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.

April Fools

He didn’t say, the poor man, “A child’s burden of gorse.”

He said, “A Child’s Garden of Verse,” for whatever reason.

Might have made the difference, hearing it that way, had the Uncle been so inclined or equipped. But his hearing was both imperfect and selective. Whatever it was that was said, the Uncle would hear what he would.

Of course he didn’t say “ A child’s burden of gorse,” the poor man.

Why would anyone say that?

Idiom? —”Ah, yes, in metaphor, the child’s burden of gorse weighing down even our most enchanted, carefree hours with that hard weedy freight of life from which we may never be relieved even in the proposed idylls of youth.”

Unfortunately for all concerned the Uncle’s thoughts escaped down the path of that unlikely idiom. Farther down that path he suspected the inevitable slur against his own childrearing practices, the effects of which were wandering uncertainly about the yard.

He searched for the proper riposte. Something along the lines of “Their gorse is light enough, thank you, though if I had a stick I’d measure you out a proper burden,” is what he claimed later to have formulated on the occasion. Everyone remembers him mumbling at one juncture the not unexpected phrase “… and another swift one, to boot…” familiar point along the short line of truculent points describing the common arc of the Uncle's conversation whatever the topic.

“Eh? Swift? No, no. Lamb, surely,” said the poor puzzled man.

Suddenly the Uncle perceived a reference to Swift himself. Would that he had been mistaken in this as well but the pronouncement was clear enough. Swift, the man said, Swift! Reference to The Dean always engendered the Uncle’s fury, brought on by his long, unhealthy attention to The Dean’s most shocking pamphlet.

Seeking to avoid the Uncle’s inevitable eruption, those who had regular commerce with him used alternate words like "quick" exclusively in his hearing, regularly robbing him of the opportunity that the poor man's reference now offered him.

“Swift, then!” he shouted.

The Uncle’s firm conviction was that Swift’s modest essay contained an implied slur against Irish babies. The cannibal act was made even more repugnant by the Swiftian suggestion of their Irishness:

Imagine eating babies! Ugh!

Imagine eating Irish babies on top of that! Gack! By comparison French babies, even French babies, would seem savory, no doubt.

In this regard the Uncle felt his whelp the equal of any man’s: a meal no less tragic, no less tasty.

Swift’s imputed view to the contrary would not be countenanced by the Uncle.

It was often remarked of the Uncle that he was never in any but a dispersing crowd.

“Lamb, I’m sure, would be correct,” said the hapless young scholar, unawares [In point of fact it was Stevenson, of course, though that is of little moment].

“Lamb correct!” shouted the Uncle. “But when it comes to it, would you not eat my bawn before the Duke of Gloucester's?”

And so saying, he delivered up to the ignorant man a prodigious thrashing.

You gotta see this

A stunning set of Russian posters from the Soviet era. A few of them are of the obligatory worker/peasant set against a bounteous background of heroically realized production quotas sort, but for the most part they're advertisements for shows, recitals, circuses, meetings, books and movies.

Magnificent graphic design. Select "View as slideshow" and be amazed.

You're Talking To A Veteran, Asshole

Forty years ago today I was drafted into the United States Army. Back then the United States was at war in Vietnam. It was going on and on, the Vietnam War, and the solution of the people in charge of prosecuting the thing at the time was to reach down each week into the citizenry and scoop up larger and larger numbers of young men to swell the ranks of the armed forces to a size whose overwhelming force would destroy the enemy over there. The draft for the week of March 27 was the largest up to that point in the war, taking up over twenty thousand involuntary recruits in one fell swoop.

The great ladle of conscription caught me up. They sent me a letter, so I had a few weeks to mope around San Francisco before the day came and the lot of us were transported to the Oakland Induction Center, that fated day forty years past now when I began my required stint in the United States Army.

