Dear Friends, Due to unfortunate considerations of time and cost, Backwards City is no longer a print journal. However, we will maintain our presence on the web that, however meager, we hope you might enjoy.
Do you feel that we would be safer today if you had been president on that day? Well, no one can say that the 9-11 attack wouldn’t have occurred whoever was president.
Really? How about all the warnings? That's a separate question. And it’s almost too easy to say, “I would have heeded the warnings.” In fact, I think I would have, I know I would have. We had several instances when the CIA’s alarm bells went off, and what we did when that happened was, we had emergency meetings and called everybody together and made sure that all systems were go and every agency was hitting on all cylinders, and we made them bring more information, and go into the second and third and fourth level of detail. And made suggestions on how we could respond in a more coordinated, more effective way. It is inconceivable to me that Bush would read a warning as stark and as clear [voice angry now] as the one he received on August 6th of 2001, and, according to some of the new histories, he turned to the briefer and said, “Well, you’ve covered your ass.” And never called a follow up meeting. Never made an inquiry. Never asked a single question. To this day, I don’t understand it. And, I think it’s fair to say that he personally does in fact bear a measure of blame for not doing his job at a time when we really needed him to do his job. And now the Woodward book has this episode that has been confirmed by the record that George Tenet, who was much abused by this administration, went over to the White House for the purpose of calling an emergency meeting and warning as clearly as possible about the extremely dangerous situation with Osama bin Laden, and was brushed off! And I don’t know why—honestly—I mean, I understand how horrible this Congressman Foley situation with the instant messaging is, okay? I understand that. But, why didn’t these kinds of things produce a similar outrage? And you know, I’m even reluctant to talk about it in these terms because it’s so easy for people to hear this or read this as sort of cheap political game-playing. I understand how it could sound that way. [Practically screaming now] But dammit, whatever happened to the concept of accountability for catastrophic failure? This administration has been by far the most incompetent, inept, and with more moral cowardice, and obsequiousness to their wealthy contributors, and obliviousness to the public interest of any administration in modern history, and probably in the entire history of the country!
In the Shadow of the Counterculture of Duke University
For too long the left-wing excuseniks in the so-called mainstream media have given the co-owners of Durham's Regulator Bookshop a free ride. No longer. Let those with ears hear the truth.
Just a reminder that tomorrow's the last day for submissions for BCR #5. If you've got any comics, poetry, art, or prose you'd like considered, email it to us by tomorrow night, or it'll have to wait until February...
Here’s the writer of Ubik, gregariously welcoming into his ramshackle parlor the bigshot Hollywood hipster filmmaker Dancer Handclasp—who has probably come here to rip him off—and Handclasp’s girlfriend, the famous and beautiful actress Lena Finney. The writer of Ubik, in his snuff-stained beard and with his barrel chest stretching the buttons of his paisley shirt and with his cat elusive underfoot—avoiding him ever since scratching the hell out of the speakers—has seen so much come through his door by now, the freaks and cops of various kinds. He’s been both freak and cop himself. Recognizes the fatal confusion in others when they appear before him, and this guy Handclasp is a classic case. He is fey and strong at once, pathetic and menacing, European and totally Californian, a hippie with power, a beggar arriving with something the writer wants: a movie deal. Legitimacy.
He sees it everywhere, legitimacy, an elusive substance the world has chosen to tease him with. He renounces it: You can’t fire me; I quit. You propriety, you legitimacy, you money, you grown-ups. You wives. You mainstream writers. There is no mainstream; he knows it now. And then legitimacy comes calling in another guise, and today it’s Handclasp, brandishing the actress, his trump card. The actress has the writer totally buffaloed. She is so beautiful and all he can do is imagine her not in his room and not in his bed but in his movie. Handclasp can have her in bed. The writer will not tell his secret: He’d give Handclasp the book he wants for free if he would only make it real, make it happen, fix the crack in the world. Put Lena Finney in a movie called Are Androids Dreaming of Me While I Sleep? The book is out of print, anyway.
Do they know who they’re dealing with?
I’m nobody.
