Belle Waring

It’s good news that violence during the Iraqi constitutional referendum was less than during the previous election. Higher turnout among Sunni voters also seems good, except insofar as they seem to have decisively rejected the proposed constitution; I don’t know what that portends for future political unity. That said, Jim Henley made me laugh today:

Looks like the Iraqi Constitution is going to pass. Hopefully people will be able to read it soon too. After that the Iraqi Hamilton, Madison and Jay can write pithy essays about why people should (have) vote(d) for it. At the very end of the process the first colonist touches ground on the shores of Iraq.

It does seem a bit strange for people to be voting on something they have never seen. It’s late Wittgenstein voting! I’ll vote for your beetle if you vote for mine! Seriously, mine has awesome iridescent wings and stuff! No, you can’t look.

Almost three years to the day after the last bomb attack in Bali, suicide bombers have struck again. (This is a good article about the aftermath.) Our family just got back from Bali last week. My heart goes out to the victims and their families, and also to the Balinese people more generally: they are all victims of these cowardly attacks. Bali’s economy, so dependent on tourism, was only now beginning to make a full recovery from the 2002 bombing; everyone I spoke to said that things were better, but not back up to pre-bombing levels. This second blow may cripple Bali for a long time. Hotels and expensive clubs like Ku De Ta have armed guards who check vehicles, but nothing can make a beachfront seafood restaurant, or a cafe on a heavily trafficked street, safe against a suicide bomber. What will happen to these families? [click to continue…]

Here are some people who have to lose their jobs, and maybe also get sued for wrongful death. Or go to jail.

1. Whoever is in charge of Louisiana’s state office of Homeland Security, maybe it’s this Major General Bennett C. Landreneau? Whoever it was who made the decision not to let the Red Cross into New Orleans. This person needs to lose his job, and he’s on my “get sued into the ground and maybe go to jail” list. If my baby had died of dehydration in the Superdome, I would be ready to kill this guy.

2. Whoever it was who gave the Gretna police orders to turn people back at gunpoint and prevent them from walking out via an Interstate to a shelter 2-3 miles away in Jefferson Parish. The Gretna Police Chief (Chief B.H. Miller, UPDATE: Arthur Lawson, guilty as charged.)? The mayor (Ronnie Harris)? Again, fuck these bastards. I’m not even that sympathetic to the policemen on the front lines obeying these orders. Is it even legal for local police to ban citizens from using public roads? I imagine there is leeway for emergency situations, but if no orders came down from above? If they did get an order from higher up, fire that bastard too.

3. Governor Kathleen Blanco. I have seen nothing to convince me that she has been at all competent in dealing with this catastrophe.

Officials in Louisiana agree that the governor would not have given up control over National Guard troops in her state as would have been required to send large numbers of active-duty soldiers into the area. But they also say they were desperate and would have welcomed assistance by active-duty soldiers.

“I need everything you have got,” Ms. Blanco said she told Mr. Bush last Monday, after the storm hit.

In an interview, she acknowledged that she did not specify what sorts of soldiers. “Nobody told me that I had to request that,” Ms. Blanco said. “I thought that I had requested everything they had. We were living in a war zone by then.”

Look, I think the feds are hiding behind a fig-leaf of federalism on this one. When she said “we need all the help you can give”, the 82nd Airborne should have been there the next day. Nonetheless, whatever i’s she had to dot or t’s to cross, she could have damn well figured out herself before the hurricaine hit, like, I don’t know, when she first got into office? Likewise, she could have put everyone in the same room and knocked heads together earlier to get some kind of unified effort going. Crying about how you’re dissappointed in looters don’t cut it.

4. Michael Brown, FEMA head. I don’t think I need to say anything here.

5. Michael Chertoff, head of DHS. There was a pop quiz on homeland security last week. He failed.

6. President Bush. There’s no point in suggesting that he resign or be impeached, since I might as well just wish that everyone had a pony. Still, we can try our best to hold him morally responsible for hiring incompetent political apparatchiks to do crucial jobs, and for manifestly failing to mobilize federal resources in a timely way once the scope of the disaster (that includes local failings too) was known. The buck has to stop somewhere, and I think the President’s desk seems a likely place. He will never run again, and the only punishments he can receive will be moral opprobrium, diminished political influence, and a severe hit to the electoral chances of his party. I suggest he receive them all.