It was an inauspicious taking for the Army in my case. I gave a poor, grudging service overall, a judgment confirmed in a severe impromptu berating given me by a Lieutentant Colonel on my final day, the Fortieth Anniversary of which won't be celebrated for quite a few months now. I was crossing the yard with a handful of paperwork, sweet thoughts of impending release wafting though my otherwise empty cranium on that, my last day, than which one can get no shorter: finished with it! Done! I certainly didn't recognize the superiority of the officer approaching me from the building I was heading towards, at least in the strictly defined manner in which such recognition is executed in the military, which is to say, salute, no, admittedly I did not.

During the Lieutenant Colonel's tirade, which picked up from the affront of going unsaluted to touch on a variety of other issues immediately arising out of my slovenly appearance (which, standing directly before him I could do little to disguise), it suddenly dawned on me: he had me on that, you see. I knew about the salute. It wasn't like I hadn't ever wended my way through a parade ground whipping the extended hand up to the forehead and smartly returning it to my side. I knew about the thing, it just hadn't occurred to me in the event. All that training for nothing in the end.

It was my privilege to suddenly see what the Lieutenant Colonel was driving at: my presence in the military was an affront to the Army. All along the affront to me that began by being drafted in March of 1968 had been uppermost in my mind, but the Lieutenant Colonel's words convinced me that there were other values and other offenses to be taken into account in addition to my own, given the circumstances.

I didn't try to fend off his remarks with the observation that it was the Army's bad recruiting that had brought all this on in the first place, a blunder soon to be rectified by my departure, although I admit I did experience a yearning to express just such a view.

Nor did I gloat out loud that my own long held suspicions regarding the slovenliness of my clothing, which I had not removed in the past 36 hours, were merely confirmed by his words, although my tendency to preen is never far removed.

No. I simply drank in the objective truth of it. The Army and I had not got on well together. The war was lost eventually, and I must acknowledge my fractional responsibility for dragging it to that end. I did my part.

I'd spent my time in a back office at Ft. Lewis, Washington, immured there doing minor harm with a keypunch machine for all my twenty-one months of active duty. I rose to the unexalted rank of Sp4 in time and never left the KP roster of Headquarters and Headquarters Company in all my 21 months. I recognized it not only as a place of imprisonment and exile, North Fort Lewis, particularly when compared to all the the ferment and frolicking going on in the San Francisco of 1968 I'd been removed from, but also as a place dissociated in its way from the actual war in Vietnam itself, tucked in a readily overlooked niche in the Army's own vast stateside bureaucracy, in a null space removed from both the lively streets and the deathly jungles of that time.

In his peroration the Lieutenant Colonel enthusiastically recommended, in the form I recognized as a direct order, that I immediately go over to that barbershop right there and get a haircut and report right back to him for inspection. Much of the rest of his address has slipped my mind in the intervening years, howevermuch I was impressed at the time by his succinctly expressed acuity in summarizing my personal failings. He nailed it, really, when all is said and done.

Anyway, that was at the sorry end of my sorry stay in the Army, which began forty years ago today.

Five years on

How the war came to be, and how it went on and on.

Via Frontline, "Bush's War" at pbs.org.

What Created This Monster?

Here's Krugman a couple of days ago, and a long NYT article that tries to describe the true shape of the mess the financial markets have created for us all.

Some of the cutting edge instruments devised to play in today's financial markets are so abstruse that only a small number of people in the world pretend to understand how they work, although that hasn't kept fund managers from vigorously rolling them out on the strength of a phone call here and an email there, completely off the books as far as the regulated part of their business is concerned, and, in the area of credit default swaps alone,

the outstanding value of the swaps stands at more than $45.5 trillion, up from $900 billion in 2001.

[…]

Bear Stearns held credit default swap contracts carrying an outstanding value of $2.5 trillion, analysts say.

