Robbing the library

I went out for a walk around the town today and stopped into the library where they were having a book sale. I bought these books:

Shakspere [sic] - Julius Caesar (1919)
H.W. Longfellow - Longfellow's Poems (no date of publication and I can't find it on the internet, but from other books advertised in the back, I figure circa 1900)
Charles Schultz - As You Like It, Charlie Brown
Aleksander I. Solshenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago
ibid - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Byron - Poetical Works
The NY Public Library Desk Reference
Daniel Defoe - Roxana
Edmund Morris - Theodore Rex (biography of Teddy Roosevelt)
Tom Wolfe - The Purple Decades
James Joyce - Ulysses
Hermann Hesse - Narcissus and Goldmund
John Berger - Ways of Seeing
Henry Nash Smith - Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
Graham Greene - The End of the Affair
Ernest Hemingway - Men Without Women
E.M. Forster - A Room With a View
Anna Boschetti - The Intellectual Enterprise
Ludwig Wittgenstein - On Certainty
James Fennimore Cooper - The Deerslayer
All Granada (a book of 150 beautiful pictures from Granada)
Photography (historical and instructional)

I paid $6 for the lot of them.

Happy Turkey Day

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I'm thankful for my loving family without whom I would be living on the street and eating banana peels. I'm thankful for my curiosity which makes unemployment more bearable. I'm thankful for public libraries and the internet which let anyone find out about anything. I'm thankful for having a life to live without having to worry about basic necessities like health, shelter, food, and love. I'm thankful for the country I live in and that we can change it for the better if we convince enough people we're right. I'm thankful for music. I'm thankful that young men like my little brother and I aren't forced to go to war. I'm thankful for our stupid dog and for my computer and for the people who listen to me on here and in the real world.

Please feel free to let me know what you're thankful for and don't feel like there's any pressure to say Joe's Ideas. Peace out, my people.

Privacy? Oh come on, you don't really want that.

If in fact you do, you should read the following.

GOP embarrassed by tax returns measure

Talking Points Memo

Bulland al-Haydari

Below are the first and last stanzas of a poem by the poet above. He was born in Baghdad to a Kurdish family and was active politically in exile. The poem reminds me of what is at stake in Iraq and that we must succeed. The kind of success I'm talking about seems to be getting further away, not closer. When I said something similar to a friend before the election, he said it was simply impossible that we would lose. Obviously this is true militarily, but a war fought in part to make the lives of its citizens better must do just that and if it doesn't is unsuccessful. People who call for patience are obligated to show that things are headed in a direction where patience would be justified. These weeks and months after the re-occupation of Fallujah will likely tell us a great deal about the wisdom of the present course and whether patience is justified. This poem talks about the absurd evil of Saddam killing his own people, but Iraqis are still killing Iraqis and we're killing them too. Lancet's estimate of 100,000 killed civilians may be too high. The Iraq Body Count project has high standards of proof and it number killed civilians between 14454 and 16604. That the military doesn't even attempt to count is shameful IMO because it says that the deaths of civilians is in operations is not up for consideration. The fact is, contra far left-wing commentators, that the military does consider civilian casualties, but the military, or more accurately its civilian policy-makers, seems oblivious to the disdain not keeping a body count implies. The importance of body counts to the citizens of a country is best demonstrated by the sanctity that the number 3,000 holds in this country. Keeping a civilian body count would open them to criticism about the price of the war, but not keeping one has the effect of adding to a building reputation of America as an inhumane power. Abu Ghraib was the biggest factor. The shooting of the unarmed insurgent/terrorist recently will also add to it. Being a humane power exacerbates the difficulty of certain aspects of the operation, but creating the impression that we are an inhumane power or worse being one in fact will have long-term effects that dwarf the difficulties created by humanity.

The City Ravaged by Silence
by Bulland al-Haydari
Translated by Hussein Kadhim and Christopher Merrill

Baghdad, that captive, forgotten
Between the corpse and the nail.

Baghdad was not besieged by the Persian army
Not seduced by a mare
Nor tempted by a hurricane nor touched by fire.

Baghdad died of a wound from within
From a blind silence that paralyzed the tongues of its children.

...

We will be executed in Baghdad's main square
With a signboard larger than Baghdad on both of our chests
(Understand . . . you may not be executed . . . understand . . .
you may be spared)
You are forbidden to read . . . to write
To talk . . . to cry . . . even to ask
What Baghdad means
What it means to be human or an animal
To be more than a stone forgotten in Baghdad
You are forbidden to be more than the two legs of a harlot
Or the two hands of a pimp.

