Thoughts on culture, politics, music and stuff by Eric Olsen, Marty Thau and Mike Crooker, who are among other things, producers.

 
Internecine
From Glenn, a disturbing and exceptional column by Radley Balko about Drug Warriors - even more so because FoxNews.com pulled it:

The cult expert Ross, a self-described Republican, is awed at the adulation still heaped on the Semblers. “It’s really shocking,” he says, “that the Semblers are still lauded and honored after all that’s come out about their organization.”

Staunch drug warriors like the Semblers believe a win-at-all-costs approach is the only way to remove the scourge of drugs from society. Such is why they can be unrepentant about the lives destroyed within the walls of Straight facilities, and in fact still boast that a program they founded “cured” 12,000 teens of drug abuse.

Last year, a reporter from Canadian marijuana advocacy magazine Cannabis Culture asked Betty Sembler in person about the horror stories he’d read from Straight survivors. Sembler replied, “They should get a life. I am proud of everything we have done. There's nothing to apologize for. The legalizers are the ones who should be apologizing.”

That’s the attitude of the drug war’s power duo. Shattered lives, suicides, forced abortions, fractured psyches – all necessary casualties of the drug war, and nothing to apologize for.

The main problem with the Drug War is that it is a civil war, and civil wars cannot be won without your own people losing one way or another.
posted by Eric at 10:40 PM

 
Let the Refutations Begin
Whoa now, the big guns have been unholstered. The Captain, Super Glenn, and on the broader topic of sexuality, Dawn and Matt Moore have to varying degrees told me where to get off. Many are advising me to "get a grip." Thanks for the concern, but my grip is intact. I am lean but wiry.

Dawn and Moore make some excellent points about sexuality being a bouquet of all the senses AND the imagination. They are right. My only quibble is with those who SUBSTITUTE the imagination for the real thing. That's all.

To Den Beste: regarding my opening comments about finding an area in which he is "woefully ignorant" - it's a compliment, take it as such. He has a remarkable range of knowledge. I often don't even know what the hell he is talking about, let alone have a contrary view, so it was refreshing to find something I TOTALLY disagreed with. I responded. That's all. I did exactly what Den Beste said he does:

What happens to me is that I'll be looking at something or other, and suddenly a full-blown concept will spring into my mind. If I can hold it until I can reach a keyboard, then I will write an article as fast as I can type..

...I'm writing because I enjoy writing and it's a way of keeping myself busy, and I put what I write online (the 21st century form of "vanity press") because writing without readers is pointless. The idea is that you read what I write because you enjoy it. Maybe it makes you smile, maybe it makes you think. Maybe it makes you angry about things I'm angry about. If it affects you in some way, then I have achieved my full goal. And that is all that is going on here.

Get a grip.

As I mentioned, my grip is fine, thanks (although I have had some pain in my right wrist since I fell on it in the kitchen). I read his post, it reflected a point of view I had mentioned in a recent post of my own, so I responded. That's all: no malice aforethought, no preplanning. Perhaps we should all check our grips.

As to this:

You don't know me. You don't know anything about me. You can't tell what kind of person I am from what I write here. I only show you what I want to show you, and some of what I show you is deliberately faked. You can't judge my behavior by what you see here, because you don't know what I do in real life. And in particular, you can't really judge my attitude towards women from the last few articles I've posted here, because those were exaggerated and partially facetious.

My personal life isn't any of your business. I do not write a "journal"-type site. When I do introduce myself into my commentary here, it's only peripheral as a way of making a point, and some of the time it is fictional. What I write here is solely intended to be entertaining or challenging and maybe even informative. I'm not trying to be some sort of direct line to The Truth, and I'm not out to change the world.

This indignant little bleat is a load worthy of the Big Shovel: you can't have it both ways. I don't claim to "know" him. In fact, I don't know him at all, nor do I pretend to. You can't present some version of yourself in writing and then say, "Hey, no fair, you can't comment on my writing because it isn't me. It's just my writing." That's fine, I am responding to the writing, not to "you." And in the writing I found a point of view I find highly objectionable. I couldn't care less about any writer's "personal life," but if they write it, it's fair game. It's just as much "my business" to write about this subject as about anything else I find online. That's what free speech is all about. You don't want people to comment on something, don't write about it in the first place. I'm not hanging around anyone's "second bedroom of his second-floor condo," with or without wood paneling, I'm reading his blog. If it's there, it's my business. Period. The gratuitous indignation is unwarranted and disingenuous:

I do not write a "journal"-type site. When I do introduce myself into my commentary here, it's only peripheral as a way of making a point, and some of the time it is fictional

What-freaking-ever. I don't care what the relationship is between what's written and whatever is "real": I'm talking about what's written. Am I supposed to do research into what blogging category the writer fits into? Am I supposed to say, "Hmm, this is NOT a 'journal-type' site, and I'm not sure if this particular writing is truth, fiction, or just making a point, so I better not comment on it"? Oh, I see, my bad. I can, and will, comment on whatever is presented, especially when I find the "point" to be odious: truth, fiction, hyperbole, personal, general, micro, macro, or freeze-dried. If you don't want comments, don't write it.

Now that we've disregarded the indignant bluster, let's get to substantive matters. The main point is that women aren't just sexual objects, they are people, and it is much more satisfying to interact with the real thing than to fantasize about them, or to watch them. That's it. I didn't call anyone a "sexist pervert" and I don't give a rat's ass whether or not they are "amused." Tough.

It's not my problem if I find very creepy the point of view reflected in a lengthy discussion of string bikinis and pictures of very young women held up as the apex of sexuality. I DO find it creepy. Sorry. I tried very hard to clarify that I wasn't putting down watching women, or that I am opposed in any way to the expression of sexuality: I was saying the point of view that allows women to be seen as ONLY sexual objects is ultimately self-defeating and unfulfilling, and that one's time and energies might be better spent if one was looking for an actual relationship. If I exaggerated my position to make a point, that doesn't mean my point isn't valid. If you are telling me that vicarious ogling is as fulfilling as an actual relationship, I will tell you that you are so full of it your teeth are brown.

As to Glenn: I was making a comparison, not making an absolute judgment, and my advice was directed at whoever cares. I can give my opinion as to what SHOULD be done on any given topic, and any reader can feel free to agree, disagree, ignore it, or give me money. EVERY opinion has an implicit "should" or "shouldn't" built into it.

Glenn's is saying, "People shouldn't give their opinions on the best way to pursue a relationship." I find whenever (small "l") libertarians disagree with something, or don't want to discuss the merits of a given point of view, they say something along the lines of "mind your own business and don't tell people what they 'should' do." I was saying that an actual relationship is more fulfilling than observation from a distance. I stand by it. People can agree or disagree - no problem - I may be TOTALLY WRONG, but certainly I should be allowed to voice it.

Regarding May-October relationships, obviously there are exceptions to the general rule, and I am happy for them. There are exceptions to EVERY general rule involving human behavior. Hey, if people of any legal age hit it off and get together, more power to them, but they will still have to actually interact with each other and not just stare from across the pool.

And as far as the genetic programming to ogle teenagers goes: we are genetically programmed to do lot's of things that we use our intellect, will and force of law to overcome. That's why we have statutory rape laws.

And lastly, as far as "unsolicited opinions on other people's sex lives" goes: as I mentioned earlier, I couldn't possibly care less about anyone involved's personal sex life. I am responding to what was written, and I sure as hell didn't solicit that. Anything written is fair game for commentary, that's the interactive part of this blog thing.

UPDATE
Matt Moore thinks old people having sex is creepy. I did too when I was 25, but now I'm 43 and a lot closer to it, so it doesn't seem so odd anymore. I don't think sex between ANY consenting adults is necessarily creepy: I think allowing a fantasy life to substitute for the real thing is creepy.
posted by Eric at 2:10 PM

 
Do You Want to Watch Her, Or Do You Want to Touch Her?
This post by the normally brilliant Den Beste reflects a disturbing level of unreality. Everything about it - and the earlier post it references - is pseudo, virtual, and presents a vision of women as generic abstractions. In a way I'm relieved: here is an area in which the omniscient Captain is woefully ignorant:

While I was gone on vacation, I wrote an article about how my attitudes towards girl-watching changed about 25 years ago, more or less from "half-empty" to "half-full", and how I was a lot happier afterwards. I think I know how it was that I was in the other mode before I came to my senses. Blame the media.

Before we blame the media for fostering improper modes of girlwatching behavior, let's check out the earlier post. It is, in essence, an ode to the string bikini:

Nothing flatters the figure more of a young woman who has a nice figure (and most do) than a string bikini. I have no idea what it feels like to wear one (and have no interest in finding out, thenkyouveddymuch) but I conjecture that since it maximizes exposure of skin that it's a feeling of freedom.

Of course, it's also the ultimate tease, and a major cause of men doing double-takes and walking distractedly into things. The young women here at the Luxor have adopted the string bikini as this year's swimming-pool fashion of choice.

So let's hear it for the string bikini, and for detente in the war between the sexes. The wearing of a string bikini truly satisfies the philosophy of feminism: be what you want to be and not what someone tells you to become. You don't have to become a bimbo because some men tell you to, but you also don't have to allow some women to force you to become a hag.

First, did I just read that nothing flatters like a string bikini? I have never seen a string bikini that didn't make a woman look much worse than she did naked, clothed, or in a regular, intelligently-cut bikini. Butt-floss makes a woman's hips look enormous, her butt globular and alien to the rest of her body (notice they don't show any of these women from behind - with good cause, and these are swimsuit models).

I am not a prude: I love to look at women at their best, and string bikinis - even on those "who can wear them" - are NEVER women at their best. String bikinis emphasize all the wrong things and are unnatural in all the worst ways. Naked is sexy; clothing cleverly-cut to flatter is sexy (look at these - these are flattering); string bikinis are NEVER flattering, even for women with tiny butts.

They are also unreal. Naked is real because there is nothing to hide; flatteringly attired (in whatever, from parka to bikini) is real because this subtly acknowledges that no one is perfect, that everyone can be improved, and is thus a form of reality-grounding modesty, flattering both the woman and those who look at her. String bikinis aren't real because they are coy: they are as close to naked as possible without being so, yet they don't flatter and so speak of arrogance. They are openly hostile: all show, no go. In this way there is nothing LESS sexual than a string bikini.

None of this matters unless you want to ACTUALLY SPEAK TO WOMEN and interact with them as human beings. Women who wear string bikinis are not looking to interact with men, merely to tease and frustrate them in a display of power. The look both titillates and repels, is brazen but distancing, lewd but unflattering. It is a huge "shove off" to men who would like to actually interact with the women who wear them, rather than simply ogle them from a safe distance.

Which brings up the next point: women are people. Everyone wants to be thought attractive; there is nothing wrong with responding to another person's attractiveness, but it is degrading in both directions to interact with real people only on this level. "Girlwatching," like the entire spectrum of pornography, drains the humanity from all involved. It's a second-person activity, one which precludes any actual interaction.

I'm not saying there is no place for pornography, sexually explicit material, or girlwatching for that matter, but I am saying that this kind of activity precludes any kind of real interaction. Women who wear string bikinis aren't looking for real interaction, nor are the men who spend their time looking at them. It's pseudo-sexuality, not real sexuality, it's isolating and dehumanizing. Rather than "watching girls," a person's time could be much more profitably spent interacting with real women.

Next problem: the girl/woman issue. There is a problem if a middle-aged man finds young women in their late-teens and early-20s to be the height of sexual attractiveness. Sexual attraction can never be based purely upon looks alone: there is no real person who consists of only looks, therefore it is counterproducive, at best, to find most-attractive women with whom there is no hope of actual interaction.

Middle-aged men should feel protective, avuncular, even paternal (not paternalistic) toward young women - toward young people - in their late-teens and early-20s: people who are young enough to be their children. They shouldn't see them as sexual objects. There is just no way a real romantic relationship is possible at 20+ years age difference: too many cultural divides, too many differences of perspective, attitudes, interests, place in life. ALL such relationships are imbalanced, are exploitative one way or another. There just isn't all that much to talk about, and if you don't talk, then it's not the real thing. It's fantasy, just marking time, avoiding the real issues, and keeping life at arm's length rather than dealing with it head-on.

The women most attractive to a middle-aged man should be those with whom he could have an actual relationship. Beauty isn't only found in the very young, and the combination of physical beauty with some actual life experience is vastly more sexy than the callow beauty of youth alone - that is if you find actual living, breathing women more sexy than stereotypical abstractions.

Back to the post: we were blaming the media for unrealistic expectations. All of the women pictured here are very young. They are too young to seem sexy to me. I look at them and think of my 18 year-old daughter: I don't lust after them, I want to make sure no one hurts them, and that they don't hurt themselves. They're just too young. I would feel very differently if I was their age, but I'm not. Katie Holmes, Mandy Moore, Agnes Bruckner (?), Anne Hathaway: these are beautiful young girls, not sexy women.

Here's the next issue:

so we watch our TV and see our films and look at the advertisements in our magazines. And a young man, just come into his full adult complement of hormones, uses this as his standard of what is desirable. And he looks at the girls around him, and says, "I don't want to settle for those; gorgeous women are plentiful. I see them all the time."

"I want one like that. But women like that are not plentiful in absolute numbers. It's just that photographs and film of them can be endlessly reproduced, so that each of us is surrounded by pictures of the few. And even if such a young man recognizes that they are few, he may decide that he wants to be one of those who get one like that anyway.

....It's worse than that. These women don't actually look like that. The photographs are carefully chosen to compliment them, and they're carefully made up and dressed. A week's work, by everyone involved from costume designers to makeup artists and the photographer and model herself may be needed to produce five or six pictures like this, or half an hour's usable film. If you met one of these women in the laundromat when she hadn't been trying to make herself look like this, you might not even recognize her. And she certainly wouldn't look like you expect.

One of the things I recognized in my 20's was precisely the fact that what I was seeing in the pictures was an illusion. "Women like that don't really exist!" became a running joke for me, but it was half-serious. They really don't. These women don't really look like this, either.

Well, yes, actually they do. I've met them (generally speaking). There are beautiful women everywhere - with or without makeup. The key is to realize that THEY ARE JUST PEOPLE. If you see women as individual beings with thoughts and feelings and concerns, in addition to the physically alluring parts, then you won't lump "gorgeous women" into some grand category and make generalizations about them anyway.

Sure there is a higher concentration of beautiful people in show biz: it's the nature of the industry, but they are real people too. I used to DJ show biz parties in LA: TV, movie, music, pro sports; I assure you, these people are real. They DO look like you think they do: with or without makeup, dressed up or dressed down (the ones with the severe disconnect between how they "really" look and the way we see them are relatively few).

