cheese it, the cops!

david brooks says this, with regard to mccain:

Eventually good and honest candidates get rewarded no matter how badly outspent they are, no matter how few consultants they have.

i don't see how you could possibly draw this conclusion. i have a lot of respect for mccain. but he was killed by bush, who besmirched him with with filth, in 2000. when was the last time the dems nominated a "good and honest" candidate? i guess when they nominated bill bradley. or paul tsongas. sometimes our boy's faith in democracy takes on the quality of sheer hallucination.

you know what? this is pretty cool.

while i'm at it, i'd like to commend hamas for blowing the wall, and the egyptians for letting these poor saps buy some food.

you know, everyone is attacking the clintons for "injecting race into the campaign." but what's remarkable is how easy it was to inject race into the campaign; obviously it's still more central to people's identity all ways round than we might have thought or pretended. i think this needs to be faced squarely. it's not enough to say that race and gender are irrelevant to the campaign or something; they're irrelevant to nothing. this does n ot bode well for barack, but it also is an opening into a way of talking about this that doesn't just keep pushing this fiction of a country that has overcome race.

i love this notion that hillary is pissed off that barack says ronnie had ideas. hillary (like bill) wouldn't know an idea, or a conviction, or a philosophy, or a coherent point of view, or a vaguely interesting sentence, if it bit her on the ass. perhaps the very notion that there are such things as ideas and that people can have them is so alien and so threatening to her self-image that she just has to release the attack dogs. the clintons' politics is based on the opposite of ideas: holes in the intellect, absences, voids.

fuck! it's general butt naked.

check me in the latimes this morning.

be sure to celebrate mlk day with a random act of savage, senseless violence again this year.

paul krugman, still ragging reagan.
i'm no republican, but a couple of things.
in 1980, the unemployment rate  averaged 7.1%. in 1988,  5.5 (though it ballooned to 9 in the recession of 1982-3).
in 1980 the prime interest rate was 13.5%. in 1990, 8.1.
in 1980 the inflation rate was also 13.5%. in 1988, 4.08.

now of course there is much more to be said. and the favorite leftist measure of economics - the relation of the very rich to the rest of us - got worse. but if you don't think 13.5% interest and inflation rates affect average people adversely, you're losing it. and the comparative measures are indices of envy. worry about whether you yourself have enough. if you do, congratulate the rich on their success.

i guess what i don't understand about american politics is its amazing free flight from the world. lose a primary and the question is, how we gonna change the message? so romney in michigan suddenly became a wild "outsider" who will fight washington,, which is "broken." how will he fight washington? with "optimism instead of washington-style pessimism." the idea of mitt romney, establishment technocrat if ever there was one, as the barbarian outsider is just too funny. but the general point is that these people can turn on a dime and simply become someone else, then return etc. in the general election, if he's facing hillary, romney might become a woman, or possibly a hermaphrodite. facing obama, he'll be black enough: extreme ghetto. what's disturbing is that people don't just fall down laughing, that this revelation of the politician as an entirely empty husk or a blob that can take any form does not merely lead to total derision. that people can persuade anyone of anything in this way is just completely incomprehensible.

the great doyle lawson and quicksilver, explaining a funny experience.

 

