Christopher Hitchens was an extremist steeped in the refinements of London literary culture. He wrote well, especially in the key of opprobrium. He eviscerated Kissinger in print, and even took on recieved wisdom regarding Mother Theresa, complicating her sainthood with a contrary reading of her place in India.
Galvanized by their plight under Sadaam Hussein, Christopher Hitchens strongly favored the cause of the brutalized Kurdish people. It's a mugs game to pick sides in the Middle East, locus of the greatest concentration of aggrieved peoples per hectare in the world, and Hitchens saw the logic of his alleigance [sorry but i cant even spell the word —p.r.] put to the ultimate test in the runup to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. He couldn't help but hope the despised Hussein would be removed, and favored the war. He didn't relent when the causus belli was shown to be so much whole cloth soon after the invasion, followed almost immediately by years of score-settling on the part of all the aggrieved of Iraq, whose balance sheets stretch continuously back five millennia in recorded history now, creating, for example, in that band of foothills sloping eastward from Asia Minor to Persia north of Mesopotamia a coherent swath of culture that flowered emphatically with Urartu all those long years ago and by virtue of the vicissitudes in that same place became what Hitchens cared to call the Kurds, holders of the debt owed to them by their history, aggrieved to this day by its denial, who may yet benefit from what's said to have ended yesterday. But still.
Public argument has long been an institution in London, and Hitchens was a master of argument there before his arrival in America. In public Hitchens spoke with lucidity and force. His rhetoric was full of the jugular-seeking barb. Speech for him was often enough an offensive weapon pointed at his opponent rather than the topic at hand.
He was not a fool. He was widely read and could write coherently about the books he confronted. He liked to drink and smoke. He became a U.S. citizen after long residence here persuing a career as a renowned journalist. Cancer of the throat killed him. He died yesterday.
December 16, 2011
December 02, 2011
November 27, 2011
Details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars…
A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger. —BloombergDo tell.
November 18, 2011
November 13, 2011
October 18, 2011
October 13, 2011
hashtag revolution
"Do you understand that 400 people in this country have more wealth than the bottom 150 MILLION? Does that sound fair to you?"
—fervent comment found here.
It depends on how well the bottom 150 million are provided for. For my money, the 400 can go ahead and be that wealthy if and only if the needs of those 150 million are adequately met, and when that happens, the 400 can go ahead and try to be as wealthy as the bottom 250 or 300 million, on the same plan, for all I care. It doesn't matter to me how much the 400 are worth compared to any other fraction of society so long as the 150 million, the 250 million, the 300 million, the 99% of us, don't have to eat shit for that to be the case.
October 10, 2011
The Polo Field To Date, October 2011
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| A View of the Polo Field From The East October 2, 2011 |
Fifty years ago, on October 7, 1961, the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park was occupied by one of the largest crowds in San Francisco history. By most accounts half a million people gathered there that day. I was one of them, squatting on the grassy berm above the playing field far across a vast sea of people from the stage where Father Peyton led us in the Rosary.
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| A View of the Polo Field From The North October 7, 1961, via |
A little more that five years later I was at the Human Be-in, held on that same field. It was a much smaller crowd that day, but in many ways equally impressive. There was a great deal of chanting on both occasions, I seem to recall.
October 08, 2011
October 05, 2011
August 23, 2011
Jerry Leiber, April 25, 1933–August 22, 2011
As much as anybody, he deserves thanks for rock 'n roll.
August 11, 2011
August 03, 2011
August is Weedmonth
A dog, snarling with bared teeth, charges you. You have a heavy stick in one hand and a gun in the other.
Do you …
A. Thwart it with the gun.
or
B. Thwart it with the stick.
There's a distinction to be made between reason and logic. Some might hasten to work logically through to an irrefragable argument for A over B, trusting that reason might prevail in reaching a solution to the dog's threat, so that the matter, succinctly decided, might shine as a beacon of best practice in all such future encounters. Others might contrarily chose to support preference B, no matter what, traditionally favoring a cudgel in hand in every dealing with a dog from the get-go.
In this narrowed window of rational choice an argument might be made. Marshalling all the main and ancillary points required to support positions for or against one or the other of these fundamental choices will take a non-trivial amount of time and effort. N.B.The stipulated dog does not inflict itself, but remains suspended in all respects while this sort of argument runs its course.