Baghdad died of a wound inside us . . . of a wound within
From a blind silence that paralyzed the tongues of its children
Baghdad was ravaged by the silence
So that we have nothing in it, it has nothing in us . . . except death
And the corpse and the nail.

A couple of long essays

Those dastardly, conspiratorial neo-conservatives are at it again. Formulating ideas that seem really persuasive to me, that is. Robert Kagan delivered this lecture ominously entitled The Crisis of Legitimacy: America and the World. In it he outlines the conflict between liberal modernism which promotes the rights of the individual and Westphalian ideas of sovereignty. I have mentioned my less than reverential view of sovereignty in this space before. Sovereignty just doesn't seem to fit very well with my ideas of the responsibilities of a state which is illegitimate in my view when it actively ignores those responsibilities. My support for the Iraq war has roots in this idea among other considerations.

If you're in the mood for reading long essays today, I would recommend reading Democracy as a Universal Value by Amartya Sen. It's a good complement to the Kagan essay. It's a couple years old, but is a good defense of the universality of democracy, particularly in answer to critics who say that authoritarianism is necessary for stability and economic development as well as those who say that regional and cultural differences are not compatible with democracy. It is an essay so it's more an outline of his positions on those issues than a detailed argument. He also has a new essay in the NY Review of Books called Passage to China which I haven't read yet, but which I can heartily recommend based on what I have read by him. Even if you don't agree with everything he says, he's a great writer and his knowledge is impressively broad.

Quote of the Day

From the standpoint of sexual selection, the mind is best seen as a gaudy, over-powered home entertainment system, evolved to help our stone-age ancestors to attract, amuse, and bed each other.
-Denis Dutton

And, in the "Excuse me, is that a large vocabulary in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?" category:

As a telling example of the human self-created overabundance of mental capacity, consider vocabulary. Nonhuman primates have up to twenty distinct calls. The average human knows perhaps 60,000 words, learned at an average of ten to twenty a day up to age 18. As 98 per cent of daily speech uses only about 4,000 words, and no more than a couple of thousand words at most would have sufficed in the Pleistocene, the excess vocabulary is well explained by sexual selection theory as a fitness and general intelligence indicator. Miller points out that the correlate between body symmetry—a well-known fitness indicator—and intelligence is only about 20 per cent. Vocabulary size, on the other hand, is more strongly correlated to intelligence, which is why it is still used both in scientific testing and more generally by people automatically to gauge how clever a person is. Such an indicator is especially telling in courtship contexts. Indeed, extravagant, poetic use of language— including a large vocabulary and syntactic virtuosity—is associated worldwide with love, being a kind of cognitive foreplay. But it is also, he points out, something that can “give a panoramic view of someone’s personality, plans, hopes, fears, and ideals.” It would therefore have been an essential item in the inventory of mate selection criteria (Miller 2000).

I'm so proud

My younger sister, with her finger ever on the pulse of Young America, cleverly parses the categories of the MSN handle.

4. Deep thoughts. For example, "Death is the only race you don't want to finish first." But shouldn't it be "Life" since you never actually finish death...you're just dead?

5. Movie lines or song lyrics. I like the movie lines, they crack me up. And I've been guilty of the song lyrics a time or two...but really...who wants to talk to someone whose name is "WHAT'S COOLER THAN BEIN COOL, ICE COLD ALRIGHT ALRIGHT ALRIGHT ALRIGHT ALRIGHT"? Poor Outkast.

From U Wisc

Nextbook: Current Features

Nextbook: Current FeaturesAn interesting interview full of nuggets like the following which mentions the self-righteousness of European political criticism that I noted in a post a while back. "I think Europe ought to be much more directly responsible and helpful in world affairs, and much less moralizing and telling others how they ought and ought not to behave. Europe could have been a lot more helpful than it is in many, many troubled parts of the world." He also notes that there were attitudes and policies in place even before the Holocaust that abrogate a right to present-day self-righteousness.

My parents, my grandparents, they were not the people who drowned with the Titanic in the big, big catastrophe, no, they were the people who were thrown into the ocean in the dark, from the decks of the Titanic, while the dancing and the dining and the ball was still going on and everybody was happy. They never recovered from it.

