amazing

The number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan has roughly doubled in the first three months of 2010 compared to the same period last year as Washington has added tens of thousands of additional soldiers to reverse the Taliban’s momentum.

Those deaths have been accompanied by a dramatic spike in the number of wounded...

Military Times, by way of Firedoglake.

As to the citizens of Afghanistan?

“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal...

New York Times.

mandate

from Slate.com:

As virtually all constitutional scholars agree, the odds that this suit will succeed are at best marginal. The federal government has vast power to tax and to regulate interstate commerce on a rational basis. The statute's rationale—that a person's failure to purchase insurance has a negative impact on health care delivery and the structure of the insurance industry, so can be taxed—is squarely within that constitutional standard.

I just don't see it. If this is true, then the government could order everybody to buy an anaphylactic pen because not having one would have a negative impact on health care delivery and the structure of the insurance industry.

One of the reasons I haven't had health insurance for most of my adult life is that I refuse to pay a company to cheat and insult me. It makes my stomach knot to contemplate it. Just the thought of it has a negative impact on me and the structure of my life. I honestly don't know what I'm going to do if it's the law of the land in four years. This is not one of the things I ever pictured myself going to jail for.

The Slate article is by Eliot Spitzer, by the way.

news of the day

The optimal conditions for the triumph of the crazy ultra-Right were an old state and its ruling mechanisms which could no longer function; a mass of disenchanted, disoriented and discontented citizens who no longer knew where their loyalties lay; strong socialist movements threatening or appearing to threaten social revolution, but not actually in a position to achieve it; and a move [sic - mood?] of nationalist resentment.... These were the conditions in which helpless old ruling elites were tempted to have recourse to the ultra-radicals... [t]hese were the conditions that turned movements of the radical Right into powerful organized and sometimes uniformed and paramilitary forces (squadristi, storm-troopers) or, as in Germany during the Great [Economic] Slump, into massive electoral armies.... [F]ascism came to power by the connivance of, indeed (as in Italy) on the initiative of, the old regime, that is to say in a 'constitutional' fashion.

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991

sin

I watched Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist recently. I first saw it at the Uniondale Mini Cinema on Long Island with my boon college companion, Franklin, sometime after its American release in 1971.

I was a little too young and unformed to grasp the film at that time. I suppose the trials of a self-loathing, self-fearing cipher in Fascist Italy were far from the aspirant experience of a post-hippie lamb such as myself.

One scene did stay with me, in which 13-year-old Marcello is seduced away by a chauffeur, taken to an abandoned villa. Once the boy cannot escape, the man takes off his cap to let his long hair fall around his shoulders. It's shocking against the masculine propriety of the chauffeur's uniform.

I don't think I again had such a sense that a movie character was in deep, deep trouble until I saw Blue Velvet, and we met Frank's idol, Ben - Dean Stockwell in face powder, lip-synching "In Dreams." (Face powder figures in the chauffeur's self-image as well, and for song, Madame Butterfly.)

Is it homophobia that makes both these characters so memorable, so dangerous? That's not something I think I'm much prey to. But after all, Marcello is a boy, and Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle Maclachlan's character) is an innocent, already deeply in danger. And exciting as it may be, the first pass a boy experiences from a man carries a charge of peril, no matter if the boy is excited, or queer, or not.

Marcello, who shoots the chauffeur with his own pistol and escapes, grows up terrified that he will be discovered as a murderer. His defense is to fit in, to conform, to become invisible, never to be distinguished from the crowd.

When his society turns murderous, his safest disguise is as a socially approved murderer, unquestionably a creature of his government. He volunteers to spy on and, likely, kill his old philosophy professor, who has escaped to Paris. He'll mask the old crime with a state-sanctioned murder.

The visual scheme of the film is astonishing. If I had a second life and a couple of years put aside, I'd love to do a scene-by-scene breakdown of the movie. For a taste, you can find a dance scene, featuring Marcello alone in a crowd, posted on YouTube.

I also saw something I thought plainly evident in the film, but not acknowledged by the action or the characters, and not referred to by Bertolucci in the DVD interview.

Marcello imagines that his sin was forced upon him by the chauffeur, that all would be different if not for that seducer. The action of the movie supports that belief. He would have been a normal man, a better man, a safer man, if not for that.

But immediately before the chauffeur finds him, we see a crowd of children bullying a boy lying on the ground, who turns out to be Marcello. "Take down his pants" (or something like that), one of them shouts. The children crowd around. Adults, perhaps even parents of some of the bullying children, watch without interfering, reinforcing the sense that there might be something proper in this singling out, this punishment previous to any crime.

