Unqualified Successes 2004 - Another year, another set of awards. Previous winners can be seen in the original entries. Thanks to Nicholas Weininger, Nell Lancaster and Jonathan Pearse for nominations. Got to dash: the Spouse of the Year wants me downstairs for the ball drop.
Least Dispensible Weblog - Fafblog
Hawk of the Year - Captain Christopher Chown, USMC
Dove of the Year - Mahmoud Abbas
Turning Japanese Award, for the Best Case of the Vapors - David "Screw Democracy" Warren
Turning IN the Japanese Award, for a Worse Case of the Vapors than You Ever Thought Possible - Michelle Malkin
Best Non-Libertarian in a Libertarian Role - Katherine Hawkins (see also)
Best Libertarian in a Neoconservative Role - Michael Young
Best Libertarians in a Libertarian Role - Catallarchy
Least Annoying Liberal - Belle Waring
*Least Annoying Conservative - James Joyner
War is the Health of the State Award - Alberto Gonzalez
War is the Health of the State Award, If You Can Call This Health - Islam Karimov
War is the Health of - Oh! Me! - DOD Deputy Undersecretary Jack Shaw
Most Successful Meme Insertion - "MSM"
Jumped the Shark Award - "MSM"
Blog Trend of the Year - Dropping comment sections
Baleful Blog Trend of the Year - Becoming a bunch of shills for campaign talking points
Soup/Food of the Year - Mrs. Fields' Chewy Fudge cookies
Special Achievement Award - The Command Post
The Road Not Taken Award - The Mike MacParlane Taste Test
Spouse of the Year - Mrs. Offering
My Year in Comics - Despite the fact that I haven't done much comics-blogging since coming off hiatus, and despite the large number of absolute stinkers the major companies gave us as the year went on, there was actually a bunch of stuff I liked.
Mother Come Home, by Paul Hornschemeier. Absolutely without question the best graphic novel I read this year. (Apparently its official publication was November 2003.) A young fantasy-prone boy and his grief-stricken father try to deal with the loss of the boy's mother to cancer. The tone of the script is assured, the colors estranging in just the right way, and the panel designs emphasize the dizzying heights and depths a child's literal perspective. The ending may be over the top, but I cried anyway. Recommended for every freaking body.
Light Brigade, by Tomasi and Snejberg. A DC squarebound-format miniseries about an apocalyptic battle between Heaven and Hell that enlists a platoon of American troops in the action. How would you act if you knew, for sure, there was a God in Heaven? Also, Nazi zombies! Snejberg's art is fabulous - he can really draw snowscapes, he's good at individuating the solders and his storytelling is clear. By the collection when it comes out.
Eightball #23, by Daniel Clowes. I finally decided this was not quite as good as Eightball #22, one of the greatest single-issue comics ever, but it's still pretty darn good. All Clowes' mad narrative skillz are on display here. 23, "The Death Ray," lacks the scope of its predecessor, and it just may be an object lesson in the limits of unredeemed coldness in storytelling. Previous Clowes landmarks like "Ice Haven" (Eightball #22) and Ghost World have been damned chilly works, but not merely chilly. Still, it's technically excellent work by one of America's best storytellers in any medium, and thus not to be missed.
Ex Machina, by Brian K. Vaughn and Tony Harris (ongoing series). Maybe, just maybe, this book is an object lesson in the limits of warmth in fiction. Everyone's so darn likeable. But . . . I like them, the characters. High concept: retired superhero becomes Mayor of New York City. I suppose it's Daredevil Meets West Wing, if I watched West Wing. Vaughn is not a scripter of the first rank, but he's more than merely competent. Harris is terrific. He's got to do a lot of people talk with other people panels and gives them movement and vitality. The "controversial" aspect of the book is that the protagonist's big claim to fame is saving one of the World Trade Center towers from a terrorist attack. He feels guilty about the other.
[Updated Material!]
Superman: Secret Identity miniseries, Kurt Busiek and Stuart Immonen. In a world much like ours, the Kents have a kid and name him Clark, as much for laughs as anything. His name is the chief annoyance of his young life: birthdays and Christmas bring an unending series of Superman-themed gag gifts. Then, one evening, he discovers that he's flying. Superhero stories are frequently concerned with the questions of How should I put my abilities to use and how much of my life can I keep for myself? S:SI's premise allows it a "meta" twist: most comic book superhero worlds are notable for their lack of comic book superheroes. That is, the "real" heroes within the stories don't chiefly use fictional superheroes (fictional to them, I mean) as their models. There's the occasional Spider-Man wisecrack about how "I bet Clark Kent never had to . . . ," but that's it. The Clark Kent of Superman: Secret Identity spends most of his life as his world's only superhuman. Fictional models are all he's got, especially his fictional namesake. Lovely book. Immonen's art is a treat. When grandeur is called for, he gives you a tiny figure against an immense landscape. Intimacy? Gene Colanesque closeups (with a smoother line).
Family Reunion by Sean Stewart and Steve Leiber. This chapbook was done to promote Stewart's novel, Perfect Circle. The protagonist is a southern divorcé who can see ghosts. You can get the hardcopy for a dollar, which I recommend over just viewing the pages on the web. The chapbook has a pleasing feel to it and the art was created to be viewed on paper. When an eight-page book sticks in the mind as one of the best things you've seen all year, it's got to have something going for it. The story is a nice southern ghost tale in which the southernness isn't played for slapstick. Leiber's art made the book for me. He's economically expressive with his facial and figure lines. He's also very shrewd in the way he makes the story's ghost more substantial than any of the humans, letting us understand just why the protagonist's gift has kept him from amounting to much, and the landscape work on the trees and mountains on the last page has a positively Chinese delicacy to it.
Hulk/Thing Hard Knocks miniseries, by Bruce Jones and Jae Lee. What If . . . Lee and Kirby Had Created Waiting for Godot? You'd get this. Really a hoot? Will absurdist vaudeville superheroics become the new hotness? Probably not. Jae Lee draws ugly good. This made him the absolute wrong artist for Captain America, but he's perfect here.
Astonishing X-Men, Joss Whedon and John Cassaday. Whedon's conceits, like the scientist who finds a "cure" for human mutation, are why this book is the successor to Grant Morrison's New X-Men in more than name only. I'd like to say exactly what it is that John Cassaday does better than any other superhero artist, but I can't. Cyclops new costume looks like a condom with a viewport, but that's life.
On other fronts . . .
Had I done a Fanboy's Edition Unqualified Successes I'd have chosen, for the Comics Blog Trend of the Year "Fragmentation," and for the Baleful Comics Blog Trend of the Year, "Assholes." But that's just me. The comics blogosphere has become huge, diverse and often contentious, sometimes vindictively so. The contention I don't mind so much.
O Nostalgia - A tradition of year-end wrapups means going through your archives for the previous year, and I found this from January:
Gas, a buck sixty-one at the off-brand stations this weekend. Jeez. Could we make it about the oil after all?
A buck sixty-one! [Sings] I wish those days / would / come back again / I wish those days / would . . .
For Those Keeping Score - The question that most interested me on learning about the revised DOJ torture memo (pdf) was, What has become of the original memo's expansive . . . "interpretation" of the commander-in-chief power? (Essentially, the President, in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, can do whatever the hell he wants.) Answer: Dodgeball!
This memorandum supersedes the August 2002 Memorandum in its entirety.6 Because the discussion in that memorandum concerning the President's Commander-in-Chief power and the potential defenses to liability was - and remains - unnecessary, it has been eliminated from the analysis that follows, Consideration of the bounds of any such authority would be inconsistent with the President's unequivocal directive that United States personnel not engage in torture.
Torture is just about the foulest thing I can think of; untrammelled executive power one of the very few fouler. (It contains the former, plus many other ills.) The revised memo reins in the one, but studiously avoids addressing the other.
There's No Doubt It's a Problem - "Study: Family, Friends Reduce Quality Internet Time" notes Scrappleface.
Like I Needed a Test
(Via Procrastination.)
Question of the Day - If you put the "Triangle of Death" and the Sunni Triangle together, what do you get? The Rhombus of Resistance? The Parallelogram of Perfidy? The Quarrelsome Quadrangle? Are there triangles we haven't been told about yet that will constitute the Tiled Plane of Terror? My New Year's Resolution is to be up on the latest talking points as fast as the hawkish blogs are.
Tsunami Relief Options - I haven't verified the research but a costello-l member suggests the following organizations that he chose on the bases:
* No apparent political or religious agenda * Enough organizational history to indicate that they're capable of delivering, and ethical * At least 90% of total budget goes directly to aid, minimal amounts to internal administration & salariesDirect Relief International (99% directly to aid)
Speak up if you think any of the above fall short on the stated criteria. (I am wondering about UNICEF and minimal amounts of internal administration and salaries, myself.)
And of course, it's simple in the extreme to donate through Amazon to the American Red Cross.
A Fanboy's Year - Heidi McDonald has the top stories in the comics industry; Johnny Bacardi his year's best titles and Franklin Harris sound advice for your - yes, your - new venture in comics publishing.
Finally, because we semi-comics (hemi-demi-semi these days) bloggers have to stick together, AND because it's worth reading, I note that Eve reviews a bunch of stuff she's read lately.
Fun with Fitness Writing - From "Kettlebells: An Antidote to the Hype," by Raymond Brennan:
This is not a reason not to use kettlebells, but more of a hype-busting exercise. If you want to be an “authentic” kettlebeller, then learn to play the bagpipes and wear your kilt with pride. The USSR is nothing now but a bad memory-and please let’s leave it that way. To evoke a spurious mystique about the unique horror that was the USSR in order to promote what are nothing more than iron balls is, quite frankly, in bad taste. I wonder what the reaction would be if they were hyped as “the favourite training tool of Nazi Germany” or “what the Viet Cong used in the tunnels underneath Saigon” or (in the post September 11th era) “what Al-Queda used in the caves of Afghanistan”? Think about this, please.