I’ve got nothing to sell. I already gave it away, cast my pearls, wasted my treasure. Every confusion etched in stone for all to see, brought down as by Moses or Mercer from the mountaintop. But totally out of print, broke, screwed, fnargled. Famous in France, among the horse lovers. And horse lover, after all, means only Philip.
I’m the greatest nobody you ever heard of, but you’re here telling me what I want to hear: that I’m the greatest, that I know the secret of the world and that makes me important and dangerous. What does that make you?
If you would seek to know everything; then do not seek to know anything. —St. John of the Cross (on why I'm in grad school for comparative literature)
No man is born wise. — Cervantes, Don Quixote
If treacherous talk is constantly in your ears, and unwanted thoughts are constantly in your mind, you can turn these about and use them as whetstones to enhance your practice. If every word that came to your ears was agreeable, and all things in your mind were pleasant, then your whole life would be poisoned and wasted. —The Ts'ai-ken T'an
I stick my fingers into existence—it smells of nothing. —Søren Kierkegaard
OPENING “VILLAGE” SECTION: How about a high-speed montage of the actual difficult, brutal lives of the villagers in Romania—the hours of debilitating toil, their oppression at the hands of their corrupt government, premature loss of teeth, death of infants, etc., etc.—culminating in a panning shot of the village on the morning of the day when they first realize they’ve been had, and that, as far as posterity goes, they will always be remembered, if remembered at all, as savages, rapists, prostitutes, etc., and they stumble out of their little sheds or whatever, looking traumatized? (Would be good if one or two could fall into depression/commit suicide as a result = confirmation of their “subhuman” status? Rich social commentary.)
SOUTHERN DINING SOCIETY SECTION: Do we have footage of the woman Borat identified as unattractive being consoled in her darkened living room later that night by her husband? Particularly good if, all her life, she’s fought the feeling that she was not attractive, and only recently has come to feel pretty, owing to the steady love of her husband, who does, in fact, find her pretty, in part because of her kindness to him and others in their community—and now all those wounds have been reopened! Also, although she is crying, she tries to cry quietly, so as not to alarm the kids. Super!
RODEO NATIONAL ANTHEM SECTION: Would be great if we had a series of shots where we see hundreds of people in the rodeo audience driving home, in their “pickups” or whatever, troubled at the thought that hundreds of other people in the audience continued to cheer even after the “Bush drinking blood” line. We could focus on one particular couple who have had complicated feelings about the war in Iraq from the beginning, even though they (1) live in the South and (2) enjoy rodeo. (Although too unbelievable?) A nice touch might be: This family sees Borat hitchhiking, picks him up, he sits in back seat of car with kids, takes shit in back seat, then pretends to be humping the family dog, and we see, from their reaction, that they really are rednecks after all.
We saw Bobby this afternoon, about the day my good friend Shankar once called the worst in American history, the day Bobby Kennedy was shot.
The last thirty or so minutes of the film are a tour de force, an agonizing wait for Sirhan Sirhan that borders on the exploitative, followed by a stirring montage over one of Kennedy's calls for national unity that I suspect will reduce many to tears. These minutes are so good that if America were a place where thirty-minutes movies were finanically viable, I think the movie would have been just thirty minutes long.
Much of the film feels like padding in comparison. Bobby is heavily influenced by Crash, to its detriment, and goes for precisely the same sort of "character" moments, roughly with the same result.
The movie's other flaw is that it twists itself into contortions to draw parallels between 1968 and the Bush years. Not that such parallels don't exist—but when your movie about the RFK assassination begins with a TV reporter talking about automated voting and hanging chads, you're being too cute by half.
Neither of these flaws is by any stretch of the imagination a reason not to see the movie; after those last thirty minutes, trust me, all is forgiven. Indeed, just about the only reason not to see Bobby is to punish the Weinsteins for signing a four-year exclusivity agreement with Blockbuster. And this is, to be fair, a very good reason -- but you should probably see the movie nonetheless.