I can only think of original sin. Marcello was marked long before his transgression. When he goes to confession (after decades without), the priest tells him, "You, my son, have always lived in sin." Yet this extremely conscious, very visual film doesn't (so far as I can tell) give us a different source for Marcello's actions, in the events of the film and its conclusion, or in his own mind.

It also works to think of Marcello's mark outside of a Catholic context - as a psychological or spiritual flaw sensed by the children and adults - or the kind of need that can draw an attentive child molester. (Marcello's parents are themselves spectacularly flawed.)

Perhaps original sin is so taken as a given by Bertolucci, and by Alberto Moravia, who wrote the book it's based on, that it would have been as gratuitous to point out as breathing or circulating blood. (The book ends differently than the movie, says Bertolucci.)

This sin of omission (if that is what it is) doesn't mar the film. I've given you no spoilers. You can watch it keeping original sin in mind or not, the experience doesn't suffer.

alternate route

I'm surprised I was brought to such a vituperous state by the conclusion of my previous entry. I've always had a kind of naive, immediate reaction to excremental obscenity. I seldom use it and am usually put off by others' use.

I might have rewritten the post, but I really liked the structure (spontaneously created) of employing the timeworn "whore" metaphor, withdrawing it, and promptly comparing our political leaders to something almost universally accepted as loathsome, foul.

You see what kind of person I am? I take account of the possibility that some human culture exists in which shit is not the very bottom of existence, and even leave a little space to ease the pain of the passing scatophile. And I still couldn't convince myself it was over the top to compare our ruling class to shit.

Firedoglake post of the day: Alternate route to calamity.

fiasco

The road ahead, as I dread it:

The first of the "health care reforms" kick in. Most of these apply to the already insured or children of the already insured. The pharminsurance folks will be undermining these bureaucratically and via government puppets, while claiming that the new rules justify any premium increase they declare. Healthbiz stock will continue to rise in value, as it has through every single step of the "health care debate."

Meanwhile the economy, at best, stagnates. Mainstream consensus is little or zero growth in employment for the next year, and since the current administration is part of that consensus, wow, they're right. So when the "Health Care: One Year Later" stories come around, everybody will be just a bit (or a whole lot more) miserable in general, and the great Democratic Party triumph will appear to be even weenier than it is.

By that time, maybe, the Dems will realize that even if they offer the same services to commerce as the Repubs, money would rather have the old, skilled whores than the young types who might drift from the repertoire. Result: the young whores will continue to try to outsuck the old ones, the old ones will continue to have the fanciest furnishings in the whorehouse, and management will prosper all the same.

Nothing here intended against whores, or sucking. Just a handy metaphor. Try a different one.

If the Dems are just fresher turds than the Repubs, why should I care? The Repubs will still be the worst, more disease-riddled, laden with fat maggots. The Dems seem to be happy polishing up their pile of shit, but the Repubs want to mash theirs into every corner of the world, private, public, national, international, orbital.

I guess that's enough shit for the day.

word?

Are any of my friends, other than Kelly, reading this blog?

word

Joe Biden is Barack Obama's Flava Flav.

wrong

Myths and facts about the health care bill, in pdf format, from Firedoglake. Printable, downloadable, shareable.

Any good in the bill is weakly affirmed and ill-defended. This is not the beginning of something like Social Security or Medicare. This is the beginning of something at best like welfare, that will be vitiated and warped by those who oppose the idea of health care as a social responsibility, to be shared by a nation.

Most of the demonstrable benefits won't kick in for four years. For four years the opponents will get to run against it, demonize it, with the same fidelity to truth they've shown this past year. And the proponents will defend it with the same vigor and integrity they've brought to the process already. And so the opposition will prosper.

The real poison pill is the individual mandate. Short of a "let's kill all the puppies" mandate, I can't think of anything better designed to unite left and right in revulsion. Take it out, strike it down, and the economic assumptions collapse, making everything in the bill even more vulnerable to deletion, rejection, repeal.

There's a cliche in physics that a theory can be so bad that it's not even wrong. This health care bill may well make it impossible to revisit the idea, revise the theory, for at least a generation. It's so bad, it's not even wrong.

today

affordability

Firedoglake post of the day: Like those affordability tax credits in the health care plan? They're indexed to disappear within a few years.

votive

I've started sifting through my 2005 files to see what's still of interest.

mendacious

Extraordinarily mendacious post in the Times today. The head is "The Perils of Pay Less, Get More". David Leonhardt discusses the deficit as if we, the spoiled masses of the US, have ruined the economy over the last twenty years by selfishly clamoring only for more more more for us, and less less less in taxes. It is as if the Clinton budget surplus never existed, and the Dubya deficit did not gut it to slop more riches to the already wealthy.