Look, Alina! I'm improving mind and body at the same time!
That Word, Senor, the Continuing Series - Researching the history of the NEA for a paper I'm writing I discover an official document from the agency, National Endowment for the Arts 1965-2000: A Brief Chronology of Federal Support for the Arts (pdf). Said "brief chronology" is 77 pages long.
The Year in Review in a single sentence, from my Agitator patron R. Balko:
If you ask me, the most remarkable thing about blogs and the 2004 campaign was just how ready formerly independent voices on both sides were willing to spew out official campaign talking points, eschew criticism of their own guy, and otherwise fell into line in order to get their man elected.
Yup.
Department of Follow-Ups - Back from traveling, Juan Cole responds to the Iraq the Model controversy. It includes clarifications of intent and a forthright apology to the Ali brothers. From a metablogging perspective, what interests me is that it starts out with a very familiar explanation:
In my own mind, I was merely drawing attention to Mailander's entry on an informal, "Isn't this interesting?" basis.
The "isn't that interesting defense" is familiar to critics of Glenn Reynolds. The thing is, Cole goes on to reject this defense:
And, if I could take it back, I wouldn't have linked at all. This is a matter in some ways of not knowing my own strength. Blogging is deceptively informal, sort of like a conversation rather than like formal writing. So it is natural to cross-link among friends and say, 'Hey, check this out.' But my weblog has come to be so widely read that this degree of informality is now a luxury I obviously cannot afford, and I will try to be more careful.
What's the word I'm looking for? Oh yeah: Indeed.
Tsunami Help - The Command Post lists multiple ways to donate to Asian tidal wave relief. (Via Virignia Postrel.)
The Comment-Spam Apocalypse? I've never opened comments on UO. When I started blogging, comment functionality was rare. You had to go out of your way to activate it. When I converted from Blogger to Movable Type way back when I set the default switch for Comments to NONE in preferences and removed that code from my templates. At one point I weakened - comments drive repeat visits, and if I wanted to take ads they would presumably make my ad space more valuable - and I had a conversation with an A-list blogger about the possibility. He advised me in the strongest possible terms not to do it: not worth the maintenance and psychic hassles. Comment spam alone was an unending grind. Indeed, on my hobby sites, I got enough comment spam to provide the merest glimpse of what I'd be in for if I allowed comments on UO. A number of sites have dropped comments in the last year.
So I didn't add comment functionality after all. Imagine my surprise when I logged in to the MT web interface tonight to discover untold numbers of penis enlargemnt comments in my database. Investigation reveals a bunch - who knows how many? - 2002 entries with Allow Comments set to OPEN. After wondering first if someone had discovered a way to turn comments on, I eventually realized that what's happening is that when I imported my old Blogger entries into Movable Type in June 2002, MT set them to the default Open status and some spambot finally found them. It won't do the penis enlargers any good - the template keeps their comments from getting published. But it's taking up space on the server and I'm getting close enough to using my full storage allotment that I'm planning to convert over to PHP soon. (Which will mean learning enough PHP to do that.) In the meantime, I've got however many entries to de-louse and a certain number more (hundreds) on which to bar the gate. Oy.
Tsunami - The Command Post's Global Recon blog has constantly updated coverage of the disaster in South Asia. Our hopes and concerns are with everyone affected by the event, both those we know and those we don't.
Not So Bad, Baby! - 78% on John Tierney's year-end news trivia quiz. This surely means I've been blogging too much. (Via Just One Minute.)
The Anti-Beinert is your barking-mad Talking Dog. Sign me up. I mean, I'm not a Democrat, but sign me up.
The Reason for the Season - Your Christmas quote only seems, initially, a non sequiter:
Even if dogs, sexual humiliation, or sleep deprivation don't rise to one's particular uninformed definition of torture, I assume we can all agree that being dropped on barbed wire or having a lit Marlboro jammed in your ear does.
It's the Most - Wonderful Time - of the Year! - It's become a Christmas tradition, if one likely to end this year: Nate Bruinooge reviews the latest Lord of the Rings extended-edition DVD. Future Christmases will have that much less magic to them.
A Libertarian Reads the Gospels - Tonight in true Annual Christian fashion I attended with La Familia Offering our church's Christmas pageant, "A Clvsterfvck for Christ." Truth is, it wasn't nearly that bad, though my poet and storyteller friend who had charge of the children's segment of the show seemed to think so - you might too if you had to somehow usher a dozen costumed grade- and preschoolers on and offstage in synchrony with the readings. I'm proud to report that Offering Boy played a crucial leadership role here: as the only shepherd who made it to rehearsal and the only child whose eye my friend could catch, it was he who managed to lead the youthful throng away from the manger not too long after the actual exit cue.
Now being a libertarian, and thus fundamentally an awful, awful human being, I found myself consumed with thoughts of the sheer volume of practicality that even the spiritual side of Christmas requires, the scheduling, the planning, the e-mails and phone calls and trips to the printer and party store (for there are the snacks downstairs after the service to present). And then I couldn't stop myself wondering, Hey! What happened to the gold, frankincense and myrrh anyway? The Magi didn't snatch it back, presumably. And it was a pretty good haul, if, as we shall see, one with a twist to it. Gold is gold, and the gum resins, frankincense and myrrh, had value too.
So what did they do with it? I think they had to spend it in short order: the Magi and their Gifts only appear in Matthew (Chapter 2), which is also the only Gospel to recount the atrocity of Herod. It's the one where Joseph and the brood flee immediately to Egypt and stay there until Herod dies. I figure the gold paid their passage and some of their living. It was one well-timed gift - a little hard currency, as it were, to slip free of the murderous tyranny of the state. Maybe you really can find anything in the Bible if you're looking for it.
Interestingly, there is no stable or manger in Matthew. The wise men find Jesus in a "house," presumably Joseph and Mary's own. The tax, enrollment and journey to Bethlehem appears only in Luke (2):
1 And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. 2 (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) 3 And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. 4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) 5 To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. 6 And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. 7 And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.
What struck me in tonight's mood is the matter-of-factness of it. Luke does not wail, neither does he gnash, about the family being in the stable. " . . . there was no room for them at the inn," he tells us, and that's it. The maudlin interpretation comes later. The Bethlehem of Luke's gospel must have been a madhouse. By decree, people were pouring in from the four corners of the Levant (to be "taxed" or "enrolled," the libertarian can't help noting, and then thinking how much easier that must make it to find all the under-twos you want to kill). Of course the inns were full. We have no idea what sorts of extremis many of the other guests might have been in. Nor does the text support the "Christmas pageant drama" of Mary, Joseph and the Burro dragging themselves into town the very night of her labor. "While they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered." The strong suggestion is that this enrollment business took quite awhile. The Mary who showed up looking for a room may not have looked ready to pop. Did the innkeeper even see her, or did her husband take care of the room registration? Did Joseph press the matter of his wife's pregnancy, or did he find it prudent to be discreet about it? How many pregnant women, infirm elders and sick people made up the lodgers who got there ahead of Our Protagonists? We can't say. We can only say that the matter seems not to trouble Luke much, and Luke is a writer willing enough to express outrage and disgust. (See the Pharisee parts.)
The real purpose of the manger story is foreshadowing, as I've noted in previous Christmas items. A manger is where a flock eats. The Last Supper, source of the Communion ritual, completes that circle.
And, back to Matthew, the frankincense and myrrh? Used, the Columbia Encyclopedia informs us, in embalming, a fact far less obscure to the gospels' original audience than to us. And stuck right there at the beginning of the story. In the midst of life we are in death, not that there's a better deal on offer.
Merry Christmas, everyone. Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men.
Quote of the Week comes from Will Wilkinson:
People in North Korea are eating each other because other people sincerely believed Marx's theory that the human essence varies with the socio-economic context in which it is embedded.
It may not be a surprise that Will Wilkinson is neck and neck with Catallarchy for this year's Best Libertarian(s) in a Libertarian Role award.
Meantime, our coinage of the week comes from Eve Tushnet, even with points off for the ungrammatical hyphen (should just be "reindeer commando").
And speaking of this year's Unqualified Successes, am I nuts that the leading candidate for Least Dispensible Weblog is No Award? Or is this simply the year when the blogosphere fragmented that much?
Welcome Back to my Nightmare - The official word is that the Mosul attack was a suicide bombing, not a shelling after all. Meanwhile, the blog of a military chaplain reporting from the base says there was mortar fire, after the attack, walking in on the base hospital in an attempt to maximize casualties. The chaplain also warns that "Frankly, it's kind of a blur," before adding thirteen paragraphs of detailed description. If the two accounts fit together, what we have is suicide murder coordinated with an immediate artillery attack, precisely targeted with the aid of on-base intelligence. (The chaplain clearly describes the progressively greater accuracy of each shot.) If the two accounts fit together.
Take Me Out to the @#*&%# Ball Game - Sport and stadium blogging, by me, on The Agitator.
Life Imitates Ray Davies - Other blogs will give you the "French Teenagers Beat Up Santa Claus" story. Some of them will even draw the parallel with the classic Kinks song, "Father Christmas." But only Unqualified Offerings will run the lyrics to "Father Christmas" through Google Translator, to give you a sense of the French Santa's own perspective, and only Unqualified Offerings, realizing you probably don't speak much French yourself (if you're a patriotic American), will run the French version back through Google Translator to translate it back into regular talk. Here it is:
Christmas De Père (Davies Ray)
When I was small I believed in a Father Christmas
however I knew that it was my dad
and I would hang to the top my bottom with Christmas
opens my present and I would be happy
but the last time I played Christmas of father
that I was held apart from a troop of department store
A of the kids came and attacked me
and struck my reindeer with the floor - they said:
Generate Christmas, give us that a certain amount of money
do not disturb with these idiotic toys.
