Days of May, 1968

April 30, 2008, NYT

Barricades of May ’68 Still Divide the French

By STEVEN ERLANGER

NANTERRE, France — Forty years ago, French students in neckties and bobby socks threw cobblestones at the police and demanded that the sclerotic postwar system must change. Today, French students, worried about finding jobs and losing state benefits, are marching through the streets demanding that nothing change at all.

May 1968 was a watershed in French life, a holy moment of liberation for many, when youth coalesced, the workers listened and the semi-royal French government of de Gaulle took fright.

But for others, like the current French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who was only 13 years old at the time, May 1968 represents anarchy and moral relativism, a destruction of social and patriotic values that, he has said in harsh terms, “must be liquidated.”

The fierce debate about what happened 40 years ago is very French. There is even a fight about labels — the right calls it “the events,” while the left calls it “the movement.”

While a youth revolt became general in the West — from anti-Vietnam protests in the United States to the Rolling Stones in swinging London and finally the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany — France was where the protests of the baby-boom generation came closest to a real political revolution, with 10 million workers on strike, and not just a revulsion against stifling social rules of class, education and sexual behavior.

For André Glucksmann, a prime actor then and still a famous “public intellectual,” May 1968 is “a monument, either sublime or detested, that we want to commemorate or bury.

“It is a ‘cadaver,’ ” he said, “from which everyone wants to rob a piece.”

Mr. Glucksmann, 71 and still with a mop of Beatles-like hair, wrote a book with his filmmaker son, Raphaël, 28, called “May 68 Explained to Nicolas Sarkozy.”

Mr. Sarkozy, in a stinging campaign speech a year ago as he ran against the Socialist candidate, attacked May 1968 and “its leftist heirs,” whom he blamed for a crisis of “morality, authority, work and national identity.” He attacked “the cynicism of the gauche caviars,” the high-livers on the left.

In 1968, “The hope was to change the world, like the Bolshevik Revolution, but it was inevitably incomplete, and the institutions of the state are untouched,” Mr. Glucksmann said. “We commemorate, but the right is in power!”

As for the French left, he said, “It’s in a state of mental coma.”

For Raphaël Glucksmann, who led his first strike at high school in 1995, his generation has nostalgia for their rebel fathers but no stomach for a fight in hard economic times.

“The young people are marching now to refuse all reforms, to defend the rights of their professors,” he said. “We see no alternatives. We’re a generation without bearings.”

The events (or movement) of 40 years ago began in March at Nanterre University, just outside Paris, where a young French-born German named Daniel Cohn-Bendit led demonstrations against parietal rules — when young men and women could be together in dormitory rooms — that got out of hand.

When the university was closed in early May, the anger soon spread to central Paris, to the Latin Quarter and the Sorbonne, where the student elite demonstrated against antiquated university rules, and then outward, to workers in the big factories.

Scenes of the barricades, the police charges and the tear gas are dear to the French, recaptured in every magazine and scores of books, including one by photographer Marc Riboud, now 84, called: “Under the Cobblestones,” a reference to a famous slogan of the time from the leader-jester, Mr. Cohn-Bendit, now a member of the European Parliament: “Under the cobblestones, the beach.”

Mr. Cohn-Bendit, known then as “Danny the Red” for the color of both his politics and his hair, is also thought responsible for other famous slogans of the time: “It is forbidden to forbid” and “Live without limits and enjoy without restraint!” — with the word for enjoy, “jouir,” having the double meaning of sexual climax.

The injunction was especially potent in a straight-laced country where the birth-control pill had been authorized for sale only the year before, noted Alain Geismar, another leader of the time.

Mr. Geismar, a physicist who spent 18 months in jail — but later served as a counselor to government ministers — wrote his own book, “My May 1968.”

Now 69, Mr. Geismar, a former Maoist, uses an iPhone. He happily displays his music catalog, which is mostly Mozart.

The movement succeeded “as a social revolution, not as a political one,” he said. While the de Gaulle government responded with the police and mobilized troops in case the students marched on the presidential palace, he said the idea never occurred to student leaders, who talked of revolution but never intended to carry one out.

Most significantly, Mr. Geismar noted, the movement was “the beginning of the end of the Communist Party in France,” which deeply opposed the revolt of these young leftists it could not control.

The leftists also managed in important ways to break the party’s authority over the big industrial unions.

The society of May 1968 “was completely blocked,” Mr. Geismar said — a conservative recreation of pre-World War II society, shaken by the Algerian war and the baby boom, its schools badly overcrowded.

“As a divorced man, Sarkozy couldn’t have been invited to dinner at the Élysée Palace, let alone be elected president of France,” Mr. Geismar said. Both the vivid personal life and political success of Mr. Sarkozy, with foreign and Jewish roots, “are unimaginable without 1968,” he said. “The neo-conservatives are unimaginable without ’68.”

André Glucksmann, who still supports Mr. Sarkozy as the best chance to modernize “the gilded museum of France” and reduce the power of “the sacralized state,” is amused by Mr. Sarkozy’s fierce campaign attack on the events of May 1968.

