Steve Gilliard, 1966-2007

Shit. A good and intelligent man, blogger Steve Gilliard, died this morning at the age of 41 after a struggle with ongoing complications from surgery. We extend our deepest sympathies to his partner, Jen, and to his family and friends. Steve fought like hell and his memory is and will be preserved throughout the blogosphere.

UPDATE:

See Mark's place for homages to SG.

Rich: Please Go Away

The mysterious Montag, the Wealthy Frenchman, continues his invaluable service to us proles by bringing Frank Rich's most recent column from behind firewall. Rich, as usual, channels the mood of the reality-based community with intelligence and elan. Al Gore said the other day that impeachment is not worth it. I hate to say it, but I agree, previous statements notwithstanding (I voted for it before I voted against it). That said, it is terribly frustrating to have this president continue at all in the White House, from where power is added to his vulgarity.

Some choice excerpts:

...It’s hard to pity someone who, to me anyway, is too slight to hate. Unlike Nixon, President Bush is less an overreaching Machiavelli than an epic blunderer surrounded by Machiavellis. He lacks the crucial element of acute self-awareness that gave Nixon his tragic depth. Nixon came from nothing, loathed himself and was all too keenly aware when he was up to dirty tricks. Mr. Bush has a charmed biography, is full of himself and is far too blinded by self-righteousness to even fleetingly recognize the havoc he’s inflicted at home and abroad...

Arguably the most accurate gut check on what the country feels about Mr. Bush was a January Newsweek poll finding that a sizable American majority just wished that his “presidency was over.” This flat-lining administration inspires contempt and dismay more than the deep-seated, long-term revulsion whipped up by Nixon; voters just can’t wait for Mr. Bush to leave Washington so that someone, anyone, can turn the page and start rectifying the damage...

If it was a relief to the nation to see a president as grandly villainous as Richard Nixon supplanted by a Ford, not a Lincoln, maybe even a used Hoover would do this time.

Kaffir Limes

Friday Dinner Party Conversation Stopper

Speaking and thinking are the same as WHAT IS.
WHAT IS exists
Nothing does not
Keep this before you.

- Parmenides

Eye of the Virus

My former student at NYU, Theresa MacPhail, recently published her first novel, The Eye of the Virus. Give it a read. Theresa has also started up a blog here.

Tejas

The absence from the blog during the past week was due to a trip by both me and Barba to a small college town in Texas. The occasion was past co-blogger Rollo's marriage. Flaco also attended and was the best man. I played the role of the priest. The town is where we all met in college before heading off to other corners of the planet for grad school, work, travel, and other forms of life. The event was actually a series of events. A barbecue on Friday made by a couple of friends now in Portland who make the best smoked brisket on the planet. On Saturday, a formal rehearsal dinner of lamb and other Lebanese delights (Rollo's lovely wife is Lebanese). On Sunday, the wedding and another fine dinner, followed by a late night of flowing champagne and, in the wee hours, Lone Star beer from the can. Meat and beer. That's Texas.

The occasion brought in old friends from all over the country and world, some of whom I hadn't seen in a decade. A place that is more or less otherwise dead to me came alive with all of these lovely people assembling probably for the last time in the town. The place has always been unique in itself and - I think I can speak for all of us - a source of both pride and disgust. Texas, like a domineering father, is something whose character you both inherit and struggle against. It demands conformity to its alleged independent streak, and yet the struggle is to become independent of its conformity. That is the kind of real Texas, its valuable bit, that all of us at the wedding have developed.

On the flight back to DC, I read a brief essay by the writer Michael Mewshaw on travel and travel writing. Mewshaw, in his musings on his own travels to exotic places, says that Texas, where he spent a few years, is "one of the most exotic, remote, culturally fascinating, and confusing places I've ever visited." I agree. I moved there with my family at the end of high school. From Bangkok. And I struggled mightily to understand the place and not get beat up trying. After years living in Asia, I didn't fit its categories and attitudes. I eventually had to leave, and I'll never return there again to live.