The most gorgeous women in the world eat, drink, and shit like everyone else, AND they really are that beautiful. That line about "it's all in the makeup, hairdo, etc., etc." I assure you, it's not. There really are women as beautiful as you think they are, and they can be found in every city and in (almost) every town. And some are smart, some are stupid, some are charming, some are hateful, some are whatever.

You can talk to them, you can even touch them, but you have to treat them as individuals, as actual people with identities of their very own, or they will know that they aren't real to you, that they are just symbols, and no one wants to be just a symbol. They want to be loved, they want to be touched, they want you to do everything to them that you want to do to them; but they want to be treated as actual flesh and blood, not as bloodless abstractions. No one ever had a relationship with an abstraction.
posted by Eric at 10:24 PM

 
Kiss My Poll
Let's set things right and have a final-day surge of votes for Dawn, who, if nothing else, is sexy and deserves to win this fucking poll. Then I don't want to hear about it anymore: not that I object to polls or the traffic they drive, but in this particular case sex appeal is pretty much something you are going to have to take someone's word on.

Conveying sex appeal through a blog is about like tasting food via email. A blog is about as sensory as the text of a John Ashcroft speech. A blog is a form of written communication, with interactive possibilities in close-to real time. The great interpersonal barrier of cyberspace remains, and while some may find the Internet sexy and get their jollies didling themselves while perched before the electronic altar, this has about as much to do with real sexuality as the Real World does to actual life as lived by human beings: none.

The Internet is great at conveying information and communication on a certain a-personal level, but it has NOTHING to do with real interaction, 3-D life, or sexuality. If you want a real relationship, pull one hand away from the keyboard, the other out of your pants, and go touch an actual person. You'll be amazed.
posted by Eric at 10:23 AM

 
Loss of Clarity?
Dave Roberts of Common Sense for Uncommon Times writes in with an excellent suggestion, which I will get on today:

Hi Eric,
I dropped in on your six month review of Bush and thought it might be useful for you to revisit the piece. The moral clarity that still resonated at six months has now dimmed to a wobbly uncertainty under pressure from the Pentagon's weak sisters. At the same time, his European trip reinforced all the "dolt" images you and I shared about him. His question to the president of Brazil " do you have blacks, too?" has to rate with the stupidest things ever uttered by an American president. He may have some limited clarity, but he seems more and more to be a figurine propped up by poll driven puppet masters like Karl Rove.

Dave Roberts

Bush says idiotic things from time to time, there is no doubt about that. By the way, Dave does not like John Ashcroft (who, we should all recall, was beaten by a dead man in his race for reelection to the Senate):

Very few people have had as many opportunities to distinguish themselves as John Ashcroft has had. He could have prevented September 11, boosted the FBI anti-terrorism budget pre Sept 11, told the President about the Phoenix memo immediately after he found out, used the gun check database to find terrorist suspects, and any number of other activities. Hey, what a great time to have been attorney general if you were alert and focused on terrorism. Of course, if New Orleans bordellos and California medical marijuana clinics and virtual child porn were at the top of your wish list, September 11 might have come as a very rude and unwelcome surprise. In our new found desire to be positive, we're positive Genral Ashcroft is doing everything he is capable of doing.

posted by Eric at 9:23 AM

 
Fresh Gonzo
Marty spotted this new interview with an old journalistic hero of mine, Hunter S. Thompson, who has unfortunately inspired more bad writing (what could be worse than pseudo-Gonzo?) than anyone since Hemingway. Either Thompson has exaggerated his substance abuse over the years to a quantum degree, or he is actually dead.

In the spring of 1971, Sports Illustrated dispatched a 31-year-old freelance writer named Hunter S. Thompson to Las Vegas to cover the Mint 400 off-road race. His assignment: to write a 250-word caption on the grueling, white-trash event. To the horror of the sports magazine's editors, Thompson filed a 15,000-word piece that couldn't quite be defined at the time. (It is now categorized as Gonzo journalism.) The editors chose not to run it.

About a week after the Mint 400 assignment, Rolling Stone sent Thompson back to Las Vegas to cover the National District Attorneys Association's third annual Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. As Thompson later explained in his classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: "If the Pigs were gathering in Vegas for a top-level Drug Conference, we felt the drug culture should be represented."

Thompson's trips to Las Vegas in 1971 produced two separate stories, both of which ran in then-relevant Rolling Stone. The articles were later combined to form the foundation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was published by Random House in June of 1972.

In anticipation of Fear and Loathing's 30th anniversary, I arranged an interview with Thompson. I intended to ask him about the book's impact on Vegas, its historical significance and a bunch of other predictable bullshit.

But the Doctor of Journalism, reached just after midnight at his fortified compound in Woody Creek, Colo., steered me away from convention.

posted by Eric at 9:10 AM

 
I Missed the Speech, Was in the Bathroom
Very interesting analysis of Bush's speech and the Director of Intelligence position by Ian on his Fierce Highway site:

During President Bush's speech on the formation of a cabinet position for Homeland Security, I got to thinking about what has become of the Director of Central Intelligence position. As we've been told time and again on TV, in print, and anywhere else the topic may come up, this position was created in '47 when the CIA was crystalized into something close to its present format (from its humble beginnings as a group of cartographers with amazing derring-do). The initial point of this role was as an oversight to our collected intelligence communities. Obviously, it's not lived up to the initial premise.

Another ex-Buckeye, Ian went to the College of Wooster and is a former Cool Tunes listener.

Here is Jason Rubenstein's take on the Bush speech:

Bush watches polls like a hawk. They poll and poll, and poll again. And a sudden announcement of a cabinet post for homeland bureaucracy, er, security without simultaneous announcement of the name of the individual who will run this department seems to be a hastily assembled shot at boosting some poll numbers ("Look, we're doing something!") at a time when them numbers are slowly sliding downhill. And I sense that the White House is in some chaos, and weak displays of action usually indicate some form of organizational malaise. Pure conjecture on my part.

Jason conjectures well - I still hold out hope he is wrong. More on this later.
posted by Eric at 8:28 AM

 
More On the "Mastermind"
He's U.S.-educated, as they so often say:

The man suspected of masterminding the Sept. 11 terror attacks is believed to have once attended college in North Carolina and, in 1999, visited the German city where chief hijacker Mohammed Atta lived, U.S. officials said Thursday.

Officials suspect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a Kuwaiti-born lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, met with Atta or members of his cell in Hamburg, but they have not received direct evidence of any contacts between them, one U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Since Sept. 11, evidence has mounted that Mohammed was chief among the bin Laden lieutenants organizing the attacks, counterterrorism officials said. He provided some of the money used in the attacks, and Abu Zubaydah — another of the alleged organizers now in U.S. custody — has identified Mohammed as the organizer, they said.

Mohammed is believed to have attended Chowan College in northeastern North Carolina before transferring to another U.S. university, where he obtained an engineering degree, a second U.S. official said Thursday, declining to provide further details.

posted by Eric at 8:24 PM

 
Signal?
I fervently hope this is a signal of immediate plans:

Vice President Dick Cheney said on Thursday there was a growing danger of terrorist groups acquiring weapons of mass destruction from Iraq or other countries and that this required a decisive response.

"This gathering danger requires the most careful, deliberate and decisive response by Americans and our allies," Cheney said in a speech to the National Association of Homebuilders.

His comments added to a drumbeat of U.S. signals of potential new military action in the U.S.-led war on terrorism. But they went a step further in singling out Iraq than President Bush's statement last Saturday that Americans must be ready for "preemptive action" against threats to the country.

Time to get preempting, I'd say.
posted by Eric at 8:20 PM

 
More Dee Dee
We are saddened by the death of Dee Dee Ramone at 49 from an apparent drug overdose. It is ironic but fairly typical of junkies that they are done in by success: the Ramones were just inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March.

Here is an interview with Ramone from the Boston Phoenix. Here is Marty's tribute to the Ramones.

We heard from a friend of Dee Dee's who offers some perspective:

One hears about very few drug addicts over 50. It's a sad thing but was destined to happen. He wasn't exactly the brightest bulb in the socket, or the sweetest and most honest person you'd want to hang out with. He's lucky he got all he did out of life. I don't mean to sound too 'cold' or indifferent about this but Dee Dee was a fine example of what not to do as a person and rock and roll musician.

posted by Eric at 7:33 PM

 
"Useful"
Dear pundits of all stripes: professional, amateur, weekend, weekday, conservative, liberal, libertarian, tech, white, black, green. Please do not ever use the word "USEFUL" to describe the writing of another person ever again.

I am sure the word is not meant maliciously: it's a habit, and many of us do it, although I'm pretty sure I haven't because it has been bugging me for a long time. I am not even speaking as one who has been called "useful" - I haven't been to my knowledge. Please call anything I write ANYTHING other than that. I thank you in advance.

The word is blatantly patronizing: "I deigned to peruse your scribbling and I found aspects of it ... useful." Besides being patonizing, use of the word is damning with faint praise: "I wouldn't call it well-written, or insightful, or delightful, or penetrating, or splendid, or meaningful, or life-changing; or obsequious, purple or clairvoyant. But I suppose there is some information in there that might be ... um ... useful?"

It's as if writing were a utility, or a garden tool. This is the most generic possible praise: "I don't really LIKE your writing, but I was able to slog my way through it and extract a few ... useful ... tidbits for my own use. Of course, whatever I do with these 'useful' tidbits will be of much greater worth to the world than the mess I found them in. Thank you for being ... useful ... now fuck off."

This is not how we want to think of each other, now is it? Thank you for your consideration. I hope this discussion was useful.
posted by Eric at 5:24 PM

 
World's Cup
Matt Welch doesn't go for that anti-soccer smack, although he likes Layne's column, which questions the rampant nationalism angle of the World Cup.

Here's the deal, Americans don't care as much about soccer as they do about the Big Four professional team sports because soccer is far too subjective. There are statistics to describe every SINGLE ACTION in baseball. It is the essence of objectivity. Basketball is a little looser with stats - no one is counting the dribbles, which they WOULD do if it was as anal as baseball - but the scoring is more prolific than cow farts and scoring is the ultimate in objectification.

Football has discrete plays to objectify and progress is literally measured in the field. Plus it's fast and violent and full of massive freaks and world-class athletes smashing into each other. Hockey is closer to soccer in its methods of operation and relative lack of stats, but it makes up for this with fights galore. Besides, Americans don't REALLY like hockey anyway. If an amusement isn't on broadcast television, rest assured Americans don't really like it.

Soccer offers all kinds of brilliant athleticism and skill - I can certainly appreciate it - but very little gets quantified: there are few actual plays to keep track of, field position is very fluid and not quantified, there is hardly ever any scoring. There just aren't very many interesting numbers to keep track of and hang your interest on; and unlike the NHL, there are few fights ON THE FIELD to fight attention drift.

Another problem with the World Cup specifically is its name: Americans, accustomed to baseball, subconsciously picture this huge athletic supporter protecting the world's package and it's not a pretty thought. We'll protect our own package, thank you, and the world can stay out of it.
posted by Eric at 4:04 PM

 
R.I.P. Dee Dee Ramone

more here. Looks like an OD...
posted by tofu at 3:45 PM

 
Bring On the Fluorocarbons!
We in Northeast Ohio have a moderate climate, if by "moderate" you mean you freeze your nads off half of the year. I am from Southern California originally, and while I love many things about Ohio, the weather sucks fatmen. At least it usually does. For the 12 years I've been back in Ohio, though, it's been pretty darn mild: shorter winters, more sun, drier.

The reason property values up here on the North Coast are so moderate is primarily due to this weather: not cold enough for real snow people, not NEARLY warm enough for heat people. So we who own property or are building new homes say BRING ON THE GLOBAL WARMING. How's this for a friendly forecast?

Citing "plausible" model scenarios, the report said many areas of the country would undergo a change comparable to "an overall northward shift" in weather systems and climate conditions. "The central tier of states would experience climate conditions roughly equivalent to those now experienced by the southern tier, and the northern tier would experience conditions much like the central tier."

This change is already under way. Some areas are experiencing "a shorter duration of lake ice," and there's already been "a northward shift in the distributions of some species of butterflies."

These are changes that force you to wonder what kind of environment lies in wait just two or three generations hence. And yet we continue, with very little restraint, to spew out the so-called greenhouse gases.

Lily enjoys our new butterflies, lake ice is a depressing hazard, and I say fucking-A-right bring on the "overall northward shift." The EPA report acknowledging global warming and its likely cause by "human activity" is just the first step to soaring property values and long, lazy summers for Ohio! And I'm telling you, Bush must own land in Lake County or some damn place around here, because his reaction couldn't have been scripted better:

"I read the report put out by the bureaucracy," Bush said dismissively Tuesday when asked about the EPA report, adding that he still opposes the Kyoto treaty.

"Yeah, we've got global warming. Am I going to do anything about it? Hell no!! I've got prime acreage in Painesville, Ohio, buddy, and that shit is going through the roof! They've got new butterflies, disappearing lake ice - the rest of the country may be going down the climatic toilet, but everything's tits up there on the North Coast. I'm retiring there after I get done being president. Hello easy street!!"

Oh yeah baby, we've got it made here - check out the horrors coming down on the current high rent districts:

In the United States, changes over the next few decades are expected to put Southeastern coastal communities at greater risk of storm surges, prompt more uncomfortable heat waves in cities and reduce snowpack and water supplies in the West.

The extents of aspen, eastern birch and sugar maple probably will contract dramatically in the United States, shift into Canada and cause loss of maple syrup production in northern New York and New England. Great Lakes water levels are expected to drop, which would affect navigation, water supplies and aquatic species. Production of U.S. hardwood and softwood products is projected to increase, mostly in the South. Fewer cold days and reduced snowpack do not bode well for the southernmost ski areas, where costs of snowmaking would rise.

Kalee Kreider, global warming campaign director for the National Environmental Trust, an advocacy group, said environmentalists want from the administration a climate change plan that joins with other nations in requiring carbon dioxide emission reductions and increased fuel efficiency requirements for vehicles.

Kalee Kreider - bitch, shut the hell up! Bring on HIGHER carbon dioxide emissions, and DECREASED fuel efficiency requirements. Every time I see an SUV sucking up fossil fuel and spitting out globe-warming gas, I see dollar signs dancing around my soon-to-be resort property. With all hell breaking loose on the other three coasts, the North Coast will be Park Ave, South Beach, and Malibu all rolled into one Buckeye Bonanza, baby!

In short, thank you George W! By acknowledging warming but refusing to do anything about it, you have hastened the cushy retirement of many a Midwesterner and put the fear of God into those damned smug coastal folk. When Manhattan is underwater and Century City an island, you will no longer find North Coast property values "surprisingly affordable," and we will smile and take your money. Right George?

UPDATE
Josh Chafetz adds:

Very nice! Actually, you forgot to mention that a little melting of the polar icecaps would make Crawford, Texas a prime beach resort! Bush would have a ranch on the Gulf!
Yours,
Josh

posted by Eric at 2:18 PM

 
Beer, Baseball, American History
How can you not love this article?

