Minfluence

Well I am glad to see that I have converted Matthew Yglesias to the drive-slow-in-the-fast-lane movement.  Finally the adherent I've been dreaming of, or at least the adhesive.  But, unable to escape a reasonable tune without interposing a high note of idiocy, he shrieks up and out of his tessitura like a soprano strapped to a Saturn V:

I don’t normally drive very much, but I’d make an exception to take part in this.

Fuck it.

Preparing a Dish

The Times' photo editors must be a gang of secret spoilers, because they seem to love to subtly undermine The Chosen Narrative with their own, well, choices.  This photo-and-headline pairing was on the cover of today's print edition, too.  Even the accompanying slide show feels calculated to undercut its own captioning, and while I do not doubt that some Bahrainis feel oppressed and some may even demonstrate, or "clash" in Timesqueak, yet ever do I suspect these stories of simmering, boiling, braising, and broiling, for above the hiss of the pressure cooker I hear the clickety clackety of NATO's doggie nails on the hardwood, come down to beg for some scraps of the action.  Whatever the verbal reportage, the scenes-in-pictures are of normalcy--and that is not to say that normalcy can't coexist with the grimmest repression.  It does; it must.  But these people are chatting.  Returning from restaurants!  They are, notably, alive.  Now if you are an American official, this last bit may fail to serve some hazy imperial strategic objective, and if you are a fanciful Revolution fetishist fresh from the satisfying orgasm of Libya's rebel yell, the prospect of their deaths may serve an even hazier sense that dying--by which you mean, of course, someone other than you dying--in a hopefully distant but nevertheless glorious orgy of freedom unchained is but a small price to pay to liberate a people with whom, until the news started pimping their plight in order to get another war on, you had only the vaguest geographical acquaintance, but with whom you now feel such a stirring and complete sense of solidarity that you are literally willing to watch them die for what you think may just possibly be their cause.  And you know, I don't know.  It may be that Bahrain is a hell on earth, a microcosmic desert gulag, an unending horror of torture and death.  But it sure doesn't look like it in the pictures; it looks, you know, like people are getting by, living their lives, sittin on the couch BSing with the fellas.  Hopefully they can avoid our strategic humanitarian right to intervene to protect for a while longer yet.

They're Gonna Kill that Poor Woman, Part Whatever

Oh God Oh God someone at Digbysplace says they're going overturn democracy in Pennsylvania.  Oh noes that's where I live!  That's where MR. FUNDAMENTAL LIVES!  No wait it's worse!  It's a 2nd America CIVIL WAR!  Hide your women!  Sacrifice your babies!  Eat your dogs!  If you find us clinging to the bloated human flotsam in a Susquehanna swollen to an inland sea by the influx of human tears, I pray thee, do not rescue us, for it is better to drown than give the Rethuglicans the satisfaction of living in their world.

You know, now, look, um, here, listen: I am all for overheated political rhetoric, obviously, but jiggling around with the electoral college is not going to set of any fucking riots; lord god, it'll be lucky if it sets off a decent comments thread on a half-read blog somewhere.  The world is on fire; Europe is going to self-cannibalize in an orgy of financial recriminations; America's robot armies are ever and everywhere on the march, and these people think we're going to fight a civil war over the disposition of Aliquippa.

Station Wagonistes

At twenty-seven, having come at last

to the leaf-bare foothills of ordinary life,

the mountain-spanning pass revealed as just

a road, the damsel just a future wife

whose rectitude antithesizes lust,

Excalibur a tarnished butter knife,

the grit of western travel merely dust

like any dust, and war mere civil strife

whose most heroic act involved a clause

invoking force majeure, the mighty writ

unmasked as lawyers!—cried, “My God!”

and got in grave return a pregnant pause

within which I interpreted a nod

of nomination.  I accepted it.

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Meanwhile the Taliban (or Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as they call themselves) are crystal clear as to their desired end-state: foreigners out and a government under Islamic law. Despite the fact that much of their media output is highly inaccurate – their website this morning claimed that they had killed "several dozen foreign invaders and local puppets" – the Taliban are always first off the mark after every incident. This has long been a source of huge frustration to senior officers, but a problem that Nato's media operations bureaucracy seems incapable of putting right.

-Frank Ledwidge in the Guardian

I am sort of charmed by the Yelpification of propaganda; like, NATO is still buying quarter-page ads in the dying local paper, while the Taliban are writing Amazon user reviews.  SPOILER ALERT: we lose.

