cheese it, the cops!

tom friedman on education is a sad sad thing. this column appears to argue for education that encourages creativity. but this turns out to be beautifully coherent with the standardized test regime which would appear to anyone with sense to be its opposite. thus, creativity and innovation in friedman's account arise from "mastering" more than one body of knowledge. sadly we know what this mastery is going to consist in. there is this odd little sentence:

Part of me said: “Gosh, wouldn’t it be nice to have a government that was so focused on innovation — instead of one that is basically anti-science.”

i wish parts of me said "gosh" rather than all chorusing together "fuck me in the ass and dump me in a ditch," but that is neither here nor there. "innovation" and "science" here appear to be used synonymously? at any rate, if you think you're encouraging creativity by the mechanical techniques of contemporary compulsory education, your own creative thinking appears, shall we say, stunted.

this is a kind of clever piece by david brooks; i like the "future history" form. but it is also a bizarre tribute to the glory of the nation-state as the hope of peace and stability, presenting the problem as "non-state actors." well, lord knows there are some pretty nasty little non-state actors out there. but without trying to elucidate once again the peaceful, stable history of the nation state, let me point out with regard to this particular situation that israel is a nation-state. iran is a nation-state. syria is a nation state. saudi arabia is a nation state. and the middle east was invaded and ripped apart by a nation state: us. the colonial powers that carved up the region were nation states. etc

today's #: "obnoxious," by immortal technique

there are many good arguments against the human species. but the very best is that we mourn our torturers. i've written about this from time to time.

truly these idiots in iran have got to go. yo let's have an academic conference and invite david duke.

pretty hilarious piece of youtube, courtesy of emma.

as close as i will come to autobiography .

today's #: "wine me up," by faron young

today's #: "chase the devil," by max romeo. produced by lee perry.

President Bush's Official Response to the Iraq Study Group Report

Executive Summary
Originally, I was going to respond to all 79 recommendations. But I have a headache. In general, my condition is grave and deteriorating.

(1) We have expended a tremendous amount of trudge and blather in Iraq. Failure is an option.
(2) Charles Graner would make a good Iraqi president.
(3) It has become obvious that the people of America are not prepared for democracy. This is a matter of their history, their culture, their religious fanaticism, and their sheer intransigent annoyingness.
(4) Thus, we may need to scale back our objectives, and appoint a "strong man," such as Katherine Harris, to take control of the American government.
(5) We should consider a partition of the country, separating the Dolts, the Cretins, and the Ass-Monkeys into enclaves.
(6) Hand me that bottle of Jack.
(7) We have come to the difficult conclusion that Christianity is false.  If it were true, God would have aided us in this righteous crusade. Damn you, God! We are returning to sheer animism.
(8) After the bad guys win in Iraq, we can deal with that fact by suspending the rights of average Americans.
(9) We are liars. We're still lying, right now.
(10) We ought to involve all the concerned parties - North Korea, for example, and Fiji - in the negotiations, without condition.
(11) Any comprehensive solution must solve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. This can best be accomplished through extreme, howling, continuous, arbitrary violence directed against non-combatants. Plus that will be amusing.
(12) Our policy must be based on hard-nosed "realism": for example, the paintings of Edward Hopper and the novels of Gustav Flaubert.
(13) Yo where did Putin score that polonium? Can I get me some?
(14) We still need an outpost of democracy in the Middle East, to inspire those backwards, uncivilized chumps to join the modern world, opening Wal-Mart Supercenters and buying K-Fed records. We might want to conquer Kuwait.
(15) Sorry for all the torture and shit. My bad.
(16) We might try "privatizing" Iraq, contracting the whole place to Latin American drug cartels. They're good at this kind of thing.
(17) Sorry about that trillion bucks of your money we spent. My bad.
(18) I just want to say to all the suckers who lost sons and daughters and brothers and sisters in Iraq: they died in a purposeless war prosecuted by brain-numb, blithering fools. And yet, I blame them for the fact that we lost.

from the archives: dick cheney is white.

i'm shocked to hear that the situation in iraq is grave and deteriorating. i wouldn't have believed it if james baker hadn't told me. but at least the report of the iraq study group will give me "political cover" to change my position, and propose a simultaneous increase and withdrawal of american forces, while moving toward and away from new diplomatic initiatives for its resolution.