In the history of American beer, the modern period begins on the spring day in 1882 when the short-lived American Association of baseball teams opened for business. The establishment-leaning National League, aiming for a tonier clientele, had recently doubled ticket prices and banned gambling, Sunday playing, and—most important—beer. Franchise owners in St. Louis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and other brewing centers refused to accept the new rules and seceded from the league. Several of them were brewers themselves, and they had learned to count on a sizable increase in collective thirst on home-game days. So, banding together, they formed the American Association. Dubbed the Beer and Whiskey League by the competition, it scorned the toffs and made its pitch directly to the average workingman, keeping the ticket price an affordable 25 cents, playing on the Sabbath, his only day off, and serving what had already become his signature drink.

Though there were strange days ahead for the mostly German-born beer barons, here, in this heady mix of beer, baseball, and fun, were most of the elements that would come to define beer’s role in the American living room and the American imagination: its connection to sports and other places men go to escape and to bond; its connection to leisure, especially of the American working class; and its implicitly rebellious, nose-thumbing attitude toward the tastes and rules of social “betters” and other authority figures.

....The deepest layer of all, though, lies in the ties between beer, work, and the saloon and the connection of all of these to a working-class vision of democracy that has seduced the whole culture. Somehow, by the middle of the twentieth century, the bar where men shared beer had picked up resonances of both the colonial tavern, mythical birthplace of patriot ism and democracy, and the pre-Prohibition saloon, refuge from the competitive marketplace, from confining domes ticity, from the coldness of modern life, from the pressure to rise and “better” oneself. The Miller brand discovered the power of the image when, in the late sixties, marketers changed the advertising approach. “The Champagne of Bottled Beers,” with its implicit appeal to class, became “It’s Miller Time,” an ode to the workingman, and Miller found itself shooting up from seventh place in beer sales to second.

In addition to the story of beer's heady place as the drink of democracy, the article also features a sidebar on the history of microbrews and brewpubs:

Inspiration may have come from Fritz Maytag, of the washing-machine-and-blue-cheese family, who took over San Francisco’s old and ailing Anchor Steam and in 1975 created the first of the new breed, Liberty Ale, in commemoration of the bicentennial of Paul Revere’s ride. Huge in flavor, intensely aromatic, and bursting with the delectable bitterness of hops, it bore the same relation to subtle, understated European beers as California wine did to French. And like California wine, it went great with the spicy new American cuisine.

In other grainy matters, Kevin Holtsberry has a poll and a debate a-brewing over which nation makes the best beer. My vote goes to Antarctica - a continent, not a country, I know - for its little-known but exquisite Penguin Piss Ale.
posted by Eric at 12:59 PM

 
Child-like Faith
Dawn has an interview with Lily about God.
posted by Eric at 12:20 PM

 
They Have Bad Breath, Too
John Hawkins has found that besides being hateful, deluded conspiracy theorists who wouldn't know the truth if it sucked out their entrails, white supremacists are also poor spellers with bad grammar.
posted by Eric at 11:58 AM

 
The "Why" Hasn't Changed
King Kaufman asks if there is a new and different mechanism working in baseball that explains the record number of six managers fired since the beginning of spring training. His answer is "yes" there is something different and that thing is money.

"There's more pressure because there's more money involved," said Jim Lefebvre, the hitting coach for the Cincinnati Reds, who managed the Seattle Mariners in 1989-91, the Chicago Cubs in 1992-93 and the Milwaukee Brewers for part of the '99 season. "People expect teams to come out of the blocks quicker, expect to perform better, so there's more pressure on managers today. Now, we know one of the reasons why is the salaries."

Lefebvre pointed out how many teams are already more than 10 games out of first, with, at the time we talked, slightly less than a third of the season gone. Through Tuesday's games, a little past the one-third mark of the season, eight of the 30 teams were that far out. "There's just teams that can't stay up with the Joneses [because they can't afford to pay high salaries]. And if you do have money, there's more pressure," he said. "Different organizations as you go around have made big investments in teams, money to get the teams going. And when they're not going, they have a tendency to fire people quicker."

All of this is true, of course, but misses the bigger picture. The thing that gets managers, general managers, and even players (in the sense of being traded or released) fired is the same thing that always has: unmet expectations.

When expectations are not lived up to, someone gets fired. The key is to assess expectations as realistically as possible, then keep adjusting those expectations to fit circumstances: injuries, off-years, career-years, etc., and try to determine what, if any, adjustments can be made to maximize a team's chances. Money may alter elements within the equasion, but the answer is always "unmet expectations" when the question was "Why did X get fired"?

In other baseball matters, Cornlad Dave Hogberg (a last name destined for an agricultural state) calls Marishal's attack of John Roseboro "ancient history," which 1965 is if you believe civilization began with the advent of MTV. But for me, as a six year-old, seeing a famous and successful pitcher turn around and beat the hell out of the catcher for MY TEAM with his bat left a deep impression upon my psyche and left me deeply suspicious of both Giants, Latins, and opposing pitchers for a long time: Giant opposing Latin pitchers being worst of all.

He also gloats about Barry Bonds, who without question, is a Hall of Famer and had one of the greatest statistical seasons of all time last year. One small problem: Bonds is obviously on steroids, didn't deny it when asked, and rumor from the locker room has it that his nuts resemble raisins.
posted by Eric at 11:17 AM

 
Sufficient or Necessary?
William Saletan rightly sees the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions regarding the 9/11 blame game:

It's doubtful that erasing any one of the admitted failures, by itself, would have averted the attacks altogether. To suggest that it would have is satisfying to the accuser but unfair to the accused. It also gives each of the participants in this collective failure an easy out. None of them had enough information to stop the crime. So if having enough information to stop the crime is the standard of culpability, no one is culpable. If we're going to learn anything from Sept. 11, we need to talk less about what would have been sufficient to avert the attacks, and more about what would have been necessary.

...."could" doesn't imply "would." The latter conveys certainty; the former conveys possibility. In fighting terrorism, possibility, not certainty, should be the operative principle. It suits the complex nature of investigation, gives agents practical guidance, and is a standard to which politicians and bureaucrats can reasonably be held. The question to ask about each step not taken in the months leading up to Sept. 11 is not whether it would have prevented the attacks but whether it would have kept alive a chain of investigation making that outcome possible [emphasis mine].

Exactly: the real issue isn't whether any given failure caused 9/11 - actually a bunch of muderous zealots CAUSED 9/11 - the question is whether a given failure broke the chain that COULD have led to prevention, or at least modification of the eventual result.

Saletan also recognizes that intelligence gathering and analysis are not mutually exclusive activities, but are intersected:

in practice, information-gathering and analysis aren't separate stages. They're interwoven. When you get information, you have to analyze it in order to figure out what kind of information to look for next. Consider the now-famous "Phoenix memo," in which FBI agent Kenneth Williams advised headquarters of "the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation universities." Williams spun that scenario from sketchy evidence based on a few examples. He offered a possibility, not a firm theory.

When asked a few days ago about the Phoenix memo and the near-simultaneous Minnesota investigation of accused Sept. 11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui, Mueller replied that "there was nothing specifically in either of those instances that gave a direct connection to what happened on September 11." That's true. But investigations don't require specific, direct connections. The Phoenix memo was just a link in the chain. The next link was to check out flight schools, as Williams proposed. If the FBI had done that, it might have found enough information to get a warrant to search Moussaoui's computer, which in turn might have exposed more of the plot and its participants.

What, then, can be done? Saletan is content to assert the culpability of the FBI, CIA and politicians of both parties for allowing failures to break the chain of investigation that could have prevented/altered 9/11. More information needs to be gathered, it needs to be shared and coordinated, and SOMEONE needs to be put in the position of thinking the unthinkable and looking for patterns that could allow the unthinkable to become reality.
posted by Eric at 10:33 AM

 
Process vs. Goal
Rand Simberg has mixed feelings about the Mars Student Imaging Project, which he posted here.

His thoughtful, empathetic concern is that kids will get all jazzed up by student projects like this one and then be forever frustrated in their desire to get into space - as he has been - and similar to the vast majority of kids who aspire to, for example, the NBA.

My overall feeling on the matter of "many will enter, few will win" is that free societies have a certain Darwinian element to them regardless of the endeavor you choose to pursue: space exploration and basketball are not different in kind, though they are perhaps different in degree regarding room at the top.

I can't see kids practicing basketball or learning this

Students in the on-site format will be at the Mars Space Flight Facility to receive the image they chose to take of the surface of Mars. Student teams will learn how to use image-processing tools to enhance their image for better scientific study. Students will also prepare a presentation to assist them in peer-tutoring the students who were unable to travel to the facility.

as ever being bad however. Yes, there are only so many hours in the day, and if all you do is dribble and shoot to the neglect of your studies then that is a poor use of time and poor prioritizing.

But developing a skill, virtually any skill, is one of the joys of life and a real achievement from which to take pride. Just because a person doesn't end up in the NBA doesn't mean that making the most out of his/her ability was a waste of time. Playing well at the high school level is deeply satisfying in and of itself, and if you are good enough, can be an open door to college, which can only be good.

The issue isn't ultimately even WHAT the particular skill is: the fundamental import of skill development is developing and demonstrating the skills required to do anything well. The fortitude and determination displayed in the development of one skill can always be applied to the development of others. The fact that only a tiny percentage of people will attain the apex of any given endeavor should in no way detract from the satisfaction a person should derive from maximizing his/her own facility.

Just because you don't make the NBA, or even your high school team, doesn't mean you shouldn't take pride in holding your own on the playground. I played baseball through college and while I feel a certain level of regret at not having been good enough to have advanced further still, the positives of knowing that I made the most out of my ability, that I played out the string, far outweigh any resentment that the string ended sooner than I would have preferred. At some critical junctures in my life I have said to myself things like "it is worth the time and effort to pursue this goal, or develop that skill - look how far I was able to go in baseball with relatively modest natural skills," and I have pushed on as a result.

Specifically regarding a few of Rand's points, then, I can't imagine there being ANY real downside to developing a love for or interest in space and/or science. I can't imagine there are very many individuals who regret pursuing their interest in space even if they NEVER GET TO GO THERE. The IDEA of space seems to me more interesting than the reality of a featureless vacuum occasionally punctuated with rocks. Sure it would be exciting to go to Mars, but the skills, knowledge and self-improvement inherent in pursuing the dream of space will always outweigh the disappointment of not actually getting there.

Regarding dreams of leaving the ghetto, I think the pursuit of basketball glory is a better use of time with more transferable skills than the pursuit of rap, boxing, drug dealing, hustling or pimping/prostitution. Basketball can be at least a tenuous connection to school and the pursuit of eligibility can persuade at least some to remain in school longer and put greater effort into studies. ANY activity that provides an entree or impetus into college is only to the good for an individual and society.

I understand and sympathize with Rand's desire to not foster disappointment by encouraging kids to pursue unattainable goals like space or the NBA, but the goal ultimately isn't nearly as important as what can be achieved in the process of trying to get there.
posted by Eric at 9:57 AM

 
Backing Away From the Brink?
Dean made some points regarding India and Pakistan in the comments section of this post that deserve a broader hearing:

I'd suggest that the situation is quite dire.

Pakistan may well not be in full control of its situation. ISI (the Pakistani intelligence service) has long been a law unto itself. One of Musharraf's first actions after 9-11 was to fire a number of ISI-linked generals in the Pakistani high command. One can only hope that they were NOT in the nuclear chain-of-command, or if they were, that their replacements have rooted down deep. This is NOT to excuse Pakistan (which has been aiding the Muslim militants), but to note that, now that the chips are down, they may or may not have the ability to corral the tiger that they unleashed.

India has little incentive to rein itself in. In the first place, it has conventional superiority; so it may well believe that it would win any conventional war. As scary, however, it may also be banking on Pakistani rationality to keep Pakistan from using its nukes, i.e., "They won't use nukes, because they know they'd lose." Such brinksmanship makes a certain amount of sense, since the Pakistanis, as noted above, have been stoking the fires of Kashmir. However, w/ a weak government and a Hindu nationalist prime minister, India also seems to believe that it is on a God-directed (or would that be Kali-directed?) mission. Remember that it was Hindu nationalists who tore apart the mosque at Ayodhya w/ their bare hands a few years ago, because it was built on the site of a Hindu temple---several hundred years ago.

That is what makes this so scary---BOTH sides are convinced that God is on their side (the Pakistanis named one of their missiles after a god that killed the Indian missile's name-sake---I s*** you not). And few wars are as bloody as religious wars, historically.

As for the handshake, a brief anecdote. John Foster Dulles refused to shake hands w/ Zhou Enlai, back at some conference in the 1950s, iirc. This was a slap that the Chinese never forgot, nor forgave. Thus, when Richard Nixon visited China, he very noticeably went to Mao w/ his hand extended, in order to make up for that diplomatic slap decades previously. And the Chinese RECOGNIZED it for what it was---an apology. I don't know what Vajpayee was necessarily referring to, but these sorts of things DO mean something, especially where there is so much hatred and dissing and all that rooted down deep.

Just some thoughts.....
Dean

I agree very strongly that gestures and symbols count, especially in Asia. It would appear the rhetoric has toned down a bit, which I presume to be a good sign:

- Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf declared on Thursday he won't start a war with India as diplomacy appeared to be making some head way in averting war between the nuclear-armed foes.

"President Musharraf has made it very clear that he is searching for peace and he won't be the one to initiate a war," U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told reporters in the Pakistan capital.

"I will be hopefuly getting the same type of assurances tomorrow in Delhi," he said.

The big boys are taking this very seriously:

Britain's Independent newspaper reported on Thursday the United States will propose a joint Anglo-American military monitoring force for Kashmir.

Quoting defence and diplomatic sources, the report said U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would put forward the proposal when he visits the region next week.

It said about 500 helicopter-born troops could be used to patrol the disputed border. Foreign office and defence ministry officials delcined to confirm the specifics of the story.

....Armitage's tour to the subcontinent follows President George W. Bush's appeal to leaders of the two nuclear-armed rivals to step back from the abyss.

....Bush telephoned Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee on Wednesday, raising the profile of an international diplomatic offensive to head off war, as the United States and Britain urged their citizens to leave the region.

....Fears that millions could be killed in the first atomic war between nuclear-armed states have prompted world leaders to step up diplomatic pressure to pull them back from the brink.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is scheduled to follow Armitage to Pakistan and India in the next few days.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said there were signs tensions between India and Pakistan were easing slightly, but it was too early for a summit between the two leaders.

posted by Eric at 8:30 AM

 
Risk and Responsibility
It comes down to the questions of what is rational and who is responsible. I am almost pathologically anti-smoking so my attitude has been "soak the tobacco companies for all you can get" every step of the way. But I beginning to realize that individuals also have to take responsibility for their own actions at some point on the continuum: where exactly this point is I am not sure, but that is the legal and moral crux of the entire product liability issue.