It's Black Friday, campers, and that means it's time to start spending money. We here at Backwards City don't endorse Black Friday or spending money, nor do we advocate purchasing your presents from Amazon rather than, say, an independent bookstore. However, if you will be purchasing presents from Amazon, we hope you'll first click-through the banner on the left, which will associate our affliate code with your purchase and give us a delicious cash kickback. It's a 100% pain-free way to support the Backwards City. Thanks! We owe our continued survival to our readers.
Second, the juxtaposition of the two words makes it sound like “faith” and “reason” are parallel and equivalent ways of knowing, and we have to help students navigate between them. But universities are about reason, pure and simple. Faith—believing something without good reasons to do so—has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these. Imagine if we had a requirement for “Astronomy and Astrology” or “Psychology and Parapsychology.” It may be true that more people are knowledgeable about astrology than about astronomy, and it may be true that astrology deserves study as a significant historical and sociological phenomenon. But it would be a terrible mistake to juxtapose it with astronomy, if only for the false appearance of symmetry.
Whenever I get a free day I like to read something far removed from whatever it is I'm studying. Today really shouldn't have been a free day, but it was, and I spent a good chunk of it reading Freakonomics, which you probably heard about in connection with its claim that the legalization of abortion in the '70s lowered crime rates in the '90s. But the book makes many other factual claims, and it's a good read, the sort of book that makes you think that all problems should be solved by people with PhDs in economics. The best section is about the KKK, centered around Stetson Kennedy's successful use of the Superman radio show to humiliate the organization by publicizing its childish rituals and absurd codewords nationwide.
As teaching assistant for a large (700+) class at upenn.edu, I was put in charge of photocopying the midterm. I added "Draw a turkey" to the last page; here are the results. Via MeFi.
I don't usually hype books I haven't read (yet), but I'll make an exception in this case. Everyone needs to read Jillian's book. That's not me talking, that's Publishers Weekly.
* The Amputee’s Guide to Sex Jillian Weise. Soft Skull Press, $14.95 (64p) ISBN 978-1-933368-52-8
In her charged and daring verse debut, Weise artfully interweaves biographical details with meditations on the history of disability and sex, laying bare the complexities of finding sexual and emotional intimacy as an amputee with a prosthetic leg. In three sections, her assured voice masterfully navigates the potential pitfalls of her subject matter—from the risk of self-pity (there is none here) to the difficulties of speaking for her community. In the first section, evidence of this speaker’s disability is hidden, ignored, or the object of curiosity and desire ("Your favorite post-coital pastime/ is nicknaming my scars"); it is also a fiercely guarded possession ("...I caught/ you staring at the railroad tracks/ along my spine, and I thought/ Mine, mine"). Part two borrows impersonal medical language to poetically redress the terminology of pain: "When and how did your pain problem start?... He met me in a dark alley." The third section imagines life and love alongside a character named "Holman." Weise also reproduces the cruelest examples of male fascination, as when the speaker’s grandfather calls her the "prettiest cripple I ever seen." An agile and powerful poet, Weise references medical literature, history and poetry, speaking boldly and compassionately about a little-discussed subject that becomes universal in her careful hands.
Several years ago, Mark Ordesky told us that New Line have rights to make not just The Hobbit but a second "LOTR prequel", covering the events leading up to those depicted in LOTR. Since then, we've always assumed that we would be asked to make The Hobbit and possibly this second film, back to back, as we did the original movies. We assumed that our lawsuit with the studio would come to a natural conclusion and we would then be free to discuss our ideas with the studio, get excited and jump on board. We've assumed that we would possibly get started on development and design next year, whilst filming The Lovely Bones. We even had a meeting planned with MGM executives to talk through our schedule.
However last week, Mark Ordesky called Ken and told him that New Line would no longer be requiring our services on the Hobbit and the LOTR 'prequel'. This was a courtesy call to let us know that the studio was now actively looking to hire another filmmaker for both projects.
This is probably just both sides posturing to gain leverage over the other, but if it's not, it's terrible. Via AICN.
Darwin tops the list with #1 and #2, with Jaimee's personal favorites Vesalius and Einstein at #7 and #8, Dawkins surprisingly low at #9, Oliver Sacks at #18, and Hawking and Diamond both disgracefully honorable mentions only.