“Sarkozy is the first post-’68 president,” Mr. Glucksmann said. “To liquidate ’68 is to liquidate himself.”

But there is also a fashionable absurdity to the commemoration. The designers Sonia Rykiel and Agnès b. discuss their views of May 1968 in every magazine, there are documentaries and discussions on every channel and a Parisian jeweler, Jean Dinh Van, Vietnamese-born, has reissued a silver cobblestone pendant he made at the time, “to celebrate 40 years of liberty” — and, in his case, success. (The smallest, with chain, $275.)

4-30-08

4-30-08—At a time when parts of the world are facing food riots, Big Agriculture is dealing with a different sort of challenge: huge profits.—WSJ,A1—hey, everyone has a cross to carry

--Bush blamed Congress for failing to reduce gasoline prices, stave off foreclosures and fund student loans, as a poll showed 73% of citizens disapproved of his economic management. WSJ A1—And the other 27% are morons, retards, and rocks.

--Iraqi oil revenue will top a record $70 billion this year a new forecast said, as US lawmakers push for Baghdad to spend more on rebuilding. WSJ A1

--The author of a major study that criticizes industrial farming said the agricultural industry is exerting “significant influence” on academic research as Congress weighs how to respond to an unprecedented series of food-safety recalls.-WSJ A4

April/May, eine Schweitzer und Proust

April 30, 2008

Albert Hofmann, the Father of LSD, Dies at 102

By CRAIG S. SMITH

PARIS — Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland...

Dr. Hofmann was born in Baden, a spa town in northern Switzerland, on Jan. 11, 1906, the eldest of four children. His father, who had no higher education, was a toolmaker in a local factory, and the family lived in a rented apartment. But Dr. Hofmann spent much of his childhood outdoors.

He would wander the hills above the town and play around the ruins of a Hapsburg castle, the Stein. “It was a real paradise up there,” he said in an interview in 2006. “We had no money, but I had a wonderful childhood.”

It was during one of his ambles that he had his epiphany.

“It happened on a May morning — I have forgotten the year — but I can still point to the exact spot where it occurred, on a forest path on Martinsberg above Baden,” he wrote in “LSD: My Problem Child.” “As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light.

“It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness and blissful security.” ...

Dr. Hofmann went on to study chemistry at Zurich University because, he said, he wanted to explore the natural world at the level where energy and elements combine to create life. He earned his Ph.D. there in 1929, when he was just 23. He then took a job with Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, attracted by a program there that sought to synthesize pharmacological compounds from medicinally important plants.

It was during his work on the ergot fungus, which grows in rye kernels, that he stumbled on LSD, accidentally ingesting a trace of the compound one Friday afternoon in April 1943. Soon he experienced an altered state of consciousness similar to the one he had experienced as a child.

On the following Monday, he deliberately swallowed a dose of LSD and rode his bicycle home as the effects of the drug overwhelmed him. That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as “bicycle day.”

Dr. Hofmann’s work produced other important drugs, including methergine, used to treat postpartum hemorrhaging, the leading cause of death from childbirth. But it was LSD that shaped both his career and his spiritual quest.

“Through my LSD experience and my new picture of reality, I became aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature and of the animal and plant kingdom,” Dr. Hofmann told the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof during an interview in 1984. “I became very sensitive to what will happen to all this and all of us.”

Dr. Hofmann became an impassioned advocate for the environment and argued that LSD, besides being a valuable tool for psychiatry, could be used to awaken a deeper awareness of mankind’s place in nature and help curb society’s ultimately self-destructive degradation of the natural world.

But he was also disturbed by the cavalier use of LSD as a drug for entertainment, arguing that it should be treated in the way that primitive societies treat psychoactive sacred plants, which are ingested with care and spiritual intent.

After his discovery of LSD’s properties, Dr. Hofmann spent years researching sacred plants. With his friend R. Gordon Wasson, he participated in psychedelic rituals with Mazatec shamans in southern Mexico. He succeeded in synthesizing the active compounds in the Psilocybe mexicana mushroom, which he named psilocybin and psilocin. He also isolated the active compound in morning glory seeds, which the Mazatec also used as an intoxicant, and found that its chemical structure was close to that of LSD.

During the psychedelic era, Dr. Hofmann struck up friendships with such outsize personalities as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Aldous Huxley, who, nearing death in 1963, asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of throat cancer.

Yet despite his involvement with psychoactive compounds, Dr. Hofmann remained moored in his Swiss chemist identity. He stayed with Sandoz as head of the research department for natural medicines until his retirement in 1971. He wrote more than 100 scientific articles and was the author or co-author of a number of books...

Though Dr. Hofmann called LSD “medicine for the soul,” by 2006 his hallucinogenic days were long behind him, he said in the interview that year.

“I know LSD; I don’t need to take it anymore,” he said, adding. “Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley.”

But he said LSD had not affected his understanding of death. In death, he said, “I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that’s all.”