There is no question the companies should be liable for damages incurred prior to the 1964 surgeon general's report - people simply didn't know of the dangers, while the tobacco companies did. After that the scale begins to slide.

W. Kip Viscusi, professor of law and economics at Harvard Law School, nonsmoker, former Nader's Raider, is an unlikely candidate to have

spent much of his energy defending the rationality and judgment of those souls, more risk-tolerant than he, who choose to light up. As a chief witness for Big Tobacco, he has made a compellingly simple argument: Smokers have a very solid understanding of tobacco's health risks. In multibillion-dollar lawsuits, individual smokers and state attorneys general have claimed that tobacco companies have duped the public about the risks of smoking. But Mr. Viscusi insists that just isn't so. Even if tobacco companies have churned out misinformation and propaganda, he says, they've failed to deceive their customers.

More controversially still, Mr. Viscusi declares that state governments enjoy a net fiscal gain from each pack of cigarettes sold, even before excise taxes are taken into account. Because smokers tend to die young, he argues, governments incur lower nursing-home and health-care costs for smokers as a class. So the major state and federal lawsuits against tobacco, which have sought reimbursement for smokers' Medicaid expenses, are based on a false premise. According to Mr. Viscusi, total Medicaid costs would actually be higher if there were no cigarettes. (That analysis, which one of Mr. Viscusi's critics calls "obscene," was initially disavowed by the tobacco industry itself.)

For a man who claims to be coldly rational and to argue only from the facts, though, it is possible that this bit of biographical information may color his judgment:

Mr. Viscusi was raised in Louisville, Ky., the son of two teachers -- and smokers. "We collected Raleigh coupons," he recalled during a legal deposition in February. Both of his parents stopped smoking during the early 1960s, shortly before he started high school. That was an era when the health risks of smoking were being widely publicized, and he describes his parents' decision to quit as highly analytic: They saw the data, assessed their own risk tolerance, and decided to stop.

Viscusi's defense of the industry is based upon this:

[In the late-'80s] he was hired as a consultant by a law firm representing R.J. Reynolds, the tobacco company. He was engaged as an expert on warning labels, as he'd done research for the government on the efficacy of various kinds of chemical warnings. "They brought me to their offices," he says, "and they had a couple of file drawers full of stuff on warnings. They said, Have a look through here and see what you find." In one of those drawers Mr. Viscusi came upon a file that would change his professional life: a survey of consumers' risk awareness, financed by two law firms for tobacco companies and conducted in 1985 by Audits and Surveys Inc., a research company based in New York City.

Here, Mr. Viscusi believed, was a gold mine. The survey asked respondents such questions as "Have you heard that cigarette smoking will most likely shorten a person's life?" and "Among 100 cigarette smokers, how many of them do you think will get lung cancer because they smoke?" In Mr. Viscusi's reading, the data suggested that the public is highly aware of smoking risks. The respondents surmised, for example, that 43 percent of smokers will get lung cancer because they smoke (the scientific consensus is that the actual figure is around 15 percent).

It seems to me that Viscusi took the information he found in the study, coupled it with the experience of his parents - rather analytical teachers, it would appear - who were able to rationally assess the risks of smoking once the surgeon general's report came out, and make the decision to quit.

But not all people are as rational as Viscusi's parents: many, many people have an amazing capacity for self-delusion, and coupled with the influence of physical and psychological addiction, the simple fact that the "truth is out there" shouldn't absolve the industry entirely:

Mr. Viscusi's critics raise several substantive questions about his approach to the public's risk beliefs. They claim that he has failed to take into account the insights of social psychology, and that he views his survey data through a crudely economistic lens.

Among the principal charges is that Mr. Viscusi's surveys suffer from "third-person bias." The Audits and Surveys questionnaires asked people how many of a hypothetical 100 smokers will contract a given disease, or how many years of life a hypothetical smoker will lose. The questionnaires did not ask smokers directly how they assessed their personal risks. "Tobacco poses a special, unique challenge to people's rationality," says Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. "A single cigarette is probably not going to harm you physically very much. And that's what you're always smoking: the next single cigarette. You don't make a decision to smoke for a lifetime. It's always, Should I take one more? Surveys suggest that people know the risks and want to quit, but they're wildly overoptimistic about the likelihood that they actually will quit within a given time frame."

....Critics also charge that, contrary to Mr. Viscusi's findings, heavy smokers are foolishly optimistic about their odds of living to age 75. A 1997 study by Michael Schoenbaum, an economist at the RAND Corporation, used data from the long-running federal Health and Retirement survey to assess whether heavy smokers among the "near elderly" (that is, from 55 to 64) correctly understand their health risks. By matching respondents' answers to their eventual dates of death, Mr. Schoenbaum concluded that heavy smokers overestimate their likelihood of reaching 75.

Some would go so far as to say that the decision to smoke is never rational: the "benefits" can never outweigh the "costs," but this is where the individual responsibility issue comes in. How do we want to be treated by our government? How much do we want to be taken care of "for our own good"? How much autonomy do we want in our decision-making?

It seems to me it is time for us to take a step back and rethink our relationship with government in order to resolve the rampant contradictions within our system. Why are tobacco and alcohol - with legion studies chronicling their detrimental health effects - legal but regulated when other substances - like marijuana - are prohibited outright with stiff legal penalties for mere possession? Yet if we are to choose less regulation nd more personal responsibility for our decisions, then it would seem that the tobacco industry could only be held liable for purposeful deception and not for simply making a product that is inherently dangerous.

There is no "right" answer, but the time has come for us to make hard decisions about responsibility and rationality and retool our legal system accordingly, because right now it is a confused and contradictory mess.
posted by Eric at 4:35 PM

 
Comments
It's probably my fault, but it seems like the "Comments" have been sparse lately. You are hereby encouraged to leave your thoughts, suggestions, criticism, recipes, whatever. I will always respond. Or if you prefer privacy, send me an email. However you do it, let's keep it interactive. Thank You!
posted by Eric at 3:00 PM

 
Cool Tunes Playlist
I've had a bunch of requests to publish the Cool Tunes playlist on the site, so from now on I will. Thanks for your interest.

Cool Tunes is a radio show in a magazine format Saturday nights at 10pm (Eastern) on WAPS, "The Summit," in Akron, Ohio. I play new music, reissues, and preview shows coming to town each week. Musically it is among the widest-ranging 2 hours in the country: modern rock, punk, electronica, jazz, reggae and ska, roots rock, Americana, blues, world, funk, hip hop, avant garde, etc. - if it's cool I play it. Cool Tunes has been proudly serving humanity since 1990.

6/1/02
Artist, Song, Album, Label

The Hives "Supply and Demand" Veni Vidi Vicious Epitaph/Sire;
The Mooney Suzuki "In a Young Man's Mind" Electric Sweat Gammon;
Unwritten Law "Sound Siren" Elva Interscope;
Our Lady Peace "Life" Spiritual Machines Columbia;
Spindle "Window" Spindle EP Spindle;
Thrice "See You In the Shallows" The Illusion of Safety Sub City;
Dillinger Four "Fuzzy Pink Handcuffs" Situationist Comedy Fat Wreck Chords;
White Zombie "Thunder Kiss '65" The KMFDM Remixes Geffen;
Static X "A Dios Alma Perdida" Machine Warner Brothers;
Trik Turner "Existence" Trik Turner RCA;
Quarashi "Transparent Parents" Jinx Time Bomb/Columbia;
Chaka Demus and Pliers "Murder She Wrote" Ultimate Collection Island/Hip-O;
Tony Rebel "Hypocrites" Realms of Rebel RAS;
Toots and the Maytals "Monkey Man" The Very Best of Island;
The Equators "Police On My Back" Hot Ace Boon Tune;
The Meters "Sophisticated Sissy" The New Orleans Hit Story Instant;
Dr. John "Mama Roux" Right Place Wrong Time Flashback;
Dr. Michael White "Caribbean Girl" Jazz From the Soul of N.O. Basin Street;
Chuck Prophet "After the Rain" No Other Love New West;
Jason Ringenberg "Honky Tonk Maniac From.." All Over Creation Yep Roc;
Freedy Johnston "Bad Reputation" This Perfect World Elektra;
Michael Stanley Band "Gypsy Eyes" You Break It You Bought It Epic;
Eddie Burns "Your Cash Ain't Nothin' But.." Snake Eyes Delmark;
Mighty Joe Young "Chicken Heads" Mighty Joe Young Blind Pig;
Sleepy John Estes "Airplane Blues" Newport Blues Delmark;
Bill Charlap and Shirley Horn "Stardust" Stardust Blue Note;
Dave Brubeck "Lullaby" Telarc Jazz 25 Years Telarc;
E.S.T. "Strange Place For Snow" Strange Place For Snow Superstudio Gul/Columbia;
Philly Joe Jones "Hi Fly" Drum Songs Milestone;
Eric Alexander "The Sweetest Sounds" Summit Meeting Milestone;
Wayne Shorter "Aung San Suu Kyi" Footprints Live Verve;
Lemon Juice Quartet "Trumpets of the Rosicrucian 2" Peasant Songs Piadrum
posted by Eric at 2:42 PM

 
A War In Six Days No More
I came late to the Israeli-Arab conflict - the machinations of a bunch of nuts in the desert didn't much capture my attention until after 9/11, when much of America and I looked up from our collective navel. I am still catching up on the background of the conflict and this Amitai Etzioni review of a new Michael Oren book on the Six Day War fills in holes and connects some dots:

IN A VERY USEFUL opening chapter, Oren provides the historical context for the Six Day War--the conflict that, in turn, established the framework for many of the geopolitical issues with which the Middle East is still contending. It is a familiar story of the Jews of the Diaspora settling in what they believed to be a land with few people. In 1947 the United Nations "General Assembly Resolution 181" created two states, Arab and Jewish, with Jerusalem under an international regime. But both the local Palestinians and the neighboring Arab states refused to accept the arrangement, choosing instead to fight Israel from the day it was born. (I served as an Israeli commando in the Palmach at the time and can testify to Oren's accuracy.)

But there is a new element to the conflict:

Nationalism did provide some motivation, but not enough to fill the rank and file of the Arab armies with a strong desire to fight. Instead, the kind of ideological fervor that leads to suicide bombers and people willing to spend years preparing terrorist attacks on civilians has come, since the collapse of Soviet communism and the fading of the Cold War, from a new force: Islamic fundamentalism.

Recently there was a fight among the hundreds of volunteers for a suicide bombing mission in Gaza--because one of the candidates jumped the queue, taking the place another considered his. And many millions of Muslims across numerous countries, egged on by Arabic TV, have made eliminating Israel (the little Satan) and the United States (the big Satan) a tenet of their faith.

As a result, the Six Day War is not a metaphor for the current situation:

The campaign against terrorism by Israel and the United States will be a prolonged struggle. Its proper metaphor is not--sadly--the Six Day War, but the Cold War. We are engaged in a long, tedious, and brutal war with virulent forms of Islam, during which will have to be a fight over the hearts and minds of those we face. We shall have to help them to see the virtue of free governments and open societies over the dogmatic life under theocratic regimes that now not only terrorize, but also ideologically mobilize them by playing on religious symbols.

When liberal democracies fight terrorism, they face a moral dilemma. The individual terrorists hide within the civilian population and do not fight by traditional rules of war. And the countries that support them place their missiles, topped with chemical and biological agents, next to schools, hospitals, and mosques. So, when we fight terrorists in Afghanistan (or when Israel fights them in Jenin), there are inevitably civilian casualties.

Other than some of the fighting in Afghanistan, this isn't a war against armies at all:

today we fight a worldwide war against terrorists who hide only among civilians. Moreover, if caught, they claim all the rights we bestow on civilians, supported by civil-libertarian lawyers, and backed up all too often by judges who think that they are dealing with garden-variety criminals. And, in terrorist nations such as Iraq, not only are there more than a few instances of major military assets being hidden among and under civilian quarters, but such positioning is systematically pursued. In short, we are unable to overcome terrorism without causing "collateral damage" on an entirely new order of magnitude.

But this shouldn't, can't stop us:

WE MAY FIND SOLACE in what ought to be called "collateral gains." We have learned in Afghanistan that the overwhelming majority of its people wanted to be released from the yolk of the tyrannical government that had terrorized them for decades. Far from being fanatical (as many of us, only two years ago, supposed most Afghans were), they were dancing in the streets when freed from the Taliban. A visit to Iran this May left me without the slightest doubt that about 80 percent of the population of that country (as indicated by election polls and their behavior) do not favor the fanatical regime imposed on them by the mullahs. And although Iraq is governed by a secular and not a theocratic tyranny, the fact that it has to rely on terror to keep its own people in check is a sign that American troops may soon be welcomed as liberators in Al Basrah and in Baghdad, as they have been in Kabul.

posted by Eric at 11:02 AM

 
"Stern Determination"
Novelist Donald E. Westlake has some thoughts on 9/11 and the president:

[On 9/11] those inhuman creatures with their own death-soaked values called America's attention to themselves, as they'd been trying to do for years. This time, they succeeded, but they accomplished far more than they set out to do.

In the first place, they finally brought an end to the Vietnam war. For thirty years, America has been wounded, defensive, insecure, a braggart, and a bully because it was no longer sure of itself. Vietnam had broken America's belief in its own decency, the belief that had made it so useful and so cordial in the world for so long. A German friend once told me that, when he was a child, the first word one thought of in connection with Americans was "candor." After Vietnam, that was no longer the first word anyone thought of.

With one slap across the face on September 11, that changed. America became closer to what it had been in 1960, self-confident without arrogance. The nation of the Peace Corps, not Grenada. Which meant that the symbol at the top had to change. In the first day or two after September 11, George W. Bush could be seen floundering, breathing open-mouthed like a fish, waiting for somebody to tell him what to do. But, more rapidly than I expected, he realized what he had to do. He had to become a grownup.

The new suit does not fit perfectly, but that's all right. President Bush is performing a demonstration of stern determination, and is certainly doing it well enough to pass. We asked him to change roles in mid-performance, and he did it. We could not ask for more.

Actually, we could and should ask for more: we should ask for him to continue with the performance and not revert to that of Fratboy In Chief, bumbling equivocator, an encore he seems to have been rehearsing in earnest of late.
posted by Eric at 10:48 AM

 
Football In June
Creepy Blogger of the Corn Dave Hogberg, who, since they have no people and therefore no professional sports teams in Iowa, has to identify with teams like Minnesota's Twinkies, writes to point out that those same Twinkies clearly dropped some Roofies on the Indians' pitchers last night at the Trash Bag Dome, as they savaged the Tribe 23-2. There goes the winning streak.