We will beat you to the top if you do not give the surplus
to him which we want your bread
thus we do not make constrained elasticity
all the toys with the rich little boys
do not give my brother equipment of Steve Austin
do not give my sister cuddly a toy
we do not want a jigsaw or money of monopoly
we want only true Christmas of father of McCoy,
we give a certain amount of money
we beat you to the top if you make us constrained
Christmas of father, we give a certain amount of money
do not disturb with these idiotic toys
but causes to give my dad work
it needs of considerable mouths to be fed
but if you have one, I will have a machine-gun
thus I then to frighten all the kids in bottom of the street
generate Christmas, give us a certain amount of money
we did not have any time for your idiotic toys
we will beat you to the top if you do not give the surplus
to him which we want your bread
thus we do not make constrained elasticity
all the toys with the rich little boy
have yourself Merry a Merry Christmas
to have yourself a good time
but to remember the kids who obtained the nothin '
while you are drinkin ' in bottom of your Christmas of wine
father, give we did not have any time
for your idiotic Christmas of father of toys,
please gives the surplus to him we will beat you upwards,
thus does not make us constrained
Christmas of father, gives us a certain amount of money
do not disturb with these idiot of the toys
we will thus beat you to the top if you do not give the surplus
to him which we want your bread,
we do not make constrained elasticity
all the toys with the rich little boys
What can I add to that but - Happy Holidays, everyone!
The Only Economics Report You Need - I'm thinking it's a pretty good Christmas for retailers. I say this because my Borders e-mail newsletters haven't included a general "Take XX% Off" coupon in two weeks. That suggests that Borders is pretty happy with the traffic they're already getting and see no need to spend gross margin to drive more. Joyeux Noel, mes sembables!
Welcome to my Nightmare - It's too soon to tell if today's Mosul attack (highclearing/highclearing) was a lucky shot for the insurgents or the start of a baleful new trend. If they go back to missing almost everything they throw, then this was a blind squirrel finding a very bloody nut. If they start landing indrect fire on concentrations of troops reliably, it will mean something else entirely. Like, that some number of the Iraqi troops we're training are acting as forward observers for attacks on "their own" bases. I think this is the most likely explanation for the accuracy of the Mosul shelling. But I'm not sure yet.
Taking One (E-Mail) for the Team - Josh Kaderlan adds and addendum to the honor roll:
The Giants did in fact finance the construction of the park itself entirely with private funds, but they managed to work out a deal whereby they lease the land it sits on from the city (at a fair market value), which allows the team to avoid paying property taxes. So while it's better than the giveaways most cities work out with sports teams, it's still not fully private.
Duly noted, though if it's land the city owned rather than stole via eminent domain, that's a mitigating factor.
Most valuable sports franchise in the United States? The Washington Redskins. What's a big reason it's so valuable? The stadium the team owns. Why does the team own the stadium? The team bought it fair and square. Dear professional sports owners: Do. The Math. God knows governments won't (highclearing/highclearing).
UPDATE: Doh! Fixed spelling of Josh's name! Because you know he won't.
Never Mind Why. WHO Hates Us? - Fascinating article by former CIA case officer, now forensic psychiatrist, Marc Sageman on the demographics of those Muslim terrorists who have attacked American targets. Lots to say about this one, but it's getting late, so, later. (Via the blog unaccountably known as "Tacitus".)
Things that Eventually Occur to One, the Continuing Series - So the Big Idea was, "We'll transform Iraq into a modern democracy, kickstarting the engine of political reform in the muslim world, just like we did with Germany and Japan." The criticism I've read, including my own, has been attacking the history behind Part A - a lot of stuff about how Iraq is not at all like Germany and Japan at the end of WWII.
Part B is the idea that a democratic Iraq would inspire a wave of liberalization in which the oppressed peoples of the Ummah throw off their corrupt rulers and replace them with the consensual (and pro-Israel) governments of our daydreams. This is not what happened even in the case of Germany and Japan, though, right? MacArthur handed down the Japanese constitution in 1947. Thereafter Japan was as democratic as any country that keeps electing the same ruling party over and over can be. And the wave of democratization in East Asia that Japan's example inspired was . . . nonexistent, I'd say. North Korea? Communist still. China? Went communist, now what we might call Fascism with a (Somewhat) Human Face. Taiwan? Only democratized in the last decade or so. Philippines? Took forty years. The countries of Indochina? Not there. In fact, some among them - Singapore and Malaysia particularly - have propounded a consciously counter-democratic "Asian system" ideology. The shining beacon of Democratic Japan touched off bupkus in the way of liberal yearnings.
West Germany became democratic in the mid-1950s. Italy was "democratic" after 1945. (Local adaptations included big bags of CIA money for the Christian Democratic Party.) The Iron Curtain complicates evaluation. For 50 years, the countries that had been reliably democratic pre-war were democratic postwar, and the countries that had been some flavor of autocracy remained some flavor of autocracy. There were pro-democracy revolts in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and eventually Poland, but I can think of no reason to think they were inspired by the examples of Italy and Germany rather than France, Denmark and the United States. Looking West, we see countries whose systems of government through the first half of the twentieth century closely resembled Germany and - moreso - Italy: Spain and Portugal. Did the transformations of Germany and Italy stir a tide of democratic reform in Falangist Iberia? Not so you'd notice.
So even if Iraq makes it past the famous "One Man, One Vote, One Time" threshold, history offers no encouragement that its example will be contagious.
Pay More Attention to the Jolly Fat Man Behind the Curtain - I think the Santa Myth may have some uses for parents too. Parenting offers great rewards, but a huge proportion goes unrewarded. (I always warn prospective parents that the first six weeks - until the child learns to smile - are fitfully-relieved hell. You've become custodian of a Need Machine whose gratitude battery is still charging.) Santa makes parents' lives simultaneously simpler and more astringent. Simpler: you have someone to lay off any Christmas disappointment on for the first seven to nine years. Kid didn't get everything he or she wanted? That Santa. What can you do?
But the other side of that is more demanding: most kids, particularly very young kids, love the bounty they wake up to Christmas morning. You don't have to settle everything they've ever wanted on them to make them very happy. Believe me, I know.
And you, the parent, get no credit for it. The bearded elf gets it all.
And that's very valuable to you. It means that the joy available to you is simply your own knowledge of your children's pleasure. You have to love the act itself, not the glory of the act. You must content yourself with your child's happiness instead of your child's gratitude. It looks from here like that's going to be the case with much of one's parenting career anyway, so it's good to get in some practice early. And I'm no expert, but there may even be something Christian about that.
Pay Some Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain - David at De Gustibus wonders, " Is Santa Claus a tool for the skeptic or the believer?" and comes down, I think, on the side of the former. I think that's right. It may be one of the things behind Eve's hostility to the concept of Santa Claus. First, it's competition for her own preferred (sorry, Eve!) Fictional Benefactor; Second, it's training in eventually throwing off belief in Fictional Benefactors. Me, I may be Godless, but I'm not a member in the League of the Militant Godless (as I suspect David is). Mrs. Offering is bringing up the kids to believe in God, with equivocal success so far, and that doesn't bother me a bit. Dammit, when I was a boy we had to work at atheism and agnosticism. We walked uphill in the snow - both ways! - to doubt the cogito! Nobody handed us disbelief on an hors d'oeuvre tray like these lazy brats you see nowadays, with their video games and their piercings!
But I lost the thread there. Thing is, as a parent, and still learning how to do this thing, I think two things are crucial: childhood enchantment, and childhood dis-enchantment. I think both the belief in Santa and seeing through that belief are valuable. It's why the one thing I do agree with Eve on (regarding Santa!) is that parents shouldn't work to prolong a child's belief in Saint Nick beyond its natural life. The question on of the bloggers she cites was wrestling with - how do we tell Junior we lied about that stuff - isn't an issue for me: we don't. When Junior comes to us to tell us he's figured it out, we admit it. And then we can have a good discussion about why parents pretend there's a Santa and how proud we are that Junior figured out the trick and the ethics of blurting the news to Junior's younger sibling etc. But I think it's wrong to drag it out.
This has keener salience for me now than it did two years ago when Eve brought it up because Offering Boy is in Third Grade. He's starting to hear things from classmates and has broached the issue. My tack has been to reflect it back on him. "Why do they think that? Why do you think they're right or wrong?" My challenge is not to turn it into a test, actually. I gave up Santa in third grade, and I'm really rooting for him to do so too. It's Time, my inner dad voice says. Don't be a dumbbell! screams one of my less worthy personality facets. I got it by now! Why can't you?
So one of the things Santa is doing for me as a parent is slapping me in the face with the reminder that - news flash - every kid develops at his or her own rate. My son and his mother and I are in the middle of a time lapse lesson in evidence, internal consistency and the limits of the will to believe. We were each rather put out when the Post Office, in its idea of a nice gesture, sent a "reply from Santa" to the letter he and his sister sent. "He IS real!" my son exclaimed delightedly, on the basis of a pathetic form letter with some handscrawling at top and bottom. (Yes, this is another Not Abandoning Libertarianism item. Who'da thunkit?)
While I was typing this he wandered in looking for his chapstick, it being dry lip season. But he wasn't wearing his glasses. Damn.
