cheese it, the cops!

it's always time to worry about this, but i might get concerned that israel is about the launch on iran. here's a press release from the israel project, which offhand seems to be the pr operation of the mossad. actually, the tone of this is colin powell building a justification for war at the u.n. suddenly the time frame on iran getting nuclear weapons collapsed, and you have to wonder where the intelligence is coming from. 

of course, i can see that the israelis might feel an kind of absolute obligation to see that iran doesn't have nuclear weapons, especially while ahmadinejad remains in power with his "wipe them off the map" inyourface threats. that's not to say that the ramifications of an israeli attack might not be disastrous.

one thing that something like this - a major international crisis, world on the brink, etc. - will do is change the face of american politics. if you're thinking that the obama presidency will be decided for history on health care, you might think again.

actually i'd launch tonight while obama yaps.

when my daughter jane (9) puts together her rock band, we're gonna call it "ultra-concentrated joy" after the dishwashing liquid (which we also use to produce giant bubbles). she just read it out one day while i was doing the dishes and we were all like: yeah! it's hard to imagine anyone in wal-mart bypassing ultra-concentrated joy and buying something else.

great moments in advertising: "we are miracle whip, and we will not tone it down."

as you know, i take thomas friedman to be a pre-eminent advocate of what i have called squishy totalitarianism, which marries economy and state into an unstoppable military/money juggernaut, and which the u.s. and china are approaching in different directions. in case you think that's too rough, check this column, showing you what's wrong with democracy in friedman-world, where you've got to control populations through education, and every aspect of economic activity to deal with global warming, etc. but he seems to be losing all focus and just kind of wanders away as column goes on.

yall ever watch glen beck? it's pretty amazing: he rants for his solid hour every day. now: "the left will try to destroy me." then "i'm a recovering alcoholic." then right back to the death of the constitution and the blackboard diagram of obama's radical associates, then free association among images: he's obsessed with seals and communist/nazi symbolism. anyway: the shit is intense.

richard cohen gives one of the few actually thoughtful treatments of a rich theme: the role of revenge in, let's say, international affairs.  it's there. and when people say it's not - when, for example, they try to draw some hard-and-fast distinction between vengeance and justice - and portray themselves as advocates of the latter and not the former - they lurch into extremely palpable dishonesty. "justice" in a criminal or war-type sense, is a slightly rationalized or systematized or delegated revenge, and by the same token, the sense for revenge harbors within it a feeling of a universe that rests on a balance which, disturbed, ought to be restored.

randi weingarten of the american federation of teachers on morning joe, apropos of obama yapping at children: "we need role models to tell students to stay in school and show them what they can make of their lives." really? we do? you can't swing a cudgel in america without hitting a role model. you can't melt the polar ice caps and flood the coasts without drowning them by the millions. if everybody muttering the same form of words in unson could transform difficult lives, we would all long ago have been redeemed. what we need is another billion organic playback devices saying the same thing in the same words, so that children can parrot those words back at us until there is nothing left in our inner lives. the only choices anyone has are between hypocrisy and complete mindless emptiness. when i grow up, i want to be a cliche.

the idea of unleashing corporate $$$ into political campaigns is perhaps disturbing, but e.j. dionne's argument strikes me as odd, especially for a pundit. the only argument is that the precedent is well-established. perhaps it is. but i doubt that dionne argues for rigid adherence to precedents that he himself opposes, which would be incompatible with the argument he gives here, which apears to take slavish observance of precedent as the only standard of constitutionality. i think we all can envision circumstances in which a series of precedents ought to be overturned, or in which the whole kit and caboodle seems obviously unconstitutional.

now i am personally conflicted about campaign finance regulation. i see the point of many (george will, for example, has been obsessed) that regulating campaign contributions is tantamount to regulating speech. o the other hand, circumstances in which, say, investment bankers can directly give as much as they want to campaigns could lead you into even worse circumstances than those we have experienced. goldman sachs is not well-distinguished fro the treasury dept and the fed. but if they could pick the senate, we'd really have a problem. and it should be said that a group of people who can contribute millions are having a crushing effect on the speech of many persons.

at any rate, the thing evidently raises many fundamental constitutional issues, and there's no need not to hear it, and though this might be a bad precedent to overturn, the mere fact that it would overturn a precedent is not the fundamental matter to worry about.

sorry no blogging of late. for me, i've been kind of furiously busy. 

at any rate i like the idea that obama's telling kids they are responsible for their own education. seems obviously true, and bizarrely out of keeping with his educational program and the entire discourse about education in our culture, but there it is. really our whole idea is to interrupt or actually destroy any taint of individual responsibility or identity in our children. on this, we are unanimous.

you can't be non-stop gung-ho for keeping people in an utterly authoritarian context, and then also hold them responsible for the results. if you wanted to inculcate individual responsibility, you needed to reverse direction entirely a hundred years ago or so.

surely schools are good at absolutely anything compared to their ability to teach individual responsibility. they're more effective at nurturing an extreme ethic of concealment, even as they try to encourage a culture of anonymous denunciation of others etc. and of course what you're subjected to in terms of actual subject-matter is standardized across all individuals, and the behavioral goals are uniformity, silence, and detailed control over people's movements and expressions to achieve homogeneity. 

if you then come back with "and you are responsible for your own education," you must be speaking...ironically?