The Reluctantly Deployed Dog of April 2008

Sunday Flowering Stuff Blogging

Irrefutable!

—via Pharyngula

Friday Stationary Object Blogging: The Sawing

Tom Scribner's statue on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz.

Friday Stationary Object Blogging: The Flowering

Herodotus FTW, again

Then, there is the story itself. A great power sets its sights on a smaller, strange, and faraway land—an easy target, or so it would seem. Led first by a father and then, a decade later, by his son, this great power invades the lesser country twice. The father, so people say, is a bland and bureaucratic man, far more temperate than the son; and, indeed, it is the second invasion that will seize the imagination of history for many years to come. For although it is far larger and more aggressive than the first, it leads to unexpected disaster. Many commentators ascribe this disaster to the flawed decisions of the son: a man whose bluster competes with, or perhaps covers for, a certain hollowness at the center; a leader who is at once hobbled by personal demons (among which, it seems, is an Oedipal conflict) and given to grandiose gestures, who at best seems incapable of comprehending, and at worst is simply incurious about, how different or foreign his enemy really is. Although he himself is unscathed by the disaster he has wreaked, the fortunes and the reputation of the country he rules are seriously damaged. A great power has stumbled badly, against all expectations.

Daniel Mendelsohn on the History of Herodotus in The New Yorker

Originals die away slowly in the archives. That's what archives are for.

The archives of the Bay Area rock band the Grateful Dead …are headed to UC Santa Cruz, where they will be displayed at McHenry Library.
[…]
The archive, which occupies 2,000 square feet of a Marin warehouse, contains thousands of pieces.
[…]
The library already has the archives of science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein and Beat poet, painter and novelist Kenneth Patchen and the only intact collection of photographer Edward Weston's project prints in the world. But the Dead archive will be the university's biggest.

—Regan McMahon at sfgate.com

From the archives of Tim the Pajaronian, fading Polaroid:

Santa Cruz Wharf

Earth Day

It's not as if I can link to the thing, Earth, being celebrated this day, and although ideas about our place, this planet, coagulate everywhere on the internet, that's of course not what Earth Day must be exclusively, recessing from an engagement with Earth itself on this appointed day to instead read or discuss what that engagement is all about, with a little pageantry thrown in to draw the crowd.

It wouldn't be bad on Earth Day for everyone to put aside a few hours annually to pay due attention to what's up with our planet, to become current with what's known about its condition. The harder part for those who'd seek to celebrate Earth on this day or any other day is to arrange to schedule an actual moment of engagement with Earth qua qua, as the philosophers say they say. There's all that distancing alienated distracting other stuff, but Earth and all its surrounds always stand ready to impress.

Did you see the big moon resting in the western sky this morning?

Saturday Morning Cartoon Special

Eliades Ochoa "Pintate los Labios Maria"

An Open Letter To Those Shaken By An Earthquake

I don't know if they're still arguing about whether or not the New Madrid earthquake caused the Mississippi River to flow backwards in places. That earthquake happened a long time ago, and although its history is pretty well known, there's no recent experience of earthquake there in that part of the continental U.S. between the Appalachian Mountains and the Rockies to match the story of New Madrid. The current population literally has no idea, even following yesterday's earthquake centered in southern Illinois, and felt from Kansas City, Mo. to Nashville, from northern Michigan to Memphis, a huge swath of the middle of America, 120,000 square miles of it.

Those of us in the earthquake bearing lands of California greet you. Yeah, that's what we're talking about.

A 5.2 earthquake is a reputable earthquake by any measure. The "what was that?" of the 2.2, the swift surcease of the 3.6, the rude obstreperous stomp of the 4.5, all of these are surmounted by the authoratatively delivered rumble of the 5.2. We'll grant you that.

Still, It's been forty years since a bigger earthquake in the Middle West. Lots of Californians have at least five much bigger earthquakes on their life list; we have a claim to a much closer connection to the story of New Madrid on that score than people living where it happened, even after yesterday's event, reputable instance of an earthquake though it may be.

