INSOLVENT REPUBLIC OF BLOGISTAN

2012-01-29T21:33:00.000-05:00

GETTING ON THAT LOCAL ISSUES TRAIN: The audience for my blog is already very tiny, and the remaining audience that would be interested in subject matter of this post is even tinier--it has not even been determined if that number is nonzero--but: the Chris Christie administration has come out in favor of the entirety of the UMDNJ Committee report (you can read it here) which contains some sensible recommendations, like dissolving the corrupt UMDNJ institution, and some odd ones, like giving the medical school in New Brunswick to Rutgers (makes sense) but spinning off the rest of the spare parts into a new institution that's, ummm, indistinguishable from UMDNJ (what?) The real headscratcher, though, is the proposal to fold Rutgers-Camden into Rowan University, which would involve a regional, undergraduate focused university with little graduate activity absorbing South Jersey's only public research university, which of course carries the centuries of prestige of the Rutgers name with it. This is, of course, completely illogical. It's being done so the nascent medical school in Camden (which still hasn't admitted anyone to my knowledge) can have the backing of a public research university, which it does need. But this can be done just much more simply with Rutgers maintaining its AAU status and creating a formal research relationship with Rutgers, as in the model proposed by former Camden Dean Margaret Marsh here. Otherwise the proposal destroys Rutgers-Camden to no good purpose I can imagine, though I can imagine some less good ones with no relationship to education or research.

Too long? Didn't read? Just sign this petition opposing the merger, please.

2012-01-18T03:29:00.001-05:00

AND SO, IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE PROTESTS GOING ON ACROSS THE INTERNET, THIS BLOG WILL GO DARK FOR A DAY: Wait....

(Seriously, though, SOPA is terrible and needs to be stopped. Don't let ancient corporations Sonny Bono Act the whole Internet, y'all.)

EDIT: And every other jerk who never updates their blog made the same stupid joke. STOP SOPA, PREVENT REPETITIVE HUMOR.

2012-01-03T23:59:00.000-05:00

RANDOM "WHO COMMENTS ON THE COMMENTATORS?" SORT OF THOUGHT: Glenn Greenwald occupies the same position in the pundit ecosystem than Camille Paglia did back in the late 90s/early 00s. Right? I mean, the Salon thing is obvious--possibly too obvious and also misleadingly obvious--but also the liberalish politics that could not possibly be constrained by the Democratic party. There's just less "porn is art" and more "how can liberals POSSIBLY NOT LIKE a Texan Republican congressman who wants to dismantle Social Security?!?!?" with Glenn.

2011-12-26T19:27:00.000-05:00

PRESS THE DISLIKE BUTTON IF YOU'RE WORKING THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS: Yay me.

I did want to add that I agree with Jim's point here that Ron Paul is pretty much screwed by his newsletters (well, by that and by being a crank. Actually, wasn't "having a newsletter" a prerequisite for crankdom back in the day?) Admitting that Lew Rockwell wrote them makes all of Rockwell's stuff fair game and--oh boy--there's quite a bit of that out there. His "ignore it even though it won't go away" is all he has...unless he wants to, you know, change the game and actually attempt to move past the issue. But he won't risk losing the position he has--leader of a political cult that isn't even at Perot levels of popularity--so he's going to stay right where he belongs, in the minor leagues of career eccentric congressmen.

2011-11-30T20:11:00.000-05:00

YEEEEARRRGH APPLE HATES WOMEN: Remember that one time Amazon searches hated gay people? This is another version of that. Especially when you consider the thoughtless, unreflecting dudeity of Silicon Valley.

Me, I think it's another useless gimmick for the Apple cultists to use to reassure themselves that the objects of their veneration are still holy and righteous without their chief shaman around to bless them anymore. And I've decided talking to the Majel Barrett computer from Next Generation does not make me feel like I'm living in the future to anything like the degree those curly-Q, allegedly-loaded-with-mercury light bulbs do.

2011-11-27T13:40:00.000-05:00

THE BEST FAKE AMAZON REVIEWS: Are the ones you're not expecting:

I'm a clown who likes a 10-12 oz. nip at the spirits every now and again, before each performance, or when I'm alone. I can say that this flask is perfect for me. My other flasks were always getting lost in my comically oversized pants pockets amidst the confetti, balloon animals, and ropes of colored handkerchiefs. It was nearly impossible for me to quickly find and swig from these puny things, not to mention they did almost nothing to satiate my thirst for liquid comedy. I tried just using the bottles my zany sauce was originally packaged in, but quickly found I needed something more discreet when performing before uptight prudish children and the priggish parents who love to scream and yell about their morals. Not to mention glass is breakable. That doesn't combine well with my specialty trick, constant pratfalls and collapsing in heaps. Then I found this 64 oz. paragon of discretion, and my hollow void now has one shining object. I've incorporated my frequent swigs into the act, and the stupid kids are none the wiser. I mean, it's opaque. They don't know what's in there, and I keep getting funnier until I somehow wake up in the park.