Galactus is real! 1. Galactus is coming. 2. He sends heralds that set the sky on fire. 3. These heralds use the POWER COSMIC. 4. Galactus' Worldship is HUGE.
Galactus and other giant space men will come to Earth and eat you! Soon! Your parents can't save you! There's only ONE hope!
Mothers, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Poets
According to BookNet Canada, only 3,241 poetry titles from more than 500 publishers (U.S., Canadian, British et al.) have sold one or more copies in the last 12 months. It's a market "fuelled by love of language rather than financial reward," observes BookNet CEO Michael Tamblyn. "Very few titles [sell] more than 100 copies a year, but that doesn't stop poetry presses from fighting the good fight."
The images above - exclusive to the Wooster site and provided by Banksy - are of Banksy installing four pieces in New York's most prestigious museums - The Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Natural History.
With Connecticut for Lieberman having achieved its victory earlier this month, Orman made his move. He contacted the secretary of the state, learned the new minor party had no registered members, then visited the registrar in Trumbull, where he lives, to switch from a Democrat to a Connecticut for Lieberman-ite.
"Then I went home and called a meeting of all registered Connecticut for Lieberman members to reflect on our party's victory in the U.S. Senate race (and) organize and submit rules to the secretary of the state," Orman said.
'This Is Not a Work of Fiction. The Isle of Flowers Actually Exists. God Does Not Exist.'
We watched Ilha das Flores / Isle of Flowers, Jorge Furtado's thirteen-minute capitalism-critiquing short, in my Marxism and film theory course last week. Turns out it's being streamed online. I just wish I could find it dubbed, rather than subtitled -- I think it's even more striking that way.
"Through a Glass, Darkly: How the Christian Right Is Reimaging U.S. History"
We keep trying to explain away American fundamentalism. Those of us not engaged personally or emotionally in the biggest political and cultural movement of our times -- those on the sidelines of history -- keep trying to come up with theories with which to discredit the evident allure of this punishing yet oddly comforting idea of a deity, this strange god. His invisible hand is everywhere, say His citizen-theologians, caressing and fixing every outcome: Little League games, job searches, test scores, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, the success or failure of terrorist attacks (also known as "signs"), victory or defeat in battle, at the ballot box, in bed. Those unable to feel His soothing touch at moments such as these snort at the notion of a god with the patience or the prurience to monitor every tick and twitch of desire, a supreme being able to make a lion and a lamb cuddle but unable to abide two men kissing. A divine love that speaks through hurricanes. Who would worship such a god? His followers must be dupes, or saps, or fools, their faith illiterate, insane, or misinformed, their strength fleeting, hollow, an aberration. A bump in American history. An unpleasant odor that will soon pass.
We don't like to consider the possibility that they are not newcomers to power but returnees, that the revivals that have been sweeping America with generational regularity since its inception are not flare-ups but the natural temperature of the nation. We can't conceive of the possibility that the dupes, the saps, the fools -- the believers -- have been with us from the very beginning, that their story about what America once was and should be seems to some great portion of the population more compelling, more just, and more beautiful than the perfunctory processes of secular democracy. Thus we are at a loss to account for this recurring American mood.
The trouble with Harper's is that they don't put their stories online. If this month's cover story on American fundamentalism ever goes up, I'll link to it. In the meantime, newsstand or library.
More on that new translation of The Aeneid, from the Boston Globe.
It's not just the retro vogue in sword-and-sandal flicks, from Ridley Scott's "Gladiator" to HBO's "Rome" -- all that costume drama as a kind of makeshift shadow play on the jittery state of the American geopolitical psyche. Academics too have lately been making heavy weather with what the Princeton historian Harold James calls "the imperial analogy." Niall Ferguson, for one, has practically made a career out of promoting that angle, and it's right there in the admonitory title of his 2004 tome, "Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire." James himself has just come out with a new study called "The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire," complete with a cover caricature of George W. Bush decked out as Caesar.
