cheese it, the cops!

a circus of spies!

so i came away thinking that new orleans will survive. it may be that its spirit will even be intensified: it has always partied in the face of death. it's really truly fucked up, though, and the "federal response" hasn't gotten a bit more timely or efficient. hey if you want to see a lot more, read marion in salon. score.

we went to a party at a house on st. charles, and saw endymion and bacchus. janie was way way into it for a while, then got overwhelmed and retreated. we got all kinds of cool beads. i guess it's temporary or perverse: people are happy here. i'm happy here. this morning me and jane took a walk over to lake pontchartrain and watched the gulls and ducks. there were no cars on the street, no kids on the sortafuckedup playground. jack told me that this is the center of the universe and he wouldn't be anywhere else. i ntend to take a harmonica and a deck of cards and busk the quarter today. i spent a year making a living as a busker in the london underground, but i feel that this professor gig has made me fat and stupid.

so marion, jane, and i are staying with our friends jack and sue. the water stopped on their doorstep. they came back in january. anyway we went to a couple of parades this afternoon(toth, for one): jane caught necklaces and stuffed toys! the spirit was beautiful: so gentle and generous. marion is a maniac for loot: she started running toward the floats when we got a to a block away. or she's a maniac for this particular party.

this place is astonishing. you hear and see this stuff on tv or whatever, but nothing really prepares you for the miles of dark ruins that were neighborhoods, the piles of debris. you sort of turn easily to the survival and revival: the optimistic conclusion to the 3-minute piece. maybe so, but it's a long long way from here to there, and the human cost is astronomical and incurable. there's a bit of devastation tourism going on: we were in a little line of cars trolling by the breach in the 17th st canal. people stopped to take pictures of the cars up to their doors in mud etc. then on the other side we ate dinner at  a hopping r&o restaurant, where everybody was wearing beads and smiling at each other.

phat

yo i'm heading down to norlins today, and i'll be blogging mardi gras.

avrich

paul avrich, the great historian of anarchism, who did so much to keep that tradition alive, is dead:  "Every good person deep down is an anarchist,"

religion is fun!

without a belief in god, there is no purpose to human life, no morality. with religion, however, there are burning piles of corpses. "No Mohammad, Jesus Christ is Lord." or vice versa!

likvidatsia

liquidation

civil war

i think today's destruction of the golden mosque is likely to achieve what the insurgency evidently wants: a civil war. and i think that we're likely to find ourselves now embroiled in a less and less tenable situation, with retreat in failure in our future, and partition of the country the long-term strategy for peace. very quickly you're going to see large-scale reprisals, and you're not going to be able to tell whether the people directing these reprisals are the government of iraq.

theory of depiction

is it just me, or do you see a problem with the idea that a cartoon from 2006 is a "picture of" the prophet. get me? long ago in a doctoral dissertation far away i argued that certain relevant visual resemblances between picture and motif was required for the relation of pictorial representation to obtain. after all this history of iconoclasm and pictures of pictures of pictures,on what theory is the picture an image of mohammad?

challenge matching grants

the crisp foundation for entrepreneurship announces a new program: fatwah challenge matching grants. with regard to any cleric offering rewards for the death of novelists, cartoonists, editors etc, we'll match the offer if you match the death.

see, depicting the prophet violates your most fundamental beliefs. killing cartoonists violates mine. a symmetrical bloodletting is the only rational recourse.

The editor, Anna V. Smirnova, who is the owner's wife, faces charges of inciting religious animosity , a crime punishable by a maximum sentence of two to four years in prison.

VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Right-wing British historian David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison Monday after admitting to an Austrian court that he denied the Holocaust -- a crime  in the country where Hitler was born.

headbomb 2

ok. on feb 2 i posted the headbomb cartoon, and obviously this stuff is all over the net. i showed the headbomb cartoon to my political philosophy class, and i was surprised that none of them had seen the actual image. flemming rose, the danish editor, has an op-ed in today's washpost defending his decision to publish the material. no (?) mainstream american paper or magazine has published the cartoons, but a couple of student newspapers did, including the daily illini. in my opinion, publishing is right. first of all, the fact that x is an iconoclast has no tendency to show that i shouldn't produce and experience images. i actually sort of defended the taliban for blowing up buddhas, but i certainly would have defended any remaining afghan buddhists had they been drawing little buddhas. second, the "we respect islam" chorus has gotten a little ridiculous, and you don't have to be a monstrous neo-fascist or  brownshirt christian coulterian to realize that islam is a deeply problematic religion in many respects, not least of which is a history of violence, repression, and militarism. obviously i've said the same of christianity, so why would i hesitate here? commentary on this should be perfectly frank and free-wheeling: images are a completely legitimate means to crystallize that commentary. third, i agree with rose that our public disourse is far too constrained. banning "nigger" from the pages of a newspaper is no blow for racial justice, just an enforcement of the mere appearance of racial justice. "cocksucker" is a word that can be perfectly legitimately used to express political opinions: there mayu be no better word, and the fact that people put their little hands over their ears just shows you that some folks are iconoclasts while others are verboclasts. i admire what rose did, and i say: let us all join him and weather the response.

ttc

more chapters of my trans of the tao te ching are up: through 39.