trying again on music. below is "one trillion dollars" by anti-flag. let me know if you can hear it?

gates says u.s. not winning war in iraq. no american politician can resist the lure of the sheer banality, the insane tautology, or the tough admission of what is so breathtakingly obvious that nobody could possibly deny it. this allows these fucks to keep yapping while not incurring the risk of saying something, with which someone might then quibble. what irritates me is that people keep writing stories about what they said, as if they were thinking or drawing important conclusions, or formulating policies rather than merely flapping their flaccid gums.

here is a guide to cussing in quebecois, confirming what i've always said, that indecent speech is political speech. oh tabernbacle!

watcha readin, profcrispy?

path of the assassin, kazuo koike (script) and goseki kojima (art) (dark horse)
this brilliant work, by the same people who did lone wolf and cub, is appearing in english volume by volume (3 so far). it's the semi-historical tale of "the man who unified japan" in the 16th century (matsudaira motonubu) after a period of "warring states," and the ninja who "serves him in the dark," performing his dirty work, while also being his best friend and confidant. the study of the warlord himself, who starts as a geeky pre-teen, is stunning: a pudgy, ugly man of immense vulnerabilty and self-reflection who also turns out to be a tactical genius. the art as always is impressionistic, with great intensity and psychological expressiveness.

the ego and its own, max stirner (johann caspar schmidt, 1806-1856), trans. steven byington (cambridge)
i have always dismissed stirner on the basis of having read little pieces and on the basis of other people's condescension. even the editor of this edition, david leopold, is dismissive. stirner's egoism is indeed disturbing, or even repulsive, but it also yields tremendous leverage over the tradition and has a compelling quality that is itself disturbing to all received wisdom. the book is hard to deal with: a sprawling mass of material in which unbelievable insights are mixed with merely eccentric or psychotic moments. but it is also a signal achievement. for one thing a brilliant rejoinder to both hegel and marx. (stirner knew marx, who wrote a book attacking him). one thing that is striking: the tone is nietzche's, down to the stylistic eccentricities, and it would surprise me if nietzsche had not studied and been fundamentally influenced by the ego and its own, though i know of no evidence that this is the case. that stirner regards "classical liberalism" with its state worship and "humanism" as a direct outgrowth of christianity connects nietzsche's work directly with him. one should also connect stirner's "subjective" response to hegel with his close contemporary kierkegaard, and there is an "existential" element,  confronting you with your own selfhood amidst the insufferable onslaught of history. this is a good candidate for the most underrated work of philosophy ever written.

the deed of paksenarrion, elizabeth moon (baen fantasy)
this collects in one volume a gigantic fantasy trilogy that is incessantly blurbed in comparison to tolkien. though the world is peopled by elves, dwarves,  and orcs, there the comparison ends. it is episodic rather than epic, and depicts a young woman ( sort of joan of arc) who goes from sheepfarmer's daughter to "paladin of gird": a powerful  warrior-sorcerer and healer. what kept me fascinated was the details: first of a soldier's day-to-day life and training, and then of a set of religious experiences and the political realities within which they play. there was something amazingly compelling about the main character, "paks," not a genius or anything, but blessed with unadulterated decency and sincerity. i believed her somehow, as a human being and as a saint.

remember this?

the krauthammer says this today:

We are trying to bring democracy to Iraq in particular because a pro-Western government enjoying legitimacy and popular support would have been the most enduring means of securing our interests there.

this makes what has turned out to be a fundamental neocon error: identifying "democratic" and "pro-western." one place that this obviously breaks down is venezuela, where chavez will win an election - an election that will be pretty "free and fair" on sunday, by a landslide. the bush administration is just flummoxed by his popularity, and keeps referring to him as "totalitarian" or "anti-democratic," to the point of using that, implicitly, as an excuse to sponsor a coup; their rhetoric just leaves reality completely. but if chavez has problems, they're surely not that he won't be elected. and any inroads he's made on freedom are less dramatic than those of the bush administration itself, which has also certainly put the lie to the idea that democratic countries are peaceful countries etc etc.
but there is a refreshingly honest moment in the column, as well, when he admits the obvious:

If we really had been in the grip of "idealism," we'd be deep in Chad and Burma and Darfur.