Fayette Nam

Although the inquiry stems from a fundamental misreading of everything ever written on this blog, the question is worth a brief answer: why am I interested in Ron Paul?  Well, I am not interested in Ron Paul per se.  I mean, I did call him a stooge and say that ersatz intellectual diversity superimposed on the public facade of the ruling class is an affect overlying an underlying unanimity among the actually powerful.  What I am interested in is the fact that Ron Paul has a constituency.  I am interested in the fact that a statistically meaningful portion of the adult voting population of the Benighted Apes of Duh-merica is unabashedly in favor of ending the war on drugs and military adventurism abroad, of a substantial and meaningful devolution of centralized federal power--and not merely the window-dressing smallgovernment yibyab of the Republican Party, but far more fundamental limits on the government, including its warmaking apparatus.  Now I don't disagree that this is not gonna be part of the program, not even if well-timed asteroid strikes eliminate every other candidate and Barack Obama is finally proven to be the immortal incarnation of Jomo Kenyata; I mean, obviously.  How often have I harped on the institutional nature of power, especially political power in an empire?  But what you hear, over and over, is that the middle of this country is chock full o nuts, that it is wholly populated by a gang of Caucasian homophobes who wish to instate executions for parking violations and invade those few uninvaded parts of the world that remain in order to establish an eternal Bachmanate of the Palin, and while that may be to a degree true, it is also true that, literallyjoebiden, millions and millions of people believe quite the opposite, that there are millions of fat white nativists who despite their abhorrent views on immigration also believe that America ought to end the drug war.  You are of course, free to argue that Paul's nativist supporters tolerate the legalization of heroin as a charming quirk of a man whose real appeal is his view on the Fed, but you will be wrong.  I grew up with these people in Appalachian Pennsylvania and your collegeboy convictions that a couple Fox News whoopsters in the back of a televised debate represent their degraded humanity is wrong and only indicative of your own insular life; most people haven't got the luxury of your imagined political coherency, and the fact that Ron Paul's popular rhetoric of liberty coexists with an uncomfortable fixation or borders, or that his beliefs about government intrusion into private life sit oddly against his positions on abortion--well, these things might in fact represent (I use that word intentionally) the unsettled nature of his supporters' convictions.

The Tea Party itself is a construct, and Ron Paul is mind control, and I am not interested in either of them in and of themselves; yet there are millions on millions whose human conscience is offended by war, surveillance, prohibition, and coercion.  A lot of them simply don't vote; many who do get suckered by the Paul Pill.  But their conscience remains.

The Postman

Ron Paul's we-should-mind-our-own-business, out-of-Afghanistan lines are generally applause lines, but last night he got booed by the same people who were purportedly whooping it up over letting emergency department patients expire on the concrete for lack of employer-paid health insurance.  I suppose that if you are credulous you'll believe that this proves the Tea Party, whatever that is, wants America to forgo its allegience to the three laws of robotics and return forever to some kind of post-Reconstruction frontier phase that resembles Night of the Living House on the Pararie or something, a sort of crackpot Hobbesian Hills-Have-Eyes Island of the Blue Dolphins pastiche in which each of us is ultimately and irrevocably alone.  Personally, it sounded like a little gaggle of plants to me; well, I've been to one world fair a picnic and a rodeo and that's the stupidest thing I ever heard come over a set of earphones. You sure you got today's code?  The whole thing is out of character and extremely convenient.  We believe in nothing.

Johannesburg

I don't really have much to say beyond a modest expression of delight at watching the New Zion Picayune try to fight a rear-guard action from the Stalingradesque rubble of the reasonable-people-can-disagree non-center of American Israelism, you know, the grand rallying cry of infinite negotiations running ever-asymptotically to the existence of an actual Palestine, ground to dust by the unsavory fact that Israel and Palestine are entities with agendas, i.e., the Palestinians desire a Palestinian state; the Israelis do not.  But of course it is anathema in the Duchy of Sulzberg to acknowledge that Israeli policy is the prevention of Palestinian statehood; Jesus, you'll pardon the expression, even Ha'aretz acknowledges that much.  So what you get is this notion that the Beeb is somehow being unreasonable as he works to undercut any effort at fruitful negotiation.  Well, he's not being unreasonable if his raison is undercutting fruitful negotiations.  People in rational pursuit of a political end may be insane, but they aren't crazy.  Of course, I've never really understood why the Times (and all big American papers, really) is so attached to the genteel illusion that Israel will ever willingly accede to the existence of a Palestinian state when it is so obviously an illusion; like, what is gained by such pretense?  Is it merely a perverse genuflection toward some notion of liberalism and diversity, some post-Civil Rights cultural sensibility that requires all Good Liberal Types to nod approvingly in the direction of the universal brotherhood of man even as they throw all the niggers and jail and the Palestinians under the bulldozer and the Afghans under the hellfire robot war? 

Felonious Funk

The Steelers didn't play as badly as the score and turnover stats suggest, and they even managed to establish the run in the first half, which is why I say, as early as it admittedly is, that Baltimore looks like they may be the team to beat in the AFC this year.  It pains me to admit it, because fucking Baltimore, but those guys looked great on both sides of the ball; Rice ran for 107 yards against Pittsburgh, which even on a bad day for the Steelers is like rushing for 207 yards against anyone else, and even Flacco looked very good--in fact, he's never been as bad as Pittsburghers believe; he's lousy under pressure, but with good protection (did we even bother to try to attempt to think about blitzing?) he can be a reliable passer.  Anquan Boldin looked beautiful; watch that touchdown reception again, because it was actually snatched from excellent coverage.  Pittsburgh looked flat-footed and under-prepared; you wonder if they rested their starters too much in the short pre-season.  Our O-line and secondary continue to be problematic, and the poor line-of-scrimmage communication that caused at least two of those turnovers is completely inexcusable in a Super Bowl team, even a losing one.  The schedule is very soft from here through Week 8, when we face the Pats, and I worry about the false security of some easy wins.  Roethlisberger's first-ever off-season without bear rape and vehicular homicide seems to have overly unscrambled his brain; someone needs to cut his brake line ASAP or replace his wife with an unwilling female gorilla, or else the season, I fear, is lost.