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? PROUST, IN SEARCH OFLOST TIME(i, 60)

And at the moment when, recovering my balance, I put my foot on a stone which was slightly lower than its neighbor, all my discouragement vanished and in its place was that same happiness which at various epochs of my life had been given to me by the sight of trees which I had thought that I recognized in the course of a drive near Balbec, by the sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, by the flavour of a madeleine dipped in tea, and by all those other sensations of which I have spoken and of which the last works of Vinteuil had seemed to me to combine the quintessential character. Just as, at that moment when I tasted the madeleine, all anxiety about the future, all intellectual doubts had disappeared … The happiness which I had just felt was unquestionably the same as that which I had felt when I tasted the madeleine soaked in tea. ... PROUST, IN SEACH OF LOST TIME, (vi, 255-256)

EXTREME PROUST, §46. Ontology: Chemicals

By this juncture, it should be clear that Proust is not the only person to have concerned himself with “madeleine moments,” although he may be the only artist to have associated a cupcake with ecstatic experience. Poets, writers, painters, philosophers, religious visionaries, and more, all have alluded to versions of rapture comparable to Proust’s madeleine rapture. These ecstasies can come from many fields of human endeavor—e.g., love, sport, work, religion, etc.—although such will always be experienced only at the apex of each field—whether the field be love, sport, work, religion, etc.

Again, these ecstasies are characterized by a disintegration of ordinary experience, indeed, a disintegration of the ordinary sense of self. In ecstasy, the self—such as it exists in ecstasy—enters into direct, unmediated relationships and experiences with the erupting and disrupting content of the ecstasy. After the rapture, the everyday self attempts to reconstitute itself and its ways of engaging everyday reality. The memories of rapture exist in a pale version of the actual experience. Perhaps art can recapitulate it.

While we have come closer to describing Proust’s madeleine moment, we have done little to explain it in terms of what it might actually be. What “is” it? ...

One pioneer who has devoted his life to exploring the chemical bases of these phenomena is Alexander Shulgin. Drake Bennett reports that Shulgin started with Dow Chemical and ended up devoting his life to creating and self-testing psychedelic drugs. Timothy Leary has called him “one of the century’s most important scientists” (34). Apparently Shulgin had an “epiphany” experimenting with mescaline: he concluded that everything he saw and thought

had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid . . . [Shulgin states:] “I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.” (34)

Among other things, Shulgin has written books called “PiHKAL” and “TiHKAL” (short for “Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved,” and “Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved,”); he also “fished an obscure chemical called MDMA out of the depths of the chemical literature and introduced it to the wider world, where it came to be known as Ecstasy” (34, 35)....

Ecstasy is another outstanding trait of lovers. This, too, appears to be associated with dopamine. Elevated concentrations of dopamine in the brain produce exhilaration, as well as many of the other feelings that lovers report—including increased energy, hyperactivity, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, trembling, a pounding heart, accelerated breathing, and sometimes mania, anxiety, or fear . . .

Directly or indirectly, virtually all “drugs of abuse” affect a single pathway in the brain, the mesolimbic reward system, activated by dopamine. Romantic love stimulates parts of the same pathway with the same chemical. In fact, when neuroscientists Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki compared the brain scans of their love-stricken subjects with those of men and women who had injected cocaine or opioids, they found that many of the same brain regions became active, including the insular cortex, the anterior cingulated cortex, the caudate, and the putamen. (52, 182-83)

Perhaps when one experiences a madeleine moment, one goes to a Platonic Paradise beyond time. Perhaps when one experiences a madeleine moment one goes nowhere except into a different brain state, a peculiar but happy re-configuration of synapses, electric charges, and chemicals (which may or may not involve phenethylamines, dopamine, the insular cortex, etc.). Which version of the ontology of the madeleine moment is correct? An ultimate proof will be hard to establish. Proust was smart to hedge his bets. As a novelist, he was allowed to do that.

4-29-08

4-29-08—In a 6-3 vote, justices uphold a voter ID law. NYT A1 History does not end. Amidst the emergence of democratic functioning across the planet we should not forget that the oldest democracies---the United States, Great Britain, France---continue to evolve. Everything seems to indicate that the latter are transforming into oligarchical systems. . .what if democracy is merely the political superstructure of a particular cultural stage---simply mass literacy? . . Secondary education and especially higher education reintroduce the notion of inequality into the mental and ideological organization of developed societies. After a brief period of hesitation and scruples, the more highly educated wind up believing that they are truly superior. In developed countries a new class is emerging that comprises roughly 20 per cent of the population in terms of sheer numbers but controls about half of each nation’s wealth. This new class has more and more trouble putting up with the constraint of universal suffrage. [Todd, 16]

--gasoline [set] a fresh record of $3.60 a gallon nationwide on Monday. Experts expect prices above $4 a gallon this summer, and one analyst recently predicted that gasoline could reach $7 in the next four years. NYT A1 . . . overall the result is easy to predict: a regulatory pole will emerge in Eurasia, one closer to the geographic center of the world, and there will be a slowdown in the flow of goods, capital, and migration that currently nourishes the United States. The United States will then have to live like other nations, notably by reigning in its huge trade deficit, a constraint that would imply a 15 to 20 percent drop in the standard of living of the population. . . [Todd, 199]

270 days and counting

Okay, folks, there are only about 270 days left until GWBush returns to his true calling, viz., pulling tall weeds from dry dirt in Texas. In the meantime, it remains for a grateful nation to summarize his remarkable tenure as leader of the disintegration of the world’s last superpower.