—Nelson D. Schwartz and Julie Creswell, NYT, March 23, 2008

Credit default swaps are like insurance for investors against the sort of bad financial moves so often made by debtors, the kind that make it impossible for them to pay back the money they've been advanced by creditors. Except that actual insurance is a relatively regulated market with a long-standing legal obligation to come through for its policyholders, to have the scratch on hand to make good the claims on its policies that can be expected to be handled over time, and the market for credit default swaps, the one Bear Stearns had a 5% share of, has never been put through its paces, and it seems likely that the Federal Reserve, when it partnered with JP Morgan Chase to take down Bear Stearns, did it with an eye toward avoiding the unpredictable but potentially disastrous effects that firm's failure would have on just that market.

James Surowiecki goes on from there in The New Yorker.

Tulip Innards

Rose on Rose

—via Quick Study

Some Magnolia Blossoms

Said to be the sad truth

The Sad Truth About Relationships

When leached of incident perhaps there's a great similarity in the envisionable story arc of any and all middle class couples; the courtship, the marriage, the nest-building, child-rearing, soon-enough-done lives expected of the sort of people who tread that path. Of course the video ignores the almost obligatory early divorce that at least half of such lives require, followed by the repetition of the first few stages of the process with other partners until at some point the permanency of marriage is either achieved or proved impossible. I haven't had the pleasure of divorce myself, but I think in deference to those who have, it would be only fair to make a version of this video that fits the normal arc of those who divorce with their unique but necessary engagements with partings and custodies and measured lasting acrimony built right into the cartoon.

Photo Op

By Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, via The New Yorker.

Obit

Never let it be said that there are no class divides in Irish America, or that the mutual contemptuousness of every class of Irish people for the other has not been successfully transplanted from the old country to its primarily urban and now suburban home in America.

Mark Wahlberg's Boston Irish character in Martin Scorsese's movie The Departed has naturally a deep contempt for the Boston Irish character played by Matt Damon for precisely these reasons, and expresses his natural contempt with succinct force from the first, as people of his station so often will.

When I first came to regard William Buckley, courtesy of his television program Firing Line and appearances on other talk shows of the time, I recognized in myself the upwelling of the sort of contempt for the man proper to my class of Irish Americans toward a man of his, and carried that contempt with me down all the years till now.

I say farewell to William F. Buckley, Jr., and to my contempt for him as well, satisfied that it no longer has its proper target. I reserve the right to my contempt for what he's left, however.

Beyond the Valley of the Shadow of the Parthian, Or, Delenda Est Su Madre Forever!!!1!

A useful visual schematic laying out the roles of participants in longstanding internet flame wars has come to my attention.



I make no warranty about the veracity of this image. It came along an email chain to me recently. It could have been cobbled together for fun by someone on Fark for all I know, or it may capture the actual visual fact of the matter in the instant it transpired, the little dog's dead buck fuck I care to call it. Likewise, I have no idea if it's at all timely. Years may have passed since it first joined the stream of Hey Look at This that sloshes through the inbox of every email user, fated to arrive at each and every one of them on the internet eventually, and to return there again and again over time at the merest click of a Forward button. Or, again, it may be pretty new; I don't know.

You might think there'd be no further degradation possible following the summary insult of intentionally inflicted death, looking at self's end from a purely personal perspective, thinking, well, if it were me I'd be dead and wouldn't know or be capable of caring so what the fuck, but you'd be wrong, this picture says. Things can go downhill from there with the remains. Insult can be always added by the littlest fucking dog to the burden of the terminated thing, is what this image indicates.

The fellow crouches down by the beast he's killed, holding the buck's rack. He's violated the buck's right to live there in the time honored way of the hunter, having apparently offered up the terminal injury with the rifle resting there on the buck's midsection. The hunter appears nonplussed by the little dog's addition to what he must have thought was already going to be a compehensive image of the buck's bad last day. He leans untriumphantly away in the scene, with his own ass low to the ground.

The connection to longstanding internet flame wars is left as an excercise for their makers.

Son (de Castro)

In the wake of Castro's retirement, lots of Whither Cuba chatter.

