From the category archives:
Writing about the LaRouche Youth Movement finally allowed me to use some of the research material piling up for a novel that’s never quite come together.
Maybe it was the anxiety of influence. Lyndon LaRouche always seemed like a character right out of Thomas Pynchon.
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Via “Matt Yglesias”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/a_surge_of_kagans.php comes the latest family full-court press from “the Kagans”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/818pmqsq.asp, who get to author policy and neutrally report on it at the same time:
bq. The new strategy for Iraq has entered its second phase. Now that all of the additional combat forces have arrived in theater, Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno have begun Operation Phantom Thunder, a vast and complex effort to disrupt al Qaeda and Shiite militia bases all around Baghdad in advance of the major clear-and-hold operations that will follow. The deployment of forces and preparations for this operation have gone better than expected, and Phantom Thunder is so far proceeding very well.
I saw Kagan on TV for the first time recently in that “Frontline Documentary”:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/endgame/interviews/kagan.html on Iraq. My immediate impression was that he looked like just the sort of tabletop war nerd who had whiled away many happy hours as a child thinking up names like “Operation Phantom Thunder,” and who had managed to parlay this into a career. This was confirmed by what he said when asked about his participation in a Camp David meeting with Bush and his advisers:
Was it the first time you’d been to Camp David?
Oh, yeah, sure. … It was a very cool experience. They flew [us] up on a Chinook from Fort McNair, which is also a cool experience, to fly along the Potomac like that. It’s a beautiful place, and it was quite a good setting, I think.
What fun. Still, “Phantom Thunder”? Looks like we’re running out of tough-sounding modifiers for the word “Thunder.” We’ve had “Blue Thunder”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Thunder and before that there was “Operation Rolling Thunder”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rolling_Thunder, which sounds better than “Operation Bombing Vietnam To No Real Purpose.” “Phantom Thunder” clearly isn’t one of the classics. Let’s see … “Operation Flash of Thunder”? “Operation Thundercats”? “Operation Grabpot Thundergust”?
Because I have no talent for or interest in it, I have been putting off dealing with my garden — or yard, as we say in America. Although the landscaping is now on the domestic agenda, it may have been a serious error to wait so long. Because, over the past few months, this … thing … has grown up with astonishing rapidity by the side of my house, next to the A/C unit. It has become known as The Triffid. It is now about ten feet tall. Here’s a set of pictures showing its leaves and little tubular yellow flowers in more detail. It has recently acquired a little brother a few feet away.
For those of you who don’t know, I live in Tucson. Given how little water we have falling out of the sky around here, it disturbs me that anything so ugly could grow quite so big, quite so fast. (I feel the same way about Phoenix.) My question to the more horticulturally informed amongst you is, What the hell is it? And when the answer is, inevitably, “Giganticus Weedus Noxiensis,” tell me what combination of axe, chemicals and Wagner will be required to get rid of it.
_Update_: Another victory for the “Digital Barbarians”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/06/21/neo-luddite-quasi-mandarins/ of the LazyWeb. Correctly identified within three comments as Tree Tobacco, _Nicotiana Glauca_, and subsequently followed by helpful information on how to deal with it (and likely consequences of ignoring it).
We’ve just had an issue with some spam showing up on the site. Not the run-of-the-mill comment-based sort. It was hidden in a block of html enclosed in a tag. Weirdly, and this is the disturbing bit, it appeared as a block of HTML appended to our index.php file, which really shouldn’t happen at all. The result was that WordPress would render CT pages and then this bit of spam text would be right at the bottom of the html, outside the body tags, etc, as the index.php file closed out.
The permissions on the index.php file are right and our WP installation is up to date. There doesn’t seem to be anything else amiss, and apart from it appearing in a very strange place it seems like automated rather than handcrafted spam. (Another odd thing was that some of the spam links pointed to some personal pages hosted by washington.edu, but I didn’t follow the links.) Unfortunately I don’t know how long the spam has been there. What happened to us is approximately the same as what happened to this guy on the WP support forum, but there wasn’t any helpful followup from that thread. Has anyone encountered this issue before?
I tend to regard myself as Crooked Timber’s online myrmidon of a number of rather unpopular views; among other things, as regular readers will have seen, I believe that the incitement to religious hatred legislation was a good idea (perhaps badly executed), that John Searle has it more or less correct on the subject of artificial intelligence, that Jacques Derrida deserves his high reputation and that George Orwell was not even in the top three essayists of the twentieth century[1]. I’m a fan of Welsh nationalism. Oh yes, the Kosovo intervention was a crock too. At some subconscious level I am aware that my ideas about education are both idiotic and unspeakable. But I think that all of these causes are regarded as at least borderline sane by at least one fellow CT contributor. There is only one major issue on which I stand completely alone, reviled by all. And it’s this; Budweiser (by which I mean the real Budweiser, the beer which has been sold under that brand by Anheuser-Busch since 1876) is really quite a good beer. I have been threatening this post in comments for a while now, and here it is:
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(Those who don’t know about Bristol’s most famous “artist” can google for “Banksy” or check the Wikipedia.)