Polls, Pols, Populations
By Crispin Sartwell

Here's a basic picture of how polling works. There is an antecedent set of facts known as public opinion. The pollster takes a representative slice and reports the nature of this opinion, like a rover on Mars clutching a sample of crust. The pollster is a scientist.
    But that is not the function of polling in the bizarre house of mirrors that encloses our politics.
    I am a political junkie, and so end up watching MSNBC, Fox, and CNN a lot these days. But the coverage, with a few exceptions, has been unbelievably repetitive, banal, and empty. Thousands of hours have been devoted to muttering the word "change," determining who the real "change agent" is, investigating how the voters' evident desire for change will affect the vote, querying campaign staffers about the relation of the candidate to the term, and so on.
    Really, once you narrow the thing down to a single word, you've subtracted all the content. You might pluck any word out of the dictionary with as much cogency. Who is candidate of hydrolysis? Who the candidate toponium? Who, of cheddar?
     Here's why we whittle the grand spectacle of human thought down to the single term. It is extremely pollable. To what extent do you agree with these statements: "America needs change" "Mitt Romney is a changent," etc. That's a lot easier than getting some poor schlub on the phone and trying to work through the details of Duncan Hunter's health care plan.
     Now, the people interpreting the polls swing into action. The Washington Post leads with the story that change is polling well and experience is falling. The campaigns have their own pollsters, and they too see the upward trend in change. The next day all the candidates appear on stage with big red, white, and blue signs that say "change, change, change." Even Mitt Romney.
     Duncan Hunter, in the spirit of his hero Salvador Dali, promises the immediate complete random change of everything, all at once. If elected, I will melt all the clocks and turn earth's atmosphere into a solid.
     All of this represents the relatively harmless hijinks of Americans, a fascinating primitive people. But now something bad happens: some people actually start to yearn for change and wonder about who best embodies it, if indeed it is possible to wonder about something that has no content. Pretty soon Candy Crowley sticks a mic in their face and asks them why they're here to see Hillary. Change! Change? Change.
    Now the polling has come full circle. The people want change (as shown by the polls). The politicians re-gear to put out their fresh new message: change. Then people see everyone talking about change on television. Then they sort of think they want change. Then they get polled about their attitude towards change.
    The simple way to put this is that polling and focus groups articulate or shape rather than represent public opinion. That's not primarily because polling changes peoples minds, but because the categories and questions and terms employ in polling end up shaping the debate through the media and the campaigns.
     That much is irritating, but not disastrous. Something has to shape the debate. But it's hard not to see that the giant woolly symbolic themes of this campaign have emerged largely as a matter of convenience for pollsters. We have tumbled, thereby, into the void. I can still hear John Edwards screaming as he falls, falls.
     In every election cycle over the last fifty years, the "scientific" "measurement" of "public opinion" has grown in intensity. It's hard to imagine how many polls by how many organizations the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire were subjected to, for instance.
    There are no real stories, and no real policies, there are only the tools of demographic analysis with their hideous limitations. The question isn't whether Hillary has got a good education plan; the question is "agree or disagree" with "education"? Strongly agree! So let's try to say 'education' all the time.
     At any rate, I have no solution to propose. It may be that, having narrowed down the governance of the supposedly free world to a single term, the pollsters have nowhere left to go: they can't just poll single consonants or blank sheets of paper, can they? Perhaps they'll add some more words.
    And my fellow Americans, I leave you with this: Cheddar. Cheddar we can believe in.

ok, back into the kristol.the public editor of the nyt, clark hoyt has a piece on the bill kristol hire. now first of all this piece irritates me with its inability to formulate a coherent opinion. yes or no? no. only yes. here's why he briefly says no:

On Fox News Sunday on June 25, 2006, Kristol said, “I think the attorney general has an absolute obligation to consider prosecution” of The New York Times for publishing an article that revealed a classified government program to sift the international banking transactions of thousands of Americans in a search for terrorists.

Publication of the article was controversial — my predecessor as public editor first supported it and then changed his mind — but Kristol’s leap to prosecution smacked of intimidation and disregard for both the First Amendment and the role of a free press in monitoring a government that has a long history of throwing the cloak of national security and classification over its activities. This is not a person I would have rewarded with a regular spot in front of arguably the most elite audience in the nation.

ok. deal with it. saying that a newspaper should be prosecuted is itself the expression of an opinion, not an act of censorship. i'm completely puzzled by the idea that this "smacks of intimidation." you mean bill kristol sounds angry enough to go on a shooting spree in the times newsroom? or maybe just that he'll make you look stupid. real stupid. and then there is pathetic pandering to the audience and the paper ("the most elite audience"). please, man. maybe we're complaining about the wrong guy; this hoyt column is incoherent, cowardly in its wishywashiness, and cloying. christ, get someone who can think and write sharply.

 

Got no dog in this fight but...

Hi, y'all. Crusader AXE here, occasional guest blogger from the Defeatists. I personally have no dog in this hunt, but find it something that Crispin would probably find enragingly amusing. The idea of not swearing in bars is intriguing -- in a lot of places you can't smoke in bars, so not swearing in bars sort of fits in with the puritanical-Mormon-Nanny-State ethos that the country is evolving toward. Next, they will turn off the big screen TVs because sports TV encourages yelling, cheering and betting in bars. Then they will forbid talking to strangers. The sole reason for going to bars will be to drink. Which will then be forbidden by the FDA because alcohol is addictive and a food. (C6-H12-O6). Commerce will be paralyzed and human life will become extinct, although ....Life is already not worth living...