Officially, the U.S. has a bone to pick with Cuba's Castro, and the next few months, the twilight of George Bush's presidency, should witness a ramping up of rhetoric on the importance of doing something to Cuba, given this administration track record. Doing what it will to Cuba has been bedrock U.S. government policy over the past hundred years at least, a policy so consistently expressed in vigorous episodic outbreaks of doing something to Cuba down the decades that it has become ingrained in the public consciousness as an existential feature of What America Stands For. Doing something to Cuba, well, how can you be against that, and call yourself an American?

What the relationship between Cuba and the United States seriously lacks is a trade agreement. China, communism's other famous redoubt, has been granted whatever dispensation is needed for its past and current cruel communist practices and encouraged to enter into a notoriously profitable relationship with the United States over the course of the last few decades. But this waiver of What America Stands For has never been extended to Cuba. Much the reverse.

Surely Castro's intransigent refusal to knuckle under to what the United States has long been willing to do to Cuba impoverished his whole nation. Although the Cuban people are entitled to the benefits of public health and education programs denied as a matter of course to the poor in America, the people of Cuba pay the price in lack of abundant goods and services for Castro's harsh and unflinching obduracy with respect to who is in charge of that country. Castro has stepped aside now, in a presidential election year in the U.S., ensuring that the enduring impulse to do something to Cuba will find its expression in the platform of every contestant for the office, and perhaps resound in public discourse with all the malignant force of the wave that swept that famous little boy on the dolphin onto our shores some years back.

Baracula

The Musical

The Bugle

John Oliver is familiar to those who watch the Daily Show. He's the slight, very laughable, owlish-faced guy with glasses ignorant Americans might say speaks with an "English" accent, though there's really no such thing as an "English" accent, each person on the British Isles being gifted with a vocal delivery that sounds out with remorseless GPS-like precision the given geographic and social position of its speaker to anyone who pays attention to that sort of thing. Is John Oliver a native of a particular six-square block of inner London? Only his linguist knows for sure. Nevertheless, he's trained his voice, like all the people on those islands over the years, to pronounce a lot of biographical and cultural information about himself whenever he uses his words. These niceties are wasted on most Americans, who in general have no idea where people from that part of the world are coming from or why that should make any difference to an American anyway.

This makes comedy hard, since relating the funny topical thing about England or Scotland or Ireland, or even about inherently laughable Wales at times, which Oliver and his partner Andy Zaltzman valiantly set out to do each week in a half-hour podcast from timesonline called The Bugle—an audio newspaper for a visual age, must depend on a familiarity with those places with which the average American audience is famously ill-supplied. Oliver and Zaltzman have solved this problem for transatlantic listeners by taking special pains in each program to make plenty of understandable fun of America as well.

Space, The Final Frontier

From the New York Times:

“If we fire at the satellite,” he said, “the worst is that we miss. And then we have a known situation, which is where we are today. If we graze the satellite, we’re still better off, because likely we’ll still bring it down sooner, and therefore more predictably. If we hit the hydrazine tank, then we’ve improved our potential to mitigate that threat. So the regret factor of not acting clearly outweighed the regret factors of acting.”

Some time in the next two weeks the U.S. is going to try to intercept a misbehaving spy satellite with a missile fired from a ship stationed in the North Pacific and smithereen the thing before it falls to earth. Doing so will represent a field test of the U.S.'s anti-ballistic missile system.

The Chinese will be watching. Like the United States, China is gung-ho on militarizing space. It shot down a satellite last year without feeling the need to give the test of its ballistic missile capabilities the humanitarian spin the United States seems to feel so necessary as it goes forward with its own forthcoming test. The implied position of the United States is that it is doing the world a favor by attempting to rid it of the danger posed by the satellite, destroying it there before it destroys us here, which is a known inclination of its foreign policy lofted up to space in this instance.

The rationale for shooting at the satellite instead of letting it descend to earth on its own inevitable path trades on the supposed danger of allowing the fuel tank, full of hydrazine, to crash to earth unimpeded. Hydrazine is a colorless toxic liquid with basic properties similar to those of ammonia, though 15 times weaker. In nature hydrazine is ready to do chemical business at a moment's notice with a wide range of commonly available elements, recombining rapidly in air and water with other loose molecules to form a characteristic batch of less toxic compounds and give off a lot of energy to boot. Well, it's an explosive. Prolonged exposure to hydrazine is bad. Acute exposure to a bunch of it is definitely not recommended.