As Mewshaw says, "we are... not just who and what we are. We are shaped by where we are. Place works on us just as do events and people, and we become - or have the capacity to become - different people in different settings." Yes, I've long assumed this and it lies at the core of my own predilections for travel. Perhaps I don't like who I am. Perhaps I am many-homed. But the lesson for me from this trip to Texas is that the old idea about people mattering is what really does matter in this case. Without those people who struggled against Texas while being of Texas, many of whom left for good, that particular place is an empty receptacle. The tragedy and the joy - and it's always about paradoxes - is that these friends constituted the place for me. Without them there, it is not a real place.

What remains is to know the place for the first time again, which I know I'll never do because I've known it before. What truly remains are the friends.

David Brooks on Al Gore

The Non Sequitur does a great job on the hapless David Brooks' attempts to talk philosophy in response to Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason. Brooks gets himself into serious trouble, but a smarter man might have seen that coming. I don't mind the plebes (sniff) doing philosophy, but I have never ever seen a pundit not mangle or radically over-simplify philosophical ideas. It doesn't need to be that way. But then, that's Gore's point.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

But Gore’s imperviousness to reality is not the most striking feature of the book. It’s the chilliness and sterility of his worldview. Gore is laying out a comprehensive theory of social development, but it allows almost no role for family, friendship, neighborhood or just face-to-face contact. He sees society the way you might see it from a speaking podium — as a public mass exercise with little allowance for intimacy or private life. He envisions a sort of Vulcan Utopia, in which dispassionate individuals exchange facts and arrive at logical conclusions.

It really would suck if people “exchang[ed] facts and arriv[ed] at logical conclusions.” The mysterious thing here is that not only is Gore lamenting the absence of civil discourse–which is, dear Mr.Brooks, a kind of civic engagement–but he can hardly be taken to be claiming that it’s the only thing people do.

What lurks behind Brooks dimwitted review is the classic Brooksian dichotomy: things can only be one way (my way) or the totally absurd other way (whatever your way is). Gore cannot be right about logic, because then we would all be Vulcans–like Dr.Spock (the one on TV). Maybe Al Gore is saying that we need logic at least, or perhaps, also.

Some, maybe like Kant or Aristotle or Aquinas, would agree with Gore.

Un-Referential Richardson

Err. Rodger Payne, writing at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, points out that we've never mentioned Bill Richardson on this blog. How odd.

Well,... Bill Richardson.

Apeman

From A Tiny Revolution:

...by all reports, President Bush is more convinced than ever of his righteousness.

Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated "I am the president!" He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of "our country's destiny."

Babylonia "casts the shadow of its own destruction before it"

And then, as the Iraqi capital's landscape became ever more dangerous, as an insurgency gained traction while the administration's dreams of a redesigned American Middle East remained as strong as ever, its officials evidently concluded that even one of Saddam's palaces, roomy enough for a dictator interested in the control of a single country (or the odd neighboring state), wasn't faintly big enough, or safe enough, or modern enough for the representatives of the planet's New Rome...

In Baghdad, Saddam's giant hands are already on the road to ruin. Still going up in New York and Baghdad are two half-billion dollar-plus monuments to the Bush imperial moment. A 9/11 memorial so grotesquely expensive that, when completed, it will be a reminder only of a time, already long past, when we could imagine ourselves as the Greatest Victims on the planet; and in Baghdad's Green Zone, a monument to the Bush administration's conviction that we were also destined to be the Greatest Dominators this world, and history, had ever seen.

See Tom Engelhardt here.

And Bryan Finoki and commenter Phila here.

Chavez and RCTV

When following the news from Venezuela, if one is interested at all in understanding the situation, one must take one's US media with a grain of salt. They have long toed the opposition line. In the case of RCTV, the opposition television station whose license was not renewed, the US press has basically turned the story into one of a dictator's attempts to censor and stifle dissent. This line is so simple it's stupid.

Now, the opposition has reasonable beefs with the Chavez government. If Chavez started picking apart the press and media in Venezuela, I'd be very worried too. But he's not doing that. There are also reasonable criticisms to be made against the opposition and its media. While the Venezuelan opposition and most US media representations will decry an alleged assault on freedom of speech in Venezuela, it must be remembered that 75% of the media in Venezuela is owned and operated by the opposition. Five years since the coup against Chavez, openly supported and abetted by the station, RCTV's public airways license has not been renewed. It remains free to broadcast through cable or satellite. It has never been a sanctuary of free speech because its political mission was severely anti-Chavez and it has consciously tailored stories bordering on falsity to transmit the anti-Chavez mission. It has not allowed counterpoints from the Chavez government. Now it is a martyr for free speech?