It's not as if this was a secret. Dubya crowed at the Al Smith Dinner in 2000, "This is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you my base." This was three weeks before the election.

SEC filings show that "Top executives at the beleaguered New York Times Company reaped hefty rewards last year, with Chairman Arthur 'Pinch' Sulzberger more than doubling his total compensation to $6 million.... CEO Janet Robinson got even more, reaping $6.3 million, a 31.9 percent hike."

The financial plight of the Times company would easily be solved if they dropped the pretense and priced to sell to their community - plutocrats. Hey, 'Pinch'! Charge $50 for the daily edition, $500 for Sundays and $10,000 per year for web access. Keep out hoi polloi, drop the display ads for mass dreck like Ralph Lauren* (Hermes and Coach have new stores for men!) and embrace your base.

Why did I have to read about an $8,500 baseball glove in the WSJ? Rupert's going to drink your milkshake.

*Nothing specific against Mr. Lauren's clothing and accessories. They just happened to be in the banner when I clicked over to the Times.

>>> Firedoglake post of the day: Never mind Kucinich, here comes the fascism!

pustule

Who could have anticipated I'd have two posts with the word "pustule" in the title?

Erick Erickson of RedState has been hired as a contributor to CNN. Please, fearlessly click the link. It leads to all of Media Matters' stories tagging him.

BIBMIPPA...

...is short for what Gregg Levine at Firedoglake calls the Big Insurance Bailout and Medical Industries Profit Protection Act of 2010. He notes:

"If BIBMIPPA doesn’t sound good to you, it shouldn’t. This bill will not provide universal coverage, it will not provide universal access, it will not significantly bend the cost curve, it will not prevent draconian escalations in premiums or out-of-pocket expenses, and, upon signing into law, it will not do anything at all for the large majority of the 48 million uninsured for another four years.

"What it will do is mandate an expansion of the customer pool for private insurance. What it will do is funnel taxpayer dollars into the coffers of the lobbying arms AHIP, PhRMA, and the various private hospital associations. What it will do is enrich and entrench the current powers-that-be at the expense of middleclass and poorer working Americans.

"What it will do is make future efforts at reform much, much harder."

Firedoglake is now my one, essential, politics and news blog. I was surprised to see how often I linked to stories at Salon over the last couple of weeks. But then I realized that was because almost every post at Firedoglake was newsworthy and postable. It is the ground against which I check my current understanding of the USA.

alive

unthinkable

You can bet that right at this moment, as you read this, somebody is being gang-raped, immobilized, electrocuted or beaten for displeasing an armed authority. Probably more than one somebody.
Similarly, right at this moment, a minor child is being beaten, abducted, sold or bullied for the sexual pleasure of an adult, or the accompanying profit. Probably more than one child.
We hate thinking about these things. We hate the idea of them happening to us or somebody we love. We hate the thought that we might be forced to witness an innocent adult or child forced into agony.
As the mind works, picturing and witnessing are not all that far apart.
I think this makes it more difficult for us to keep charities that deal with such things in mind. Acknowledging, picturing, witnessing the terrible - these are more disturbing than feeding, medicating, legislating.
I try to counter this by making The Center for the Victims of Torture and the Somaly Mam Foundation my primary charities. The links in this paragraph go right to donation pages at these sites - you don't have to read details about their work unless you want to.
The CVT operates healing centers in Minneapolis and St. Paul, as well as in Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Jordan. The Somaly Mam Foundation rescues child sex slaves in Cambodia, and offers healing, education and possibilities for the future to them. Somaly Mam herself was sold into servitude and prostitution as a child.
I feel I offer a little healing myself, knowing that someone who has been through hell might feel a little better today because of my contribution, or contemplating a silk bracelet woven by a rescued child.

pix 03/07/10

gospel

PLEASE DON'T POISON ME
(words: Brother Michael Rosenthal; music: traditional)

refrain:
Don't poison,
don't poison,
don't poison poison poison,
please don't poison me.
Don't poison,
don't poison,
don't poison poison poison,
please, don't you poison me.

verse:
Don't put arsenic in my jelly,
cause it really hurts my belly,
don't poison, don't poison me.
(repeat)

(refrain)

Don't fill my jujubes with antifreeze,
cause it makes me wobbly in the knees,
don't poison, don't poison me.
(repeat)

(refrain)

Don't put cyanide in my latte,
cause it makes my skin all spotty,
don't poison, don't poison me.
(repeat)

(refrain)

Don't stick my cranium with uranium,
it might make me go insanium,
don't poison, don't poison me.
(repeat)

(refrain)

Spare me from formaldehyde,
from homicide and suicide.
Don't poison, please don't poison me.