A Few Bad Nashville Apples - I felt a little abashed after I called bullshit on country singer Chely Wright last week on little more than a hunch. But reader Timothy Hodler tips me to a proof of a systematic campaign of deception in the promotion of the song. Doesn't speak directly to the song's provenance, nor does the Tennessean really press the question of What did Chely Wright know and when did she know it. But I'll say two things: 1. Getting fired from the fan club of a singer with no record contract has to constitute "hitting rock bottom." (The guy works on Wall Street too. Move your money into an index fund.) 2. By the time this is over, I bet it will turn out the chick Wright says flipped her off didn't even have chemical weapons. 3. Shut up! I said two things, just like I said I would. I simply happen to also be saying a third thing. That's a bonus!
Wait, what was it? Oh yeah. This story really fits with the recent discovery that most FCC complaints come from the members of a single organization.
Things Best Done in the Dark - Cropp and Williams hashed out a deal last night, apparently. Programming notes and quick sportsblogging at The Agitator.
Mail of Fame - Stadium deal mail, in response to my request for honor roll nominations. Greg Pearson:
Someone in an on-line forum I read said that Wayne Huzienga built the Marlin's stadium with his own money. Of course, the poster was a pro-stadium conservative, so he may be conveniently omitting a sweetheart land deal or something. I could look it up myself, but I don't have a blog, so I don't have to.
Crap, does this mean I have to look it up? Because I'm hoping to make an early bedtime. Five minutes with Google comes back ANSWER UNCLEAR - TRY AGAIN LATER. Greg continues:
If you can swallow the offense to your libertarian principles, you might also consider adding Green Bay to your honor roll. True, the city owns the stadium. But they also own the team. While cities owning businesses is very anti-libertarian, it does mean that their stadium is not a taxpayer give-away, since the financial benefits of the stadium go back to the city rather than to some third-party owner.
Yes, and it roots the team in that locale, which removes it as a weapon to shake down other cities, which is why the sports leagues are so dead set against replicating the Green Bay model. (The NFL forbids it for any other team, and other leagues may also.)
Michael Lee writes that:
Bill Davidson of the Detroit Pistons built the Palace of Auburn Hills (one of the most financially successful arenas in all of sports) on his own (and his investors') dime. Or dimes
And a great cage match facility too! But seriously, folks, amplifying Michael's point, Your Talking Dog writes
Two of the biggest value hoops teams-- the Lakers and the Knicks-- both own their arenas (via the vast media empires that in turn own them; Bertelsman IIRC for the Lakers and Cablevision for the Knicks). Owning your hall tends to make your team MORE valuable; but hey-- its about the short run, right?Amazingly, while New York confronts its OWN largesse to a billionaire operation now (and that billionaire FROM NEW JERSEY, no less), Mayor Billionaireberg is painting the Dolans (who are villains, except for THIS) as villains, for "selfishly" trying to protect their turf (and the West Side of Manhattan... and nearly a billion dollars for a city that can't afford this...) by sponsoring the oopposition to the Jets Stadium (an arrangement so perverse, parking will be in New Jersey and transit by ferry... not even TAILGATING!) Part of the shtick to sell this bullshit is that it will enhance the Olympic bid; it will, of course, KILL the Olympic bid (the Olympic poo-bahs want the stadium near the Olympic village-- preferably WALKING DISTANCE-- and not across a river and the world's most congested midtown streets.) But-- Woody Johnson's a friend of Mike, so... you know...
Interestingly, Republicans have been the big whores about this sort of thing here, be it Rudy's taxpayer giveaways to the Yankees and Mets, or this... by contrast, the despised Democrat Dinkins cut a GREAT DEAL for the City on the tennis center: the City spent NOTHING! And yet, naturally, Giuliani vilified him for it
Scott Lemieux mentions another candidate:
I don't know enough about the details of the deal to know if he qualifies fully--he may have gotten some land cheap--but the new baseball stadium in San Fanscisco was built with almost entirely private money, so I think Peter McGowan deserves a slot on your list somewhere.
He's got one. Go Peter McGowan!
The Constant Variety of Sport Subventions - Linda Cropp has scheduled the stadium issue on tomorrow's City Council agenda. I suspect that the deal will go through, as most of these do. At bottom, you're asking Democrats to vote against a big public works project, and to eschew new taxes. It's not unheard of, but is nevertheless rarely observed in the wild. Off Wing Opinion has a cogent summation of the pragmatic reasons it's too bad:
. . . it's probably important to note that the real reasons for opposing the stadium are the negative effects of the gross reciepts tax (driving small to medium sized businesses out of the city), as well as the fiscal risk that public financing poses to the District budget in future years (if there's a shortfall in the funding mechanism, the balance has to come out of the general budget).
Top links (filched from Eric): the Sunday Post's account of last Tuesday's meltdown; the Post's latest report on the Cropp-Williams negotiations. For the record, I'm against such projects on principle. I'd be less against this deal if the only taxes were the ones on the ticket sales. Don't want to pay that one? Don't go to the game. The gross receipts tax is not just unjust - taking money by force from one set of businesses to give to another set - it's bad political economy. All other things being equal, it will tend to drive businesses out of DC into Maryland and Virginia, which is the last thing DC needs. Considering that one of the justifications offered for the stadium is that it will spur development, it seems counterproductive to finance it with a provision that will depress development.
But I suspect Steve Czaban and Max Sawicky will, in their different ways, prove to be winners here. Mark my words: costs will exceed $700 million and the City will have to raid the general fund to make good on the overruns.
Daily Stadium Swindle Update is link-rich, and available from Off Wing Opinion. My late today estimate: chances that Cropp sells out and a deal gets done - rising! Also check out liberal blogging legend Charles Dodgson, who takes issue with an aspect of yesterday's item. I think his version of a "principled" take is really a pragmatic take, but I don't expect he'll care. Meantime, he reminds me of something I've been considering for a couple of days now, the honor roll of professional sports team owners who built their own stadiums with their own money. My immediate list:
Robert Kraft, New England Patriots
Jack Kent Cooke, Washington Redskins
Abe Pollin, Washington Wizards and Capitals
Daniel Snyder, Washington Redskins ("improvements" to FedEx Field)
New Boston Garden Corp, Fleet Center (Celtics and Bruins)
There have to be at least some others. To qualify, the owner has to have bought the land and built his building on his own dime. Municipal/state spending on "infrastructure improvements" (roads, sewage and so on) permitted. For better or for worse, such things are universally accepted as government functions.
And if you needed a sex angle to keep you interested in the story, we've got one.
Baseball Diamonds are a Corporate Welfare Queen's Best Friend - First, to Eric McMerlain: Sorry, I was just feeling testy. Eric was fighting the good fight on the stadium issue when I was writing it off as a lost cause. See a June 2004 piece for just one example.
Matt Welch, a baseball fan who has also tackled this issue from time to time, writes to note that he worked on his college paper with Steve Czaban, our villain of last night, and that the same school's radio station nurtured Czaban, Sean Hannity and Jim Rome.
"And this," Matt notes, "was a very liberal school, mind you . . . "
That's certainly the effect liberal schools have on me.
I got a nice note from Skip Oliva of Citizens for Voluntary Trade! Skip blogged about the stadium deal for the Mises Institute a couple weeks ago. He quotes Washington Times columnist and Sportstalk980 Sports Reporters regular Thom Loverro's report on a Cato Institute conference:
The pencil-neck geeks who write economic reports and participate in panel discussions, such as the one held Monday by the CATO Institute, have no clue about that identity or the economic benefits - or much else for that matter.
My emphasis. Thom, you are far from the first guy who ought to go insulting people's physical appearance, as the top left picture on this page will make clear. Also, you have a high sissy voice.
NB: You started it, buddy. And either Gene Healy or Radley Balko could kick your ass. Hell, I'll bet Brooke Oberwetter could kick your ass. (I'll give you 6:5 against Wilkinson.)
Thomas Nephew has an amusing exchange from last night's evening news:
Yglesias has an interesting post and comment thread, including some fairly determined advocacy by liberals who support the deal. Heaven knows I can't construct a principled liberal objection to stadium subventions myself - it seems to me that if you believe in the welfare state it's hard to oppose corporate welfare, at least in concept. I think this is why almost all of these deals end up going through - a critical mass of a legislature's liberal opponents eventually roll over. That's how Maryland passed the stadium deal that "gave" us the Baltimore Ravens - the Montgomery and PG County delegations swooned once enough pork was waved under their noses.
Speaking of liberals and cool folks to their left, Max Sawicky wonders if Linda Cropp isn't simply playing her part in a pageant:
Our corrupt, incompetent, vacationing mayor, errand boy for the elite, makes the basic deal. The taxpaying citizens (including yours truly) protest the impending picking of their pockets, so we need some kind of kabuki exercise to provide the illusion that democracy is functioning and some brake on fiscal insanity and malfeasance in governance is in play.So after Linda Cropp gets a little something something -- headlines attesting to her pull and her fiscal responsibility -- she rolls over and buys some fig leaves on the original arrangement. The financial details are lost on the public. Lo and behold, the day is saved, baseball is coming to the nation's capital, and the taxpayers get reamed for the cost of the stadium and associated public expenses.
Hey, could be! It would fit the general pattern for these deals: Executive agrees to pointless, illegitimate expense. Earnest liberal legislators whine about "the children." Executive/legislative leadership buys them off with a separate pointless, illegitimate expense: end result, the taxpayer gets boondoggle with extra fleece.