What better way than to pose the issue in the form of a standardized test, to show how the people of the USA has gotten even smarter and smarter?

An opening sample is given below, although before approaching this problem one may wish to consider the words of Dan Ariely (who is probably a disgruntled jew, or, an MIT professor, all of which amount to the same thing)

[Experimenters] asked Asian-American women to take an objective math exam. But first they divided the women into two groups. The women in one group were asked questions related to their gender. ... The women in the second group were asked questions related to their race... The performance of the two groups differed in a way that matched the stereotypes of both women and Asian-Americans. Those whose who had been reminded that they were women performed worse than those who had been reminded that they were Asian-American. Ariely, PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL (2008) p. 169

Anyway, please provide additional options for the following question:

THE BEST WAY TO SUMMARIZE GWB’S 8 YEARS IN OFFICE WOULD BE:

a) There is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action—Goethe

b) Heckuva job Brownie!

c) Mission Accomplished!

hoosier hysteria

4-24-08—“Frankly, we want it to be like it used to be.”—Kokomo cracker, NYT A21

--“Old-fashioned can be in a good way”—Kokomo cracker, NYT A21

--“What are we going to change to?”—Kokomo cracker, NYT A21

4-24-08

4-24-2008—Gurgaon, India: ...debt collection represents a growing business for outsourcing companies, especially as the American economy slows ... Debt collectors in India often cost about one-quarter the price of their American counterparts... NYT A1

--A prominent Illinois Republican Party leader may have ried to use his friendship with the former White House political aide Karl Rove to push for the outer of the US attorney in Chicago, a federal prosecutor said in court on Wednesday.—NYT A18

--August Kleinzahler criticizes poems that Garrison Keillor reads on the “Writer’s Almanac” as “middle-aged creative writing instructor catching whiff of mortality in the countryside...” NYT B1

happy anniversary

April 23, 1968. Students and police clash at Columbia.

a kind and gentle nation

April 23, 2008

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. ...Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences. ... The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London. ...The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.) The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63. ... Inded, said Vivin Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.” ... “The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism,” said Ms. Stern of King’s College. ... Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of population; Minnesota, about 300; and Texas, almost 1,000. Maine has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States, at 273; and Louisiana the highest, at 1,138.--NYT A1

kinder and gentler death penalty

4-21-08--WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Army and Marine Corps let 861 convicted felons join their ranks in 2007, an 88 percent jump over the previous year that helped meet recruiting goals in wartime, according to data released on Monday. The Army, the largest branch of the U.S. military, gave felony waivers to 511 recruits last year, up from 249 in 2006, according to the figures released by a congressional panel. The Marine Corps granted 350 waivers, up from 208 the year before.

--Overall U.S. life expectancy increased mostly because of fewer deaths from heart disease, the No. 1 cause of death, and stroke. But by the 1980s, death rates started to head back up in many counties. "The majority of these counties were in the Deep South, along the Mississippi River, and in Appalachia, extending into the southern portion of the Midwest and into Texas," Ezzati's team wrote.

--The Supreme Court on Monday followed up on its ruling last week upholding the commonly used lethal injection method of execution and rejected appeals by 11 death row inmates in seven states.

Patriot Day, April 21, 2008

4-21-08 [Patriot Day!!]—[Ecuadorean] President Rafael Correa ... is pressing ahead with plans to cast out more than 100members of the American military from an air base here in Manta... NYT A6

--The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they’ve got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don’t care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I’ll fly the plane myself. Thomas Frank, WSJ A17

my girl

Rep. Bachmann’s office has high turnover rate

By Jackie Kucinich

Posted: 04/15/08 06:56 PM [ET]