(refrain)

________________________________
Gospel music every Sunday morning
from 8-10am, WKCR 89.9FM.

"this pustule in the white house"

Dan Riehl, whose blog I will not link to, refers thusly to President Barack Obama. Well, one man's opinion. He goes on to describe O as "this accidental, affirmative action jerk." And now we know something about the man behind the opinion.

The man behind the opinion believes that if the GOP doesn't stop O and the Dems, "it becomes not just a right, but a responsibility for the American people to take their country back from the political elites that have already bankrupted it."

Mr. Riehl's post was enthusiastically tweeted by Erick Erickson of RedState and linked to by Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit. These two rank #22 and #17 in the DBKP list of 100 most popular conservative websites.* Glenn Beck's site nestles between them. Instapundit and RedState are each more popular than Sean Hannity's, Bill O'Reilly's or Ann Coulter's sites, more often visited than the Heritage Foundation or Cato Institute sites. It was nice of them to send some affirmative action Mr. Riehl's way (not far enough down the rankings for my taste at #53).**

*Based on Alexa traffic rankings - DBKP here.
**I pulled the rankings from DBKP, but learned of Mr. Riehl thru Alex Koppelman at Salon. That article I happily link to.

grassdoe

Usually I dislike the art/photography links posted at Metafilter.com - high novelty factor involved. Not this time. Jonathan Levitt is a pro, but his grassdoe blog certainly looks as if it's done for love.

As it happens, most of the commenters at Metafilter are dismissive. So it goes.

click

This blog - any blog not hosted on its own server - can be disappeared at any time by its host, Google. Any website not hosted on an independent, creator-owned server can be taken down by the host or blocked by the ISP.
Usually we associate such things with alleged violations of movie or music copyrights. Last week Google deleted six music blogs. You can read the full story at the website of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but the essentials are that these were not piracy sites, that some of the site-owners had gone to great lengths to get permission to post files, and that the initiator of the complaint has not been revealed, although it was likely a music industry copyright-enforcement org. In the meantime, those blogs are gone. And may not be restored.
Allegations of piracy are not the only reason blogs are disappeared, and mp3s are not the only kinds of files contested. Corporations have gotten blogs taken down for criticizing them. Whether a posting is libel or free speech, or whether a picture is theft or satire, are litigable issues. In the meantime, your site can disappear. Again, more info at eff.org., an essential site for news about online freedom in all its forms.
This post is not about the battle to keep the 'net unowned and undominated, altho I think that's essential to the preservation of civil rights. My point is that if you've put hours of work into your blog or site and don't want to re-create it in the event of a disappearance, back it up to your hard drive. Instructions for doing so on Blogger appear at the bottom of this page. All it takes is one click.

writes

I'm a little envious of my friend Patricia Morrison, whose writing habits are so much more professional and disciplined than mine. She does have the benefit of a fabulous imagination and a journalism degree, but she couldn't have published a memoir, ten books of fantasy and two of mystery (with another one ready to go) without dedication and perseverance that I don't think I'll ever match. (Her newer books are available at Lulu and the older ones at Amazon and other good book search sites.)

Writing, mainly fiction, used to be my vocation. I was turned on by the ideas I had, when they came to me, as I allowed them to ripen, when they were finally ready for harvest. I had the habit of the double life, one life walking around while also testing every experience, sensation or phrase for use in the writing life.

I'm a verbally prolific talker and a very painstaking writer. I spent twenty-five years trying to find a method for bringing more stories to the page. Freewriting. Assigned writing. Writer's groups. Writing outdoors. Carrying a notebook everywhere. Pinning myself to the chair in front of a freshly opened doc for hours.

I had some encouraging response to the stories I finished: publication in New York Press when the brilliant John Strausbaugh was editor; an actor calling me out of the blue for permission to mount a dramatic presentation; a request to write a screenplay (boy, did that not pay off); spending six extraordinary weeks as a MacDowell colonist. And I eventually accumulated enough stories to fill a proper-sized collection.

I'm proud of those stories. I think they are well-written; I think they do something interesting with the language. I even feel that something good is added to the culture whether or not an artist manages go get their work out to a public, so I take satisfaction in that. I self-published them in a volume to give to friends. (And apparently you can buy a copy from Amazon.)

But I'm all out. For more than five years I've kept my brain case open for new seeds, but whatever nut or acorn drops in there, it never sprouts. No meat in the shell. No hungry body to begin accumulating ideas, words, contrasts. I miss that most of all. Nothing was better than living one life and writing another. And so while I credit Patricia, I am still a little envious that her mind remains fertile and her story-culture productive.