well i'm as flummoxed as anyone by hillary. i guess one thing that is amazing about our political process is its insane hallofmirrors quality. like: she has to show them the real human being underneath the yackety smackety. ok: so right in the middle of the yackety smackety she chokes on it. a genuine moment! (well, what in the world could constitute a genuine moment?? no really, we're conceptually outside that, so that the idea that she could allow herself to portray herself as having a genuine moment is...a genuine moment.: or perhaps it is impossible for her to know how genuine the genuine moment was.) then  the infinite reflection on the media's coverage of itself etc. i bet, frankly, that the polling just wasn't right on some fundamental level: who says: look she choked up at a diner! it's hillary! i have never seen such superficial horseshit as the coverage out here. they're still saying change! but what kind of change??? one thing to entertain is that polling distorts polling; i can't imagine how heavily nh was polled, by how many organizations. after # 17 you might start giving some pretty punchy answers, or running, or just bitch-slapping the pollster, which might skew the results.

you know if you've never indexed a book, you ought to; it's fun. it's a whole hermeneutic dimension: you develop a reading of the work. (right now workin on against the state for suny. in my new little tiny house in the woods, beeches.) and listening to mad bluegrass (well, right now the kendalls: my baby's gone.) springtime in jan.

watching the media swoon for barack is unbelievable. it's your fucking jib not to swoon. good christ.

what i love about the idea, now evidently an obsession, that elections come down to a single word, is that it is an artifact of the means that are used to detect it. it's because "change" is easy to poll that polls poll it. it's because they poll it that "the media" gets this portrait of the electorate as wanting "change" or associating it with the candidacy of duncan hunter. then they report it, after which we do more polling, etc:  there is no surcease!

you know people have done an amazing squawk about the appointment of bill kristol  as a columnist for the nytimes. get over it. some idiot on the guardian said there were no liberal columnists in the times. huh? of course we'd all like to see, not to put too fine a point on it, ourselves on that page, and barring that, someone who agrees with ourselves totally. my argument would be for strange or fringey voices etc. why, i wonder? but the times conceives itself as dead center of the mainstream. on their own account they have to have central voices, speaking from the basic nodes of the ideological taxonomy. i think, first, that kristol is a reasonable selection: surely a lucid spokesman for a basic position in the spectrum, who writes well. actually, today's column was refreshing and reminds you how warm and fuzzy and non-partisan david brooks's "conservativism" is. do i think that bill kristol is wrong? of course. is he bizarrely and even dangerously enthusiastic for armed conflict? hey we all have our eccentricities, and the right approach is to grapple with the arguments. it's a needed voice on that page.

thus the guardian/observer

Infections from the debilitating norovirus stomach bug will peak this week as millions return to work after the holidays and spread the germs, the government has warned. People are advised to protect themselves by washing their hands thoroughly at all times.

on the other hand, if you're washing your hands "at all times" you may also end up hospitalized, though in a different ward. quite the damn dilemma.

last week i declared that as president, i would introduce a radical complete instant random transformation of everything. i described in detail my program to make earth's atmosphere into a solid, for example. i referred to myself as the true changent. however, recently in bimini, while i was campaigning in that state's primary, i met a young woman named dorothy small. "senator sartwell, i'm extremely rich and healthy and stuff," she told me. "i don't want everything to change!" like so many americans in this nightmare nation created by the special interests, dorothy was struggling. still she had those basic american values that hold us together: the interconvertibility of love and money, and the emotional abuse of innocent children, as if there were any innocent children. there and then, i vowed that i would cease to be the candidate of total heraclitean flux and instead pledge that as president i would, within the first 24 hours of the sartwell administration, convert the universe into a completely full invariant parmenidean sphere. some philosophy professors have said,  "governor sartwell, this represents at best the merest contradiction; introducing an entirely static universe by flip-flopping, you have undermined your own assertion that all change is an illusion!"  my fellow americans, assmonkeys, i say to you: eat me. and god bless america.

it's pretty amazing to reach your forties, having raised a bunch of children, pursued a career at least adequately to make a living, lived through the demons that claimed many people for death, settled in a big house on a hill, started gardening and feeding the birds, found heterosexual love etc to the point where life appears settled and in a way gloriously typical or nornative, and then to find your personality disintegrating, find yourself driving west with no destination listening to dwight yoakam's "thousand miles from nowhere," drinking mid-priced vodka and flopping in cheap hotels, spending christmas eve as the only guy in the theater watching "walk hard." over these joyous holidays i thought as seriously as i was able of simply driving on, trying to get i.d. in the name of a dead person somewhere in missouri or alberta, and pretending to be someone else so convincingly that i actually did become someone else. i took to referring to myself as "crispin sartwell," i.e. enclosing my name in scare quotes. there is one reason i came back and signed a lease and reacquainted myself with my family and my job: i am a coward.