UPDATE: I think it should be obvious that I listed these people in bottom-up hierarchical order, not decreasing-level-of-blame order. (Perhaps, in that case, 1 and 2 should be reversed, but you see my general thrust.) Someone who has 1000 gallons of water is more to blame when someone near her dies of thirst than someone with 1 gallon. The locals were overwhelmed and the feds should have stepped up to the plate, not complained about the mysteries of federalism. That doesn’t mean Gov. Blanco magically did a great job, or Jefferson Parish officials weren’t a bunch of racist bastards.

Jim MacDonald (over at Making Light) offers us a compendium of vital life advice gleaned from folk songs. Number one is, if someone says to beware of Long Lankin, then totally beware of him, for real. More:

If you are an unmarried lady and have sex, you will get pregnant. No good will come of it.

If you are physically unable to get pregnant due to being male, the girl you had sex with will get pregnant. No good will come of it. You’ll either kill her, or she’ll kill herself, or her husband/brother/father/uncle/cousin will kill you both. In any case her Doleful Ghost will make sure everyone finds out. You will either get hanged, kill yourself, or be carried off bodily by Satan. Your last words will begin “Come all ye.”

Going to sea to avoid marrying your sweetie is an option, but if she hangs herself after your departure (and it’s even money that she’s going to) her Doleful Ghost will arrive on board your ship and the last three stanzas of your life will purely suck.

If you are a young gentleman who had sex it is possible the girl won’t get pregnant. In those rare instances you will either get Saint Cynthia’s Fire or the Great Pox instead. No good will have come of it….

Have nothing to do with former boyfriends who turn up and say it’s no big deal that you’re now married to someone else and have a child. If their intentions are legit, that’s got to be a problem. If it’s not a problem, their intentions are not legit.

You are justified in cherishing the direst suspicions of a suddenly and unexpectedly returned significant other who mentions a long journey, a far shore, or a narrow bed, or who’s oddly skittish about the imminent arrival of cockcrow.

If you are a young lady and you meet a young man who says his name is “Ramble Away,” don’t be surprised if, by the time you know you’re pregnant, it turns out he’s moved and left no forwarding address.

I’d just like to add a few words based on American folksongs (probably derivative of the English ones): if you do kill your pregnant lover by drowning her in the cold, cold sea, the odds are good that someone will find her body and make a fiddle bow of her long black hair, and pegs of her white finger bones, and then the only song that fiddle will play will cry your guilt out to the world. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

In the Washington Post today, humor:

Tierney, of the Institute of World Politics, identified five groups: ANSWER, Not in Our Name, Code Pink, United for Peace and Justice, and MoveOn.org. He said these groups “come from the Workers World Party” and are an “umbrella” for smaller groups, such as the “Communist Party of Kansas City” and the “Socialist Revolutionary Movement of the Upper Mississippi.” Of the last two, he said, “I’m just making these up.” [oh, that’s all right then–ed.]

Tierney singled out Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq and who camped out at President Bush’s ranch this month to protest the war. “I’ve never heard of a woman protesting a war in front of a leader’s home in my life,” he said. “I’ve never heard of anything quite so outrageous.”

Wow, that’s funny, because I’m sure I’ve heard of at least one or two things more outrageous than that, in the history of humankind, ever…wait. Did he say “a woman”? Fuck it: it’s on now, commie. Don’t mess with American Pride.

Unrelatedly, for those who wanted to re-enter the fray, a new post at John and Belle Have a Blog about who, exactly, is a big pussy. Bonus vagina dentata action! (Teeth not included.) Speculations as to my anxiety about how anonymous men on teh intarweb will no longer find me attractive welcomed! (If by “welcomed”, you mean “I’m laughing about the probable size of your penis.”) Post away, kids!

From the Washington Post today, a supremely depressing tale of 15 Uighur men trapped in Guantanamo:

All 15 Uighurs have actually been cleared for release from Guantanamo Bay twice, once after a Pentagon review in late 2003 and again last March, U.S. officials said….

Even after the second decision, however, the government did not notify the 15 men for several months that they had been cleared. “They clearly were keeping secret that these men were acquitted. They were found not to be al Qaeda and not to be Taliban,” Willett said. “But the government still refused to provide a transcript of the tribunal that acquitted them to the detainees, their new lawyers or a U.S. court.”

Let’s give the government some nano-credit in that it recognizes that these men will be imprisoned and tortured by the Chinese government if returned. But they’re still pretty badly overdrawn at the moral bank:

In the meantime, the men are still treated as prisoners. Sabin P. Willett, a Boston lawyer who volunteered to take the cases of two Uighurs in March, finally met with them last month, after he and his team went through their own FBI clearances. One of the Uighurs was “chained to the floor” in a “box with no windows,” Willett said in an Aug. 1 court hearing.