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Over the years, my interest in the work of Cornelius Castoriadis has more than once led to a moment of conversational awkwardness, when it turned out that the other party had been quietly distracted by the effort to figure out what the anti-totalitarian left had to do with taking peyote.
With time I have learned to detect the signs of struggle early, and so make haste to point out that I don’t mean Carlos Castaneda, whose tales of cosmic shenanigans with Yaqui shaman Don Juan once played a big part in the counterculture.
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Spotted at the “Economist’s Free Exchange blog”:http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2007/03/airlines_and_inequality.cfm :
bq. According to the new tax data, the income gap has widened. This has led to more speculation that we will descend into a Dickensian dystopia full of the have and have nots. I recently experienced this type of reality when I had the opportunity to fly business class on a trans-Atlantic flight.
Possibly this is an attempt at irony by La Galt; possibly the gap between first-class and regular transatlantic passengers really does make her think of _Bleak House_ or _Oliver Twist_ . Either way, there’s a kind of disconnect here that I have trouble getting my head around.
Greetings, O Timberites! Welcome to “spring,” unless it’s now “autumn” for you. (I hate these fashionable nods to “global relativism,” but I’m informed that some CT readers and contributors are adherents of some kind of Southern Hemisphere Standpoint Epistemology.) I fear that my nasty reputation has preceded me to this prestigious blog, but just for those of you who might be wondering who I am and why I’m here, my name is Michael Bérubé. I teach literature and cultural studies at Penn State University, where I also co-direct (with my wife, Janet Lyon) Penn State’s Disability Studies Program. In future posts, I will be more than happy to remedy this blog’s inexplicable inattention to (a) disability studies and (b) professional hockey in North America, but first, I should probably mention by way of introduction that I published two books last fall, one of which features my <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/images/uploads/berube_rhetorical.jpg”> ginormous looming ghostly head</a> and the other of which has been widely lauded for its innovative jacket design:
Hey, hold the phone!
This post is kind of a personal customer-service gripe, so feel free to skip it.
_Update_: Within an hour of posting this, I got an email renewing my DF membership and a note from John. Apparently the t-shirt gnomes are in the process of being re-engineered (I’m paraphrasing) and improved models will soon be managing his t-shirt delivery needs. Thanks to John for his quick response.
“The problem with espousing hatred of gay people and darkly suggesting they “shouldn’t exist”? It creates problems for homophobes.”
Full explication/evisceration at Julian Sanchez’ “place”:http://juliansanchez.com/notes/archives/2007/02/whys_he_gotta_go_making_life_h.php.
It is February 14, and that can only mean one thing — the arrival of this year’s batch of Valentine’s Day slogans from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization:
Proletarians And Oppressed Peoples,
1. Progressive And Revolutionary People Everywhere, Resolutely Uphold The Militant Bolshevik Spirit And Revolutionary Romanticism Embodied In Comrade Valentine!
2. Decisively Smash Retrograde And Joyless Ultra-Left Lines Which Disparage Proletarian Love And Desire!!
3. Warmly Celebrate The 20th Anniversary Of ACT-UP, A Militant Organization Which Attacked The Bourgeois State and Big Capital On Behalf Of LGBTQ People And All AIDS-Affected Oppressed Communities Worldwide In 1987 And Has Remained On The Offensive For Two Decades! ! !
It’s snowing. Here, in downtown Tucson, Arizona. Just wanted to let you all know.
The one thing I enjoy about this season is watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Some part of me always hopes things will turn out differently this time — that maybe the Grinch won’t go back to Whoville and return the stuff. (Of course I do know better; still, it’s my holiday wish.) Also, it is impossible not to admire the Grinch’s efficiency.
From the blog Intellectual Conservative, I learn that my green hero is being Semiticized. Who knew?
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Calling young African immigrants ‘scum’ is a brilliant move that paves the way for necessary economic reforms in France.
No, really. “See for yourself”:http://volokh.com/posts/1161028053.shtml.
Update: Commenters have suggested that this post might be read as saying that Kopel is himself a racist. That isn’t what was meant, and isn’t what I believe. The snark is because Kopel is uncritically praising a highly offensive and racist statement, but I happily accept that he’s doing so for reasons other than its racism.