The DC deal could still go that way. History even favors it. But today's developments give me added confidence that Cropp, cagey fake-dumb as she's acting, really wants to kill this deal dead. In the Yglesias thread, commenter Violet notes that they already tried the "extra money for schools and libraries" compromise. She says Cropp hived that off into a separate bill to be considered in January. The (literal) 11th hour maneuvers Tuesday seem calculated to maximally discommode and even insult MLB and the Mayor. And today, Cropp suggests, in an aside, that it would be a "gesture of good faith" if Baseball were to extend the approval deadline past the end of the year. The offhand manner in which she broached the possibility is bravura. The woman is wicked good at this shit.
Cropp knows and MLB knows and I know that not only is MLB ill-disposed to make concessions to anyone, especially the District; any deadline extension puts the stadium bill before the new Council, which will replace three pro-stadium members with three antis.
I am in awe. No, I am in love. I hope Mrs. Offering will agree to share.
A final note: Linda Cropp is no one's idea of a libertarian. I have no reason to suspect she's being driven by praiseworthy motives. If she thought supporitng the stadium deal would make her the City's next mayor she'd probably hold up our medium and large businesses at gunpoint herself. That's too harsh. She's a politician. She has people for that. But like I always say, you know what it's called when a politician does the right thing for the wrong reasons? A nice change of pace.
Yet More Stadium-Deal Blogging - "Libertarianism in One Lesson," at The Agitator.
More Stadium Inanity - Metro columnist Marc Fisher has a particularly odious column about the stadium vote. Cropp is dishonest for playing her cards close to the vest, like any canny pol facing a big vote. And he feints in the direction of addressing the obvious objection to the pro-holdup side's mantra that "A deal is a deal," then jukes the other way:
A deal is a deal. Ah, you say the council should be able to inspect and judge any deal that comes before it. But the mayor's job was to keep the council in the loop and with the program at every stage of the process. And the council members knew, as Evans reminded them at every turn, that however greedy and voracious baseball's owners may be, what brought us a team was one simple promise: We will build a new stadium.
Buried in there, seemingly to be addressed by the rest of the paragraph, is the core and basic civics lesson at work here: at just about any level of American government, the executive can propose any spending plan or law he wants subject to constitutional review, but only the legislature can authorize it. This is Schoolhouse Rock-level civics. "We" did not have a deal. The Mayor's Office had a deal. The City did not "have a deal" until said deal was voted into law. At that point, a deal exists. No approval? A deal does not exist. (On the other side, if the MLB owners had not voted to approve Bud Selig's proposal to them, "we" would not have a deal.)
You will notice that nothing that follows Fisher's Sentence Two disqualifies it as the entirely sufficient refutation of his Sentence One. He wants to complain about the Mayor; to suggest darkly that the Council must realize that it is killing "the deal"; but he can't gainsay the core local-constitutional truth embedded in "the council should be able to inspect and judge any deal that comes before it."
There's some real ugliness elsewhere in his column.
Now, Cropp expects to capitalize on the revulsion of baseball fans and ride the joy of the anti-baseball crowd straight into the mayor's office.
"The anti-baseball crowd" is a fancy way of saying an apparent majority of District voters and taxpayers.
This city is pathologically averse to change, captive to deep anxieties about race, class and the urban-suburban and District-federal divides. Baseball was an opportunity to rise above those strains, to reach for world-class status, to lure suburbanites back into a view of Washington as the center, a place of pride.
Perhaps all these pathologically anxious darkies are also averse to handing $650+ million in taxpayer money to a bunch of out-of-town billionaires too. Ya think?
The District's job was quite simple: Prove baseball and assorted other doubters wrong.
I would think the District's job was to allocate its resources prudently, and with due regard for who was earning them, and who was looking for a windfall. The flip thing one says here is "But that's just me." Apparently it isn't, though. It happens rarely enough that local columnists might appropriately celebrate it.
Linda Cropp's late-night bombshell eviscerating the deal with Major League Baseball immediately restores Washington's status as America's laughingstock.
Speaking of "world-class" cities, they have a saying in Paris: Au contraire, mon ami. In fact, this vote may, may you understand, mark the turning of the tide against professional sports-league boondoggles. That would give the District an unfamiliar spot on the honor role of fiscal sanity and political rectitude.
A Breath of Sanity - Deft political maneuvering by a Linda Cropp-led alliance on the DC City Council may have killed the stadium giveaway Mayor Anthony Williams negotiated as part of the Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals relocation deal. The local sports "journalism" establishment has disgraced itself in the matter, from the hysterical Tom Boswell at the Post to the Sportstalk980 regulars, whose biased coverage makes CBS/FoxNews on politics (pick your villain) look like a model of probity. Steve Czaban's evening national show reached such a level of repulsiveness I actually switched it off - Linda Cropp is a politician and a big girl, but repeated references to her as "Bizatch," faux Sopranos voice or no, are simply too ugly to abide. There's a lot of barely suppressed sexism in the coverage of Cropp's maneuvering, including numerous references to her being out of her depth. Well guess what, fellas - she won! That's some depth she's out of.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Dayn Perry's article on Foxsports.com last week is a welcome relief from the admixture of Stockholm Syndrome and class interest most sports media brings to coverage of corporate welfare for the people they make money covering. It's national, not local media, mind you, but the sports fan who nevertheless opposes sports-driven fiscal lunacy takes what he can get.
Now Calling Bullshit On . . .
Country singer Chely Wright, whose "true story" behind her chart-climbing pro-war number, "The Bumper of my SUV," beggars belief.
Juan Cole, who credulously and approvingly cites dark and baseless mutterings about the authenticity of the blogging brothers at Iraq the Model. It doesn't take a secret cabal to try to make propaganda value out of a couple of guys who hold what are, for their society, fringe views. They are also guys who, by participating in Iraqi political life, are showing a measure of physical courage none of us blogging stateside has shown.
President George W. Bush, for awarding the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, to: a military man for the performance of his military duties (we have military medals for that); a hack who was by no means solely responsible for the mess in whch our Iraq policy finds itself, but never saved the place either; and a cashiered spook who made "slam dunk" a laugh line and couldn't even win a bureaucratic cage match with the White House. I tend to hold the FBI more responsible for failing to prevent the atrocities of September 11, 2001 than the CIA, but still: not helping.
The Scott Peterson jury. Grant two things: Scott Peterson is a convicted murderer and I'm a death penalty squish. But isn't there something . . . creepy about "We'll be back to deliver our sentence of death once we've had lunch?"
So much bullshit, so little time.
Not Abandoning Libertarianism, Reason 5,271,009 - Barbara Boxer:
Boxer said she agreed with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that Congress might have to intervene if baseball owners and players did not require more sophisticated and regular steroid testing of athletes."I don't like to see Congress getting involved in the sports arena ..." she said, "but if developments lead us there, we'll have to go there."
-- In another sports-related issue, Boxer said congressional oversight may also be needed to get answers from college football's Bowl Championship Series after the failure of UC Berkeley's team to be selected to the Rose Bowl despite a 10-1 record and a No. 4 ranking.
In a letter to Kevin Weiberg, the coordinator of the Bowl Championship Series, Boxer suggested that the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees interstate commerce and sports, might require more information about the process regarding the way teams were picked for bowl games.
Isn't there a housing association somewhere this woman could terrorize?
(Hat tip: Mrs. Offering.)
Gimme an A! Over on the Agitator, I do some sportsblogging. Perhaps, just perhaps, somewhat tongue in cheek.
A Fanboy's Voicemails - Sometimes, particularly in the commercial arts, a creator "phones it in." Perhaps even bloggers do this from time to time. Inevitably we're dealing with lesser work when that happens, by that creator's standards. You'd still rather have a call from Dashiell Hammett than face time with Robert B. Parker or, dare I mention the name? Brad Meltzer. By coincidence, I got two comics last week, and both of them showed creators giving less than their best. Was I rooked? Let's see.
Hulk Thing Hard Knocks #4 of 4 is by Bruce Jones, late the writer of the regular Hulk series, and Jae Lee. Jones is phoning it in here, but what he's phoning in is Waiting for Godot, and that ends up making it worthwhile. Marvel's four-decade-old monster characters star as Estragon and Vladimir, and take turns playing Pozzo and Lucky too. (Neither gets an erection - that I can see - but then, they don't hang themselves, so what can they expect?)
This is one eccentric story, and it took me all four issues to realize I liked it. The Thing approaches Bruce Banner in the desert, riles him up enough to bring out the Hulk and - strikes up a conversation, about the first time the two of them met. The story moves back and forth between flashbacks to the events of Fantastic Four #12 (vol. 1) and what passes for Today. Now and then one of the two gets mad enough to pop the other good, but they always end up back on the stools of the decreasingly lapidated coffee shop where the tale begins.
Like Godot itself, there's a lot of vaudeville here. It's - absurd. Absurdist, even. It's as metafictional as any Grant Morrison script, but sneakier about it. The oddly timeless present of the framing sequences speaks to the mandated inertia under which the corporate comics scribe labors. I suspect it speaks to Jones' own frustrations with the editorial directions of the last months of his stint on the ongoing series. (Forced Iron Man crossover, anyone?) What we end up with is a far more agreeable swan song than the rushed wrapup of his long conspiracy storyline. And also weirdly, the pleasures of the miniseries are not the pleasures of Jones' years on the main title at all. What was terrific about that book was that Jones made Bruce Banner a likeable, sympathetic guy. Banner didn't spend his days whining about his curse. He took purposive action and he cared about other people. That Banner is hardly even glimpsed here. Go figure. As for artist Jae Lee, I hated his arc on Captain America. But here he's an asset. His storytelling is a lot better, and the fight scenes fit the theme: they look like an Ultimate Fighting match between a couple of skin condition cases. The faces, a weakness in Lee's Cap issues, are a strength here.
When the trade comes out, buy it.