Nevertheless we stand with those shaken yesterday on the uncommon ground of our shared experience in that momentous instant of unsolidarity granted by an earthquake.

Earthquake! How about that, eh?

Ultimate Chess Smackdown

British illusionist Derren Brown demonstrates how to come out ahead when playing nine simultaneous chess games against superior opponents:



[via Gambit]

They Always Called It "The Fire"

My grandparents all had stories of the 1906 earthquake, how my grandmother was saved by her sister from being crushed by a falling cabinet, how her father's team of horses kept busy for weeks hauling people's stuff out Mission Street all the way to Colma, all of them, father's and mother's people, living in the Mission District and thus spared the utter obliteration of the fire that consumed downtown, but caught up in the ancillary destruction of broken buildings and streets and lives that visited everyone from Santa Rosa to Santa Cruz in the wake of the enormous temblor that struck that day 102 years ago.

Here are some panoramas the city from that time.

Signs Of Progress In The Iraq War

I hear John Conyers asked an assembled crowd today in Philadelphia whether any of them would object to impeaching the president. No one objected. Then he asked whether anyone would object to impeaching Cheney. Again, no one objected. I don't know the full context of Conyers' remarks, but the timing indicates it is related to Bush's admission.

—Booman, via Atrios.

The Bad Reporter

Don Asmussen on the Olympic torch in San Francisco.

The Big Story Is That Things Have Gotten Better

Updated at 8:15 p.m. EDT, April 10, 2008

Fighting in Sadr City has subsided dramatically, but violence still took the lives of 68 Iraqis across Iraq. Almost half of them were found in a mass grave. […]

A mass grave containing 33 bodies was found in Mahmudiyah. The bodies were found together in a house and appear to have been dead for over a year.[…]

In Baghdad, a U.S. airstrike left five dead and four injured in Sadr City in one attack; two boys were among the dead. Another person was killed and four more were wounded in a second bombing. At least two other people were wounded during these or other air strikes. U.S. forces killed 13 suspects across Baghdad yesterday. No casualties were reported after an IED blasted a U.S. patrol. Also, the Iraqi army blockade of Sadr City will end on Saturday.

In other incidents taking place in the capital, one person was killed and four were wounded during a bombing in a central neighborhood. A roadside bomb near al-Shabb Stadium wounded six people. Two police officers were injured during a bombing near Sheik Abdulqadir al-Gailani Shrine. Three people were wounded when shells blasted their home in Bayaa. Also, two dumped bodies were found.

Antiwar.com tallies the dead in Iraq daily so you don't have to. U.S. forces, it says, killed 13 suspects across Baghdad yesterday, many of them by aerial bombardment. Even all these years after the first Gulf War, the U.S. is firing on Baghdad from the air, and hitting the predictable child or two.

Apparently the dead found in a mass grave in Mahmudiyah have been added to today's 35 freshly killed from all over Iraq to arrive at the figure of 68 dead for Thursday, although it's reported that the bodies of the 33 were in a house in Mahmudiyah for over a year, not alive all that time, but until today not notably dead. Perhaps this is just a preliminary assignment, until the proper date of death can be unearthed by whoever might be spared to find it.

The sound of the opening of the odd mass grave on a day much like any other desperate day in Iraq (just scroll down through antiwar.com's meticulous daily coverage of the carnage for proof enough) is that disquieting noise in the background you may hear behind the dulcet tones of John Burns and Dexter Filkins recorded last night on the Charlie Rose Show, by way of DavidKurtz at Talking Points Memo.

Last Month's Magnolias

Monday Morning Dizzymaker

El Caminito del Rey:



[via Metafilter]

Democracy has been getting knocks the past few years for being associated, notionally at least, with the bad crowd of other excuses given by the U.S. for invading Iraq: introducing democracy there was one of the bullet points of the war's champions before the invasion and it still gets predictable mention in all the justifying talk about Iraq to this day. In this sort of talk democracy itself has withered over the years to mean just the vessel for carrying global capitalism from place to place in a profitable and orderly way; implictly the war's champions believe democracy could be born in Iraq in shock and awe, democracy on their terms, born out of the public rape of an invasion, as handily as any other way. Foolish thought, that, as it turns out, betting on the rosy outcome of a rape.