Those of us who remember the equanimity with which the United States greeted the anticipated reentry of the 83 tons of Skylab back to earth in 1979 will appreciate the marked shift in official U.S. policy represented by this new approach. Back in the day, technology and the ABM treaty did not allow for the deployment of missile systems capable of blasting satellites out of the sky. But Ronald Reagan gave the giddyapp to the technology by his Star Wars initiative, and George Bush removed the United States from the ABM Treaty in 2002, so that now, fruit of all that effort, the United States is going to give itself a few tries at plinking the satellite as it passes overhead, a defining moment in its march to space.

In the Times article, David C. Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists allows as how the proposed missile strike could create 100,000 pieces of debris, some "small as a marble but still dangerous to vehicles in space." It's unquestionable that if the satellite is destroyed by a ballistic missile strike, some of its debris will be propelled into higher orbit around the earth, though presumably not into the path of working satellites up there (speed up an object in space and it assumes a higher orbit. Slow the thing down and it goes to ground. This rule of thumb is repeated over and over again in some novel or other of Heinlein's). Should the test succeed it remains to be seen how long it will take for the sky to rid itself of these 100,000 or so pieces, which will presumably slow and fall to earth of their own accord sooner or later, creating in the meantime their own little region of danger for any object that might care to cross it, a new neighborhood of space populated by small marbles of material traveling in some alternate direction at relatively great speed. Travel is likely to be harmful in that neighborhood for some time.

The worst case of course would be for the ballistic missile to merely wound the tank of hydrazine, causing it to spit its load of caustic liquid in a fine mist onto the ozone layer below, although I'd be willing to be told that this is chemically and indeed astronomically impossible.

Another Year, Dear, Same Valentine…

A Glade in a Gleam of Light

A discussion of the photos of Rarindra Prakarsa at Metafilter leads to this linked article by Mark Hobson at The Landscapist.

I'm not enough of a photographer to know how K manages to acheive the effects visible in his idylic images of children poised in their customary frolics. The golden shafts of light, yes, I can see that happening in an air full of dusts, although I don't live in land that sees much of that kind of weather. But there's the chance, implicit in comments by some of the Mefites, that the photographer has postprocessed the image to bring out an unnatural amount of goldenness in his images, a rejected Thomas Kinkaid level of painter of light romanticism that the landscape never really owned in the first place, for whatever reason.

So, over at the Landscapist, the host hosts a couple of K's shots, and the comments there tend off in the same critical direction (comments at Metafilter being comparatively brusque, as fits the established rhetoric there, but similarly inclined), suspecting that these images, however capably produced, are in a word, aesthetically speaking, corny.

So the Landscapist posts a few pictures of the sorry land around Jakarta, a peopled urban midden of the sort that is the handmaiden of massive urban environments everywhere around the globe.

And a couple of the commenters bite. Oh, yah, that's more like it. See, this is Indonesia here.

And then a communication comes from a fellow in Indonesia, expressing as best he can in English the immensity of the place, the vast variety of scene and experience embodied there, how a person in Indonesia can see the urban desolation but cannot deny the children and goats and lanes and ponds and trees breaking all the light to little golden bits as it refracts off of countless leaves, that exist there at the heart of Indonesia as well.

Me and my generation still struggle to fix poverty in this country. But hence..there's a lot of time when we were felt very sad about what happened in our country. Mad And loose the spirit to change the way our goverment rule. Tired on corruption and lazy people.

When that times come, looking in some Rarindra's photograph give us good feeling.

Still. Rarindra may dont have any clue about what he has done. I think he's just want to make a beatifull portrait of Indonesia and represent it in dreamy way. The reality sure is not good as the photo. But looking at his portofolio give me sense of pride. We love this country. And will do something to make it remain loved.