Michael Moorcock's Elric: The Making of a Sorcerer #1 of 4, by Michael Moorcock and art by Walter Simonson, is a prequel to the first Elric prose stories, available in the US under the title Elric of Melniboné. The five original books of the Elric saga, ending with Stormbringer, are probably my favorite sword & sorcery novels. (Unless you want to count Wolfe's Book of the New Sun as sword and sorcery. Silly! It's science fiction.) Since Elric's world ends in the fifth volume, all of Moorcock's subsequent returns to the character have been filling in ever-smaller gaps in the character's history, often illuminating areas where craggy, doom-haunted shadows were better left to fall. There were some enjoyable stories in Elric at the End of Time, written by Moorcock, and at least one good short, by Brad Lineaweaver, in the "tribute" anthology, Michael Moorcock's Elric: Tales of the White Wolf. On the other hand, the late novels Fortress of the Pearl and Revenge of the Rose both stink. I'm not interested enough to tell you why, though I'll mention that Rose bored me to the point of leaving it aside unfinished.
The comic under discussion (really! I'm discussing it right now!) takes place just before Elric's ascension to the throne. "Some say [Melniboné] is unvulnerable and will rule for another ten thousand . . . " Others that we've already read the books and the place is going down! Down, I tell you! But early captions to prequels make easy targets.
It'll probably piss PNH off if I invoke a concept as hoary as "pulp vitality" to describe what's missing from Moorcock's writing here that was present in the original stories. Instead, let's say that the original Elric stories were fevered in a way that this isn't, and Pearl wasn't, and Rose wasn't, and fever is what made the saga proper so compelling. It's not bad that Moorcock should ever be urbane, measured, recollecting in tranquility; it's not bad that fantasy should be urbane, measured, recollected in tranquility. It's only bad that Elric should be. It's not like Moorcock is attempting to satirize Victorian England here or anything, as he did in Rose. (Oy.) It's stripped down storytelling. But the clay lives not in his hands. The form set decades ago and the best he can manage is a little polishing.
On the other hand. Walter Simonson is not phoning in the art. The design of the book is a mashup of bog-standard Nordic fantasy and - American Indian motifs. It seems to fit poorly with known Melnibonean continuity. As a longtime Elric fan, I experienced considerable cognitive dissonance with the notion of Elric as Dreamtime hero "White Crow," " . . . learning wisdom . . . controlling his powers . . . defending life . . . " But it's a visual treat, and it beats another parade of helms and hauberks. I have always suspected that the Norse Loki, who can take the shape of a raven, and the Trickster bird of the Northern Tribes were related by more than coincidence anyway.
Flip through it. If you find the art as compelling as I do, buy it.
A Fanboys Notes - The new Batman Begins trailer is up on the official website. Pretty. Freaking. Cool.
Don't Blame ME, It's YOUR Petard - Charles Dodgson finds a bizarre appeals court decision and, in noting all the strange, simulataneously anti-liberal (as currently defined) and counter-federalist implications, finds himself mired in a swamp for which he has no name. That would be the Wickard v. Filburn Bog, the rare New Deal-era public works project that added to our nation's wetlands (metaphorically, at least) rather than subtracting them.
The Commerce Clause had its Abu Ghraib Experience decades ago now. The poor thing hasn't been the same since.
A noteworthy aspect of state and local government tax break deals to entice or retain specific businesses is that both Republican and Democratic politicians engage in them. Another is that the Democrats who do so are implciitly acknowledging that lower taxes are a contributor to job growth and business retention. However, no way are they going to let everybody in on such a deal. There's more job security and glory, not to mention sheer fun, in working highly-publicised deals with specific companies. Everybody gets the dinners, press conferences and ribbon cutting ceremonies - and very possibly a leg up on one's next job. Beats hell out of quietly providing everybody with some measure of tax relief and regulatory easement, if your goal is a) make sure you give yourself plenty to do, and b) make sure you get seen doing it.
Yes, I COULD Be More Cynical - I could be Yglesias:
[I]n retrospect we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble if, instead of giving trade credits and chemical weapons precursors to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s we'd just given that stuff to Iran instead, and let them install a SCIRI/Dawa government way back when. That strategy wouldn't have had all the muss-and-fuss of backing Saddam, then tilting toward neutrality, then fighting the Gulf War, then years of sanctions, then another war, then occupation and counterinsurgency, and then an election that's going to install a SCIRI/Dawa government that will ask our troops to leave and effectively deny us much influence over the course of events in our once-so-promising colony.
My only serious comment is that I suspect any Shiite government that ends up ruling Iraq will be much less reliable Iranian puppets than many here fear and doubless many in Iran hope. Simple [Professor James] Buchananism tells me that once Iragi Shiite poobahs get their hands on the levers of power, they're going to like using it for their own ends more than they'll enjoy continually asking Tehran "So, like, what do I do now? And now? Now? Now? Okay. Now?"
Democracy Sounds Much Better When You're Not on the Receiving End of It writes Lex Concord of The Libertarian Enterprise. His solution to the Red State-Blue State divide? More government.
[Anarcho-capitalists] either smile and say that Constitutional Government would be a good start, so let's go along with it, or they object and start rambling on about defense agencies or insurance companies providing the services that government currently provides.But people don't like insurance companies (except of course, after someone hits their car or their house burns down), and they sure don't like the idea of giving insurance companies their own private armies. A claims adjuster with a briefcase and a calculator is scary enough—and you want to give him an Uzi?
There may be a few wrinkles to work out of his plan for solving this problem, but it's an interesting wrinkle on the idea of red/blue "secession."
Via Anton Sherwood.
Stupid is as Stupid Does - Atrios continues to track variants of the silly CBSNews blogging story that references him. It's almost unutterably stupid:
The affiliations and identities of bloggers are not always apparent. Take writer Duncan Black, who blogged under the name Atrios. His was a popular liberal blog. During part of the period he was blogging, Black was a senior fellow at a liberal media watchdog group, Media Matters for America. Critics in the blogosphere said this fact wasn't fairly disclosed.“People are pretty smart in assuming that if a blog is making a case on one side that it’s partisan,” Jamieson said. “The problem is when a blog pretends to hold neutrality but is actually partisan.”
The juxtaposition here makes me guffaw every time I reread it, in a bitter way, though. It's the order in which things are put. Does "pretends to hold neutrality" strike one as a relevant characterization to Eschaton at any point in its entire history? But sticking the Jamieson quote smack in between two paragraphs about Eschaton implies that Jamieson's comment somehow speaks to that particular blog. (The next paragraph mutters darkly of "ethics" and what Atrios did "eventually."
Also, is it just me, or does anyone else think "the good old days" were when the hot rumor was that Atrios was a gym teacher? "Liberal economist" is such a comedown. Further also, wasn't Atrios' eventual connection to Media Matters disclosed before he let slip his civilian name? Do I misremember here? Wasn't there a whole My present employment situation is coming to an end and I'd like to get some professional political work oh look I got some! period? That would make the CBS story even sillier.
Agitate and Irritate - I offer irrational sportsblogging exuberance in today's Agitator guest post.
That Word, Senor, the Continuing Series - John Cole calls Brent Bozell's Parents Television Council's organized campaign of papering the FCC with complaints "proto-fascism." James Joyner disagrees:
People have every right to organize and lobby their government about things that matter to them. (I believe the 1st Amendment mentions something about this.)
Yes, but. "Fascism" isn't just a system of totalitarian government. Before it is that, it is a political movement. It differs from traditional right-authoritarianism in its desire to energize a mass base. Fascism doesn't just want "the people" to shut up and do what you're told. Fascism wants "the people" to get into it, to "shut up and do what you're told" at the top of their lungs. Fascism is also about energizing the base against enemies, internal and/or external, and using the violence of the State to shut the labelled enemies the hell up. Fascism also has a fondness for disease metaphors, and heaven knows Bozellian critiques of "sick" (Blue State) culture partake of that.
Within the United States itself, so far, state violence is attenuated most of the time. That's probably one of the reasons John Cole said "proto-fascist" rather than just fascist.
While I don't expect the example to sit well with either of the authors under discussion, the Dixie Chick brouhaha is a useful example. The Dixie Chicks were not "censored." They were not arrested, denied work or killed by the government. But the freelance demonization campaign against them was nevertheless a fascist impulse in action.
So What's the Overarching Critique Anyway? - I'm glad you asked. Rumsfeld tells the troops, "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have." Append to this a silent when you decide to go to war. I've been hard on the blinkered nature of the criticism of those liberals who restrict themselves to complaining that the Administration didn't "plan." But for bad faith, said critics can't hold a candle to the Bush Administration itself. We went to war with the army we had when we went to war because it was the only way to have the war in the first place. We used the number of forces we used because a bigger call-up would have alerted the American public that this was going to be a big freaking deal. The Administration's political strategy was to intone "hard days ahead" while taking pains to give the opposite impression with the pre-war show. The Administration said we had to invade in March 2003 because "time was running out." Among other things, we couldn't wait until summer. You may have noticed that we've been in Iraq for two summers since then, not infrequently conducting combat operations. No, we had to go to war in March 2003 because, had the UN inspections continued much longer, it would have been impossible to ignore what rubbish the Administration's WMD case was. Sliming the competence of Hans Blix and co. had a shelf life.
The Administration sold the war to the American people as something akin to an emergency raid against a conquerer with an arsenal of doomsday devices primed to take out Chicago, a raid that would end with the bulk of our troops driving back out of town by the holidays, wreathed in the flowers of a grateful people busy paying for their own reconstruction entirely out of oil revenues. That's why we used "the army [we] have" when we used it - it was the sales pitch the hawks could close. "We" did not plan for the real occupation because doing so would have been political suicide. Wars take on their own momentum, and the tendency of a citizenry is to rally round the flag once you're in it. So naked political calculation says, if you're a hawk, you can afford not to "plan." You can't afford the reverse.