UPDATE
Dave isn't really all that creepy and he informs us that he isn't a Twinkies fan as he was originally a Bay Area denizen. Well thank goodness for the former, but as to the latter, does he think I'll be happy he's a GIANTS fan? I'm from L.A. and think Juan Marishal should have been taken out back and shot after he attacked John Roseboro rather than being fined a pittance and suspended for 5 minutes.
posted by Eric at 10:23 AM

 
Aussie Follow-up
Tim Blair knows his idiotic countrywoman Dr. Helen Caldicott:

Oh my God! Caldicott!

She's freakin' hilarious. The old bint has been railing about nuclear evils for decades, then a few years ago developed cancer -- for which she needed treatments devised by, you guessed it, nuclear medicines.

Then she went straight back to campaigning against Australia's only nuclear reactor, which isn't a powerplant. It has only medical and research applications.

She's insane.

Cheers,
Tim

posted by Eric at 10:08 AM

 
Nuclear Responsibility
Two nuclear nations, the fate of millions in the balance, a million troops massed along their mutual border, Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf were both at an Asian summit in Almaty, Kazakhstan earlier this week. What happened?

Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was due to leave Almaty early on Wednesday after failing to agree to a face-to-face meeting with his Pakistani counterpart, President Pervez Musharraf, who left for home on Tuesday.

"No, I didn't meet him. And no, I didn't shake hands with him," Musharraf said earlier. "I shook hands with him once before... Maybe I was waiting for him to shake hands with me this time."

"Maybe I was waiting for him to shake hands with me this time"???

This is the best diplomatic effort the leader of a nation poised on the brink of the first nuclear exchange in the history of the world could come up with? Say what you want about John F. Kennedy running around like a rutting Irish wolfhound, in October of 1962 he wasn't waxing petulant about who initiated what handshake while the missiles flew:

On Saturday evening, after a day of tense discussions within the "ExComm" or Executive Committee of senior advisers, President Kennedy decided on a dual strategy—a formal letter to Khrushchev accepting the implicit terms of his October 26 letter (a U.S. non-invasion pledge in exchange for the verifiable departure of Soviet nuclear missiles). coupled with private assurances to Khrushchev that the United States would speedily take out its missiles from Turkey, but only on the basis of a secret understanding, not as an open agreement that would appear to the public, and to NATO allies, as a concession to blackmail. The U.S. president elected to transmit this sensitive message through his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who met in his office at the Justice Department with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.

And do you imagine that even blustery Khrushchev, who variously pounded his shoe on the podium at the U.N. and said "We will be at your burial," would have encouraged Cuban terrorist raids on South Florida and then coyly denied it? ("Pakistan will not allow its territory to be used for any terrorist acts outside or inside its boundaries.") Or whined that it was Kennedy's turn to call him on the Hotline?

The difference between then and now - the U.S. and the Soviet Union vs. India and Pakistan - is that nuclear capability 40 years ago seemed to carry a much higher burden of responsibility: those who had it took it very seriously, perhaps with Hiroshima and Nagasaki relatively fresh on their minds. The U.S. and the Soviet Union played at brinksmanship, but had diplomatic efforts going on behind the scenes throughout the Cubam Missile Crisis:

the resolution of the crisis (Khrushchev's withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba) came after a series of secret meetings in which RFK offered the Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin not threats of nuclear retaliation but an old-fashioned diplomatic deal: a pledge of no U.S. invasion of Cuba, plus the withdrawal of U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey. The terms, according to the memoir, were that this could not be an explicit quid pro quo and that the deal would never be publicly acknowledged by the United States. Further revisions of the myth emerged in the early 1980s, when former Kennedy aides Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy, alarmed by what they saw as President Ronald Reagan's embrace of brinkmanship, warned the public that the Cuban Missile Crisis had not been resolved by America's nuclear superiority but by its conventional superiority in the Caribbean, which enabled restraint and the quarantine of Cuba.)

The threshold then for nuclear confrontation was very high - let us hope it remains so. Perhaps India's conventional superiority will also "enable restraint," though certainly not the "quarantine" of Kashmir. I am not reassured of the parties' understanding of the seriousness of the matter though after exchanges like these:

In the midst of heightened Indo-Pak tensions, an Indian high commission staffer in Islamabad was abducted on Saturday by unidentified persons, believed to be Pakistan intelligence operatives, while he was returning home along with his 10-year-old son.

High commission officials said Kulwant Singh was abducted at around 11.30 hrs near his residence at Royal Enclave while he was returning on a two-wheeler.

India on Saturday night termed the abduction of one of its high commission staffers in Islamabad as 'inhuman and reprehensible' and lodged a strong protest with Pakistan over the incident.

The abduction was against all diplomatic conventions and code of civilised behaviour, an external affairs ministry spokesperson told PTI.

The abduction, she said, was an obvious retaliation to Friday's incident involving an assistant of the Pakistan high commission in Delhi being caught red-handed while accepting classified documents from an Indian Air Force sergeant.

Pakistan has said that Kulwant Singh, the Indian high commission staffer who was prevented from crossing over to India by road, was stopped 'for travelling without completing procedural requirements' and accused Indian officials of 'deliberately subverting' rules agreed between both the countries.

A Pakistan foreign office spokesman said in a statement on Tuesday night that the staffer had not completed the formalities required to travel by road.

"The foreign office has conveyed its deep concern to the Indian high commission in Islamabad at the deliberate effort of the Indian official to circumvent the relevant requirements," said the statement.

Handshake slights, beating up a diplomat on a bicycle, preventing same from getting medical treatment - these are not the actions of people who understand the seriousness of their situation, who are willing to keep the unthinkable unthinkable. We, the world, must make them realize that nuclear is not an option, that this is not a game.

Ernest W. Lefever, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, tries to be reassuring:

Strange as it may seem, a little nuclear saber-rattling over the Kashmir conflict may be a good thing. During the last two weeks, the leaders of India and Pakistan have brandished their nuclear-tipped missiles and made veiled threats to use them. Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee have felt compelled to look and act fearsome.

Like animals that show their fangs or inflate themselves with air to appear more menacing to adversaries, both men have resorted to this hallowed ritual of political rivals, which more often than not has prevented a deadly showdown.

"More often than not" is not the level of assurance I am looking for.

The well-documented history of the nuclear era--and virtually all other evidence--suggests that such a war will not erupt. The provocative words on both sides are part of an elaborate ritual.

Now, as always, leaders confronting a crisis communicate with one another not only through quiet diplomatic channels but also by a public ritualized code. This coded confrontation is often a substitute for lethal conflict, a kind of foreplay that can end in a fragile peace if not in a mutual embrace.

Lefever believes they DO know what they are doing:

More important than the immediate posturing by India and Pakistan is the fact that both sides are increasingly aware of the lessons learned by Washington and Moscow since the dawn of the nuclear era. Many of those who studied in the U.S. have adopted the esoteric vocabulary of the nuclear balance. Among the understandings they learned are these:

* The atom-bombing of Japan in 1945 was a one-time measure, tragic but justified because it ended a brutal war and saved up to a million lives, mostly Japanese.

* Shortly after the Soviet Union acquired the atom bomb, both Washington and Moscow realized that the basic purpose of their respective stockpiles was to prevent their use. As it turned out, the delicate nuclear balance of terror also prevented a conventional war.

* The 1962 Cuban missile crisis demonstrated the stabilizing impact of nuclear deterrence and reinforced the tendency of the superpowers to rely on less-lethal means for managing conflict. Further, President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev negotiated by deeds without the necessity for face-to-face talks.

* After the Soviet Union fell, the threat of nuclear war receded even further. Both sides increasingly recognized the merit of minimum deterrence, the view that each side needed only enough nuclear weapons to make a first strike against it too costly to the other. What rational Kremlin leader would initiate a nuclear attack if he assumed millions of his people would perish in retaliation?

To what extent have the leaders of India and Pakistan internalized these vital lessons? And do they have the requisite attributes--common sense, prudence and courage--to resist the passions of the moment? I believe they do.

The childish behavior, the sabre rattling, is it a front for serious negotiations? We must hope.
posted by Eric at 8:32 AM

 
"Goodnight and Have a Pleasant Tomorrow"
This headline appears in one form or another every few weeks:

Taliban Leader Still Alive, Says Afghan Minister

Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, one of the world's most wanted men, is alive and spending much of his time outside Afghanistan, the interior minister of the interim Afghan government said Monday.

"... Mullah Omar still exists. He is out of Afghanistan most of the time," Yunis Qanuni told reporters.

It was the first time an Afghan minister has confirmed the one-eyed Taliban chief and protector of Saudi-born al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was still alive.

It may be the first time an Afghan minister has said it, but a series of spokesmen for this or that organization have been proclaiming the irrelevant, illiterate, one-eyed bumpkin-terrorist alive since he disappeared.

I am reminded of the old Saturday Night Live running gag where a picture of a general, replendent in a military uniform, flashed on the screen during the newscast. Chevy Chase deadpanned to the camera: "This just in ….. Generalisimo Francisco Franco is still dead."

Of course we want Omar - he's a murderer, a stupid demagogue, a dangerous remnant. But that's all he is: a remnant. For Afghanistan's future, he might as well be dead. He is the discredited detritus of history. Regardless of his wretched biological status, for all intents and purposes, "Mullah Mohammad Omar is still dead." Good riddance to bad news.
posted by Eric at 9:07 PM

 
9/11 Mastermind Fingered?
All of this dithering about Iraq, and inconsequential mop-up work in Afghanistan has left me bored and frustrated, but this is a headline to make the dog sit up and wag his tail:

Sept. 11 Mastermind May Be ID'd

Investigators believe they have identified a Kuwaiti lieutenant of Osama bin Laden as the likely mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said Tuesday.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, designated one of the FBI's most-wanted terrorists, is at large in Afghanistan or nearby, the official told The Associated Press.

U.S. investigators believe Mohammed planned many aspects of the Sept. 11 attacks, turning bin Laden's calls for dead Americans into reality.

"There's lots of links that tie him to 9-11," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "He's the most significant operational player out there right now."

I think it is not coincidental that this information is coming out now, the day the Senate investigation into intelligence failure begins.
posted by Eric at 8:06 PM

 
Other Ecosystems
With the blog world abuzz about NZ Bear's Ecosystem, it is worth noting there are other systems for plotting the blogs. Also, Doc Searls and Richard Bennett note that the "A Team" of early computer-related blog legends like Winer, Weinberger, Kottke, Evhead, etc., are grossly underrepresented on the Bear's system, which they are.

Mark Pilgrim checks in with his blog-relation system, which he calls a "neighborhood":

The neighborhood is just a way of figuring out where you fit into the larger weblogging community. There are lots of ways to determine this; some automated, some not. My particular interactive example today looks at Google to find sites "related" to yours, for instance

Then it looks at each of these sites to see what sites *they* link to (in their permanent blogrolls).

I was experimenting with this over the weekend to try to find sites that I might be interested in reading on a regular basis, but that I didn't know about yet. There are several different ways to do this, and they all yield slightly different results.

But anyway, that's the goal: not only to see where you fit, but to use the collective intelligence of the community to discover new and interesting people.-Mark

posted by Eric at 6:20 PM

 
Starved to Life
According to this article in the WSJ, scientists are on the verge of declaring a "restricted calorie diet" adds to the life span of monkeys and most likely humans:

Calorie restriction was first shown to create exceptionally long-lived rats in the 1930s. It later had the same effect in guppies, water fleas, yeast, spiders and a microscopic water invertebrate called the rotifer. Last month, Labrador retrievers became the first large mammals to join the list.

Now, scientists appear on the verge of a finding that calorie restriction also extends the lifespan of monkeys, who share more than 90% of their genes with humans. At the National Institutes of Health, where researchers have been studying a colony of 120 rhesus monkeys for 15 years, evidence for calorie restriction is mounting. The control animals, fed a healthy lowfat diet, are dying at a normal rate, while animals fed 30% less appear to be living far longer -- and avoiding age-linked maladies. One of the underfed monkeys is 38 years old, the human equivalent of 114 years.

There are various theories as to how it works:

Calorie restriction appears to create biochemical changes in the body that have a more-profound effect on lifespan than simply avoiding diseases caused by excess fat. No one knows for sure how it works. It might lower the levels of free radicals, or potentially toxic particles created by the breakdown of food. Other scientists believe it triggers a state of emergency called "survival mode" in which the body eliminates all unnecessary functions to focus only on staying alive.

....If scientists could discover what makes calorie restriction work, people might be able to enjoy the same effect without the hassle, and without the deprivation. One theory is that the lower body temperature caused by near-starvation somehow extends life. In case low temperature is in fact the secret, Mr. Rae avoids putting on a sweater even when he feels chilly.

There is mounting evidence for another favorite theory -- that lower food intake results in fewer free radicals, or unstable particles created as a result of the breakdown of food. These particles can seriously damage genes and proteins, resulting in potentially fatal diseases. Advocates of this theory got a major boost when samples of thigh muscles from the calorie-restricted monkeys at the University of Wisconsin were shown to have suffered remarkably little free-radical damage, says Dr. Weindruch.

NIH scientists have also found preliminary evidence for the "survival mode" theory. The scientists found that human and rat cells grown in the blood of calorie-restricted monkeys are enormously resistant to heat and toxins -- suggesting there is something in the blood that is fighting dangers aggressively.

Whatever the actual trigger, we are talking about very restricted intake to make it work:

the NIH monkey experiments limit food intake to the minimum necessary to prevent negative effects on health -- or at least 30% less than the current "healthy" diet. Translated into human terms, that would be 1,120 calories a day for the average woman, or 1,540 for a man.

For the average American, eating at that level would create deep hunger pangs. One meal at McDonald's -- a Big Mac, supersize fries, and small Coke -- weighs in at 1,450 calories. And if a woman on 30% calorie restriction had a cappuccino and a large muffin during her morning commute, she would already have consumed 75% of her allocation for the day, says Cathy Nonas, director of the Van Itallie Center for Nutrition and Weight Management at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York.

There are calorie-deprived people all over the world, but in most of the Third World malnutrition offsets the benefits of a low calorie diet. One place where a low calorie/high nutrition diet occurs naturally in on Okinawa:

a study of the Japanese island of Okinawa -- whose 1.3 million inhabitants have traditionally eaten a spartan, but nutrition-packed diet of about 1,800 calories a day -- provides some evidence for calorie restriction.

On Okinawa, where the diet consists of soy, vegetables and small amounts of fish, meat and rice, there are 34 centenarians for every 100,000 people -- more than triple the U.S. rate, says Bradley Willcox, a gerontologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. The oldest person in the world, 113-year-old Kamato Hongo, lives on a nearby island, he adds.

In the monkey study, not only are the calorie-restricted living longer, they are healthier as well:

Only 14% of them have developed an age-related disease, such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes or failing kidneys, compared with 32% in the control group, Dr. Lane says.

