cheese it, the cops!

so i'll be appearing in dialogue with the astonishing harvey molotch this evening at 6:15 at the university of maryland architecture school auditorium. we're talking about the future of american urbanism. so if i've done the math right - which is not my strong suit - my program is that each american man woman and child gets 8 acres and a fema trailer. it's gonna rock!

the new new urbanism.

exactly. what's going wrong is the inference from the fact that a trait exists to the claim that it was selected for.

i think this is how you actually engage in jurisprudence: supersede the supreme court by just gettin up off your ass and doing something about it.

i must remark that anti-marijuana violence surprises me. on the other hand, pro-marijuana violence would surprise me even more.

i have to say brooks is very right about students, especially the best, these days: "If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic." and one might point to the culture of standardized testing - again bushobama's only idea in education, or for the eradication of education - as a symptom and a cause of this slavishness.

but in addition to finding that disturbing ("What we have is a person whose career has dovetailed with the incentives presented by the confirmation system, a system that punishes creativity and rewards caginess"), i find it surprising that someone is a law professor at chicago or a dean of the harvard law school, without an elaborate record of scholarship. maybe i don't understand the standards operating in that zone of the academy. can you be those things as mere academic entrepreneur?

when you reach the point at which somebody's little lost lunchbox mobilizes hundreds of cops and all cable channels, makes you evacuate times square, etc, you've reached the point at which nyc is no longer viable. what if you found a dumpster? or a coke can? or a person? all of these are profoundly suspicious and could of course be a bomb. i told you this idea of putting a whole lot of people in the same little area (a "city") was a bad idea. but would you listen to me? geez. move back out into america. yet another example showing that you just can't terrorize americans. bring it on!

offhand one would suppose that paul krugman - a very big fan of government borrowing and spending - would be a bit chastened by the meltdown of greece and the potential meltdown of the world. but one doesn't win nobel prizes by being chastened.

sometimes you're straight-up embarassed to be a terrorist. geez these guys are idiots sometimes, like i'm sitting here trying to light my crotch on fire.

ok i love sarah, but i gotta admit this combination of text and image from the huffpost is pretty funny:

Sarah Palin Says The Lesson From Oil Spill Is To Not Trust Foreigners

you can kill almost any public figure with a strategy like this: the worst pic juxtaposed with the worst sentence, every single day for years. it's an art form, like on the daily show and a million websites; no one has been as thoroughly subjected to this treatment as sp. but what the hey; it's good when it works.

i've long argued that there is no - can be no - principled distinction between the natural and the artificial. our pride in human amazingness and distinctiveness - understood theologically or in terms of evolution - is matched by our self-loathing (beautifullly developed in the monotheistic traditions and environmentalism), and we regard our own interventions primarily as destructions. ''pollution' is a nice site of this struggle: pouring artificial poisons of our own invention into a pristine nature. so think about this: the gummy black toxic slop pouring into the gulf of mexico is an entirely natural substance: it hasn't been refined or processed at all; it is the trace of billions of organisms over millions of years; what's going to kill everything is an essence or a remainder of life. all we did was...release it. that is a much better model of us in relation to our world: not standing outside it destroying or conserving it from the heights of consciousness and technology, but issuing slight deflections or articulations of it, wholly from within. if we were to destroy nature (which, i tell you, is by definition impossible) it would be nature devouring itself.

ny bomb will not terrorize americans. dude. are you kidding? a strong breeze terrorizes americans. keep me safe!

  me and the great god molotch, next week at the u of maryland college park, where i went to college.

lynn redgrave is dead. she narrated my script for "confucius, lao tzu and chinese pilosophy," going on twenty years ago, and did a good job.

since everyone wants the benefit of my expertise, let me say that the guy in the times square surveillance film looks unconnected to the suv. they keep saying he changed his shirt. no, he removed his sweatshirt; it was hot. he doesn't appear to come from the direction of the car. if it was me (which, if you're wondering, it wasn't) that's not where i'd pause to do anything.

one thing you're going to see in the gulf spill is that it will turn out to be the government's fault. it will bring the governorship of bobby jindal or perhaps even the presidency of barack obama to a crashing halt. this is the actually interesting purpose of government, of erecting over ourselves a gigantic human power. it makes the world comprehensible as an arena of human responsibility, so that no matter what happens you have someone to burn at the stake. the paradigm is katrina, where bush's lack of global warming initiatives gave rise to the hurricane etc, etc. or the financial crisis: a regulatory failure. who to blame for the weather has been a really difficult question for some time, but statism has put it to rest. that is, when you reach a certain pitch of real state power combined with a kind of imagination of omnipotence you finally get a comprehensible universe, a purposive universe, a universe that is potentially a just universe, though it continually fails.

that's why "mistrust of government" is always growing: well, one should always mistrust flighty pagan gods of one's own invention, even as one propitiates them with blood sacrifice. but really if you trusted government at this point you'd be trusting it to make you immune from the world, from sickness and poverty, terror and depression, crime and arbitrary disaster: in short, you could trust government only if it made you entirely invulnerable to pain and death. and you expect it to. and it promises to. and in its ridiculous reality as a bunch of human beings it always necessarily fails.

i keep running into the name giorgio agamben here and there, and then people tell me to read his books. so every few years i pick one up and begin again. and then every time it strikes me again that there is no giorgio agamben, that he is a parody of jacques derrida, invented by alan sokal. you're not still going with "always already" in every third sentence. for real?