In addition, Mr Oz tells how he deals with the transformation of the stomping grounds of his younger days into something unrecognizable which I wrote about in my second "Report from Riceville." He says:

I don't have the slightest problem with the fact that places change. The Kerem Avraham of my life is in my book, not where you have gone for a walk. It's in my memory, and it's in my descriptions, just like those shtetls in Eastern Europe where my parents came from. They no longer exist, and yet they do exist in the collective memories of those who came from there. So no, I am not going to lament the fact that my world is gone. It's not gone, it's elsewhere.

Coolness.

Via Viewropa: Graffiti animation.

Back

I had a good time hanging out with my brother's family, especially teaching my nephews some finer points of football. Everyone was down at my mom's for Thanksgiving this weekend because it's so hard to come out on top of every one of the holiday scheduling conflicts of the sisters-in-law. Yesterday I had a job interview. We'll see.

Via ALDaily is this article from its editor, Denis Dutton, reviewing a book about evolutionary psychology applied as literary theory. Interesting stuff. I wish I'd known of this kind of thinking before. I might have been very satisfied with my English studies.

Evolutionary psychology has typically over-emphasized mating (and courtship) as the focus of attention, and indeed fictional narrative universally deals with the trials of love. But Carroll thinks that all these life-period patterns must be kept in mind when discussing fiction. He does not accept that maximizing human reproductive potential is so vastly important in the scheme of human history. Sultans who sire hundreds of children, he remarks, are not typical of the human race. Much of what has taken human attention in evolutionary history is directed at bodily survival and at social maintenance: keeping yourself and your family well-fed and healthy, defending family and tribe, and making the tribe a stronger, more fit social unit. Inclusive fitness toward successful reproduction is the ultimate goal, but the lived fabric of daily human life brings many other purposes and ideas into play. Issues of social dissonance and cohesion, death and its meaning, as well as the challenges and adventures of youth that do not involve courtship, can also be expected to figure into the cognitive content of stories and art.
...
Now let us imagine that some clever neurophysiologist invents a drug or technology that can give you the emotion of the Brahms movement directly, without having to sit through the music itself. This might involve taking a pill, or attaching little wired pads to your temples. The Hanslickian claim is that such a procedure is unintelligible. It makes no sense because the intense emotional tone of the Brahms 4th is not something in your brain externally caused by the music, and therefore extrinsic to the music. The emotion is known only in experiencing that very piece of music, in the minutes that you experience it. The emotion is both individual and intrinsic to the experience of that individual musical work itself. Hanslick called such moments the experience of The Musically Beautiful, and his rather Kantian point is that we have them only in contemplating music. For Hanslick, as for a Kantian, music is not an aesthetic form that has an emotional content which might be delivered by some alternative, non-musical means.

Update: Also, if you found that as interesting as I did, read his entry, Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology, from The Oxford Handbook for Aesthetics.

The Report from Riceville-November 9, 2004-Demographic Dilemmas edition

Brain drain is a problem for Iowa. Most of the very top students either leave the state after high school to study elsewhere or after college never to return for much longer than it takes to eat a turkey or shoot off some fireworks. Lack of economic opportunity is at the bottom of it. The problem is magnified at the level of the small town. The engine of the small Iowa town is, in almost every case, farmers and the ag industry.

In most towns the story is one of traditional farming communities struggling against the pressures put on them from the modernizing urban centers which has been going on roughly since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Farming equipment developed with new technology is increasingly efficient and increasingly expensive. The incresed efficiency means that fewer people are needed to produce the same amount of agricultural goods resulting in a declining population. The increased expense means that only the wealthiest farmers are able to directly reap those gains in efficiency; only they can buy the more efficient machinery. This means that less wealthy farmers are increasingly at a competitive disadvantage and sooner or later they lose the farm to the bank or sell it to their more successful neighbor. This also puts downward pressure on population.

The population decline has a number of effects. The small town school is one of the first to feel them. Declining enrollment means declining money for teachers resulting in fewer of them and less competitive salaries to attract the best of them. Less competitive salaries can result in a situation where older, experienced (higher-paid) teachers are encouraged to retire early making room for recruits fresh from college who take the low salary, but leave after a few short years to market their experience to a better-funded school. Teachers do a great deal for the culture of small towns and losing them or having a new batch of them pass through every few years is harmful to establishing and fostering the kind of social and intellectual community that might be useful in retaining more of the brightest kids. Teachers are college-educated; their kids are more likely to go to college; with familial ties to the community, those kids are more likely to grow up and contribute to the growth of that community.