Here's the standard story from Time: Is Chavez Stifling the Media?
And from Reuters: Venezuela's Chavez widens attack on opposition media.

Here's an alternative discussion from Common Dreams: Is Free Speech Really at Stake? Venezuela and RCTV.

And here are three pieces explaining the broader context and issues behind the situation:

FAIR: Coup Co-Conspirators as Free-Speech Martyrs: Distorting the Venezuelan media story.
UN Observer: Venezuela, RCTV, and Media Freedom: Just the Facts, Please.
LA Times: Hugo Chavez versus RCTV.

Read all of the above pieces. Now, tell me where you stand.

This is the basic story:

The RCTV case is not about censorship of political opinion. It is about the government, through a flawed process, declining to renew a broadcast license to a company that would not get a license in other democracies, including the United States. In fact, it is frankly amazing that this company has been allowed to broadcast for 5 years after the coup, and that the Chávez government waited until its license expired to end its use of the public airwaves.

Plums, Blackberries

The full cast and crew of Phronesisaical is on the road, friends; this here's just a sample of yesterday's pickins here in central Texas (pickins not pictured include oak-smoked brisket, Lone Star beer, pecan pie).

Miraculous Air

Friend and fellow blogger CM Mayo's latest book has just appeared in print: Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles Through Baja California, the Other Mexico.

Carbon Dioxide Emissions Rising

We have to go to Le Monde for this one, though the report was produced in the US. The gist: carbon emissions have tripled between 2000 and 2004 from their levels of growth in emissions in the 1990s. The growth is largely coming from industrializing nations (particularly China and India), while, of course, industrialized nations are still the main polluters (the US tops the list).

Les émissions de dioxyde de carbone (CO₂), un des principaux gaz à effet de serre, ont augmenté dans le monde de façon alarmante entre 2000 et 2004, à un rythme trois fois supérieur à celui des années 1990, selon une étude scientifique américaine publiée lundi.

Elles sont en hausse de 3,1 % par an au début des années 2000 contre un rythme de 1,1 % par an dans les années 1990, d'après cette étude publiée sur le site Internet de la revue de l'Académie nationale des sciences. D'après les auteurs de l'étude, cette croissance accélérée des émissions de CO₂ est largement due à la hausse de la consommation d'énergie et à l'augmentation de carbone dans la production d'énergie...

Entre 2000 et 2004, les pays en développement ont été les principaux responsables de l'augmentation des émissions de dioxyde de carbone, même si cela ne représente que 40 % du total des émissions de CO₂ dans le monde. En 2004, 73 % de la croissance des émissions dans le monde est venue des pays en développement et des pays moins développés, qui représentent 80 % de la population mondiale. La même année, les pays développés (dont la Russie) ont contribué à 60 % des émissions totales. Ils sont responsables de 77 % des émissions cumulées depuis le début de la révolution industrielle, relève l'étude.

Vacationless Nation

Helmette has long complained about this fact. If it were France....

This report reviewed international vacation and holiday laws and found that the United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers any paid vacation or holidays. As a result, 1 in 4 U.S. workers do not receive any paid vacation or paid holidays. The lack of paid vacation and paid holidays in the U.S. is particularly acute for lower-wage and part-time workers, and for employees of small businesses.

Download the paper here (via Dean Baker).

Our Allies in the News: Colombian Edition

Top paramilitary commanders have in recent days confirmed what human rights groups and others have long alleged: Some of Colombia's most influential political, military and business figures helped build a powerful anti-guerrilla movement that operated with impunity, killed civilians and shipped cocaine to U.S. cities.

The commanders have named army generals, entrepreneurs, foreign companies and politicians who not only bankrolled paramilitary operations but also worked hand in hand with fighters to carry them out. In accounts that are at odds with those of the government, the commanders have said their organization, rather than simply sprouting up to fill a void in lawless regions of the country, had been systematically built with the help of bigger forces...