This is for a 64 oz. giant flask. I mean, okay, maybe I should expect gag reviews for gag items, but I was SERIOUSLY thinking "wow, think of all the booze you could carry with you!" and I swear I'm not a drunk I JUST NEED TO TAKE THE EDGE OFF and then BAM, the gag review, reminding me that one really shouldn't tote around 64 ounces of bourbon (enough for 32 smallish Manhattans) with them.

2011-11-15T22:10:00.001-05:00

LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE JUST BEGINNING: Apparently Coach K set some of wins record tonight. But I bet at least 245 of those wins were due to refs giving his floor-slapping Coach K white boy-Mini-Me's credit for charges while they were clearly moving their feet but K had spent the previous half screaming at them (the refs, I mean) so they gave in.

Just the most unattractive style of basketball I can think of, three pointers, ref-baiting and floor-slapping. I do not celebrate an achievement based on such dreck; I condemn it; I fart in its general direction.

EDIT: I regret being such a churlish hater. Thanks for getting us that gold medal, though, Coach K. That was the time I did cheer you on.

2011-11-13T23:05:00.001-05:00

AS GOOD AN EXPLANATION FOR THE FRIENDLY'S BANKRUPTCY AS ANY: From out of the mouths of Yelp reviewers:

How does this chain still exist? So fried, so greasy, nothing healthy on the menu and limited options. You are better off swimming in butter and stapling donuts to your ass.

And yet, how is Five Guys a hot chain? They don't even have a turkey option, let alone a veggie patty option, and Friendly's does. Cracker Barrel isn't a hot chain anymore, but they're enduring, and they're not healthy either. But Cracker Barrel does kitsch and Five Guys does great burgers...Friendly's doesn't do any one thing particularly well, except possibly the Fribble, and that isn't enough anymore. (I admit to being partial to at least the idea of Friendly's breakfast, if not always the results.) The Friendly's menu is a wilderness of things that were unambiguously delicious decades ago, and there's too many other options now to make them viable at their current size, which is bigger than it should be relative to, like, Bob Evans or Perkins, is my guess. (EDIT: Wikipedia tells me Perkins has gone bankrupt as well.)

...so basically I like that line from the review about stapling donuts. Good job, Yelper David C.!

2011-11-10T21:50:00.000-05:00

IF I DIDN'T HAVE A QUESTIONABLE SENSE OF HUMOR I WOULDN'T HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR AT ALL: This upload was always going to be TOO SOON:

Via: The Internet.

2011-11-07T19:06:00.000-05:00

"A DEEPLY SELFISH, HALF-CRAZY OLD MAN": Paul Campos on Joe Paterno and the Sandusky scandal. Probably the best blog take (as opposed to the pro media, who may also have blogs) I've seen on this.

2011-10-20T22:56:00.000-04:00

AND TODAY WAS THE DAY I LEARNED HOW TO PRONOUNCE VERNOR VINGE'S NAME CORRECTLY: It's VINGY~!

(Finally read A Fire Upon the Deep, was doing some googling. Surprised there isn't a larger Zones of Thought fanbase...though there would at least be a wiki out there or a message board or something. It's a well-constructed fictional world that you could easily map in your nerdy way, after all.)

2011-09-12T21:44:00.001-04:00

HAPPY DAY AFTER NYPD HATS DAY: Those hats go back in the closet and we remember the NYPD is a fairly awful institution again. Those hats, though, man--totally symbolic of all the office workers who lost their lives, many of whom--I'VE HEARD--were NOT EVEN AMERICANS.

(I complain, but those hats might be the only thing reminding people this is not yet another occasion to SUPPORT THE TROOPS/justify our various excursions and incursions worldwide. Without the hats the memorials are nothing but another set of American flags and then 9/11 becomes Successfully Conflate The Iraq War With Terrorist Attacks Day, otherwise known as Cheney Day.)

(This is as good a place as any to note a local firm is opening a new suit against Saudi Arabia for, you know, causing 9/11.)

(EDIT: Oh, and another great way to celebrate NYPD Hats Day is by racial profiling. "And NYPD Hats Day started off as an excuse to beat up the brown!" "'Tis true, and we took many a lump!" ALL IN GOOD FUN, AMERICA.)

2011-08-23T10:39:00.000-04:00

WHAT WE'RE READING THIS VERY SECOND: Discussion about that Morrison interview where he calls out Millar, Moore and Ware. I'm more sympathetic to Morrison than any of the other three, at least creatively--Moore and Ware are more of a mixed bag than the straight awesome they're usually credited with, and Millar is Millar in the sense that Brett Ratner is Brett Ratner. Morrison isn't perfect either, but I do think he's less cynical than the other three. He also has a more vocal set of detractors than Ware and Moore, I feel like, which isn't particularly fail. (Millar's detractors are everywhere, and this is A Good Thing.)