Also, calorie restriction staved off the normal age-related decline in a multifunctioned hormone called dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate. DHEA, sold as a dietary supplement, has touched off a craze among Americans even though many scientists say there is no proof it will forestall aging.

All of this is very interesting, and obviously, the key is to find the actual mechanism that triggers the positive changes rather than forcing us to starve ourselves to live longer.

But what if this mechanism isn't found? The emphasis for active people now, especially athletes, is to get bigger and stronger, using intense weight training, supplements and even illegal steroids to achieve maximum size and muscle density. What would happen if a person pursued these twin, seemingly contradictory goals simultaneously? My guess is either one lean, muscular corpse, or an abundance of trophies from the Senior Olympics.
posted by Eric at 4:46 PM

 
RED STAR vs. HEINEKEN UPDATE
Here's a letter Marty wrote to an online journalist with Aversion.com, who is preparing a follow-up story to this, and this.

Hi Matt,
Thanks for getting back to me. I'll do my best to answer your questions.

Question # 1: Any developments since the antiMusic.com story? -- not a peep from Heineken but a huge response at antiMusic. Thousands of visits per day, I'm told. I've finally located the right lawyer to represent my claim on a contingent basis in the event I'm forced to institute a Trademark Infingement suit against Sony Music and Heineken USA, Inc. He's a specialist in Intellectual Property matters. We're now ready to call for a meeting with all parties and try to settle this dispute.

Question #2: Is Heineken conducting a "war of attrition" against me? -- I've been e-mailing all online press coverage to critical legal and executive personnel at Sony & Heineken. I know it has been finally noticed because Heineken's main Washington Trademark attorney called my 1st lawyer, the one who sent the initial cease and desist claim letter on my behalf, and threatened to sue me for 'slandering' Heineken. I don't think they consider my rights an issue of concern. I'm meaningless to them. They want the name
because of the red star logo on their beer bottles and if they can get away with stealing it, they'll do just that. That's what they pay their lawyers for ... and their lawyers, like too many lawyers everywhere, are equally unscrupulous types -- hypocritical bastards that lie and bluff and say and do anything to win.

Question # 3: Why are they trying to make the beer promo look like some sort of a public service? -- I think they're simply unconscious and obviously believe the black public is unconscious, too. They're not fooling anyone with just the slightest degree of awareness and sensitivity. I think they think they're being "cool" by introducing their "non-profit music initiative to benefit urban musicians" and that blacks will realize this and respect their social conscience and, in turn, buy their beer.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that this is all about selling beer. How amazingly dumb and tasteless this marketing campaign is. If they wanna be considered "cool" let them come up with something as good as Budweiser's "Waz Up" campaign. That's cool, creative and honest, too. Blacks don't seem to need any help in figuring out how to get so-called "urban" music across. Why is music categorized as white or black, anyway?

If Heineken wants a bigger slice of the black (or white or green) beer buying dollar all they have to do is to release good CDs on a regular basis and let everyone know it's coming from Heineken ... and that Heineken makes good music and good beer -- at the right price, too. And then, if they really want to do something for those truly in need, they can donate monies to AIDS researchers, or computers to public schools. All these bogus "social" trappings are unnecessary, transparent and degrading. I wonder if any of the artists on Heineken' s CD -- Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Nelly Furtado, India.Arie, Glenn Lewis, Macy Gray -- have any idea what they're lending their names, reputations and artistic skills to ...

Question # 4: Do you have anything to say about their apparent disregard for the little guy? -- Whatever you can get away with seems to be the way it works. We're taught to be honest, to be ethical, to obey and follow the law but when we grow up we realize no one practices that ... and you're ridiculed and branded as naive if you do. Only one thing talks ... money ... and people and corporations will do anything for it. This is yet another American Corporate scandal and a statement on how business is conducted today -- lie,
steal, cheat, falsify -- but don't get caught ... and if you do, buy your way out of it and go back to business as usual.
MT

posted by Eric at 3:32 PM

 
And In This Corner...
I feel it prudent to run interference between my pals Jim Treacher and Max Power. What we have here is a failure to communicate and I am the GREAT COMMUNICATOR, or was that Ronald Reagan?.

Max feels that 'N Sync boy Lance Bass spending $20 million to go into space isn't something worth getting worked up about, since people waste money on all kinds of stupid things. Spending $20 mill to go into space is no worse, and is possibly better, than Imelda Marcos spending a similar amount on shoes, or whatever.

Treacher doesn't care about the money itself: this isn't an economic morality matter for him. He, a connoisseur and chronicler of mass culture, cares about the affront to public aesthetics that is the continued DISCUSSION of the issue: Is he? Isn't he? Who gives a festering boil? Just shut up about it. Lance Bass has nothing of interest on any level to contribute to the public discussion, so he should acknowledge his place and fuck right off.
posted by Eric at 2:15 PM

 
Nuke the Aussie Whales
Jeff Goldstein is both hilarious and penetrating (I'm not talking about sex polls - clean it up). He made it through my Grateful Dead post, accusing me only of working under the influence of hallucinogens, while others - who sing in a cappella groups - address me as having "gone nuts." The effrontery.

So anyway, Jeff caught Politically Incorrect last night (which I thought was canceled and the host defenestrated months ago, by the way) and another freaking Australian with a Ph.D. was whining about nukes and war and other exigencies, and even David Crosby, the old drugged walrus himself, looked askance at the woman's piffle:

Famed Aussie anti-nuke activist and physician Dr. Helen Caldicott appeared on last evening's "Politically Incorrect," prattling on about the "5000 innocent people" killed by US bombing missions in Afghanistan ("paging Dr. Rall, Dr. Ted Rall") and about the Chicago "leukemia epidemic" that will invariably result from a catastrophic waste spill (a foregone conclusion statistically, Dr. Caldicott informed us, given the percentage of roadway accidents and the number of trips we'll need to make) should we try to transport spent nuclear materials to the proposed Yucca Mountain containment site.

Because evidently scientists haven't thought through the safety issues thoroughly, and have proposed storing the toxic goop in porcelain tea cups -- which, of course, will then be balanced on the ends of sticks by circus clowns (who'lll spin them to keep them aloft).

To his credit, Bill Maher was having none of this, and tore Dr. Caldicott a brand new bomb shelter for her troubles. Even David Crosby, in fact, inched away from her once she began arguing that violence never solved anything, and that when you go to war, what you're really doing is (wait for it).... killing people.

If you can't get your head around the concept that IN THE BIG PICTURE sometimes it is best to kill some people so that they don't live to kill lot's more people who don't deserve to die, then you will never be able to come to terms with the WORLD AS IT REALLY IS.

We went to the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and had a ball. We loved the Australians we met, but it would appear that the entire country, other than Tim Blair and Martin Roth, live in a world of fairies and unicorns where the bad guys never have to be killed and all leaves are ever Green.

My guess is the isolation of the country - which is also a continent - and the fact that 20 million people live on a landmass nearly the size of the continental U.S., plus collective guilt over its piss-poor record concerning its own indiginous people, leads its inhabitants to believe that trouble can always be avoided, SHOULD always be avoided: "What's that you say? The Islamofascists are invading our shores? No problem, we'll go on walkabout so they won't be angry with us, since ANYTHING is preferable to killing these poor oppressed, misunderstood souls who deserve our sympathy and respect."
posted by Eric at 12:22 PM

 
"PERMANENT LINKS" - No More Confusion
Even after the heated, granular discussion of the last few weeks, there is still rampant confusion as to the meaning of the term "PERMANENT LINK." In a medium where words are all we have to convey our meaning, there is no good excuse for semantic confusion.

As it now stands, the term PERMANENT LINK is being used to describe two completely separate entities. Please allow me to describe them in some detail in an effort to settle the matter once and for all (until next week). Also, please excuse me if this seems elementary - just trying to make it as clear as possible.

The original, and etymologically speaking, "proper" meaning of PERMANENT LINK is the specific address of a given blog entry. Since you are already here, let's use this site as an example. Please scroll down to the post just below this one, entitled "Do Your Duty." At the bottom of the post are the words "posted by Eric Olsen at 9:00 AM." If you move your mouse over "9:00 AM" you will find that it is a HYPERLINK, that is, if you click on it, it will take you somewhere else. That "somewhere else" in this case is the permanent specific address of the "Do Your Duty" post.

Hover your mouse over "9:00 AM" again. While you are doing so, look down at the bottom of your screen and you will see an address appear. That address is the "PERMANENT LINK," or "PERMANENT ADDRESS," or "SHORTCUT" for that post. The PERMANENT LINK for this post is ends with this number: #77328724

The easiest way to copy the permanent link is hover your mouse above "9:00 AM," then right-click (click the button on the right side of your mouse) on "9:00 AM." When you right-click, a menu will pop up. Left-click on "COPY SHORTCUT"; you may then paste that link/address/shortcut anywhere you would like, including the link box of your blogging software. The process I just described applies specifically to blogs that use Blogger software (as we do).

InstaPundit just went through a site redesign, and Glenn now uses Movable Type, as does Daily Pundit. On Movable Type blogs, the process of finding and copying the PERMANENT LINK for a given post is a little different. Let's take for example this post on Glenn's site. The entire post consists of these words: THIS WHOLE BLOGGER-SEX THING is getting out of hand. Below these words is this: posted at 08:45 AM by Glenn Reynolds. Next to the words "Glenn Reynolds" is a symbol that looks like two chain links hooked together. Hover your mouse over this symbol and perform the right-click operation described above.

UserLand is another brand of blogging software. Doc Searls uses the Manilla product from UserLand, as does company owner Dave Winer. On Dave's site, the PERMANENT LINK is the little # symbol that follows each post. On Doc's site, the PERMANENT LINK is the little curvy arrow that follows the title. Follow the right-click procedure to copy any PERMANENT LINK.

The PERMANENT LINK, therefore, is simply the identifying address of ANY given article or blog post. The reason you have permanent links at all is so that you can identify ANY INDIVIDUAL POST. You will note that the permanent link of any given post is different from the URL, or address of your website. The URL of your site will always bring up your CURRENT PAGE, with your most current post at the top. The URL for this site is THIS. This is the address of your site in general, the permanent link is the address of an INDIVIDUAL POST.

Moving on, the term PERMANENT LINK is also being used by many to mean LINKS TO FAVORITE SITES THAT APPEAR AS A PART OF THE SITE TEMPLATE and typically appear on the far right, left, top or bottom of a blog site. Ours appear quite far down on the left side of the site under the heading BLOGROLLING, and begin with a. beam, Amygdala, Asparagirl, etc. Since these appear in the template portion of the site, and can't be changed without going into the template, they have also become known as PERMANENT LINKS, as in "InstaPundit added me to his 'permanent links'; I am so totally pumped I may spontaneously combust."

This is where the confusion comes in. We need to find another term to mean "the links to other sites that appear in the template area, and typically go to the URL of the site itself and not to a specific post." Again, on our site, we call it "Blogrolling." On InstaPundit's site, they are on the left side of the site under the heading RECOMMENDED, and then the subheading BIG JOURNALISM. The most clever and descriptive term I have seen so far is on Doc Searl's site: his is on the right under the heading BLOGROLODEX.

Andrew Sullivan has his on a completely separate page under the heading LINKS, which is perhaps a bit too generic and may contribute to confusion. I would suggest that any title without the word LINK in it is fine: BLOGROLLING, RECOMMENDED, BLOGROLODEX, whatever. Anything but PERMANENT LINKS so that we may put an end to the confusion that grips so many a weary mind.

I believe I am a logical person to forward these thoughts because I am so computer illiterate: I figure if I can explain it so that I can understand it, then ANYONE can understand it and life will be better for one and all.

UPDATE
Ginger Stampley of What She Really Thinks writes with some additional information on the issue:

FYI: the chain symbols for permanent links are not a feature of Movable Type per se, but of the site designs a number of bloggers use. The default templates for Movable Type don't use them; the time stamp has the permanent link to the entry.

I've used Radio, Blogger, and Movable Type, and there's no reason someone who knows templates couldn't set up any of the different tools with any of the icons.

Best,
Ginger
now thinking about updating her template and perma^H^H^H^H^Hblogroll ...

ADDENDUM
David Weinberger writes to inform me that he is the inventor of the term "blogrolodex," Doc Searls invented the ever-popular "blogrolling."

UPDATE ADDENDUM
Dave Trowbridge presents his own coinage for those links on the left or right of your site: roloblog, which as he says, is indeed more euphonious than blogrolodex.
posted by Eric at 10:16 AM

 
DO YOUR DUTY
The Sexiest Female Blogger poll heats up!! There is much agitating and thrashing about by the competitors and their shills. All I can say is check out Dawn's action photo HERE, my testemonial HERE, then go DO YOUR DUTY and vote for her ass (not literally, you know what I mean).
posted by Eric at 9:00 AM

 
Herblockbuster
Speaking of guns (see immediately below), political cartoonist Herbert Block - "Herblock" - died last October leaving an astonishing inheritance of $50 million to establish a foundation to further his favorite causes. The NRA will not be pleased:

Although his manner was unassuming, his passion for the issues depicted in his cartoons never wavered, Swoboda said.

On handgun control, for example - the subject of many cartoons - Block clearly felt more work was needed. In his will, he left $200,000 to Handgun Control Inc., now the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, as well as a total of $1 million to other charities.

"There is a special circle in my cartoon hell for them - and a special contempt for the politicians who exchange support with them," he wrote of the gun lobby in a 1995 essay that accompanies a retrospective of his work on The Post's Web site. "Some progress has been made, although in 50 years they haven't yet received their just desserts. But there's still a good supply of pencils and ink."

Apart from gun control, Block's goals for the foundation were very broad:

Swoboda said the most difficult part of his job will be figuring out how best to fulfill the broad missions Block laid out for his foundation.

The cartoonist's will lists six goals for the money, including to "improve the conditions of the poor, distressed and underprivileged," and to "promote free and democratic government." He also wanted to encourage the declining art of newspaper editorial cartooning and to provide scholarships for disadvantaged youths.

The voice of Herblock will not be silenced by death.
posted by Eric at 6:40 PM

 
Daughters, Guns, and Professors
As you can tell by my glut of pop culture posts of late, at times I grow weary of policy and news blogging. Most of the time I feel an urgency to pursue the news of the day - feel that it really matters to my life - but lately I haven't. It probably has something to do with my daughter graduating from high school this Sunday, sending my mind back over the 18 years of her life, looking for softer, rounder concepts than the strident interplay of politics and policy.

I look forward to Sunday with polar feelings: I will be exceptionally proud - she is singing for commencement as well as graduating - but I know it will be a weepfest, and I'm not looking forward to that part of it.