Ten of the 14 people Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) hired early last year have left the freshman’s office, according to public documents and sources familiar with the personnel changes. The casualty list includes two chiefs of staff, a district director, a press secretary, two legislative assistants, a staff assistant, a caseworker, an outreach and grants coordinator and a district scheduler. Bachmann spokesman Stephen Miller ascribed the departures to the “same old Washington shuffle” that comes with working on Capitol Hill. “It’s the nature of the beast in Washington, D.C. … Staff moves from place to place,” he said. “All of us here are just so thrilled to be working for such a dedicated, principled member committed to reforming Washington.” He noted that Tara Westby, a legislative correspondent who left Bachmann’s office, will return this summer. Bachmann’s first chief of staff, Brooks Kochvar, stayed only two months, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. A third chief of staff, whom sources identified only as a former chief of staff to another member of Congress, was never officially on the payroll, but rescinded his decision to take the position prior to Kochvar’s tenure. Bachmann’s office, however, disputed this account. Meanwhile, Bachmann’s campaign treasurer departed last summer, Federal Election Commission documents show. Former staffers contacted for this article declined to comment on the record. In January 2007, Bachmann attracted national headlines and was fodder for the late-night talk show circuit when she kissed and then lingered around President Bush following his State of the Union address. Shortly thereafter she came under fire after reports surfaced that she used her campaign fund to reimburse her husband $6,000 for campaign expenses. She quickly paid the campaign back out of “an abundance of caution,” her spokesman said at the time. A month later, Bachmann was back in the news when she told the St. Cloud Times of an Iranian plot to expel the United States from Iraq so that Iran could partition the country. “There is already agreement made,” she said in the February 2007 interview. “They are going to get half of Iraq, and that is going to be a terrorist safe haven zone where they can go ahead and bring about more attacks in the Middle East, and come against the United States.” She later apologized if her words had been “misconstrued.” Democrats are targeting her seat, which the Cook Political Report has deemed likely to stay in GOP hands. According to the 2006 House study, 21 percent of the 141 congressional offices surveyed said they had a problem with employee retention. The higher the position in the office, the lower the turnover rate, according to the study. Bachmann is certainly not the first new member to have trouble holding onto staff. Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) lost 13 staffers in his first year as of September 2007. Former Rep. Shelley Sekula Gibbs (R-Texas) in 2006 had her staff walk off the job within days of being sworn in.

editorial endorsing John McCain

OK, with a new spate of primaries coming up (including Indiana), we knew that it would become necessary for our editorial page to issue a position. We endorse John McCain.

Admittedly, we were initially tempted by Barack Obama, on the theory advanced by one of our friends, viz., that “Well, you KNOW with Hillary you are going to get sold out, it’s a matter of record; when Barack fails, or sells you out, at least you can’t point to a precedent that’s already registered in history.”

However, in the past few weeks, Barack’s campaign has substantiated a significant point: the American people need to be ruled, and they need to be ruled by foreigners. If Meryl Streep once said that life was like high school, she was manifesting tyically liberal Hollywood indulgence: American political discourse is like middle school at best, and more probably like grade school. E.g., Obama has to defend the fact that he listens to some minister who is actually offended by the fact that African Americans were slaves until 1865, put to jail and hard labor after that, and otherwise legally disenfranchised until 1965. And after that, Obama has to defend the notion that he might think that some white trash are unhappy because their jobs and their dollars are no longer worth the turds that my dog makes in my back yard. And after that because he doesn't wear a tin fetish on his coat lapel to repel demons and terrorists. And so on. And so on.

However, such suggests that Obama himself is probably stupid: why is he treatng these morons as if they had sufficient sense to pour piss out of their gun barrels? Most humans in the USA are the descendants of the losers, misfits and rejects from their home countries—how could he expect them to show anything that resembles thought or taste? It’s a matter of evolution, if all you secular humanists would only pay attention.
GW Bush, that great American hero, tried to end the fallacy that this nation should be ruled by votes from its natives in Year 2000. Failing that, he chose the next best—or indeed, preferable—alternative: he ensured that the assets of the USA could be purchased easily by non-citizens, so that USA citizens would merely have to shut up, go to work, and do as they were told—which is how it should be. Clearly the USA citizenry cannot tell the the turds that my dog makes in my back yard from a madeleine concocted by a master French chef. And to get upset over this fact would resemble getting upset over the fact that the turds that my dog makes in my back yard stink.

So if anyone is going to accelerate the process by which the USA is going to be cheapened for purchase by foreigners , who is stalwart as he is principled and consistent, assume the Presidency by fair election, rigged or otherwise.

WOP 4-17-08

4-17-08—Justices Uphold Lethal Injection in Kentucky Case. ..”Simply because an execution method may result in pain, either by accident or death, does not establish the sort of ‘objectively intolerable risk of harm’ that qualifies as cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment.” [said Catholic Hoosier Chief Justice John Roberts] NYT A1

--I was doing my Pilates when [the Pope’s] plane touched down, and nothing usually keeps me from that, you know. I was moved. I just teared up.”—nonCatholic Kathie Lee Gifford NYT A25

April 16, 2008 -- correction/addendum

probably should have said "will be arguing with Her..."

April 16, 2008

4-16-08—A company of Iraqi soldiers abandoned their positions on Tuesday night in Sadr City, defying American soldiers who implored them to hold the line against Shiite militias.—NYT A1

--Danny Meyer, who operates several highly rated restaurants in Manhattan, said the he added the Euro equivalent on the wine list at the Modern, the restaurant at MoMA, to impress upon tourists what bargains the bottles were. The device worked. NYT A1

--The richest hedge fund managers keep getting richer—fast. To make it into the top 25 of Alpha’s list, the industry standard for hedge fund pay, a manager needed to earn at least $360 million last year, more than 18 times the amount in 2002. The median American family, by contrast, earned $60,500 last year. –NYT A1

--Until early Tuesday morning, visitors to John McCain’s campaign Web site could find seven of “Cindy’s Recipes” ... Only problem was, all three, listed as favorite family recipes of Cindy McCain, Mr. McCain’s wife, were taken verbatim from the Food Network. A fourth ... bore a striking resemblance to a similar recipe by Rachel Ray. NYT A22