Relatedly, this account of prison life in Iraq is not one to inspire confidence:

Since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, the military said it has arrested more than 40,000 people…. The average incarceration at Bucca is a year. The military attributes the surge in detentions to an increase in combat operations and the inability of the nascent Iraqi justice system to handle the crushing caseload.

Many of the freed detainees express bewilderment at why they were held; even the U.S. commander who oversees Bucca, Col. Austin Schmidt, 55, of Fairfax, estimated that one in four prisoners “perhaps were just snagged in a dragnet-type operation” or were victims of personal vendettas.

“This is like Chicago in the ’30s: You don’t like somebody, you drop a dime on them,” Schmidt said. “And by the time the Iraqi court system figures it out, they go home. But it takes a while.”

Well, just 25%…

Noted without comment:

I points the fingerbone of scorn at those inhumanly cruel Republicans who drink puppy blood for breakfast. When I consider the sharp, tiny milk-teeth of those puppies, protruding from gums now white with blood loss, I am filled with a righteous and long-abiding anger. In fact, the mere thought of a pure-bred English Bulldog puppy, its throat slit with a dull buck knife, its precious life-blood draining into a glass pitcher soon to be enlivened with worchestershire sauce, gin and Tabasco–the lot soon to be poured into a glass garnished with a pale green stalk of celery from the inner part of the bunch, in the manner of some cut-rate third-season Dr. Who–well, my gorge rises. Just saying, is all.

UPDATE: Some e-mailers have objected that not all adherents of the GOP refresh themselves with puppy blood of a morning–I would have thought that was obvious.

UPDATE 2: Falsely claiming that someone (or the majority of some group) drinks puppy blood is indeed egregious misbehavior. (Accurately claiming that, of course, is not egregious.) I haven’t bothered to investigate whether any Republicans in fact drink the blood of innocent puppies, so I can’t speak to the merits of any given case, but to the extent that my opponents uncover and condemn false claims of this type, they are doing reasoned debate (and basic decency and fairness) a great service.

UPDATE 3: I find it odd that so many Republicans who do not–and in fact have never been accused of–drinking puppy blood felt it necessary to object to my claims. Perhaps each of these people should look in his own heart. No matter how small the number of Republican puppy-blood drinkers is, so long as it is >1, then clearly this “group” should be denounced. I find it difficult to see how any fair-minded individual could object to this. Also, any readers who can supply links to prominent Republicans advocating the de-lumptious quaffing of puppy blood would be much appreciated. Please note that anonymous emails sent to K-Lo will not qualify.

Matt Welch, LBC patriot, has had enough of these expansion-minded Angelenos, and he’s not going to take it anymore. Nativists at an LA radio station (in response to some flap about Californian billboards in Mexico) have erected a billboard reading “Just To Clarify, You Are Here: Los Angeles, CA; Gracias KFI AM 640.” The thing was, they put it in Long Beach. And that was where they made their fatal mistake:

That’s right, Juan y Ken, I’m on to your game, amigos. You and your kind have been trying for a century to effect a reconquista of the LBC, just like you successfully gobbled up weaker port-side sisters like San Pedro and Wilmington. We let you take advantage of our open borders every day, abuse our infrastructure (the 710 looks like freakin’ Mexico City), and now you’ve even stolen the name of what by all rights should have been the Long Beach Angels.

Well, this time you’ve gone too far, angelitos. We’re drawing a line in the asphalt, a bit to the north of the 91 (where the offending billboard stands, like a slap in our mothers’ faces). And you best not mess with our Minutemen — they’re not lard-asses in lawn chairs, they’re the G-funk crew with a gangsta twist. Mr. KFI, tear down this billboard!! Or else you’re gonna learn a new meaning for the word “regulate.”

Now, I’ve never met Matt Welch, but I figure it’s a safe bet all the Reasonistas are packing heat, so, watch your back, KFI AM 640. Watch your back.

Readers of BoingBoing will have heard about this a while ago, but mashup artist extraordinaire ccc has done an amazing Beatles mashup album called Revolved (scroll down for a bittorrent link). I was just listening to it and I had to share it with all of you, because it is so very fab and gear. The Taxman track is great; it combines Beck’s New Pollution with The Jam’s Start (which, of course, just rips off the bass line from Taxman, but hearing them together is funny). You should check out his other tracks, too.