With all my caveats aout the stuff, I like the raw unfiltered democracy better than I like the current brand, the one that the comic opera Coalition Provisional Authority tried to bring along to Baghdad, whose lads and lasses sat around in the Green Zone for endless days devising a stock market for Iraq because, well, that's what modern democracies have, right?

There are places with no hint of that sort of democracy, like Somalia, which is unhinged from the regular machineries of global capitalism in it own distinctive way, as are North Korea and Southern Italy and a host of other regions around the world where the regularities of global capitalism break down in the anomlies of overrirding local conditions: pirates, answering to no authority but their own (as is their ancient custom), hijacked a huge French cruise ship in the eastern Indian Ocean and brought it into port in Somalia today. The sort of democracy that serves global capitalism is historically opposed to piracy on the grounds of both profitability and order, doesn't countenance the stuff in the least and never has, but there's not a whole lot of recourse for the complainant here; those pirates got away to Somalia.

Strains of Coltrane in 1959

John Coltrane performing Giant Steps animated by Michal Levy:

Early Strains of Hip, 1959

Del Close, legendary performer and coach of improvisational comedy, in
How to Speak Hip, with John Brent.

It's said that How to Speak Hip was a particular favorite of Brian Wilson.

And, too, The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film, directed by Richard Lester and featuring the Goon Show regulars, Mulligan and Sellers and all.

Part 1


Part 2


It's said that The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film was a favorite of the Beatles, particularly John Lennon.

"And You Didn't Have Any Moral Qualms?"

Esquire interviews John Yoo, author of the Bush Adminstrations's infamous torture memo.

Some Miles to Go

Blues for Pablo

Is Obama's Lama Peddling False Unconsciousness?

Professor Bérubé schools us on false consciousness, in response to a claim about people voting against their best interests in the comments to his typically witty post at TPM Cafe:

I tend not to speak of people voting against their best interests, actually. As British cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall once put it, "though there are people willing enough to deploy the false consciousness explanation to account for the illusory behavior of others, there are very few who are ever willing to own up that they are themselves living in false consciousness! It seems to be (like corruption by pornography) a state always reserved for others."

The contentious notion of false consciousness may be a concept like phlogiston that just doesn't map well to reality, however much it gets stretched into use in all the elaborate rhetoric that depends on it. The questions false consciousness tries to resolve are there, they exist, just as the questions that phlogiston tried to resolve exist. Sure, the rhetoric that depended on phlogiston incited what we might consider a false consciousness in those who trafficked in it for awhile, until that sort of talk was muted by a much more acutely concieved rhetoric based on fundamentally different principles. But false consciousness itself may be as ill-concieved as phlogiston. There may be some better basis for answering the questions false consciousness is trying to resolve, a superior rhetoric, for all I know. Still, it does get bandied about.

When Stuart Hall says "illusory behavior" in the quote above, he obviously doesn't mean that people's behavior is illusory, of course. He means that their concrete behavior is being commanded by some illusory conception of just exactly what it is that's going on and what's to be done about it, causing people to behave in ways that are, given circumstances, entirely inapt, all things considered. He accurately notes the mote in the eyes of those who see false consciousness in others, but this doesn't deny false consciousness, merely makes of it a generally unrecognized condition shared by all.

I wouldn't be surprised if Obama's lama had a whole afternoon's worth of things to say about the interplay of act and illusion, drawing on all the business about Maya and whatnot that's been piling up Asian rhetoric over the millennia. I can't say that promiscuously using Maya instead of false consciousness is any improvement on the situation, however.

Ultimately, what any thoughtful voter must consider under the circumstances is Obama's lama's stand on The Void. Is he an absolutist, or is there wiggle room in his Nothing? Does he peddle a true or a false unconsciousness?

The Future of Sewage

This is the front page of a leaflet recently mailed to customers of the Santa Cruz Sanitation District. The image is, well, ominous, if I do say so myself.