidewalk. "We shouldn't be standing around like this," said 1st Lt. Devin Hammond, the leader of 1st Platoon, A Company of the 2-1 Infantry. He gently shepherded the Iraqi troops into a nearby courtyard. As the mission wore on, the Americans started to give their partners tips: Don't walk around with your rifle's safety off. When you're leaning back against a wall to check the other side of the street, leave a small space so your comrades can walk behind you instead of having to cross in front of your weapon. When you enter a house, check it for weapons before you strike up a long conversation with the owner. "We had to coach them a little bit, at the beginning," said Hammond, of Staunton, Va.--Michael Weiss [link] Wednesday, February 1, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Looking For Satire In The Muslim World... The BBC has a feature entitled, "In pictures: Cartoon outrage," ostensibly about the now-notorious Danish depictions of Mohammed in less-than-sacred caricatures... Too bad the BBC hasn't got the courage to reprint the causes of the original "outrage." Instead, there's a lame disclaimer posted under all ancillary links generated by any story about this overblown and ridiculous fracas, which disclaimer promises "The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites." Among the offending visuals is this relatively innocuous rendering.
Under the headline "We have the right to caricature God," a struggling French tabloid today reprinted all 12 of the cartoons first printed by Jyllands-Posten, a right-of-centre Danish broadsheet last September...C'est bien. Today we are all Bernard Henri-Levy. --Michael Weiss [link] Craig With The List... The guy who brought you the neverending Borgesian virtua-yardsale gets profiled, sort of, in New York magazine. Fucking hippies have all the luck. In the past few months, I and countless others in the mainstream media have awakened to the fact that something we thought was benign and even modestly beneficial, if we happened to have a room to rent or something to sell, was in fact a wild beast, loose in the orchards. Craigslist.org is changing everything. A simple and free online classified-ad service started by the gnomish Craig Newmark in San Francisco eleven years ago, Craigslist is (a) where young urban people conduct much of the traffic of their lives, including renting apartments, finding lost pets, and getting laid in the middle of the day, and is (b) thereby destroying classified revenues for big-city newspapers, which are already in crisis, and so it has become (c) the symbol of the transformation of the information industry. Rocked in a Bay Area cradle of left-wing values, Craigslist has built a huge national community by word of mouth. The site is free and without advertising (with the exception of help-wanted ads in three markets), and it gets more than 3 billion page views per month (10 million actual users a month), ranking it seventh on the Net, not so far behind Google and eBay. Starlet Suffering Chronic Peripeteia... Lindsay Lohan was apparently injured in what headlines are calling a "teacup accident," which first led me to believe she somehow crashed her convertible into the Disney World ride.
The 19-year-old "Mean Girls" star had 10 stitches to close a gash on her shin after she slipped on a set of stairs Friday. Lohan was released from the hospital later that day, the reports said.Okay, I see the stairs, the teacup, and the shin. Then what?
"She had just come out of the shower so she was still wet and had some lotion on...Stairs, teacup, shin, wet, naked oily starlet. Okay.
...and she completely flipped on the stairs since it was slippery. The teacup went flying, it was shattered, and one of the pieces cut Lindsay in her shin. It was an accident."So Lohan slipped because she was wet, and cut herself on a teacup that broke? She needed ten stitches from a teacup? Why was she in the shower if she had been cooking eggs? Why didn't she put some clothes on if she had her friends over? Were her friends cooking and brewing tea while Lohan showered? Does Lohan often walk around naked (or at least, with exposed, oily feet and shins) when her friends are over? This story sounds too bizarre -- it's right out of the "icicles known to kill people" file. I believe the lotion part, and that's about it. Give us the truth, Lohan!
Lohan is filming "Chapter 27," a film about John Lennon's killer, Mark David Chapman, also starring Jared Leto. The stormclouds of dramatic irony are gathering over Lindsay Lohan like nobody in my lifetime. Forecasts: 2008, a kinky sex scandal; 2010, lethal overdose on pills, which her publicist will insist Lohan thought were Good 'N Plentys; 2011, Elton John tribute. --Nic Duquette [link]
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