let me give you a quick idea about what's wrong with the concept of intellectual property. consider the history of recorded music in jamaica. from the beginning, it was made by people with extremely limited resources. whenever they could, they used simple technologies to reduce costs, and often recycled their own and other people's rhythm tracks and ideas over and over again: the most popular riddims in jamaican music have been recycled dozens of times by singers, djs, dubmasters, sound systems - some of them for decades. and for decades, producers and artists were completely unconcerned about the whole concept of copyright; it was simply not a going notion that people owned sequences of notes and so on, and they could either be reproduced or literally grabbed and sampled.
this idea, first of all, helped create the atmosphere in a which an island of a couple of million people could revolutionize the world's music: you hear reggae and ska everywhere, all over the globe. and paradoxically it created incredibly rapid innovation and transformation: a new idea was instantly seized and transformed again and again and again. and it revolutionized the way the world made music: it provided the basic concept of hip hop, in which, for example, we sample chic's "good times," throwing down some poetry over it: the idea of assembling tracks from the history of recorded sound. the idea of popular music as it exists is impossible or would be utterly impoverished without this constant insouciant theft.
on the other hand, consider contemporary american pop music, like the teen preens or american idol schlock or pop country. this observes some legal definition of ownership in ideas about music: you use it, you pay, etc. so first off, the actual history of recorded sound is only available to those who can afford it: corporate entitites, essentially. and second the music is incredibly creatively challenged: without heart or guts: paradoxially (again) unbelievably formulaic and derivative.
i really do believe that the notion of intellectual property is nonsensical. but even if it's not, it's extremely, obviously counterproductive in terms of basic creativity or in terms of access to creation, in terms of originality and quality.

my love for you was the instrument you used to rip me to shreds. my rage is the only thing that kept me alive.

well punditry is a disease so here's a quick go. romney is in freefall. i say he's got no contituency and no center. he'll get crushed by mccain in nh; if ron paul did better than mitt in nh it wouldn't shock me. it'll be huckabee and mccain into feb 5. huckabee is a fiercely good politician, btw: i'm listening to him kill the victory speech right now. i think it'll end up being mccain, but huckabee is so much a more viable candidate than say pat robertson that it's not funny. and it is not impossible that he will be the next pres. rudy i think is not going to do that much, but i could be wrong about this. hill's fall is slower than mitt's, but it's a fall anyway and she too will get beat in nh and then flatline no matter how much money and expertise she's got onhand. it'll obviously be obama by this time next week, though i think edwards is liable to survive long enough to catch a little obama backlash.

watcha watchin profcrispy?
well last night had the great emma over to the new house in the woods, with her boyfriend jason. we watched the astounding the thief and the cobbler. in some ways it's probably the greatest feature-length animation ever produced, but what a tale. richard williams spent some 26 years on it. then lost the ownership of it. miramax put out a version a week before aladdin - which in some ways derived from it - was released, and on a budget of 24 million it grossed 300,000. and they seized the film, adding the voices of a bunch of movie stars to a picture that was conceived as mostly silent. they also added a series of songs that were as bad as the worst that ever appeared in a disney film. in the process of finishing the thing they sent the art to thailand, where it was lost. even with all of that, the visual imagination is stunning, abstract, various, utterly brilliant. someday somehow a decent version of this film has to be produced.

i guess the common wisdom (as expressed, for example, by that acme of common wisdom gail collins, who last said something provocative or surprising before she could actually talk) is that the iowa caucuses are undemocratic because...iowa is too white, only 15% participate, no secret ballot, etc. well. on grounds like these the quaker meeting is undemocratic, the new england town meeting etc. i think it's amazing and cool that a rural state participates in this through face to face actual democratic procedure. deal with it. or jack it up.

if i were calling now, iowa morning, i'd say that the nominees will be obama and mccain. i think the reps are gonna discover they've got nowhere else to turn. i'd rather be jumped and killed by bunnies than governed by that fucking android mitt romney.

ok here's bob herbert on the year 1968:

Rock ’n’ roll, drugs and long-haired young people who considered themselves hip were ubiquitous. But it was still a pretty innocent time. That would change.

i just want to point out that whether it's 1955, 1312, or 8003 BC, there are no innocent times. dude, it's suffering death racism war high tax rates natural disaster starvation throughout. throughout. this innocent time crap has to go. if you think there was less undeserved suffering in 67 than 68 or in 55 than in 35, i want to to show me. if innocence just means "everybody trusted the state" or something than i would simply say: no, of course not; we knew all along what that was. how not? anyway that would make innocence merely moronic enthusing for totalitarianism.