In more depressing news, I met an actual real-live defender of torture last night. I mean, I know they’re out there because I have to read all the incredibly stupid and irritating comments threads, but it was still weird. His metric of sucess involved 99 innocent people being tortured for every one guilty jihadi who then gives up the goods on some plot which would have killed many people (not clear if this was he fabled nuke scenario or your more run of the mill bombing). And he seemed so normal otherwise! For an English guy who reads LGF all the time. I was really polite too; clearly I wasn’t drinking enough, though when I woke up this morning that wasn’t my first thought.

N.B. Please talk about mashups in this comments thread. Please. You too, jet. C’mon, McSleazy vs. dsico, who’s your man?

UPDATE: You know, there are all these famous mashups out there that don’t seem to be available anymore, like Conway’s “Lisa’s Got The Hives”, or some of that Frenchbloke stuff, or Soundhog? I can’t believe that the basic illegality of the whole thing could possibly be compounded by some enterprising CT reader emailing me some mp3’s. Just thinking out loud, here.

No one who has read the Gulag Archipelago or Sinyavsky’s A Voice From the Chorus can possibly read these words without a pang to the heart:

“It was just a short poem,” Badr recalled. “Something about how in life everything is possible and we should be patient because freedom is close at hand.” But it was enough to swell his heart with hope. “I was suddenly so happy,” he said.

Dost had smuggled the note to [his brother] Badr through an ingenious ruse. Every few days, representatives from the International Committee of the Red Cross arrived with forms so prisoners could write brief letters home. They were given only 10 minutes, but that was enough to dash off other notes on hidden scraps of paper cups. Prisoners then passed the messages between wire pens on pulleys made of threads from their prayer caps….

Eventually, he said, the interrogators seemed convinced that he had not meant any serious harm. [he wrote a satirical piece in which he offered to match Clinton’s $5 million reward for bin Laden with his own 5 million afghani (US $115) price on Clinton’s head.] In February 2004, Dost said, he was transferred to another section of Guantanamo where he had access to as much paper as he wanted.

He continued to produce hundreds of poems, translated the Koran into Pashto and wrote a text on Islamic jurisprudence.

In the meantime, Dost said, he was taken before a review tribunal, a brief procedure that he described as a “show trial,” even though it ultimately resulted in his release. To date, U.S. military officials said, 232 Guantanamo detainees have been released and more than 500 remain in custody.

Often, Dost said, the guards conducted raids when officials suspected a detainee had issued a fatwa — an Islamic decree against them. Each time, all inmates’ writings were confiscated. Dost said he was assured that his work would be returned to him on his release.

But when that day finally came last week, Dost said, he received only a duffel bag with a blanket, a change of clothes and a few hundred papers — a fraction of his writings.

This parting blow, he said, struck him harder than all the humiliations of confinement. On Friday, as well-wishers swarmed into his home, he said his only thought was how to recover his work.

“If they give me back my writings, truly I will feel as though I was never imprisoned,” he said. “And if they don’t . . . “

Look, my country is better than this. Or this. Just. Stop.

I know I’ve related this before on my own blog, but my grandfather was an OSS spy in WWII. In one of the letters he sent home to my grandmother he describes how he met up with US ground troops who had just taken a French village controlled by a particularly awful German captain. He relates how his first impluse was to beat the shit out of the guy, knowing what he did about what the man had done. But he just gave him a cigarette instead. I don’t remember exactly what he said in the letter, but it was basically that the German was surprised at his mild reception, and my grandfather told him that was what happened when you were taken prisoner by Americans, and that we were better than them, better by a long shot. Anyone who thinks Osama bin Laden is more of a threat to the US than the Axis is welcome to come to East Hampton to get hit on the head with a lead pipe by my grandpa. He’s still pretty spry. Also, just stop.