--Krister Stendahl, a former dean of Harvard Divinity School and a bishop in Sweden ... died Tuesday in Boston. He was 86. ... As dean of the Harvard Divinity School from 1968 to 1979, he [transformed the School] into a more diverse institution. The women among the divinity students so appreciated his support that they called him “Sister Krister.” ... he wrote that he had learned to “argue with God,” saying that in Jewish and biblical traditional, this was the proper relationship.—NYT, A23 [full disclosure: Stendahl’s wife Brita introduced me to Kierkegaard by meeting with me individually to discuss his philosophy, so I am monumentally prejudiced in favor of the Stendahls, and I grieve Krister’s passing—if there is a God worth existing, Krister will be arguing with him as I write this]

numbers were invented by Arab terrorists, Islamofascists, and homos

But such official commemoration does not enhance our appreciation and awareness of the past. It serves as a substitute, a surrogate. Instead of teaching history we walk children through museums and memorials. Worse still, we encourage them to see the past—and its lessons—through the vector of their ancestors’ suffering.. marked by its own distinctive and assertive victimhood. ...

This contrast merits statistical emphasis. In World War I the US suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the UK, France and Germany the figures are respectively 850,000, 1.4 million, and over 2 million. In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC records the deaths of 58. 195 American over the course of a war lasting 15 years: but the French army lost double that number in six weeks of fighting in May-Jun 1940. In the US Army’s costliest engagement of the century –the Ardennes offensives of December 1944-January 1945 (the “Battle of the Bulge”)—19,300 American soldiers were killed. In the first 24 hours of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916) the British Army lost 750,000 men and the Wehrmacht almost as many.

With the exception of the generation of World War II, the US thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries. But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead. Further afield in China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2000 dead.

As a consequence, the USA today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknocn today. ... For Washington war remains an option—[in Iraq] the first option. For the rest of the developed world it has become a last resort. Judt, NYRB, 5-1-08, p. 16, 18

We must start now to recognize our crimes and our complicity. We are all guilty, and we must all take action in whatever way we can. Torture and abuse are not American. They are foreign to us and always should be. We need to exercise them from our souls and make amends.—Col. L. B. Wilkerson, US Army (Ret.) former chief of staff to Colin Powell, NYRB. Ibid, p. 43

[on the date marking the deaths of 4000 American troops in Iraq] no one can give you a figure of the number of Iraqis souls that have been lost in the five years so far of this conflict. ... We’re talking about—on conservative estimates between 80,000 and 100,000 Iraqis have lost their lives. And that’s not to mention more than 4 million Iraqis are displaced from their homes... NYRB ibid, p. 56

this settles the question for me...

Even Adorno said that there can really be justice only if there is a resurrection of the dead, so that past wrongs can be settled retroactively, as it were... THE ESSENTIAL POPE BENEDICT XVI (2007) p.114

WOP (4-15-08)

But first we must finish what we were saying about the different ways in which Christian faith transformed the synagogue. ... The Torah is replaced by the Gospels, which alone can open up the meaning of the Torah. "Moses," says Christ, "wrote of me."(Jn 5:46)--Pope Benedict, THE ESSENTIAL POPLE BENEDICT XVI (2007) p. 198

thank you, Jesus!

WOP

Welcome Our Pope

1588
Pope Julius did abuse the Church's rights,
And therefore none of his decrees can stand.
Is not all power on earth bestowed on us?
And therefore, though we would, we cannot err.
--Marlowe, Dr. Faust, Text B, 3.1, 149-152

WOWP

Welcoming our Wonderful Pope:

April 12/13, 2008—[Notre Dame University President Father Jenkins notes that the Rev. Edward Sorin, the Frenchman who founded Notre Dame in 1842] was complaining about the Irish immigrants. They don’t work very hard; they’re not very good students. Germans are the hard workers.—WSJ A9

ON EMPIRE

Eric Hobsbawm. On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy (2008)

--Over the past thirty years or so, however, the territorial state has, for various reasons, lost its traditional monopoly on armed force, much of its former stability and power, and, increasingly, the fundamental sense of legitimacy, or at least of accepted permanence, which allows governments to impose burdens such as taxes and conscription on willing citizens. The material equipment for warfare is now widely available to private bodies, as are the means of financing nonstate warfare. In this way, the balance, between state and nonstate organizations has changed...The novelty of this situation is indicated by the fact that the most powerful state on the planet, having suffered a terrorist attack, feels obliged to launch a formal operation against a small, international, nongovernmental organization or network lacking both a territory and a recognizable army. [27-28]

--In the middle of the last century, we suddenly entered a new phase in world history which has brought to an end history as we have known it in the past ten thousand years, that is to say since the invention of sedentary agriculture. We do not know where we are going. ... Within a few decades we will have ceased to be what humanity has been since its emergence, a species whose members are chiefly engage in gathering, hunting, or producing food. We shall also cease to be an essentially rural species. ... Let me note only one significant fact. There are today twenty countries in which more than 55 percent of the relevant age groups continue studying after their secondary education. But with a single exception (South Korea) ALL of them are in Europe (old capitalist and ex socialist), North American, and Austalasia. In its capacity to generate human capital, the old developed world still retains a substantial advantage over the major new-comers of the 21^st century. [35, 38, 39-41]