I could go on at length about some of the other economic and cultural tectonics that are occurring in rural Iowa in general, but this is the Report from Riceville so I’d better return that shining city on a hill. The interesting thing about Riceville is that, unlike other towns whose chief threat to their existence is the inability to adapt to the aforementioned pressure of modernity, Riceville must also adapt to the pressure of antiquity, counter-modernity in the form of an increasing Mennonite population beside an already existing Amish population.

Before I go any further I want to make perfectly clear that I mean to cast no aspersions on either the Mennonite or Amish communities. In my experience with them, members of both sects have been some of the most courteous, respectful and genuinely nice people I’ve come across. An Amish acquaintance of my dad’s visited him when he was sick and Mennonite carolers came and sang for him at Christmas time. My dad even took me once to a Mennonite church service when I was very young. Mennonites have been the most entrepreneurial people in Riceville in the last five years and could add a great deal to the town life.

Mennonites are, however, distinct and their self-segregation adds to the downward pressure on population among non-Mennonites. They will not attend the public school, but administer their own schools instead. Even when a farmer loses or is forced to sell his land the house is often occupied by someone who has or could have kids who would go to the public school whose centrality in the life of the town I touched on above. If a Mennonite were to buy the same tract of land he would also live in the house but would send his kids to the Mennonite school. It seems to me that the pressure on population from this phenomenon would be significantly smaller compared to those I talked about a few paragraphs ago, but many in Riceville see this as a big problem. (In a small town, unfortunately, this is more of a zero-sum game than elsewhere. That is, there is relatively little available property and few available businesses so when a Mennonite buys something it is seen as taken from the column of the traditional townspeople. In a larger market individual purchases would represent smaller portions of the whole pie and hence would not be as contentious.) The problem is not with the Mennonites as a group. My experience of them as nice people is typical. There is some resentment that they are buying a lot of land, but the problem is less with Mennonites (and Amish) coming into the town as with the ‘native’ culture dying. People in Riceville are worried that the town they know will cease to exist.

What Riceville needs of course are smart, entrepreneurial people to start businesses and create jobs. It does have some things going for it. A few years ago the school received a hefty bequest from an area farmer that gives students who enter agricultural, medical and technological fields a $2000 per year scholarship. This will probably increase since enrollment has declined in the four years since it was first disbursed. The school has also produced the Dinger ambassadorial duo and, most importantly, is perennially good at football.

The Report from Riceville-November 7, 2004-Maple Leaf Chili Cook-off edition

I’m spending a short week in Riceville with my brother and his family and in blogging hope to treat it as a bit of vacation from political topics. We’ll see how it goes. Watch out for sentimental and nostalgic writing that tends to the superficial. I may not be able to control myself outside the cynical world of politics.

Tonight my brother David and his family and I went to the Chili Cook-off at Maple Leaf Lutheran Church. My uncle, Dan, is the pastor there, having moved back to the area to be close to the rest of the family after his four kids graduated from high-school. Maple Leaf has been attracting some new and former attendees since his return and a bit more life in the church and a few more cars in the parking lot are helping the old country church continue to outlive half-century old pronouncements of its inevitable demise.

Recently there was discussion of building a new Maple Leaf Church. The proposal was to build a handicap accessible, one level church on the other side of the parsonage, currently part of a cornfield (The church truly is a country church, the parsonage being its only companion in the sea of soybeans, corn and grain.). This plan to build anew was taken up because the costs of installing an elevator in the current church were prohibitive, but was rejected after one of the members found a chair lift on auction for two-hundred dollars. Those against building a new church also argued that the church wouldn’t be around in twenty years anyway so it wasn’t any use building a new one. My brother said that the same argument was raised fifty years ago when the current building was remodeled. He seemed annoyed at the defeatism, saying that he would not be surprised at the church’s decline if the building was allowed to deteriorate without a replacement being built. There are similar attitudes regarding the eventual closing of the school and the death of the town. Beside those mourning the foregone conclusion of these eventualities are also those who are working toward avoiding them.