Her car broke down over the weekend so I had to take her back to her mom's this afternoon. It's about 70 miles, and on the way she revealed - quite sheepishly - her new tattoo. I am about as not into tattoos as you can get without some kind of religious prohibition - especially for women - but she designed hers and it's a cute little flower on her lower stomach, so I can live with it. No more, though; and no piercings beyond the ear - not that I can really do anything about it since she turned 18 a couple of weeks ago. She seems to still care what I think - that's a blessing.

So anyway, my mind's been kind of like mush lately with all of this going on, and I've shied away from the hard (news) stuff. Some of it never interests me: truth be told, if I never read another word about guns - except as how they are used by professionals to control or eliminate bad guys - that would be fine. And even though I was pre-law in college, I never went beyond "pre" and a fair amount of detailed legal conversation leaves me slackjawed as well. So, like most other people (I am guessing), not everything interests me, even in my favorite blogs. But when the Professor gets down to brass tacks and lays it on the line, there is nothing finer:

I'm for the war. I'm glad that we killed a lot of Al Qaeda and Taliban. I'm sorry we didn't kill them all. I'm sorry that we killed any non-Al Qaeda and non-Taliban Afghans, but it was a war, and that kind of thing happens. I don't believe -- with Mary Robinson -- that you have a moral duty not to engage in war if anyone might be hurt as a result. In fact, I think that when you engage in war you have a moral duty to use sufficient force to end it swiftly, because that actually saves lives overall.

But Ted Rall claims that we were "carpet-bombing" Afghan cities, something pretty easily refuted by the (low) casualty figures I cited. Most everything Rall says is easily refuted. Which is what makes the glowing Time review of his book so pathetic.

In a weird sort of way, though, I see reason in O'Neill's final point. I don't believe that the war is an imperialistic venture by America to solve its internal problems -- unless, you know, having crazed Arabs crashing loaded planes into skyscrapers counts as an "internal problem." But if there's something wrong with our war effort, it's that it's "ineffective." In other words, we're not bombing enough people to ensure that attacks like 9/11 won't happen again.

I'd be happy to sit in isolationist splendor if I thought we could do it. (Of course, then people would complain about the U.S. not being "engaged," and about its "ignoring world problems," instead of complaining about "imperialism.") But if we have to bomb a lot of people to make America safe from dangerous wackos, then so be it. "Kill Americans and you're dead meat" still seems like a good operative principle to me. I'd rather see all the Islamofascists turn peaceful and become McDonald's franchisees or whatever. But that's not an option at the moment.

A thing of beauty, and policy writ large and simple. I can appreciate such a thing even today.
posted by Eric at 6:12 PM

 
What They Think
From Craig's BookNotes, British literary mag Granta looks at "What We Think of America."

The September 11 attacks on the US provoked shock and pity in the rest of the world, but mingled with the sympathy was something harsher: anti-Americanism. It wasn't confined to the West Bank or Kabul. It could be heard in English country pubs, in the bars of Paris and Rome, the tea stalls of New Delhi. 'Hubris' was the general idea: in one opinion poll, two-thirds of the respondents outside the US agreed to the proposition that it was 'good that Americans now know what it's like to be vulnerable'.

Is the US really so disliked? If so, why? In this issue twenty-four writers drawn from many countries describe the part America has played in their lives—for better or worse—and deliver their estimate of the good and the bad it has done as the world's supreme political, military, economic and cultural power.

Available online are essays by Ian Jack, Hanan al-Shayk, Ian Buruma, Amit Chaudhuri, Haim Chertok, John Gray, Ramachandra Guha, Michael Ignatieff, Ivan Klima, Fintan O'Toole, Raja Shehadeh. Some are the usual diatribes against our "hubris," but others are nuanced, affectionate, thought-provoking. It never hurts to hear what the slugs think anyway.
posted by Eric at 12:51 PM

 
"We're Just a Bunch of Hacks"
Steven Den Beste tries to harsh David Hogberg's mellow - David will have none of it.
posted by Eric at 12:35 PM

 
"That Way Lies Madness"
The hard-charging N.Z. Bear - who informs me curtly that he is never "atwitter" - has come up with an arcane formula (what a computer head) for gauging the popularity of blogs based upon links, shoe sizes, and chicken entrails.

After feeling a bit down about things over the weekend (very slow), I am perked right up by the fact that we are merely one link below the second-highest group, "Mortal Humans," at the top of the "Large Mammal" classification (Dawn is there as well - way to go, babe), well above "Rodents," "Lowly Insects," and of course, "Insignificant Microbes," who are at least above those WHO DON'T EVEN EXIST. How satisfyingly Darwinian.

As Glenn notes, though (he is well in the lead above Sullivan and Vodkaman):

Words of wisdom: "if you're gauging your own blog's success by any measure other than how much enjoyment it gives you, well, that way lies madness."

UPDATE
The Bear has added a cool graphic representation of his Blogosphere Ecosystem:

The map is a graphical representation of the relationships between weblogs in the Blogosphere; each weblog is represented by a node, with links between weblogs shown as lines. The size of a node roughly corresponds to how connected it is to the other nodes in the blogosphere.

I live between Andrew Sullivan and the Volokh Conspiracy and right down the street from InstaMan: pretty damn plush neighborhood.

SIGNIFICANT DEVELOPMENT
Olsen Bloc Forming: Per the Bear's Ecosystem, if you combine Dawn's 48 score with our 59, you get a combined OLSEN 107. Together we VAULT over MORTAL BEINGS into the realm of HIGHER BEINGS. In literal terms, our daughter Lily is the physical embodiment of our combined score - she is a Higher Being. Ponder that one a while.
posted by Eric at 11:17 AM

 
US and Them
With the typical mixture of excitement and trepidation, I sent my oldest two off to Xfest 2002 last night: the aggro festival starring Rob Zombie and Static X sponsored by our local “Xtreme” radio station.

I was a bit concerned with the “Xtreme” nature of the concert, festival “seating” (“No, you have to wear real shoes or you will be trampled”) and all of that stupid parental crap, but I also knew there would be a ton of security because radio stations don’t like riots, death, or mayhem at their shows.

The kids came home hours later all jazzed having met Wayne Static, collected autographs, rocked hard, not got lost, etc. While they were gone I spent a lot of time thinking about a festival I went to 19 years ago almost to the day, before they were born, with their mother.

May 1983

The phone rang - the impatient ring of an editor:

"Your mission - cover the US Festival."

I was a veteran of many a festival campaign, and no stranger to the mud, the blood and the beer. A sense of duty welled within my heart. Neither rain, nor sleet, nor smog, nor big mean dogs would keep me from my appointed rounds.

Saturday, dawn, US day. A heavy aerosol spray hung over Hermosa Beach. An impressive lineup of new wave bands awaited us in Devore, headed by the Clash, the Stray Cats, Men At Work, English Beat, and Wall of Voodoo.

The Clash had been threatening to not perform, or to perform an acoustic-only set, because festival promoter/Apple Computer magnate Steve Wozniak was a "racist, a capitalist” and had a “lame beard." Wozniak had dismissed the Clash as "publicity hounds, and hypocrites with bad haircuts." He had a point - the Clash were receiving $500,000 for the show, had no black members and Joe Strummer's coiffure did appear to have been executed by a lawnmower.

The concert was to begin at 11:20 am. I was of the old school: rock ‘n’ roll should be played in the dark. Rock ‘n’ rollers should be going to bed at 11:20 in the morning, not performing.

At 10:00 am a phone call assured us that press credentials awaited our arrival at the grounds: "Oh, by the way, we aren't in your name." At high noon, a respectable hour, my wife and I set out for destiny.

Eastward Ho, to Devore, a town with a carnivorous name set in the San Bernardino dust lands. We soon spotted fellow pilgrims in a multicolored pickup truck emblazoned "US-mobile" across its side, replete with a retinue of revelers toasting the Highway Patrol at 65 miles per hour. Perhaps this was a festival for stupid people.

At 1:30 we spotted a sign: "Devore - 10 miles." Ah Devore: where the mountains meet the smog. We had already missed the Divinyls and INXS - the Australian invasion, neither of whom was very well known at the time. It was 75 degrees and overcast in Hermosa; it was 95 degrees and blazing in Devore.

A 40 foot-high sign commanded us to exit. A mad flurry of gesticulations guided us into a parking labyrinth.

"We're with the press," I said with a certain swagger. "That’s swell – that’ll be $3," said the hand reaching out for my parking fee.

We crept through the parking lot procession of tailgate festivities. We stared at the fierce partiers and ritualistic sun worshipers.

Almost a mile of parking lot later a barrier appeared. Yellow-shirted sentries repelled the milling multitudes and redirected wayward vehicles.

"Where is your pass? This is the vendor's area," said the firm-jawed gatekeeper.

"Well, I'm trying to find the press area and all I have was this letter, and I just drove through a mile of parking lot and my car was overheating and...."

"Ok, that's enough. You need a pass to get through but you can't get a pass without getting through - so I'm going to let you through, but you have to come back and show me your pass once you get it."

I blinked in response, nodded and drove in. The vendor domain was thick with semis, tankers and pickups. We squeezed between two semis and parked with a sigh of relief.

Wall of Voodoo wafted with the breeze from over the hill:

Wish I was in Tijuana,
Eating barbequed iguana

An incongruous mechanical beat contradicted the Buck Owens-on-crystal meth vocal delivery of Stan Ridgway. Strange creatures have always arisen from the Hollywood underbelly.

We threaded our way up the hill betwixt beer merchants and weenie vendors. At the entrance I pointed and waved papers, nodded gravely and we were in.

We meandered among the bronzed, the beet red, the bulging and the bushed. “Press Island” was directly behind the stage in the middle of a large pond. People were paddling on the pond - all were perspiring. A Thanksgiving float-sized vinyl Miller beer bottle marked the beginning of the path to Press Island. I noted that "Press Island" was, in reality, a peninsula.

Wall of Voodoo concluded with a perverse Spaghetti Western theme song oozing electric pasta out of the speakers.

There was a final guard at the heart of Press Island. He was young and unimposing. My wife smiled, I spoke slowly and softly, opened and closed my briefcase. Then we were inside the inner circle with the ink-stained wretches.

Press Island had an outdoor bar (half price!), a typing area (this was 1983), and restrooms (vastly superior to the legion of porta-potties provided for the masses).

At the center of activity was a rustic wooden building of the kind often found in parks (this was Glen Helen Regional park). We entered the wooden building and mingled with the press, a sickly looking bunch. A gentleman behind the desk was handing out press kits.

"Where's your pass? How did you get in here without a pass?"

I looked at my shoes and mumbled.

"Go out the other way and get your press-pass like everyone else. Do you think you're special? She'll need one too," he pointed with his chin.

To be safe, my wife waited inside the gate while I exited to the credential tent. I explained, for what I hoped was the final time, why the pass for the Easy Reader was in someone else's name, etc., etc.

Finally, I was presented with a cool laminated pass that read "Press - Easy Reader," under the name "Horace Greeley."

I clutched my pass and gave thanks. As I reentered, the 6'4", 230 lb guard with "Ride to live, Live to Ride" tattooed on his bicep said, "Horace, dude, I read Easyriders, and I don't remember seeing your name in there. Are you new or something?"

Wishing to be agreeable, I nodded and mumbled as the guard gave me a friendly slap on the back that propelled me stumbling inward - legal at last.

We returned to Press Island. At the monstrous Miller bottle, the guards halted us, "One person - one pass." I whimsically countered with "One man - one vote," but not being a political science major, the head guard was not amused. I started to argue, tired of the whole mess.

"Don't argue, just hand her the pass through the fence."

This seemed reasonable. We did so and pressed on. Back at Press Island, we signed pieces of paper requesting interviews with all of the bands.

"What are our chances of talking to the Clash?" I inquired politely.

"About an ice cube's in hell. Say Horace, is that your real name?"

"It's a pseudonym. Go west young man - heh, heh."

At 4:00 pm, demonic Oingo Boingo singer Danny Elfman, leered suggestively and blurted in his forcefully constipated manner about how he loved little girls because they paradoxically made him "feel so good," and "feel so bad."

Suddenly, there was a localized drum roll. The denizens of Press Island were roused from their heat, smog and alcohol-induced torpor. A startled Rolling Stone writer dropped both of his hard-earned cups of beer on my left shoe - refreshing though wasteful.

A P.R. toady spoke: "It is my pleasure to introduce you to the one, the only - Steve Wozniak. You may call him 'Woz.'"

The sycophant stepped aside as the Woz nosed up to the microphone, under the shade of an apple tree imported just for this occasion. Bouquets of microphones sprouted about us. Oingo Boingo was singing about the felicities of "Violent Love."

Woz, the young multimillionaire co-founder of Apple Computers was of medium height, medium build, cross-eyed and bearded. The beard WAS pretty lame.

"Woz!" "Woz!" "Woz!" "Woz!" the vultures mistook this for a Presidential press conference. "How do the attendance figures look?"

"They’re looking great! We have 100,000 people in here now, another 50,000 out in the parking lot. If last year's figures hold up, we'll get 100% walkup between now and 8:00 pm. We'll have more than that tomorrow and as many as that on Monday!"

Either the Woz really believed all of this or he was putting up a good front. He sounded like an unpopular kid trying to buy friends by throwing a big party and hoping the cool people would show up.

"What about the money, Woz?"

"I was expecting to take a bath, but with these figures coming in, we might break even, or even make a little!"

"What about the Clash's remarks, Woz?"

"I was expecting worse. They’re publicity hounds, hypocrites and have bad haircuts, but they’re a great band. They'll play - we have a contract."

I ambushed Woz from behind, "Why are there no black acts on the bill, Woz?"

The Woz was unflustered, "We tried to get acts that would appeal to the broadest base possible. We did try to get Prince and Michael Jackson, but they wanted too much money."

"More than the $1.5 million each that you are paying to David Bowie and Van Halen?"

"I can't comment on that, but they wanted a real whole lot."

The crowd murmured, turned protective; the stroke questions returned: "How's your kid, Woz?" Etc.

Icy stares fixed upon me. "Why were you so mean to the Woz?," my own wife spoke in icicles.

I mumbled something unconvincing about the social gadfly role of the press, but this cut little or no ice. I was the steamroller operator who had run over a kitten.

It was time for a reflective beer or two. The heat was hot, dry and toxic. Smog hung on the mountains like a layer of taupe frosting. Oingo Boingo concluded with a roller coaster instrumental frenzy and received tumultuous applause. I have always found it inexplicable that Boingo was never better-known outside of Southern California.

The English Beat was next. The band was called "The Beat" in England. They were saddled with the appellation "English" here because there was an American band that had first dibs on "The Beat." We were looking forward to the English Beat because they were the coolest practitioners of the English Ska revival, our favorite dance sensation. We dug that skanking backbeat.

We strolled out into the crowd. The concert area was a massive horseshoe with the stage as its closed end. Concession stands rimmed the sides. The masses were concentrated on a gradual grassy slope inside the shoe.