Not a state anyone would ever expect to be in...

Crusader Mike is reasonably sure that no one had ever used the word "enthralled" about the head of a central bank before. Certainly, no one was ever so smitten with Alan Greenspan...except maybe Andrea Mitchell, and that makes you wonder what's up with that? It's kinda like Cher having the hots for Boris Yeltsin.... Anyway, we can tell that the bar is fairly low for rockstardom in the public policy arena.

"Bernanke displayed two marked contrasts to his predecessor: An ability to communicate in plain English and an unwillingness to tackle issues outside monetary policy. In some instances, he showed both at once.Asked if taxes were too high, he replied, "Compared to what?" Asked whether inequality should be considered when cutting taxes, he said, "These are value judgments. It's what people have elected you to do, and clearly it's your responsibility." 

Gerrkk. A talking head who tells congress to do its job? It's kinda like in high school, when as an aspiring guitarist, I just wanted to watch the band do its thing...I might want to sit and watch this guy...except I doubt that there's any hope of congress doing it's job well enough to have any of those bozos achieve rock stardom.

please

so seriously, the american left had better hop off the hunting accident. it's bullshit. like bob herbert: cheney needs to resign or whatever. that you go mad at a hunting accident just discredits you when you're opposing torture etc. get me? focus on what is important, eedjits.

what i'd like to know

maybe someone has already done this work? but one wonders about the ways that the bush administration is intertwined with fox, which then would amount to a pbs: a state broadcasting "service."  it's a wrong decision for cheney to give fox an exclusive first interview on the hunt, but obviously it helps ratings and has every competitor scrambling.  but exactly why does the admin want to serve those ends?

rolling the other way

on cheney. ok. dick cheney is a kind of looming threat to american democracy etc. but i think we better give him a pass on the hunting accident. unless you're positive that you could never fuck up in a bad way, with a car or a power tool if not a shotgun, you've got no room to be anything but sympathetic. just imagine that you just peppered your friend with birdshot: you'd spend the first few hours just going fuck fuck fuck much less calling ap. and there was actually no real urgency in getting the thing out publicly. and cheney's statement was just right. so...get over it and back to internment without trial, torture, cover-ups on the iraq invasion etc.

cheney in love triangle

so it's gonna turn out that this whittington dude has already been dead for 48 hours and dick cheney has disappeared. also that whit was doing lynn, "hunting quail."

things could always be worser

Gay Bishop in Treatment for Alcoholism

i'm powerless over ... o never mind.

book reports

one of the standard forms of the op-ed column is the book summary. it's a hard thing to write without being incredibly dull. george will is the best at the form. john tierney, though, truly sucks. he's passionless and his prose is flat as a pancake. and he's writing summaries of self-help books.

hunting bankers

so the question is whether shooting shotgunning your buddy  is as damaging to a political career as being photographed as you are attacked in a canoe by a rabbit.

rob me, baby

sweet.

DOMAINS
An Academic Retreat
Interview by EDWARD LEWINE
Photographs by BRIAN SMITH
Donna Shalala, president of the University of Miami and a former Clinton administration cabinet secretary, shares the official president's residence with her dog, Sweetie.

amazing! this is in today's nyt mag. i only wish that *i* had gotten this story first.

official form of suffering of the turin games

strange people dramatize the tragedy of tension headaches during the opening ceremonies at turin.

destroy

it is so breathtakingly obvious that this has to happen. also, that we need to blow some shit up.

eat me, alberto

i don't know whether you caught gonzales's performance before the judiciary committee on monday, but it was, as the nytimes points out this morning, shameful: a collage of lies and evasions, all heading toward totalitarian conclusions. truly the only reasonable response to the career of alberto gonzales is revulsion, and when i face god at the judgement i will have one ace in the hole. "i know, i know. but at least i'm not alberto gonzales."

this face will eventually grace the million dollar bill, y'all.

column

my creators column last week asserted that the u.s. has the same economic and politica;l system as china, more or less.