The Chili Cook-off was held in the basement of Maple Leaf. There are kitchen facilities on one end of the single room basement and young people from the youth group, the beneficiaries of the ten-dollar fee for entry of a dish in the competition and five-dollar fee for entry of a person through the door, served up a few spoonfuls of each of ten different varieties of chili via a tray full of miniature plastic cups. Also to be picked up for judging were a plate full of bite-size portions of twelve different desserts and another with four types of salad and yet another with five different breads because in truth this was not a one-front battle for the best chili, oh no, but rather a two-front war for tops in chili and dessert with additional minor skirmishes in the third world of breads and salads.

The chili itself was less diverse than I might have hoped with three of the ten barely differentiable from each other. My uncle Dan made his with lamb, which turned out to just not be quite the right meat for chili. Another’s makeup was literally ninety-five percent beef, but despite that promising constitution lacked flavor. Without knowing it was hers one of my nephews picked his mom's chili which made her pretty happy. In the end I cast my ballot for number ten, a spicy number with just the right consistency and tasty tomatoes, but not before I considered writing-in Ralph Nader.

Cuz Stone Cold says so

About Andrew McCarthy's review on NRO of Seymour Hersh's book Chain of Command:

As usual with partisan writers the adjectives and adverbs do most of the talking. McCarthy sarcastically describes Hersh's reporting as 'tireless,' General Taguba's report "which Hersh selectively praises" as 'aggressive' and former Secretary of Defense Schlesinger's probe as 'exhaustive.' Also, lest we remain unconvinced that the military and government are the paragons of objectivity and impartiality we are reassured that "the abuse is being vigorously prosecuted." These examples are culled from a single paragraph of the article.

McCarthy's liberal use of adjectives is not what bothers me about his article. Such style is found on either side with equal frequency. What bothers me is the claim that runs through the article, other articles defending Bush, as well as many public statements from the Bush administration and campaign in which something amounting to "cuz Stone Cold says so" serves as a refutation of criticism.

I would be the first to welcome a state of affairs when a politician's word was his bond and no more investigation was necessary. Even if such a state of affairs were achieved it would remain somewhat dubious as a mode of arguing to say that two plus two equals five because President Trustworthy said so. The final reckoning is always in the examination of whether or not five is in fact the sum of two and two.

McCarthy calls on the say-so of authorities that uniformly align with what he thinks while savaging Hersh for relying on the testimony of his own experts. Having dismissed unnamed sources by virtue of their anonymity, McCarthy dismisses all Hersh's named sources thus: " while the few sources he [Hersh] does identify tend to be conmen or the transparently agenda-driven." These agenda-driven people are excluded from offering analysis based on their association with the Democratic Party (Wes Clark), Human Rights Watch (Kenneth Roth), The New York Times (Anthony Lewis), and the UN (scott Ritter). Richard Clarke is disqualified because he wrote an election-year bestseller which must be mentioned because he isn't directly associated with any of the other associations which serve as shorthand for "people whose information we will use only if it supports our ideology." Hence "everyone in the world thought Saddam had weapons" can be used as a defense of invading Iraq while to cite the UN's estimates of civilian casualties in Iraq would be a mind-blowingly craven, irresolute, and moreover, liberal thing to do.

During the campaign such appeal to the say-so of the Bush administration was peddled as an answer to the draft question. The fact that people on both sides of the aisle were saying they didn't want to have a draft was never in question. What was in question was whether Bush administration policies would eventually create the need--which is quite different from the desire of politicians--for a draft. This was never explained. A draft is unlikely, but an explanation was in order to diffuse the fear of one, not a mere statement by George W. Bush, a uniter, not a divider.

A couple articles...

on the values debate.

David Brooks attacks the post-election conventional wisdom that "has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them." This broadens the condescension beyond intellectual snobbiness and I think it's well founded. The liberal line seems to be that we need to talk about poverty, the war in Iraq and health-care in moral terms and in so doing unmask the immorality of the so-called morals voters. Brooks says that the country is simply more conservative which is not the same thing as saying more religious. If so, and it would probably be a natural reaction to 9/11, the liberals have a great deal more work to do than reframing. That said, I'm not sure all this rending of garments is called for. Solutions such as building up institutions seem the most level-headed approach. Such institutions have value regardless the number of one's supporters. There are so many voter blocs within the majority the Republicans won that it would be stupid to go after just one of them, even if it is the biggest (though Paul Freedman debunks that idea here.)