We smiled, wove, ducked, apologized, and stepped, leapt and stumbled over bodies in various prone positions. Some people are positively Japanese in their ability to conduct private activities while ignoring the masses around them.

We bivouaced next to a light tower. The press-pass cut no cheese out there. The English Beat began. It was the only racially integrated group to play during the three-day festival: brotherly love, hands across the water and all that. Ranking Roger was the Beat's vocalist, percussionist and "toaster." The group played a great set of double-time ska, including hits "Save It For Later" and Smokey Robinson's "Tears Of A Clown." The band's 50ish Jamaican sax player, Saxa, played a number of spirited solos before dropping from heat exhaustion. He was carried off the stage, inert.

Despite the heat, we gyrated corybantically with the rest of the crowd, then collapsed, satisfied.

At 7:30, the announcer intoned, "Put your hands together for A Flock of Seagulls." "Did he say, 'Handsome weather for lox and egg rolls?'" inquired a hungry-looking neighbor.

"Ah, no," his companions informed him. A Flock of Seagull's rhythmic synth/guitar cloud sounds encompassing on record but was more like patchy fog live. The band member's looks didn't help, either: they had wing-like hair sculptures on top of their heads, except for the drummer who was bald.

"These guys look like faggot aircraft, I'm getting a beer," announced another neighbor. This sounded sensible - intolerant but sensible.

We returned to Press Island where we found the English Beat ready to be interviewed. Neither Ranking Roger nor Saxa were present. The musicians present were small, pale, British and cordial; their bodyguards were large, dark, British and less cordial.

While my wife captivated the band's attention with smiles and questions, I talked to one of the bodyguards, who was flattered by the attention: "What's your name? How did you get involved with the band?"

"Jon Richardson - no 'h' - and we're all from Birmingham [pronounced “Buh/ming/um”]. I met them through Roger who was me mate in school."

Jon (no "h") and I chatted some more until lead singer Dave Wakeling turned around and told us to shut up in no uncertain terms, as he was talking to a charming young lady. We were abashed.

A Flock of Seagulls ended to half-hearted applause and navigated their hairdos offstage. The earth turned and it got dark. The beer gardens filled up. I coughed up a dust ball; my lungs felt cramped.

The Stray Cats strutted onstage. What a band! The rockabilly throwback trio carried 17 tattoos and 350 pounds between them, but pounded out real rock ‘n’ roll. They lined up vertically on the stage with singer/guitarist Brian Setzer in the middle, drummer Slim Jim Phantom on the left playing his pots-and-pans kit, and bass player Lee Rocker on the right slapping a vintage stand-up hollow body. The crowd loved them. We loved them.

Men at Work began working at 9:30. The wildly successful band from The Land Down Under sounded like its records: pleasant but unexciting. I expected more from the reputed wild man lead singer, Colin Hay. Half of Men At Work's set was beamed live to the Soviet Union. The Soviet authorities were probably quite comfortable with the band’s name.

We watched from the top of the horseshoe; the band members looked more like Ants At Work from there. There were video screens of remarkable clarity on either side of the stage, but the Diamond Vision on top was less so.
Men At Work became Men At Rest.

At 11:00 the crowd started making crowd noises. I was driven by an impulse.

We trotted down to the backstage gate. I flashed my pass and babbled untruths about the English Beat expecting me, and Jon Richardson and this and that. Repelled but undaunted by the most impassive yellow shirts yet, we remembered noticing a flaw in the fence on the far side of Press Island, near the hallowed backstage area.

We drew a picnic table up to the dent in the fence and leapt over. There were trailers. Someone peed out of the window of a trailer marked "The Clash."

We angled up to the rear of the stage. It was like a scene from a movie about the fall of Saigon. People were darting about screaming, waving, landing helicopters, wringing their hands and clutching at themselves in an alarming manner. We ducked between trailers and limousines. The yellow shirts had reached a density of one per square yard.

"Who are you? Where are you going? Where is your backstage pass?"

I dropped names like marbles all over the pavement. The harried yellow shirts stumbled. A meaty hand on my shoulder and a flashlight in my face stopped us.

"You need a blue stripe on your pass to be back here. You need a yellow stripe just to get through the gate. How'd you get back here?"

I tried the name-dropping tactic. It failed - things looked desperate. Just then, Jon Richardson strutted by. I called to him. He waved and smiled warmly, if somewhat uncertainly, before walking away. We were left unattended as the yellow shirts in the vicinity dashed to quell a larger disturbance.

We carefully worked our way toward the stage itself, careful to move in a serpentine and surreptitious manner. We transcended the yellow shirts - then there were only roadies, pushing and tugging like ancient Egyptians.

We reached backstage center. One barrier remained: the King Kong of the yellow shirts clogging the stairway to the backstage bleachers. I flashed my pass. No luck. I tried the name-dropping ploy. No dice.

Could it be? Yes! Jon Richardson appeared like the cavalry and pushed past us and up the stairs. I shouted his name. Richardson stopped halfway up, turned around and waved with a quizzical look on his face, perhaps thinking, "How do all these people know my name?"

Richardson continued up the stairs and out of sight.

"I have to talk to Jon Richardson to deliver a message from Sid, the English Beat's manager. His wife just had a baby, we have to tell him."

"YOU go up and tell him, she stays here."

I ran up the stairs. Now what? I didn't really want to find Richardson. I waited several pregnant seconds: "One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand....."

I bounded back down the stairs, missing half of them and landing against King Kong. A phalanx of monster yellow shirts was pushing the crowd back from the bottom of the stairs, including my wife. She was slipping away.

"Stop!" Amazingly, they did.

"He wants to know height and weight and sex and all of that baby stuff. Only SHE knows all that," I said pointing to my wife.

"This is probably all bullshit, but I don't care anymore, go ahead," said the human monolith.

We were free. We embraced. Fireworks exploded in space. The Clash began to play.

They played with a collective chip on their shoulders: efficient but snotty. Singer Joe Strummer made fun of the festival, the Woz, and Woz’s beard. This made even me feel indignant and protective of him. The least the band could do for their 500-grand was keep their mouths shut.

But we were onstage, 20 feet from the band. The sound was great - all was right with the world. We could see the vast sea of humanity out there in the dark from the band's point of view - awesome. We watched technicians scurry about, hidden from the crowd. We were one with US.
posted by Eric at 10:46 AM

 
PC Ad Nauseum
Blank Blank (his name is "Josh Chafetz," but that is so obviously a reference to Judaism that his name would have been excised from the New York State Regents Exam, the subject of this disgusted post) of OxBlog noticed this despicable race to inanity:

In a feat of literary sleuth work, Ms. Heifetz, the mother of a high school senior and a weaver from Brooklyn, inspected 10 high school English exams from the past three years and discovered that the vast majority of the passages — drawn from the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anton Chekhov and William Maxwell, among others — had been sanitized of virtually any reference to race, religion, ethnicity, sex, nudity, alcohol, even the mildest profanity and just about anything that might offend someone for some reason. Students had to write essays and answer questions based on these doctored versions — versions that were clearly marked as the work of the widely known authors.

If there is any subject where "offense" might be instructive, it's literature. Literature is the internalization and interpretation of the human condition. It's jagged edges are the details of art. Does one alter great paintings and sculpture to reflect the mutating sensibilities of an age, or use those works as a window into the age in which they were created as well as the human condition? I guess it's the former for the NY State Education Dept.

Sometimes people need to be shocked, offended, made to think, to feel - I thought this was the job of literature. The state's excuse?

The State Education Department, which prepares the exams, acknowledged modifying excerpts to satisfy elaborate "sensitivity review guidelines" that have been in use for decades, but are periodically revised. It said it did not want any student to feel ill at ease while taking the test.

After making her discovery, Ms. Heifetz contacted most of the affected authors or their publishers, and found them angered that their words had been tampered with without their consent. Word circulated among groups concerned about censorship and literary affairs, and an assortment of them, including the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Association of American Publishers, the New York Civil Liberties Union and PEN, jointly sent a letter on Friday to Richard P. Mills, the state education commissioner, calling for an end to the practice.

Thank goodness these groups have taken note and are raising a stink. A final bit of absurdity to consider: these students are taking a test based upon their knowledge of literature. Do you think it might throw some of them off - say the ones who know the work best - to alter the text? "We're going to test you on this stuff, but we're going to change it, ha ha ha. That'll be funny. That'll mess with the heads of those little smartasses who memorize this junk." A few more examples of PC run amuck like this and we may finally be able to bury the corpse.
posted by Eric at 8:20 PM

 
John Scalzi Doesn't Want All Dopers Dead
John responds:

You wrote:

"Among other things, a problem with Scalzi's critique of 'stoner culture' is that it conveniently leaves off the boatload of stoners who don't fit his stereotypical dreadlocked, Deadhead, perma-groove, no-visible-means-of-support characterization"

Well, of course it does. Not everyone who enjoys pot is a stereotypical stoner. I'm at all bothered by tokers who enjoy their pot as an addition to their daily lives. I doubt that any of those you list as prominent tokers would list "getting stoned" or hemp-based living as a primary endeavor of their lives. Hardcore pot smokers are like any people who are hardcore about anything, whether it's politics, collectible beanie babies, Camaros, sex, Star Trek/Wars or religion -- eventually they become annoying to everyone who is not similarly "in the life."

I assume readers know enough about the world to know that not every pot smoker is a scraggly-bearded burnout, but that enough are to make the article interesting and fun to read, and can discriminate appropriately between the former and latter.
Best,
John Scalzi

Aha, so it's "hardcoreness" in general that is the irritation: beanie baby collectors DO deserve to be beaten regularly.
posted by Eric at 4:59 PM

 
Saddam and Osama?
Howard Owens has a ton of great stuff on his site right now; best of all is a fascinating bit of investigative reporting into the Iraq-terrorism connection:

Rather than foreign agents in the FBI, or laziness, maybe the pre-9/11 screw-ups can be attributed to nothing more than a few select bureaucrats' desire to protect their pensions? As much as the Democrats might like to blame Bush, the systematic failures probably began under Clinton. But even then, Clinton wasn't, per se, criminally negligent; he just gave bad policy.

Below is some evidence that leads my current thinking in this direction. All of it comes from papers by and interviews with Laurie Mylroie, an expert on Iraq, who even before 9/11 was accusing the Clinton administration of mishandling the WTC bombing investigation and warning of a more terrifying attack by Hussein.

Mylroie sees Saddam behind it all:

at that point in early April 1993, the FBI proclaimed that it had captured most of those involved. The bombing, it claimed, was the work of a loose group of fundamentalists with no ties to any state. The predictable media frenzy followed and, perhaps as a result, some obvious questions were not asked. How could the government know so early in the investigation that those it had arrested had no ties to any state? If the government knew so much so soon, then why did one of those arrested never stand trial for the bombing, and why were three others indicted much later? In short, the Justice Department determined that the bombing had no state sponsorship even before it decided definitively who had been involved.

Owens acknowledges that it is dangerous to grant too much credence to the opinion of one person, but his report on the possibilities is instructive and frightening nonetheless.
posted by Eric at 2:48 PM

 
John Scalzi Hates Dopers
John Scalzi is back and cheerfully pissing people off. Having "never taken an illegal drug in his life," he finds "stoner culture" annoying and wants to electrocute dope smokers. When asked how he knows of its evil if he hasn't participated, he says, "I've never been sodomized by a silverback gorilla, either, but I don't need to do that to know it's not for me." Interesting analogy, but I'm not sure it is altogether apt.

Among other things, a problem with Scalzi's critique of "stoner culture" is that it conveniently leaves off the boatload of stoners who don't fit his stereotypical dreadlocked, Deadhead, perma-groove, no-visible-means-of-support characterization: Willie Nelson, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, Carl Sagan, Louis Armstrong, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Andrew Sullivan, George W. Bush, millions of just plain folk from every walk of life who are responsible members of society and break no other laws.

As I discussed here, for most smokers, the drug culture is a small part of their lives. Most adult users fit no stereotype whatsoever, at least most of the time:

People became compartmentalized. The unalloyed idealism of the '60s has been discredited as impractical and divisive, the grasping materialism of the mid-'70s into the '80s has been discredited as dispiriting. During the '80s these opposites waged war within the national psyche, agreed to disagree, and emerged with a sort of Gorbachev/Yeltsin coalition government: different values for different circumstances.

The Dead became THE symbol of this kind of bifurcation until Jerry Garcia's death in '95: a well-oiled money making machine ($50 million a year in concert revenue) that sold peace, love and understanding to a legion of internally divided admirers. The Dead sold out every show because everyone needs a break and a Dead show was a socially acceptable place to try on the values of another time and place.

Drug use was pandemic at these shows because drugs act to trigger the transformation into the private self. People who didn't do drugs any other time fired up a doob or sucked on a nitrous balloon - or even ate a tab of acid - and danced around like learning-impaired pixies to the Dead and their light, rhythmic, pleasant, and occasionally inspired musical noodling. They wanted it all, and they wanted it now. At a Dead show they didn't have to give up anything permanent to get it. A deadhead sticker on a Cadillac isn't an absurdity, Don Henley, it is emblematic of an age.

It would apear that Scalzi is trying to kill drug culture rather than the druggies themselves, but drug culture is a small part of millions of lives - it's a large part of the lives of only a small subculture, and even with most of them, it's only temporary.

Another quibble: Scalzi says

I will grant that being buzzed makes stoner culture icons seem better than they are while you're sober. But that just goes to my point. If you have to be pharmacologically impaired to truly enjoy something, there's something wrong with you, with the thing you're enjoying, or both.

I recall Woody Allen making this argument regarding sex and marijuana in Annie Hall. It's simply wrong. Our apprehension of most experiences varies widely under different circumstances: that's why there are such things as "mood enhancers" like candles, music, fragrance, alcohol, lighting, etc. None of these have any particular utility beyond mood enhancement, which is exactly what pot is when used responsibly by adults.

Scalzi seems to feel the culture would disappear if pot were made legal because it would become uncool. I would point to another substance that was illegal for a time, then legalized: alcohol. Did "alcohol culture" disappear after prohibition? Hardly, it spread like wildfire and became the norm. Alcohol dominated social life for decades after it was decriminalized, and for the most part, it still does.

There is no question that drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, should not be used by minors for a variety of reasons; nor should anyone be sitting around smoking pot all day and wasting their lives. But how many people you know live like that? I don't know anyone like that anymore and I know plenty of dope smokers, including artists, musicians, business people, professionals, educators, etc, etc.; none of whom have I heard compare the experience to bestial sodomy, by the way.

Decriminalize marijuana to take vast revenues out of the hands of organized crime, and to aviod criminalizing millions of otherwise responsible and law-abiding citizens. Culture has nothing to do with it.
posted by Eric at 1:17 PM