---...armed force is no longer monopolized by states and their agents. ...Almost equally striking is the decline in the acceptance of state legitimacy... I very much doubt whether ANY state today—not the United States, Russia, or China—could engage in major wars with conscript armies ready to fight and die “for their country” to the bitter end. Few Western states can any longer rely, as most so-called developed countries once could, on a population that was basically law-abiding and orderly, except for the expected criminal or other fringes on the margins of the social order. The extraordinary rise of technological and other means of keeping the citizens under surveillance at all times ... has not made state power and low more effective in these states, though it has made the citizens less free. [43,44]

--Frankly I can’t make sense of what has happened in the USA since 9/11 that enabled a group of political crazies to realize long-held plans for an unaccompanied solo performance of world supremacy. I believe it indicates a growing crisis within American society, which finds expression in the most profound and cultural division within that country since the Civil War [or the same damn division—SRB] and a sharp geographical division between the globalized economy of the two seaboards, and the vast resentful hinterland, the culturally open big cities and the rest of the country. Today a radical right-wing regime seeks to mobilize “true Americans” against some evil outside force and against a world that does not recognize the uniqueness, the superiority, the ;manifest destiny of America. What we must realize is that American global policy is aimed inward, not outward, however great and ruinous its impact on the rest of the world. It is not DESIGNED to produce either empire or effective hegemony. ... the most obvious danger of war today arises from the global ambitions of an uncontrollable and apparently irrational government in Washington ... To give American the best chance of learning to return from megalomania to rational foreign policy is the most immediate and urgent task of international politics. [57-59]

--empires were mainly built, like the British Empire, by aggression and war. And in turn it was war [usually] that did them in. Winning big wars proved as fatal to empires as losing them... [69]

--[The USA] is the only major empire that has also been a major debtor. [86]

4-10-08

--Inflation, spanning globe, is set to reach decade high. WSJ A1
--A war born in spin has now reached its Lewis Carroll period. ... Flag officers in the Bush Administration's military have learned that they can be marginalized or retired if they speak out too boldly. --NEW YORKER, 4-14-08 p 22

April 7, 9

4-9-08--Crossings by [illegal] migrants slow as job picture dims --WSJ A1
--"You don't have to predict it. We're in it." Thus did Paul Volcker respond to a question Tuesday about whether he still predicted a "dollar crisis" in the coming years. We hope current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is paying attention. ... The present climate, Mr. Volcker told his audience, reminded him of nothing so much as the early 1970s.--WSJ A14, editorial page

4-7-08--...with the dollar losing much value in recent years the pace [of foreigners buying local factories

and businesses] is picking up again, as some of the country's most valuable assets go on the block at bargain-basement prices. --NYT A1

--The Green Zone attacks on Sunday were, symbolically at least, a sign that forces hostile to the US

are still able to strike at the American nerve center and seat of government power in the capital of Iraq--NYT A1

--At West Point, a military historian and Iraq war veteran raises questions about Gen. Petraeus' counterinsurgency efforts. WSJ A1, A4

--How does golf thrive in [Sweden] and churn out PGA Tour pros such as Henrik Stenson, Jesper Parnevik and many others, along with LPGA superstar Annika Sorenstam and several other top women golfers? The answer is an attittude toward the game that is more egalitarian and more relaxed than in the US. Golf is much cheaper to play in Sweden than it is in the US, and the Swedish Golf Federation pays for the training of promising young players. The game is promoted as a family sport here, and there is less pressure on youngsters at the elite level, at least overtly, to succeed in competition. WSJ R8

--The percentage of recruits requiring a waiver to join the Army because of a criminal record or other past misconduct has more than doubled since 2004 to one for every eight new soldiers. The increase reflects the difficulties the Army faces in attracting young men and women into the military in a time or war. USA

having a good weekend

April 5, 1968. USA lifts siege of “crucial anchor” of Khe Sanh—abandons it July 5.

April 4, 1968. MLK assassinated.

lies sex and videotape

April 3, 2008--For a man who came into office as the nation’s first M.B.A. president, Mr. Bush has sometimes seemed invisible during the housing and credit crunch. As the economy eclipses Iraq as the top issue on voters’ minds, even some Republican allies of the president say Mr. Bush is being eclipsed and is in danger of looking out of touch.—NYT A1 I’ll believe my lying eyes

--US Cites planning gaps in Iraqi assault on Basra. Maliki Underestimated Militias, Officials say, and overestimated Iraq Army. A “defining moment” does not turn out as had been anticipated. –NYT A1, A11 Out of touch abroad as well as at home.

--President Bush threw the NATO summit meeting here off-script on Wednesday by lobbying hard to extend membership to Ukraine and Georgia, but he failed to rally support for the move among key allies. –NYT A16 ibid.