Mick Hume resumes a line he has taken before (probably where I got the idea that ran through yesterday's post) and attacks what he sees as racism against 'white-trash.' This line is near to what I meant by the Britney Spears loving proletariat: "Those who pour public scorn on 'American idiots' are parading the latest version of the socialism of fools." He gets 'American Idiot' from the Green Day song. "The contemptuous tone of this campaign is captured by a song I keep hearing called American Idiot, by the punkish American band, Green Day: 'Don't want to be an American idiot/One nation controlled by the media/Information age of hysteria/I'm not part of a redneck agenda'." I'm going to a Green Day concert in Minneapolis on Friday. It should be fun. Also at spiked is this article, a review of a movie similar in tone to 'Super Size Me' and Michael Moore's stuff. "But the more political films could also be described as feel-good movies, in that they make viewers feel part of something greater than themselves. Instead of class-based solidarity, The Corporation offers the kind of shared consumer experience pioneered by the very corporations it attacks." I would actually argue that class does play a part in that the 'white-trash' class is what Moore lovers seek to define themselves against. One can belong to the same economic class as 'white-trash' and still disdain 'white-trash'. To define oneself out of the 'white-trash' class by adopting the liberal ideas that attack the 'white-trash' class is to attach oneself to the educated and higher economic classes. Everyone talks about Howard Dean as a wild-eyed liberal, but one thing he wanted to do was break down this condescension and bring 'guys with confederate flags on their pickups' into the party.

Moore condescension

Kevin Drum gets at one of the reasons that people in red states like Iowa vote for Republicans.The Washington Monthly

Now, needless to say, I don't agree with Wolfe that our sense of morality is "twisted," but I do agree that we probably lose a lot of support we don't need to lose because of a very real — and often dripping — condescension toward anyone we consider less enlightened than us.

...

In other words, they disagree with us, but not so much that they can't be brought around or persuaded to vote for us based on other issues. Too often, though, a visceral loathing of being lectured at by city folks wins out and they end up marking their ballots for people like George Bush.

There are a lot of Democrats and liberals who seem completely perplexed that lower-income voters vote 'against their self-interest' i.e. for the Republicans. A guy named Thomas Frank has written a book to this effect called What's the Matter with Kansas?. I haven't read it yet. This elitism has a lot to do with it I think.

Michael Moore plays the part of populist, but in fact much of his vitriol is directly or indirectly aimed at lower middle-class people who disagree with him. He condemns corporations, but also the ignorant people ignorant who keep buying their products despite his revelations of their misdeeds. They are the pre-occupied proletariat who can't hear the calls of revolution because they are listening to Britney Spears.

In Bowling for Columbine, for example, the corporate targets are the gun industry, the NRA and K-Mart. The indirect targets are people who own guns and belong to the NRA. These people, through Charlton Heston, are portrayed as callous bastards who have no empathy for young victims of violence. The conventional wisdom is that people who belong to the NRA are the same kinds of people who go to church every Sunday and vote for Republicans. [sidenote: I would like to find some statistics on gun crime among NRA members. If you know where I could find some, do let me know.]

Moore aims to condemn both corporations and their working-class, non-Democratic customers. In the same way, the condescension that Kevin Drum describes is not only aimed at people who eat at McDonald’s and shop at Wal-Mart, but also against those corporations. One of the roots, IMHO, is in academia with everyone from Anthropology to Chemistry departments and students not even bothering to mask their contempt of the Business department and students (There are certain departments like Political Science and occasionally Economics which seem to be slightly more friendly to the Business department.). It is not surprising then, that business people and working-class people find themselves on the same side.

Will Wilkinson, also an Iowa boy, has been intelligently discussing the same thing from a libertarian perspective for the past few days.

Darfur Increasingly Unstable, U.N. Envoy Warns (washingtonpost.com)

Darfur Increasingly Unstable, U.N. Envoy Warns (washingtonpost.com)

Pronk said that the Sudanese government is losing control of the Arab militias it equipped and recruited last year to counter black rebel forces and their kin, and that the militias have killed thousands and forced more than 1.8 million from their homes. But he blamed the rebel Sudanese Liberation Army for stirring up the latest round of violence by stepping up attacks against local police and robbing Arab traders of their camels, which are vital to Arab tribes. 'They are provoking the militia to attack,' he said in an interview after the meeting.
Pronk appealed to the 15-nation council to increase pressure on Khartoum and Darfur's rebels to strike a political deal ending the violence at a rare council meeting in Nairobi scheduled for Nov. 18-19. The meeting is being organized by John C. Danforth, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to encourage Khartoum to sign an agreement with a separate rebel force it has been battling in another part of Sudan for more than two decades. Danforth hopes that such an accord will help lead to a peace deal in Darfur.
Pronk said that although the links between Sudanese authorities and the militias are becoming "blurred," Sudan's military has incorporated police and Janjaweed militias into its operations in Darfur. African Union monitors are also investigating reports that Sudan bombed villages with attack helicopters in violation of commitments that the government has made to the United Nations.

