Relevant History

My 6 year-old political commentator

My son saw this picture on Wonkette, and asked, "Is that someone at the Maker Faire?"

"Why do you think that person was at Maker Faire?" I asked.

"Because of those things in his ears," he said. "Those headphones."

Technorati Tags: children, politics

Important new report

This is funny.

Officials from the Institute for Somehow Managing to Hold It All Together warned that, despite their best efforts, everything appears to be falling completely apart and "getting way out of hand," according to a strongly worded report characterized by panic, frustration, and numerous typographical errors that was released to the American public Monday.

I especially like the debate between the Institute for Somehow Managing to Hold It All Together, the California Center for Not Worrying About Stuff So Much, the Sitting Around and Expecting Others to Take Care of Everything Foundation, and the National Blame Allocation Council.

Technorati Tags: humor

My new favorite writer

Tony Zirkle is a lawyer running for Congress in Indiana. He's got a rhetorical style that-- well, it's hard to describe. Imagine Hunter Thompson on meth, trying to simultaneously channel Buckminster Fuller, Huey Long, and Jerry Falwell, with a little Unity Mitford-level Nazi-loving crazy thrown in for good measure:

What goes around, sometimes comes around, and sometimes a Zulu massacre comes right back in a dot com a few generations later to taunt a people in a new, more efficient destroying form of the same song, different dance hate speech. If addiction prone blanches can’t get their act together, then all of us who have a shred of justice in our spine may one day have to debate the idea of giving them what their ancestors gave to the natives, the author or whom is still honored with placement on the $20 bill…

If history can not produce one mono-syllabic tax cut king to stick his fluking harpoon between the porn Tiamat's oeilles, then perhaps history will one day send a homeless vet to attempt a confoundation of those incognoscenti who think they're wise. I'm starting to feel very strongly that a lot of very bad events are going to happen to me in the very near future for writing this.

The man in running for Congress. Give that a minute to sink in.

Could he even see the keyboard when he wrote that? I wish I could write with that kind of zest.

He also recently gave a speech to the American National Socialist Workers Party. According to the AP, he said "he did not know much about the group [emphasis added] and that 'I'll speak before any group that invites me.'"

Perhaps the fact that it was Hitler's birthday, and that the stage was decorated with a Nazi flag, large portrait of Adolf Hitler, and sparkly cardboard "Happy Birthday" draped across the podium could have provided the smallest of clues? Unless it was also Zirkle's birthday, in which case the confusion is understandable.

Man, I hope he gets elected.

[via Sadly, No]

[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, "The Battle of Evermore," from the album "Led Zeppelin (Disc 2)".]

Technorati Tags: writing

Quote of the day

[F]or all its horrors, the Cold War was a system of international security. The world was dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, and the countries in between often subordinated their own interests to accommodate—in the West by choice, in the East by force—the interests of their superpower protector. When the USSR evaporated, we didn't step into the vacuum; the vacuum expanded. Old allies realized they could go their own ways and pursue their own interests with less regard for what Washington thought. Other powers—China especially—moved up in the world, offering alternative alignments. (Fred Kaplan, "How to Heal U.S. Diplomacy")

[To the tune of The Beatles, "Ticket To Ride," from the album "Anthology 2 (Disc 1)".]

The Spitzer scandal, explained--

--by a 3 year-old in a Disney Princess dress.

Technorati Tags: humor

Pankaj Mishra on the "politique de civilisation"

Writer Pankaj Mishra has a piece in the Guardian on Nicolas Sarkozy's proposals to create a new "politique de civilisation," and what it tells us about how Western politicians are reacting to the shifting balance of global power:

Last month Nicolas Sarkozy floated a raft of policies under a flag of "politique de civilisation". Borrowing the title from a 2002 book by the leftwing philosopher Edgar Morin, the French president argued that "we must fight the blunders and excesses of our own civilisation", which is apparently threatened by "global environmental destruction" and "the mistakes of finance capitalism"....

So what does the French president mean by politique de civilisation? There are some hints in Morin's writings, which broadly state that materialism and individualism have shattered older forms of community, replacing them with soulless anonymity; and that to reform itself, modern civilisation should seek quality of life rather than mere quantity, the mindless accumulation of things....