So does a vetting of "The Aeneid" lend credence to these sweeping imperial parallels? Was its author the consummate apologist for empire, or something closer to its brooding voice of conscience? Readers who might be cramming for a handy take-home message are best advised to take a breather. The durable relevance of "The Aeneid" has everything to do with Virgil's profound sense of ambivalence over the wages of war and peace.
Today, of course, is my birthday, which long-time Canavaniacs will know always puts me in the very cheeriest of moods. (2004, 2005)
27. Alas.
From there he traveled in time to 1965. He was forty-one years old, and he was visiting his decrepit mother at Pine Knoll, an old people's home he had put her in only a month before. She had caught pneumonia, and wasn't expected to live. She did live, though, for years after that.
Her voice was nearly gone, so in order to hear her, Billy had to put his ear right next to her papery lips. She evidently had something very important to say.
"How ...?" she began, and she stopped. She was too tired. She hoped that she wouldn't have to say the rest of the sentence, that Billy would finish it for her.
But Billy had no idea what was on her mind. "How what, Mother?" he prompted.
She swallowed hard, shed some tears. Then she gathered energy from all over her ruined body, even from her toes and fingertips. At last she had accumlated enough to whisper this complete sentence:
We also recently watched Word Wars, the Scrabble documentary, which is like the crossword puzzle documentary after a bad marriage and a three-week drunk. It tries to be another happy-go-lucky look at obsessive nerd subculture, but there's a bitter edge here you just don't see in Wordplay or Spellbound.
For a Bond picture, “Casino Royale” is amazingly short on lust. There is a moment when our hero lands in the Bahamas and glances over his shoulder at a couple of flirters in tennis gear, but Craig looks so embarrassed, almost insulted, by such levity that the experiment is never repeated. Bodies, it would seem, exist to be abused, not caressed, and Campbell takes care to incorporate, straight from the novel, a sequence in which Bond is denuded and tortured, with particular attention being paid to his organs of desire. Poor fellow. If Pussy Galore showed up, he’d pour her a saucer of milk.
AFV956382: Man at office birthday party punches co-worker in arm, but really hard, so co-worker looks like he's about to cry. A mood of quiet and intense discomfort descends upon the room.
AFV377745: During elderly uncle's tribute speech at wedding, dentures eject from his mouth, trailing a glistening string of saliva at just the perfect arc so as to impress upon the viewer the terrors of old age and life's crushing vanity.
AFV444871: Infant's eerily steady, unblinking gaze suggests forbidden knowledge of the ancients.
* liberaldocumentaries.google.com: You can see The Power of Nightmares at Google Video, and you should. Via MeFi. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Another story reports that Dharma Arthur, the woman responsible for booking Borat on the show, says she lost her livelihood because of the incident. "I spiraled into depression, and before I could recover, I was released from my contract early. It took me three months to find another job, and now I'm thousands of dollars in debt and struggling to keep my house out of foreclosure. The upsetting thing is that a man who leaves so much harm in his path is lauded as a comic genius."
Even more of a buzzkill, however, is an article from the British press which reveals that the producers used a real Gypsy village (!) to film "Kazakhstan":
When Sacha Baron Cohen wanted a village to represent the impoverished Kazakh home of his character Borat, he found the perfect place in Glod: a remote mountain outpost with no sewerage or running water and where locals eke out meagre livings peddling scrap iron or working patches of land.
But now the villagers of this tiny, close-knit community have angrily accused the comedian of exploiting them, after discovering his new blockbuster film portrays them as a backward group of rapists, abortionists and prostitutes, who happily engage in casual incest.
...
Disabled Nicu Tudorache said: "This is disgusting. They conned us into doing all these things and never told us anything about what was going on. They made us look like primitives, like uncivilised savages. Now they're making millions but have only paid us 15 lei [around £3]."
I thought for sure Kazakhstan was a set, and Tudorache an actor. (I had been curious about whether he was actually disabled.) This really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
This week -- in addition to becoming the very last person in my demographic to see the full run of the Da Ali G Show (it'sgood, for the reasons articulated below), and seeing Wordplay (the crossword puzzle movie, also good, surprisingly so) -- I had the rare privilege of finally reading a book for class that I can recommend in good conscience on the blog: A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist. Airplanes and imperialism, genocide and global thermonuclear war: if you want to know the history of the twentieth century, this is the only book you need.