Shooting the Gnat on the Elephant - Andrew Olmsted offers a defense of the Rumsfeld press conference yesterday, based on a reading of the entire transcript. I would agree with him to the extent that, when it comes to stop loss and single parents in the reserves and suchlike, once you've decided to go to war, you're inevitably going to make decisions that inconvenience somebody. Too many of the Administration's Democratic critics - including the Party's most recent presidential candidate - are unable or disinclined to tie the pain caused by those decisions back to an overarching critique of the decision to go to war itself. This is particularly true of the so-called "liberal hawks" and erstwhile liberal hawks.
Our troops don't have enough armor on their vehicles! is the ideal in pusillanimous criticism. It allows the critic to be: against the administration; "on the side of our soldiers" in a thuddingly obvious way; safely removed from having to offer any strategic opinion at variance with administration policy, which oh by the way was at least popular enough to get the President reelected with an increased share of the popular and electoral vote. There is at least the possibility that the criticism is, synechdotally, spectacularly wrong. It may be that our emphasis on force protection has done our official aims in Iraq far more harm than good. Our policy is to max protect the lives of American soldiers and marines, which means body armor, hair triggers at checkpoints, hell-bent for leather convoys no local driver dare risk finding himself mixed up in on the highways, no-knock raids and plenty of softening up of targets with artillery and airpower before the ground troops go in. These policies have been pretty successful at minimizing American fatalities, and pretty unsuccessful at unifying post-invasion Iraq in democratic solidarity with the Topplers of Saddam. To be bloody-minded, it's at least possible that a posture that cost ten times as many deaths in combat would have been more strategically effective - minimal body armor; rules of engagement appropriate to police work rather than garrison duty; much, much more vulnerability to irregular warfare but much, much less offense to Iraq's persuadables and neutrals. Many more American soldiers would die, at least at first. Many fewer Iraqis, though, would have reason to hate American soldiers, and that much less reason for fellow-feeling with the killers of American soldiers.
No politician would dare propose this. Just as damned few of them have the guts, yet, to say we should have avoided war in the first place and should seek to wind up our business in Iraq as quickly as possible. Far, far safer to loudly complain that the Administration needs to do a souped-up job of what it's already doing, or to complain about its ministers' attitudes.
The Saladdin Soviets Continued - Constant monitoring of infrastructure outputs is so May Day Parade somehow, but it's worth noting that Dan at Rhumb Line, who has his sources, writes today about the water situation:
Well, the water project isn't fairing any better. Only %40 percent of people have potable drinking water, and %4 percent have a workable sewer system. The reconstruction efforts budget was slashed from $4.2B to $2.3B – that now only supports a fraction of the original 170 or so projects the Ministries initially wanted complete.
Things You Learn When the TV by the Rowing Machine Always Has CNN and close-captioning: Lou Dobbs says "in point of fact" a lot. Rarely, though, is he pointing out a fact when doing so.
Now That's Service! - Lunchtime, and when I come up from drowsing off my train is pulling in by White Flint Mall in Kensington. Shit shit shit! I follow the crowd toward the gates and the realization sinks in: I have no farecard. I mention this and the guy behind me laughs. "Shut up," I tell him.
I get the attention of the gate attendant in the folding chair. He's a young white kid with a smirk I don't much like.
"Let me through," I tell him. "I have no farecard."
"You can't exit the system without a farecard unless you pay the maximum," he says, snottily.
"Dude, this is an obvious dream. That means you're just an aspect of me. So do what I tell you."
"Okay."
Once Again - I've made this point before, but "prewar levels" of any Iraqi infrastructure output do not represent some Golden Age. Iraq's prewar infrastructure was degraded by deliberate strategic bombing during the 1991 phase of the war and after, and hampered by cash shortages during the sanctions era and typical third-world kleptocracy during the period of the oil-for-food program. When and if we manage to haul Iraq back up to prewar levels of production in all infrastructure sectors we will have turned a festering sinkhole back into a dump.
(End Note: We know from the infant mortality figures that, even with the graft associated with oil-for-food, infant mortality improved under that program. It would be very interesting to compile figures for electricity, fuels, employment and other key metrics for the 1999-2002 period and see what's what.)
Dept. of Labor-Saving Devices - Mrs. Offering sent me a link to the "Dude" study as possible blog fodder, but Gene Healy already took care of it.
His conclusion:
Do you realize what a fabulously wealthy society we are?
Rock on, scholars and bloggers!
Seems Like Old Times - Yglesias and Drum are doing some tracking of Iraq's electricity production. Time was we did a little of that here. And Matt points me to yet another resource (PDF) for Iraqi production metrics. (Since the CPA changed its name and stopped putting out the good stuff - the daily electricity production spreadsheet - I've stuck with the Saban Center's Iraq Index.)
Couple things: 1. You know that passage from Garet Garrett about crossing the boundary between Republic and Empire and there being "no painted sign to say" when you are "entering Imperium?" Guys sitting around their homes in Washington, Maryland and California looking at electricity production data for a rathole 8,000 miles away is a sign. 2. We've now been in Iraq long enough to be able to compare annualized electricity production numbers. This too is a sign. Unfortunately the graph provided by the Dept. of State report Matt and Kevin are working from doesn't go back far enough to compare season over season. For that one needs to go to page 24 of the Saban Center report, which lacks a graph but offers a table.
Avg. Daily Megawatt hours (thousands)
| 2003 | 2004 | |
| Aug | 72 | 110 |
| Sep | 75 | 107 |
| Oct | 79 | 99 |
| Nov | 70 | 77 |
The stated goal was 120K. No date is provided for meeting it, but the peak output production goals had dates in mid-2004 for the country as a whole and late 2003 for Baghdad. The numbers suggest that summer 2004 represented a substantial improvement in production, with regression throughout the fall toward 2003 levels. Peak output for the country as a whole shows a similar regression toward 2003 performance. It has only exceeded estimated pre-war levels (4400MW) for three months since the the US began tracking. Peak output for Baghdad, home to 20% of the population, can't be annualized because the Saban Center doesn't have figures for Oct-Nov 2003. But it has never gotten closer than 60% of prewar levels. Daily MW Hours for Baghdad are not tracked.
Saban Center began tracking Average hours of "electricity/day nationwide" recently enough that it can't be annualized, but here are the numbers, Feb-Nov04:
13, 16, 15, 11, 10, 10, 13, 13, 13, 13
The string of 13s make me suspicious that, as so often when dealing with Iraqi statistics, we just haven't got data for all the months.
Anyway, let me forthrightly acknowledge that whoever makes the power grid go was able to ramp up summer time (busy season) output, though not to goal levels. That's good. What has been happening since appears to be less good.
Read All About It - The full text of the Rumsfeld-Troops colloquy. (Via IRAQ'd.)
Do the Math - Forget my Venezuela scenario from last night. A bigger threat looms. (Or is that "gathers?")
The Blogosphere Wishes to Welcome Professor Gary Becker to the year 2002. How did we ever hash all this stuff out without you?
Meanwhile, Becker's co-blogger Richard Posner approaches the issue mathematically. As I understand it, if I think there's a 1 in a 1,000 chance that pinko Chavez in Venezuela will acquire and launch smallpox against the US, potentially causing 10 million casualties, I face an expected cost (in lives) of 10,000 by not going to war with Venezuela. Our armed forces are pretty bitching, so I think I could conquer Venezuela with only 5,000 American dead, and conquering it would reduce the chances of Venezuela germing the US to one in a million (expected cost reduced to 10), I should do it. I'm leaving the monetary costs of both war and a successful smallpox attack by Perfidious Caracas aside; the first would be considerable, but the second would be far, far greater. Can we afford to take that chance? It looks like the numbers say No.
Mister Jones and Me - Your Agitator guest-post item of the day is on the Generation Jones meme. I did think the song was about his dick, by the way, but apparently Adam Duritz has specifically denied this.
Smoking Crack: A How To Guide for Teens and other successful and unsuccessful attempts to get blog titles past MSN Spaces' vocabulary censor, at boingboing. (Via the not-entirely worksafe Daze Reader.)
Not Abandoning Libertarianism - Yesterday afternoon I stopped by our local CVS to fill a prescription for Offering Boy. They were out. So I asked the pharmacist where the closest 24-hour CVS pharmacy was. She told me. So I asked her if she could call to see if they had any of his prescription in stock.
No, she couldn't. It's a Schedule 2 drug, she explained. It would be against the law for them to tell her.
When You're in a Hole . . . Stop digging. This is advice Matthew Barganier, on his fourth "Max Borders Affair" update, would do well to heed. For those of you joining us late, the other day Matt did something he doesn't often do, which is declare a self-identified libertarian beyond the doctrinal pale. He also invited readers to let the target's employer know what they thought of his supposedly libertarian opinions. The target was Max "We put the terrible in enfant terrible" Borders; his employer the libertarian Institute for Humane Studies. Reaction was fierce, as can be seen in Micha Ghertner's item on the matter.
It's fair to say I like Matt Barganier a lot better than I like Max Borders. (I haven't met or exchanged personal communication with Max Borders. I am not, based on his writing, rushing to correct this.) I think Matt was in the wrong, though, and not a little wrong. Micha Ghertner calls Matt's attempt to get people to complain to IHS "one of the most vile ad hominem attacks [he has] ever seen." Just sticking to the blogosphere, I would rank Roger L. Simon's jihad against Gregg Easterbrook and Donald Luskin's threatened libel suit against Atrios as worse. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the fact that Borders is a professional libertarian and works for a libertarian organization and what he believes presumably speaks to his qualifications, as Matt points out in one of his followups, it was pretty bad. The reason: Matt deciding on his own to write a complaining e-mail to IHS constitutes informing Borders' employers. Inviting his readers to do the same is Release the hounds! "Release the hounds" gets my back up. I think it happens way too often in the blogosphere. And I think that, used against fellow bloggers, it's a kind of cheating.