Politics as High School Pep Rally

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Two Nations Under God: "The election results reaffirmed that. Despite an utterly incompetent war performance in Iraq and a stagnant economy, Mr. Bush held onto the same basic core of states that he won four years ago - as if nothing had happened. It seemed as if people were not voting on his performance. It seemed as if they were voting for what team they were on."

Calling Woodstein

QaQaa update: LA Times--Soldiers Describe Looting of Explosives

The U.S. troops said there was little they could do to prevent looting of the ammunition site, 30 miles south of Baghdad.

"We were running from one side of the compound to the other side, trying to kick people out," said one senior noncommissioned officer who was at the site in late April 2003.

"On our last day there, there were at least 100 vehicles waiting at the site for us to leave" so looters could come in and take munitions.

"It was complete chaos. It was looting like L.A. during the Rodney King riots," another officer said.

He and other soldiers who spoke to The Times asked not to be named, saying they feared retaliation from the Pentagon.
...
"We couldn't have been given the assignment to defend a facility unless we were given the troops to do it, and we weren't," said one National Guard officer. "[Objective] Elm being protected or not protected was not really part of the equation. It wasn't an area of immediate concern."
...
During the same period, Marines came across another massive ammunition depot near the southern Iraqi town of Diwaniya, the senior officer said. They sent a message to the U.S. headquarters in Baghdad seeking guidance on how to keep the site from being plundered.

Commanders in Baghdad responded that the Marines should attempt to blow up the depot. The Marine officers responded that the site was too large to demolish.

Commanders in Baghdad "didn't have a good response to that," the officer said. "There was no plan to prevent these weapons from being used against us a year later."

Wednesday Night at the Movies

In the spirit of past two-term Republican Presidents, I'm consoling myself by watching All the President's Men tonight.

Amen.

Amy Sullivan at Washington Monthly:

I gotta say, it doesn't help much when exit polls and sloppy reporting use terms like "moral values" and "moral issues" as shorthand for very narrow, divisive issues like abortion and gay marriage, feeding into twenty years of Republican rhetoric. Opposition to the war in Iraq is a moral issue. The alleviation of poverty is a moral issue. Concern about abortion is a moral value, yes, but you can stay at the level of empty rhetoric about a "culture of life" or you can talk about how to actually reduce abortion rates, which is what most people care about more. (Did you hear once during this election season that abortion rates have risen under W. after they fell dramatically during Clinton's eight years in office?)

"Religious" does not mean Republican. And "moral" does not been conservative. There's going to be a lot of discussion about all of this over the coming weeks and months, and it's incredibly important to make sure we're neither sloppy about our terms nor overly broad in how we characterize "the faithful."

One of my friends (you can read his blog which is to the right under Friends' blogs) is a youth pastor and he voted for Nader. We've been having some discussions about the religious right and their interesting relationship to morality. If we come up with something useful I'll share it.

Shock and awe

It's tough to know what to say. I have nothing useful to add at this point.

As a baby's bottom

I voted with my mom and sister this morning and it couldn't have been more smooth. Most everyone knew each other so when one of the election officials said to a guy, "Hey, you're at the wrong polling place." everyone just laughed. Ah, sometimes it's nice to live in Normal Rockwell America.

Free lunch

Via Viewropa:

Par Blog: The current edition of Restaurant Magazine has an article on a restaurant in the suburbs of London where there are no prices on the menu. Customers pay what they think the meal was worth. It is called Just Around the Corner and has been around for 17 years. From what I saw when I went to help photograph it for the magazine, it serves old fashioned French food of an average standard (soup, chicken supreme, profiteroles...).

When people don't pay what the owner thinks appropriate (about £20 a head) We just thank them nicely and give them their money back. These people know they don't belong here, they try you out and by giving them their money back nicely, you ensure that they never return.

I would like to see what a population of free-riding college students would do to this interesting arrangement. For my London readers the address is 446 Finchley Road and the name of the restaurant is Just Around the Corner. Enjoy.