The trouble with Borat, and the reason the movie is an artistic failure while still being quite entertaining, is simple: its staginess.
Borat is a means to comedy. Borat is not a comedy end in himself.
While Borat's malapropisms and strange behavior are obviously funny, they are in every case funny because these things are happening in the presence of someone who isn't in on the joke. Take away the spontaneity of an interview and the anything-can-happen feeling of contingency and all you're left with is Latka: a funny accent, not a cultural weapon.
The narrative scenes and the various staged encounters do more than waste time, they ruin the things that make Borat more than just a one-note joke. We shouldn't be thinking about whether or not Pamela Anderson is in on it (she was, of course), or trying to separate salaried actors from real people, or enumerating the many ways in which the movie violates its own premise. (#1: They forgot to account for a cameraman. You must always account for the cameraman.) What Borat is good for is shining an absurd light on social mores, taboos, and hypocrisies, and exposing those things about our culture that are kept hidden by social convention. The skits from the TV show do this; about a quarter of the movie does it; the rest of the movie does not.
Boffo box office and many laughs aside, Cohen blew it.
Aiken Republican on the radio 60,000 Northvietnamese troops now infiltrated but over 250,000 South Vietnamese armed men our Enemy — Not Hanoi our enemy Not China our enemy The Viet Cong! McNamara made a “bad guess” “Bad Guess?” chorused the Reporters. Yes, no more than a Bad Guess, in 1962
* The Time Traveler podcast has a 1974 speech by Isaac Asimov on utopian change. (via Bookslut) It's good. But Isaac, say it ain't so:
...As a result I hate literary critics, who have been described to me as remembling, you should excuse the expression, eunuchs in a harem: they can observe, study, and analyze, but they can't do it themselves.
* This week's Mother Jones has a cover story on climate change, as well as a subject near and dear to my heart, high-school debate.
During his time as head of the Ministry of Defence UFO project, Nick Pope was persuaded into believing that other lifeforms may visit Earth and, more specifically, Britain.
"The consequences of getting this one wrong could be huge," he said.
"If you reported a UFO sighting now, I am absolutely sure that you would just get back a standard letter telling you not to worry. ''Frankly we are wide open - if something does not behave like a conventional aircraft now, it will be ignored.
I've barely done anything productive today, I'm so pleased about the one-two punch of the Dems winning Congress and Rumsfield resigning. Of course I know the Democrats will betray the principles they won on at the first opportunity, but for now, at least, American conservativism has taken a huge hit.
A last couple of links about the election, via Chris and Boing Boing, and then I'll shut up about it:
1. Mandatory homosexuality 2. Drug-filled condoms in schools 3. Introduce the new Destruction of Marriage Act 4. Border fence replaced with free shuttle buses 5. Osama Bin Laden to be Secretary of State...
Welcome to Physics C10, equivalent to L&S C70V, or (as I prefer to call it) "Physics for Future Presidents." I am not kidding. After every lecture, you should come away with the feeling that what was just covered is important for every world leader to know. (Except, perhaps, for the material on Relativity, which is just interesting.) Introductory physics lectures from a professor at Berkeley. Here are the podcasts. Via MetaFilter.
Via MeFi, Dave's Long Box has a list speculating about the political affiliations of various superheroes, though he loses points for incorrectly casting Superman as a moderate Republican. He's a vegetarian, he's a member of the hated liberal media, he's personally benefitted from a lax immigration policy, he hates nukes, he's pro-science, he's suspicious of big business and corporate fatcats, and I think most of us will agree that both "truth" and "justice" flow left these days.
The best entry is Batman's.
Batman is a true independent, a man of solid principles and baffling contradictions. This may be because he is mentally ill. Batman has an almost paranoid distrust of government institutions, yet believes in the rule of law. He’s an urban vigilante, yet he’s a proponent of gun control. Batman is anti-death penalty to a fault – how many times has he had to capture the mass-murdering Joker and return him to Arkham Asylum instead of the electric chair? Contradictions be damned. Batman follows his own moral compass, and Batman is always right. When Batman votes, he weighs all the options and chooses the best person for the job, regardless of party affiliation or whether they are actually running for office. In other words, he writes-in BATMAN on every ballot.