Sarkozy's rhetoric about remaking our planet was most likely provoked by the dramatic changes the rise of China and India have forced on the political and economic architecture built by the US and Europe in the postwar era.... In less than a year [thanks to the sub-prime debacle, China's growth, and the West's continued reliance on Mideast oil], as the Wall Street Journal noted, "power and wealth have shifted from west to east, from major oil companies to petro-governments, and from US banks and hedge funds to the state-controlled investment funds of the Middle East and Asia".

This transformation has been in the making for a while. But excesses of greed and hubris - such as the invasion of Iraq, the sub-prime crisis and the environmental disaster precipitated by a recklessly globalised model of consumer capitalism - have accelerated the decline of western power. They have made harder, too, the task of the west's political elites: to tell their restless electorates that immigration ought to be restricted even when they know that the economy needs more of it; that globalisation is not all bad even though it has caused job losses; that climate change is an urgent problem even as they promise to enhance consumer purchasing power.

Above all, there is the unspoken fear that Europe could be reduced to what, as the French poet and essayist Paul Valéry speculated in 1919, "it is in reality - a little promontory on the continent of Asia".

[To the tune of Fleetwood Mac, "Go Your Own Way," from the album "The Very Best Of Fleetwood Mac (Disc 1)".]

Technorati Tags: globalization, politics

Who would David Bowie vote for?

Via Sadly, No!

And in other, definitely NOT life of the mind, news

Those of us hearing pundits talk about how wrong they were about the New Hampshire primary are missing out on a really awesome sex scandal in Greece, involving an archaeologist who nailed a Ministry of Culture official, allegedly at the behest of real estate developers who wanted to build condos or something on the site of an archaeological dig and thought the MoC dude would grant a permit.

She then tried (allegedly) to blackmail him for a couple hundred thousand Euros. When that didn't work, she (allegedly) sent DVDs of the two of them getting it on (for 100 hours) to every journalist in Greece.

Said official (quite definitely) threw himself off a building (but survived), and the blackmailer's lawyer, who apparently didn't realize that it's just an expression, threw himself under a bus (and survived).

My favorite part, however, is the article in the Times of London that concludes that, because of this twisted story, Greece should stop asking about the Elgin Marbles.

Technorati Tags: British Museum, politics

Quote of the day

From a 1986 Life magazine article by Anne Fadiman about Benazir Bhutto:

Cambridge, Mass., 1970. My next-door neighbor in Eliot Hall is named Pinkie Bhutto. She is the daughter of the former Pakistan foreign minister, which impresses no one, since Robert Kennedy's daughter Kathleen lives directly beneath her in a room covered with photographs of her dead father and uncle. Pinkie can't hold a candle to that.

Given recent events, what sounds like a very insider paragraph has a more tragic echo.

Henry Porter on "this putsch against our freedoms"

A while ago I had the good fortune to spend a day with Henry Porter, an English author and political commentator. He was doing a documentary on surveillance technologies, and we talked about RFID; the footage is playing on a cutting-room floor somewhere, but it was still a good time.

Since then, I've been reading his Observer column off and on, and as someone who loves going to England, was really struck by his recent howl over the British government's latest proposals to gather information about travelers.

Welcome to Fortress Britain, a fortress that will keep people in as well as out. Welcome to a state that requires you to answer 53 questions before you're allowed to take a day trip to Calais. Welcome to a country where you will be stopped, scanned and searched at any of 250 railways stations, filmed at every turn, barked at by a police force whose behaviour has given rise to a doubling in complaints concerning abuse and assaults.

Three years ago, this would have seemed hysterical and Home Office ministers would have been writing letters of complaint. But it is a measure of how fast and how far things have gone that it does nothing more than describe the facts as announced last week.

We now accept with apparent equanimity that the state has the right to demand to know, among other things, how your ticket has been paid for, the billing address of any card used, your travel itinerary and route, your email address, details of whether your travel arrangements are flexible, the history of changes to your travel plans plus any biographical information the state deems to be of interest or anything the ticket agent considers to be of interest.

There is no end to Whitehall's information binge. The krill of personal data is being scooped up in ever-increasing quantities by a state that harbours a truly bewildering fear of the free, private and self-determined individual, who may want to take himself off to Paris without someone at home knowing his movements or his credit card number.

[To the tune of Pink Floyd, "The Fletcher Memorial Home," from the album "The Final Cut".]

Technorati Tags: England, politics