Individuals entering into such an argument become attached to, proprietary of, the logical structures the've contributed or endorsed in searching their way through to what they submit is a reasonable end to the matter, and often enough are so willingly invested in supporting the logic that leads them to claims about the fairly decided thing they strive for that they will continue to defend that logic long after it has become abundantly clear that an encompassing view of the list of alternatives to the leading question Do you …, has not yet been exhausted, with all the explanatory material inserted here in the text merely serving to approximate the effect of the great opening intercessionary salvos of argument arising whenever gun or stick is called for, but which alternatives must at the very least include
C. Trust the fence.
D. Profit!
Do you …
A. Thwart it with the gun.
or
B. Thwart it with the stick.
There's a distinction to be made between reason and logic. Some might hasten to work logically through to an irrefragable argument for A over B, trusting that reason might prevail in reaching a solution to the dog's threat, so that the matter, succinctly decided, might shine as a beacon of best practice in all such future encounters. Others might contrarily chose to support preference B, no matter what, traditionally favoring a cudgel in hand in every dealing with a dog from the get-go.
In this narrowed window of rational choice an argument might be made. Marshalling all the main and ancillary points required to support positions for or against one or the other of these fundamental choices will take a non-trivial amount of time and effort. N.B.The stipulated dog does not inflict itself, but remains suspended in all respects while this sort of argument runs its course.
Individuals entering into such an argument become attached to, proprietary of, the logical structures the've contributed or endorsed in searching their way through to what they submit is a reasonable end to the matter, and often enough are so willingly invested in supporting the logic that leads them to claims about the fairly decided thing they strive for that they will continue to defend that logic long after it has become abundantly clear that an encompassing view of the list of alternatives to the leading question Do you …, has not yet been exhausted, with all the explanatory material inserted here in the text merely serving to approximate the effect of the great opening intercessionary salvos of argument arising whenever gun or stick is called for, but which alternatives must at the very least include
C. Trust the fence.
D. Profit!
July 14, 2011
BREAKING: After 168 Years, Britain's News Of The World Vomits Its Last Edition
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| Mr. Murdoch and his son discussing the British phone hacking matter with Paul McMullan. |
July 06, 2011
Egypt
…as it ever was:
Four months after the fall of Hosni Mubarek, the winners have begun to take shape. The military averted the prospect of a Gamal Mubarek succession and maintained the power it has held since Nasser’s coup d’état of 1956. The Moslem Brotherhood has emerged from decades of persecution to potentially become new Egypt’s new powerbrokers, and the Salifist groups, once outlawed, are now organizing political parties. So far, Egypt’s revolution has bolstered the standing of all parties, except the young, secular, progressive activists whose dreams and courage first ignited it.
—Christian Vachon at The Rumpus
July 04, 2011
June 16, 2011
The Half-Life Of Other News
“Ft. Calhoun is the designated spent fuel storage facility for the entire state of Nebraska…and maybe for more than one state. Calhoun stores its spent fuel in ground-level pools which are underwater anyway – but they are open at the top. When the Missouri river pours in there, it’s going to make Fukushima look like an x-ray.”
—Tom Burnett on the underreported story of Nebraska's Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant, currrently submerged beneath a national wave of weiner jokes. Presumably Burnett is concerned that the flooding Missouri River, adjacent to the plant, will wash away some, or even lots, of the spent nuclear fuel stored in outdoor pools around the plant, where an electrical fire in the control room interrupted the regular order of business a week ago.
Bloomsday! For Reals!
It's all aligned now, you see, the proper anniversary of Bloomsday, when the calendar comes round as it will from time to time, with the day of the week, Thursday, and the month, June, and its sixteenth day, all three essential components matched up once more, identical to those canonically given in the famous book "Ulysses" by James Joyce.
Here's the fabulous RTÉ Radio dramatization, courtesy of the Internet Archive:
I'll be over here leafing through the thing as is my way on Bloomsday.
Here's the fabulous RTÉ Radio dramatization, courtesy of the Internet Archive:
I'll be over here leafing through the thing as is my way on Bloomsday.
June 14, 2011
May 30, 2011
May 24, 2011
May 20, 2011
He Walk On Gilded Splinters
Dave Bry at The Awl posts "13 other songs about Voodoo, Juju, Mojo, and Witchcraft" to go with a video by Random Axe called "The Hex" and fails to include a song by Dr. John. Specifically, this song, "Walk on Gilded Splinters," a seven-and-a-half minute discursus on just those matters.
May 15, 2011
May 14, 2011
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