Meet the New Boss! Subtly Different from the Old Boss!
With what looks like a 32-seat victory in the House and an apparent one-seat margin in the Senate, barring a switch by Joe "Wish He'd Lost Too" Lieberman, Demoncrats now control the U.S. Congress. It's a new day.
First thing on the agenda needs to be voting reform. Electronic voting machines need to be banned, and attempts to suppress, intimidate, harass, purge, or otherwise disenfranchise the elecorate need to be met with huge jailtime, preferably life imprisonment. It is beyond unacceptable that voter suppression has become an normalized strategy in American politics.
Penalties for voter fraud and ballot-box stuffing should be commensurately increased as well. People need to trust their election system. Right now no one does.
I like vote-by-mail and see no reason why Oregon's system shouldn't be adopted nationwide.
Beyond that, the sky's the limit. Leftist moonbats like me run the country now. I look forward to being able to animal-marry one straight dog and gay-animal-marry two gay dogs in a polygamous marriage ceremony by June -- and having the whole thing covered by welfare.
* What will New York City look like in 100 years? If you answered "like it's underwater," you're right! -- but you probably won't win the "City of the Future" competition.
* Speaking of global warming, the same idiots who used to claim it wasn't real are now saying, fine, it's real, but it won't be all that bad. Adjust your Apocalypsometer accordingly.
* Republicans have been robocalling Democrat voters in the middle of the night to try to decrease turnout. Because they're dirtbags, that's why. (Metafilter bloviates.)
There's something quite exhilarating, but also indescribably excruciating, about watching Grizzly Man, the documentary about deluded environmental activist Timothy Treadwell, who was mauled to death with his girlfriend Amie Huguenard after years of antagonizing the bears of Katmai National Park in a deeply misguided effort to "earn their trust" and "live among them."
You're just not supposed to get that close to bears.
What's amazing is that these two can have a humorous, good-natured conversation with each other, and everyone comes away happy. I don't think that could happen today. Part 1.Part 2. Via MeFi.
Yes, I think religious belief is a scientific belief, in the sense that it makes claims about the universe which are essentially scientific claims. If you believe the universe was created and inhabited by a supreme being, that would be a very different kind of universe from the sort of universe that wasn't created and does not house a creative intelligence. That is a scientific difference. Miracles. If you believe in miracles, that is clearly a scientific claim, and scientific methods would be used to evaluate any miracle that somebody claimed evidence for.
Suppose, hypothetically, that forensic archaeologists, in an unlikely series of events, gained evidence -- perhaps from some discovered DNA -- which showed that Jesus did not really have an earthly father, that he really was born of a virgin. Can you imagine any theologian taking refuge behind Stephen Jay Gould's non-overlapping magisteria and saying, "Nope, DNA evidence is completely irrelevant. Wrong magisterium. Science and religion have nothing to do with each other. They just peacefully coexist." Of course they wouldn't say that. If any such evidence were discovered, the DNA evidence would be trumpeted to the skies.
Watched Why We Fight tonight, the best in the how-did-this-happen genre of Iraq documentary that I've seen. It's loosely organized around Eisenhower's famously prescient "military-industrial complex" farewell address, returning to the speech multiple times over the course of a nauseating sixty-year history of American militarism overseas.
There aren't a lot of surprises here, in terms of facts; instead, the impact comes in seeing everyday people wrestling (and not-wrestling) with the contradiction between the values we claim to stand for and the actions this country actually takes in the world. As a result, it's brutal.
Uncovered is good, too, taking a more focused view on the build-up to war in Iraq -- but if you see only one how-did-this-happen Iraq documentary this fall, make it Why We Fight.
Ricky Gervais has a free Halloween podcast up at the Guardian's Web site...if you're into that sort of thing. Two more free podcasts will follow at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
We saw 