--This year Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, predicted that “some Americans are going to die” because of the public debate that resulted when Mr. Lichtblau and his New York Times colleague James Risen disclosed the existence of the Bush administration’s secret surveillance program; for the same articles Mr. Lichtblau and Mr. Risen won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. –NYT B9—and the corpses are all over the place...

--Thus husband of Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow told authorities that he used the Internet to arrange a $150 sexual tryst with a prostitute at a metropolitan Detroit hotel, police said. SBT A1.—So do we call it a “tryst” because Midwesterners are more polite, or because it’s less than a $5000 gig? But hey, he’s not gay, and it’s just another reason for getting those sex robots into production ASAP—maybe they’ll sell cheaper in the Midwest (because, like American cars, they’re made in Detroit?)

please don't confuse me with facts...

4-2-08—Britain froze plans to pull out troops from Iraq after a faltering effort to drive Shiite militias from Basra and a jump in deaths raised doubts about Iraqi security capabilities. WSJ A1

--The Bush administration was caught off-guard by the first Iraqi-led military offensive since the fall of Saddam Hussein, a weeklong thrust in southern Iraq whose paltry results have silenced talk at the Pentagon of further US troop withdrawals any time soon. President Bush last week declared the offense, which ended Sunday, “a defining moment in Iraq’s history” ... “There is no empirical evidence that the Iraqi forces can stand up” on their own, a senior US military official in Washington said... SBT A3

fools for April

April 1, 2008—The Army is letting soldiers who are married live together in the war zone, a move to bolster re-enlistment. WSJ A1

--With food costs climbing and the economy slowing, US supermarkets are touting their discounts even as they raise the price of most items. WSJ A1

--There has been nothing to signal a transformation in the sea of blight and abandonment that still defines much of [New Orleans]. ... the re-population of the city after the storm that emptied it has slowed notably. The Census’ Bureau’s latest estimates, 239,000, represents barely over half the former population—and well under what local officials and New Orleans demographers have been claiming for months. NYT A1, A18

--In 2004, less than two months after his confirmation as housing secretary, Mr. Jackson told a House panel that he believed poverty “is a state of mind, not a condition,” provoking strong criticism. Two years later, he said in a speech that he had canceled a contract for a company after its president told him that he did not like Mr. Bush. Mr. Jackson later said he had made the story up. This month, Mr. Jackson took a pounding from senators who demanded explanations for accusations that he had steered hundreds of thousands of dollars to friends for work at the Virgin Islands housing authority and reconstruction in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The Justice Department and the inspector general at the Housing Department are investigating those accusations, which were first reported by The National Journal. A government official briefed on the inquiry said investigators were particularly focused on Mr. Jackson’s role in New Orleans, where he is accused of helping a friend get construction work. Lawmakers also raised concerns about accusations, first reported by The Washington Post, that Mr. Jackson had threatened to withdraw federal aid from the Philadelphia Housing Authority after its president refused to turn over a $2 million property to a politically connected developer. Pennsylvania’s senators, Arlen Specter, a Republican, and Bob Casey, a Democrat, said “it is difficult to conclude that HUD’s actions are anything but retaliatory.” A13

--Might Republicans want to drink until 4 am at their convention in St. Paul in the summer? .... In a proposal being considered in the Minnesota House, the last call for alcohol would be pushed back two hours from the usual 2am for all establishments within a 10-mile radius of the convention site. The sponsors hope to spur spending at the convention from Sept. 1 to Sept. 4—and also to make the Twin Cities metropolitan region seem “more sophisticated,” as one law maker put it. –A16

--Buttressed by local advocacy groups and criticized by a Colorado business organization, [a proposed ballot proposition] measure would make business executives criminally responsible if their companies run afoul of the law. It would also permit any Colorado resident to sue the executives under such circumstances. Proceeds from successful suits would go to the state. C3

March 30, 2008—Q: ...are you surprised by the recent flurry of depressing financial news? Paul O’Neill: Not really. We’ve been creating this pass of events for several years... Q: McCain recently confessed in public that his grasp of economics is limited. A: Yeah. That’s a great place to start from, isn’t it? Q: Do you feel bitter about your service of the Bush administration? A: No. I’m thankful I got fired when I did, so that I didn’t have to b associated with what they subsequently did. NYTMag p. 17

--The worst mistake, however, was the disbanding of the Iraqi Army in May 2003, two months after the invasion. This was a decision made by only a few men—specifically Bremer in his capacity as the head of the occupation authority, and his aide Walter Slocombe—and against the advice of just about everyone with any one-the-ground knowledge of the situation. (According to Ferguson, it’s unclear if President Bush approved of the idea.) Bremer and Slocombe apparently believed that the Iraqi Army had to be rendered powerless, though others explain to Ferguson that Bremer and Slocombe were confusing the army with the Republican Guard. The Guard consisted of Baath Party loyalists; the Iraqi military was a professional force that had always tried to keep its distance from the Hussein regime. When the war began, the army faded into the countryside, leaving the Guard to do the bulk of the fighting. ... “More than any other single action,” Fergusen says, the order to disband the army “created the Iraqi insurgency.” NYTBR p. 24

March 31, 1968. LBJ announces he will not run for re-election.