I think Matt owes Borders an apology. (This is not news to Matt that I think this.) But at least stop digging. I think Matt's locked in combat mode here and could do with a pause.
(This site's policy is to add unfairly attacked bloggers to the next blogroll update. I'm a victim too!)
That Word, Senor - A quote from the Defense Science Board's much-discussed report, as reported by Neil Mackay of the Sunday Herald:
“American direct intervention in the Muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature of, and support for, radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single digits in some Arab societies.”
Paradox? Where's the "paradox?" It's what anyone not besotted with boundless faith in our power would expect.
Something tells me the DSB was trying to let its audience down easy.
Correction - Dan at Rhumb Line says that, contrary to my statement the other day, he is not a pro-war blogger. He asks (rhetorically?), "Is it because I posted an e-mail from someone who is trying to rebuild Iraq?" Answer: not entirely. I was misled, apparently, by his emphasis on his friend's "optimism" in his intro to the excerpts from her letter. My perusal of Rhumb Line also turned up a quick, approving link to a "the shooting of the unarmed insurgent in Fallujah was not a war crime article. The irony here, of course, is that I made the exact same argument and I'm not, and I realize I should have told you all this well before now, a pro-war blogger myself. So! I stand corrected, Dan at Rhumb Line!
Blogging on Steroids - I posted some stuff about the Sports Issue of the Week to the Agitator. I'll mention here that, as a late-blooming athlete of no particular distinction, I feel this issue to a depth I didn't even three years ago. In an abstract way, I understand the temptations, and the muddiness of the borders between superior training and illegitimate enhancement have a salience they didn't before. I take a multivitamin, a fatty acid supplement, a glucosamine/chondroitin/MSM supplement - my orthopedist even recommended this last - and Vitamin C. I ingest supplemental protein. I swill carefully formulated sports drinks on long runs and SlimFasts (4:1 carb:protein ratio!) afterward. I take a chemical that allows me to train harder with less cardiovascular risk than I could otherwise: it's called blood pressure medication. I've idly wondered if a nonprescription iron supplement would improve my red blood cell count to the point of tangibly boosting my aerobic capacity. I don't take testosterone, creatine, THG, HGH, the Clear, the Creme or the Pretty Darn Cloudy Ointment. But risks aside, the line between the things I do and the things that are commonly held to be illegitimate is not at all obvious to me.
Semi-Comics Blogging - Man, am I out of this habit. Here are some stray, comics-related thoughts.
I've continued to enjoy Daredevil more than I expected. Since I wrote my "Collapse of NuMarvel" item awhile back, Daredevil has been one of two books that exceeded my expectations for the future. Substantially, this is because creators Bendis and Maleev have not given up on the threads they've been weaving through the long "Out" storyline. We haven't seen much of Matt Murdock's estranged wife Milla, but the recent Black Widow storyline was driven by Matt's determination to keep faith with her in the face of temptation. The current storyline, featuring an aging, mutant-growth hormone mobster who once killed a masked vigilante and is aiming to notch his second, is, first, an opportunity for the art team to really go to town - different flashback sections have production sheens reminiscent of Golden and Silver Age comics. And as of the most recent issue, it looks like writer Bendis is about to intensify Daredevil's not-quite-secret identity complications rather than quietly pressing the reset button. The narrative jumps are either to your taste or not. (Frex, the latest issue begins with Matt the bound prisoner of mobster Bondt and the supposedly reformed Gladiator. Did we get to see how the two captured him, or even exactly how Bondt suborned Gladiator to his cause? No.) They work for me. Bottom line: I still find Daredevil an unreserved pleasure. Indeed, I think it's on an uptick.
Another way you can tell I'm not a Real Comics Blogger is that I just can't work up the requisite outrage over the just-concluded, controversial storyline in Amazing Spider-Man. In the story, it is "revealed" that Gwen Stacy had a brief fling with Norman "Green Goblin" Osborn just before she died, said fling resulting in a pair of twins Peter Parker knew nothing about. Owing to Osborn's funky genetics, the twins grew up fast (and they grew up mean), led to believe by Osborn that Peter Parker, Spider-Man, was a) their father, and b) the murderer of their mother.
I should stress that I am in the perfect demographic to be outraged by this. I read the origiinal Death of Gwen Stacy storyline when I was twelve, the instant it hit the newsstands, and yeah, I cried. What's more, through the Marvel Tales reprint series, I was familiar enough with the history of Peter and Gwen to understand teh impact. And here I am, one of the aging comics-reading white men damned for keeping the industry afloat at the cost of imposing our peculiar nostalgia template on current production, and they're (Marvel and author J. Michael Straczynski) sullying the memory of Gwen Stacy by making her some kind of a, well, a, um - I think the word people are trying to avoid using is "slut." Because she had one sexual encounter with a dangerously-appealing older man who was not her boyfriend. In the seventies. Imagine.
And I'm sorry, kids, but I'm not offended. Nor do I think the premise especially bad, nor even that the story was poorly done. It's no masterpiece. In passages, the bathos is amped to the point of recalling the very era of comics (bronze age Marvel) it supposedly dishonors. But there are some nice stretches about the impact of the revelations on Peter and Mary Jane. I haven't followed the series obsessively, but Straczynski seems particularly good writing about marriage. (He also, let's not forget, is the man who made Aunt May more than a stale joke.) Mary Jane is the heroine here, and to the story's credit the ending rewards her rather . . . ambiguously. Look, if I say "Spider-Man," you say "superhero soap opera." The unknown kids storyline is about as soap opera as it gets.
You can find the contrary view expressed by Bill Sherman:
Still, I can see where fans are coming from when they react to the news of sexual coupling between the once-pristine Gwen Stacy and the skuzzy maniac in the green goblin suit. Straczynski's "adult" plotline isn't just a violation of character; it's a violation of the storytelling premises and format under which these characters were first crafted. Though she's been memorialized for years in all manner of Spider-Man stories, the fact remains that Gwen Stacy was created and lived her comic book life in a time when Marvel's superhero comics were aimed at a wider aged-ranged readership than the current plotline allows. Reading that these figures from the brightly colored Lee & Ditko/Romita Sr. comics once engaged in a sordid sexual coupling is a bit like learning Santa Claus has a thing for young elves: it might make a rollicking episode of South Park, but would you wanna hear a stanza about it in a public holiday reading of "The Night Before Christmas"?
I like Bill, but I'm damned if I can see the difference between this thesis - by no means Bill's alone - from John Byrne's widely reviled (by comics bloggers!) peroration on "All-Ages Books."
Paul Hornschemeier, probably my favorite young cartoonist, has a new Forlorn Funnies out. The story, "Return of the Elephant," is a "quiet" one, about two pedophiles meeting to exchange material. The two have known each other since childhood, and inherited the - bug? - from their fathers. The visitor has taken over his father's supply business; the host is, like his father, a consumer. The story has a coldness to it that I associate more with Dan Clowes than with Hornschemeier. Even the art recalls Ghost World-era Clowes as much as, say, Hornschemeier's own Mother Come Home. (I think it's the wash shading.) The characters are unassumingly repellent and you get not a moment's relief from them. I'm not sure what to make of the thing. I realize that may itself be Hornschemeier's desire. In moments, I wonder if it might even be intended as a satire of Clowes, a critique of the limits of the eye coldly cast. It's certainly an object lesson in the difficulty of separating the moral and emotional response to a work from the esthetic - or at least, my difficulty.
It's the Most - Wonderful Time - of the YEAR! That's right - New Year's Eve is coming, and that means it's time for the fourth (fourth!) annual Unqualified Successes awards. I am judge, jury and, er, executor of the series. HOWEVER, I am inviting nominations for any and all categories from any and all loyal readers. Truth is, even fickle readers can submit nominations. I mean, I might not even know which you are, right? Each year offers a mix of standard and new categories. To get the flavor see the 2003, 2002 and 2001 announcements.
Quick Linkblogging - First week of the month is always hard on blogging and this month is worse than most. But here's some stray stuff of note:
John Scalzi's Ten Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time. Includes A Muppet Christmas with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Christmas with the Nuge and Ayn Rand's A Selfish Christmas among others.
A "Good News" letter to a prowar blogger from a friend in the Iraqi reconstruction effort. The mind boggles. It deserves close comment, but I feel guilty at the prospect, since the author of the letter is almost certainly quite young and, while you can find in her letter illustration of much that is wrongheaded about our Iraqi adventure, this young woman herself is not the cause of its absurdity; she's a symptom. She obviously possesses physical courage and a desire to Do Good. But, Oy. Via Yglesias, who gets the Find of the Year award.
Related to the previous link, I first discussed what I call "RSN Syndrome" and Iraq not quite 13 months ago.
Your Agitator guest-blogging link of the day is not a piece by me. It's Drug War Rant's Pete Guither on stupid conservative reactions to the medical marijuana case. Not that they could be much stupider than a couple of the justices.
Eve points readers to EndTortureNow, which "makes it easy for you to email your senators about Gonzales's support for torture."
Deluged by requests from, um, me, Dave Intermittent has added an Atom feed to his fine, occasionally updated blog. His site r0x0rz, and with RSS you don't risk forgetting that it exists during his sometimes substantial pauses in activity.