Call it third world fake realism. But for me it worth something.

I admire Rarindra Prakarsa for being able to retain the color of objects in the foreground of his images. Because I can't do that I wonder how he does. When I shoot directly into a light source, objects in the foreground take on a heavy shadow not visible to the naked eye. This image of the sky above Hetch-Hetchy has that in spades:



The solitary tree and the abrupt cliff on the side of the road were swathed in midday light when I took the photo, but the camera, given the settings I inflicted on it I suppose, winced at all the brightness overhead, and the tree and cliff are left in darkness in the image as recorded, as is the telephone pole to the right. I don't know how to avoid that, but Rarindra Prakarsa does, I'll give him that. Maybe it's some f-stop thing, or an adjustment of the ISO speed or white balance or something or other that if I knew my camera better I'd be able to allow for. Or, maybe it's something that's best left to Photoshop, selecting and enhancing from the shadows of the image the colors masked in shadow but retrievable by that powerful program's intervention.

When I first looked look at Rarindra Prakarsa's photos I was immediately immersed in questions I have about technical aspects of picture taking without any regard whatsoever to the corniness so many find there.

I see by his photos Rarindra Prakarsa has found some satisfactory solution to the problem I have with shadow-filled foregrounds. I like that.

Update

I guess it's time to see about those Zogby numbers.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo points to Zogby's mixed success on Super Tuesday. Missouri, yeah, he got that one. It was close, just as he said it should be. But in California, whew…

15 G's

Lake Chargoggagoggmanchaoggagoggchaubunaguhgamaugg

Surging Continues Apace On the Eve of Super Tuesday

A few weeks ago the United States military dropped 100,000 pounds of explosives on the Arab Jabour region south of Baghdad: 100,000 pounds. 50 tons.

Tom Englehardt outlines the other terrorism in Iraq at TomDispatch.

Maybe then, it's time for Seymour Hersh to take another look. Or for the online world to take up the subject. Maybe, sooner or later, American mainstream journalists in Iraq (and editors back in the U.S.) will actually look up, notice those contrails in the skies, register those "precision" bombs and missiles landing, and consider whether it really is a ho-hum, no-news period when the U.S. Air Force looses 100,000 pounds of explosives on a farming district on the edge of Baghdad. Maybe artists will once again begin pouring their outrage over the very nature of air war into works of art, at least one of which will become iconic, and travel the world reminding us just what, almost five years later, the "liberation" of Iraq has really meant for Iraqis.

Don't hold your breath, Mr. Englehardt. Artists are exhausting themselves in other pursuits, and journalists and bloggers have a presidential horse race to follow.

From The Who'da Thunk It File

The game tasted like one of Sophocles’ better tragedies; divine gifts made too much of, then hubris brought low. That’s coming [at] it a bit high... but a few of those football plays managed to wrench the audience’s attention away from good company and doggie antics and really outstanding food. Which is all Sophocles ever asked of his plays, I bet.

— Tim Bray at ongoing

My own Super Bowl prediction fell equally flat. Up by just thirty at game's end, and then hand after hand of unplayable cards. Two hours worth of feeding antes into the pot and in return cards not even good enough to lose with. Ante and fold, ante and fold. Meh. Admittedly I wasn't 18-0 going into the game, but still.

Zogby Numbers

Does anyone else share the impression that Zogby's numbers are often the crazy outliers of numbers distributed by the good graces of the science of statistical sampling when the mood of the public is being tested before an upcoming election? Are Zogby numbers ever really that close to the results they attempt to foresee in retrospect? Or are they useful because they are so predictably off? Maybe I'm ignoring all the good work Zogby numbers do at other times and places I'm not aware of, I don't know. I do recall what seems a pretty long list of tallied returns that delivered a good crumpling to the Zogby numbers that foreshadowed them.

The season of the horse race is upon us, at least according to Zogby the pollster, whose numbers show "Clinton, Obama Neck-and-Neck in Key Super Tuesday States."

We'll see shortly.

[via…]