The Futures Market for Violence in Afghanistan Holds Firm

Recently, for some reason I had cause to remark that some of the best political writing of the past 40 years has appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine. Somehow, almost overnight, noticing Rolling Stone's political writing is the new black.

General McChrystal's sudden demotion followed almost immediately on his surprising appearance in Michael Hastings's article, word of which spread so fast that the General was already days gone from his post before the print version of the article even hit the street, although the gist of the piece, and even the magazine's own exact words, were more or less instantly available through the internet to anyone who cared to see them.

On principle, I would personally fire anyone who drank lite beer with lime flavoring in it, so McChrystal's removal doesn't trouble me. For his role in orchestrating the cover up of Pat Tillman's death he probably deserves to have his career crimped anyway, although the months I spent in the military years ago gave me the perhaps contrary impression that covering up such things was just one of the many duties thrust on those in command and which, when successfully accomplished, inclines the officer commissioned to deal with it toward rapid promotion rather than reprimand. Colin Powell earned his first star for polishing the turd of My Lai, giving up to his superiors in the Pentagon an earnest and workable telling of the tale that so enwrapped them all in asscoveredness that Powell's future career was assured.

And, again, even before the print version of the Rolling Stone article hit the newsstands, it had already been determined that Obama must respond to McChrystal's impertinence directly and forcefully, that a line had been crossed and Obama needed to show the general the I'm in charge here clause in the Constitution. Fretting over whether he would actually do it or not dissolved when, only a few dozen hours after word of the story began to spread, he actually did remove McChrystal from command and replace him with General Petraeus of Iraq invasion fame.

This is a very peculiar episode. Hamid Kharzai, who many suspect is our ally in Afghanistan, bemoaned the loss of General McChrystal, while Obama gave a stay-the-mysterious-course speech in the immediate aftermath of the episode which among other things reaffirmed the ongoing resolve of the Administration to accomplish something or other in Afghanistan in the next eighteen months or maybe longer, depending, so help us God.

So in the national political Kabuki, firing McChrystal is the symbolic act by which it is revealed that Obama has the mojo necessary to commandingly announce the continuation of the current US policy of going on and on in Afghanistan, which he promptly does after disposing of McChrystal: the pledge of an endless future there is freshly and importantly reaffirmed in public, even before the story that sacked the general hits the street in printed form.

e to the i times pi

I guess the order of the exponents in Euler's famous identity doesn't matter, so that e to the italicized i times pi arrives at the same terminus as e to the pi times italicised i, which is another way of ordering those three fundamental mathematical objects, e, pi, and italicized i, when going on about the profound interrelation of those objects arrayed just so that resolves itself inexorably at long last into a confirmation that the mathematical value we call "minus one" actually exists, is, in fact, identical to the very same thing pointed to by those mathematical objects when so arrayed. And if minus one exists, well, there you are. All the rest of the numbers can be reached from that simple unit that we, QED, don't have one of.

Salman Khan of the invaluable Khan Academy wends his way toward a demonstration of the circuitous and lovely math involved here and here.

"Bloomsday" 2010

The Chairman of BP cares about the small people, and so do I most days, and especially on Bloomsday. Much of the charm of the character of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce's comic novel Ulysses is in the fact that Bloom is one of the small people, living a run-of-the-mill urban existence in a backwater city of the mighty British Empire. Not a general or a statesman or a great poet but a near-Chaplinesque character bumbling through the jumble of events that accrue on one relatively representative day, Thursday, June 16, 1904.

Although Bloomsday has been commonly celebrated (at first by a small pack of literary drunks including Brian O'Nolan/Flann O'Brien in Dublin some years ago) each and every year on June 16, I continue to maintain that only the June 16 which falls on a Thursday is legitimately called Bloomsday. Is Bloomsday Thursday, or is Bloomsday June 16? It's both, forever both. The rest of those June 16ths, like today's, falling on a Wednesday, well, I don't know. Sure, you can call such a thing "Bloomsday" if you must, but just don't call it Bloomsday.
 

Relief for the Unread, An Anniversary

 
On this date in 1966, the Vatican abolished the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, originally instituted in 1559 to keep good Catholics current on what it was they were forbidden to read. The Index went through 20 editions in its 400+ years of existence, the final refinement of its accumulated distaste printed in 1948, specifying 4000 titles and the entire works of over 500 authors. From the first, hand in hand with the Index proper went wide-ranging and variously effective efforts to expunge from the stock of available reading material works identified there.

Since the moment the Index was nullified, the whole domain of reading has been thrown open to the searching eye, more's the pity. A judicious list, however contentious, of what's safely left unread would really come in handy some days.
 

From The Wharf in Santa Cruz

The Gulf Oil Eruption of 2010, Day (n + 1)

 
Some of the best political reporting in America over the past 40 years has appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine, for some reason. Tim Dickinson takes the story of our oily Gulf for a spin in the latest issue, online here.

Here's a marvelous representation of Earth in cross-section in 5,000 foot increments, from more than 35,000 feet above sea level to more than 35,000 feet below. Scroll down toward sea level, and on the right you can follow a red line representing the descent of the drilling done from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. It wasn't plain to me until I saw this graphic that the site of the eruption of oil, at about 5,000 feet, is actually 13,000 feet above the deepest point reached by the drillers,the oil shooting out of that broken section of pipe on the sea floor carried under immense pressure from way, way down below.