"Could these three groups -- I'm talking about political people, economic people, the institutional people, meaning the military -- operate without having contact with the chief of chiefs?" said Duque, speaking from the Itagui prison in Medellin, which houses dozens of paramilitary commanders. "That's impossible. That cannot be."...

Still, Duque called Colombia's war "dirty, slimy, anarchic, anachronistic," and said paramilitary fighters had killed countless civilians in massacres, contradicting long-held claims that those slain in the attacks were Marxist guerrillas. And he said that the paramilitary groups also murdered many union members for their "ideological posture," not for purported ties to guerrillas, as was claimed. "It was profoundly unjust," he said.

A Faucet = Genocide

I don't think it's worth anyone's time to bother taking people like Michelle Malkin seriously. But we can always laugh at them for a bit of midday entertainment.

Mountain Apples

Photo: Selvin Chance

Sarkozy and France

This blog occasionally points out how vast the gulf is between the realities of France and the American understanding of one of its closest allies, which, I think, remains a very important power in the international sphere if we take on a more sophisticated view of power than the typical economic-military might version (here's a recent post). The Independent recently reported that,

In an election restricted to French voters aged 18 to 59, Mme Royal would have won handsomely. M. Sarkozy owes his victory to a "wrinkly" landslide with an overwhelming triumph among French voters in their sixties (61 per cent of the vote) and a jackpot among the over-seventies (68 per cent).

This gives the lie to the notion that "economic malaise" and unemployment was the key to Sarkozy's victory in the recent French presidential election, although this remains the standard American interpretation of the election (in addition to going on and on about Sarkozy being "pro-American"). That is, the younger age bracket that voted overwhelmingly for Royal is also the age bracket that ostensibly suffers from the "economic malaise," not the retirees who voted for Sarkozy. The older age bracket, however, is the group that is most worried about France's identity and immigration problems. Sarkozy, in the end, was most appealing to those who prefer "France for the French."

Here's a terrific summary by Bernard Chazelle at Rootless Cosmopolitan of the roots and meaning of the recent election. Much more enlightening than anything in the mainstream US press.

"Ecoterrorism" as "Terrorism"

When law-enforcement agencies arrested 10 animal rights activists and environmental radicals 18 months ago, it was a major breakthrough in the fight against what officials call "ecoterrorism."

Among the crimes solved were a string of arsons and other attacks across five Western states totaling more than $40 million in damage. Targets of the group calling itself The Family had been timber companies, meatpacking plants, an SUV dealership, a Colorado ski resort, and the University of Washington Horticultural Center.

Now, with all defendants having pleaded guilty because of the weight of the evidence against them, including an informant who wore a recording device, prosecutors are seeking "terrorism enhancements" to their sentences.

"This is the first time in the history of the US that the federal government is seeking this enhancement for property crimes that did not result in injury or death to humans," said Lauren Regan of the Civil Liberties Defense Center in Eugene, Ore.

In their 148-page sentencing memorandum filed last week in federal court in Eugene, prosecutors argued that "although the government was not a direct victim, it was nonetheless a federal crime of terrorism because of the offenders' motivation." Intimidation, coercion, and retaliation aimed at the conduct of government, prosecutors said, deserves "enhanced" punishment under federal antiterrorism laws.

The ecosaboteurs' goal, according to prosecutors, was to retaliate for certain federal policies related to natural resources and animals, and they were attempting to coerce government agencies into changing those policies. Federal sentencing guidelines in such cases can add up to 20 years to a sentence, and this can also mean being sent to a maximum security prison.

Remember this. I don't condone the actions of these groups, but there is a difference between civil disobedience (which by its nature breaks the law in order to publicize the violation of larger moral principles) and terrorism here that seems to be collapsing. It's not a very large step to imagine a gulag for any objectors to the socio-economic status quo.

UPDATE (9pm, 5/22):

So,... in light of the post above and the comments, let's see what happens to this guy:

Mark Uhl, a student at Liberty University, was arrested today for possessing several homemade bombs which he told authorities he made to disrupt protesters at the funeral of Jerry Falwell.

The 19-year-old student, reportedly had six devices on his person or in his car when he was arrested. Some reports say the devices were gasoline-based "napalm" bombs.