This may just be the single most random post ever on Crooked Timber, but I, er, soldier on. Perhaps an entomologist or two reads this blog? Leftist entomologists who are sticking it to the man with their ground-breaking research in Roraima? So, I live in Singapore, where we’ve got lotsa ants. Big soldier ants. Little stinging ants. Medium-sized stinging ants. Demi-hemi stinging ants. And so on. When I walk my daughter to school we often see them running in little glistening jointed rivers, 15 ants wide, streaming from the corpse of a snail to the detritus at the edge of the sidewalk. And when the new queen ants are making their maiden flights we are tediously overrun by drones, even on the nineteenth story. They throng to the lights if you forget to close the windows. They also tend to induce menlancholy “to dust thou shalt return” feelings, being, as they are, so poorly put together. Their wings fall off at the feeblest provocation, leaving them to crawl around on the floor in circles. It’s as if a heartless Nature has put them together with the least possible care, thinking, “well, if they haven’t made it to the queen by that time…”. I have to kill dozens of them, usually smushing them with a wadded-up paper towel which I then throw away. This seems a peculiarly modern response; “I’m done with this insect—let’s throw it away in the trash!” But what I am I supposed to do, herd them back to the balcony in some Jain fashion? If they’re in my apartment, they ain’t impregnating the queen. Anyway, if I were to brush against them even slightly, their stupid wings would fall off. This wasn’t my point, though. Yesterday, I went out for a swim with my daughter around 4 o’clock. There is a waist-high stucco wall all around the pool. When I went to put our things on a chair, I noticed a strange sight. The top edge of the wall was thronged with ants, all of whom had their abdomen flexed up at a 90 degree angle to their thoraxes. They weren’t interacting with each other much, and were mostly all facing the same direction. When I leant over to look they rippled back in waves, then slowly edged back to their original positions, abdomens high as flags. WTF was up with that, then? I was struck with the vague thought that they were cooling off, but that didn’t really make any sense. When I got out of the pool 20 minutes later, they were still there, rippling back and forth, peculiarly bent. Thoughts?

I’m sure others have suggested this, but doesn’t there seem to be a great job opportunity available in those American states which carve out (as some are considering) a “conscience exemption” for pharmacists who do not wish to fill prescriptions for birth control or emergency contraception? Just get certified as a pharmacist, hired at Walgreen’s, and then reveal that you are a Christian Scientist and it is against your religion to dispense any medicine at all. Then just sit back, read chick magazines, and eat expired candy while the money rolls in. “I’d like to fill this perscription for an asthma inhaler?” “Sorry, ma’am, that’s against my religion.” And you can’t get fired! Awesome.

This is one of the most exciting things to have happened in a long time. Scientists using a new photographic technique have made amazing strides in deciphering the famed Oxyrhynchus papyrii (the contents of an Egyptian trash-heap). Apparently, just in the last few days, they have discovered previously unknown writings by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod, and Lucian, as well as a long epic passage from Archilochos. It’s not particularly likely that you’ve ever had a look at how much Archilochos there is in the world, but let me tell you: ain’t a whole lot. Not even one complete poem, if memory serves. (Oxford’s Delectus ex Iambis et Elegis Graecis has all the details.) From the Independent:

The previously unknown texts, read for the first time last week, include parts of a long-lost tragedy – the Epigonoi (“Progeny”) by the 5th-century BC Greek playwright Sophocles; part of a lost novel by the 2nd-century Greek writer Lucian; unknown material by Euripides; mythological poetry by the 1st-century BC Greek poet Parthenios; work by the 7th-century BC poet Hesiod; and an epic poem by Archilochos, a 7th-century successor of Homer, describing events leading up to the Trojan War. Additional material from Hesiod, Euripides and Sophocles almost certainly await discovery.

Oxford academics have been working alongside infra-red specialists from Brigham Young University, Utah. Their operation is likely to increase the number of great literary works fully or partially surviving from the ancient Greek world by up to a fifth. It could easily double the surviving body of lesser work – the pulp fiction and sitcoms of the day.

Go Mormons! (Now if only you could find those darn gold plates and diamond spectacles!) I know every Classics scholar and enthusiast in the whole world is waiting with bated breath…
On the other hand, this Scotsman headline is enthusiastic but misleading: “‘Lost’ classical manuscripts give up their secrets after 9,000 years.” What’s 7,000-odd years among friends, after all?

If Vicente Fox is serious about democracy in Mexico he will exercise his power of pardon and allow Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (currently polling ahead of all other candidates for the upcoming Presidential race) to stand for election next year even if he is found guilty of what amount to minor charges in Mexico’s corrupt political culture. In fact, it would be fairer to pardon him in advance of the verdict in a lengthy court case, Mexican courts not being known for swiftness.
The U.S. should make its views known as well. Lopez Obrador may not be the most palatable candidate, but that is all the more reason for the U.S. to take a stand in favor of his not being shut out on dubious procedural grounds. This seems a chance for the U.S. to show its pro-democatic bona fides at little cost.

[Presidential spokesman Agustin] Canet Gutierrez strongly denied that Fox was trying to scuttle Lopez Obrador’s candidacy, but he said the critics had a point in noting that seemingly far greater corruption had gone unpunished.

“It is difficult to answer that — it doesn’t show coherence, and we accept that,” Gutierrez said.

That’s just what I was thinking…