Al Jazeera's Libya live blog.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry's "Hey Ron Paul Fans: Hope You Know That If America Stopped Being The World's Policeman, America's Economy Would Collapse." In which our position as "benign, global military hegemon" is responsible for our economy remaining, umm, powerful (I wanted to say "awesome" but that probably isn't feasible.) An interesting argument at least.

2011-08-01T13:18:00.000-04:00

FIRST HIGH SPEED RAIL DOLLARS: And now Rick Scott turns down health care dollars. (Via.) TEAMENTUM~! These guys can't possibly think they're doing the will of the electorate, right? I mean Scott is staggeringly unpopular.

By the way, though he was a guy elected as part of the anti-Democrat backlash Chris Christie is not a fan of the taste of Tea. Tea people don't call bigots "crazies." They ignore bigotry since economics supersedes color lines mumble mumble and liberals are the REAL RACISTS, amirite?

2011-07-14T13:07:00.000-04:00

DEPARTMENT OF GOOD, VALID ADVICE FOR A FAIRLY LIMITED AUDIENCE: This piece has been floating around my circles:

If you go to Harvard and then you live in New York, no matter what you do, the fact remains that you will have old college friends who are in the top positions in whatever field of endeavor you’re concerned with. If you’re twenty-five, you’ll know people who are getting their first pieces published in The New Yorker. If you’re forty, you’ll know people who are editors of The New Yorker. You will know people who are affiliated with every level of government. And across the board, just everywhere, you will know some people at the top of everything.
But in Canada, if you went to Harvard, it’s just a weird novelty, a strange fact about you, like that you’re a member of Mensa or you have an extra thumb. There’s no Harvard community here. There are equivalent upper-class communities to some degree, like maybe people who went to Upper Canada College prep school, but it’s not even remotely the same thing. I mean, partly there just aren’t the same heights to aspire to. There’s no equivalent to being the editor of The New Yorker in Canada, or being an American movie producer or anything like that. Partly, the advantages of class aren’t as unevenly distributed in general.
So while going to Harvard constitutes an invitation to join the American upper class, this invitation is pretty useless if you’re living in Canada. I often think about how I was given this invitation—this tremendously valuable thing—and I just kind of threw it away. I’m not sure how I feel about this.

So: if you're a Canadian, and you want to join the American upper class via your Harvard pedigree--don't live in Canada! Good advice for, ummm, two dozen people.

2011-06-29T22:29:00.000-04:00

NOT THAT I AGREE WITH ALL OF THIS: But the idea that Hope Solo's falling out with Greg Ryan back at the last World Cup was a big, watershed moment for American women's soccer a la Chastain's sports bra is an interesting one. I'm also struck by this quote from Solo herself:

"We needed some change (in 2007)," Solo said Saturday in a phone interview from Niketown in New York City. "People like to keep everything so positive -- like we're the girls next door. We like to do everything together, and all that. Why are we sugarcoating? Just because we're teammates doesn't mean we're all best friends. But that's how women's sport have been portrayed. We're not your girls next door. We have opinions, we have arguments."

Because the Hamm-dominated teams were portrayed that way, neatly packaged by Nike as safe for consumption by little girls. And post-Solo the national teams aren't that way anymore, they're edgier, meaner. Definitely more personality-laden. (Remember how great a vector Hamm was for endorsements? Solo talks too much to be much use for that--and it is of course sexist that she can't sell products but, like, Charles Barkley can, who is also a talker/sayer of incorrect things.) And I remember thinking back then, "Wow, we're having a major media dustup involving female athletes complaining about playing time! JUST LIKE THE DUDES!"

Where that post above goes wrong, I think, is when it claims Solo was vilified because she's a woman. I mean, 1. she wasn't universally vilified; I remember there being legit debate over what she said, and of course in hindsight she was right, she should have been there instead of Scurry; and 2. just look at LeBron. All he did is switch teams and have a tv special about it and he's American sports worse than Hitler. Americans are perfectly willing to vilify anyone whose lifestyles we fund via ticket prices and shoe sales, because we PAY THEIR SALARIES GOLDERNIT and we have that right. And I would say even accounting for their relative size of their fames LeBron is getting it much worse than Solo.

2011-06-14T16:09:00.000-04:00

LUCKILY I WAS ALREADY BOYCOTTING THE HUFFINGTON POST: Because it's unreadable and--you know--Arianna Huffington. But if you need to support the actual union-organized boycott, here's why you should. Good discussion in the comments too.

(Radley Balko never followed through on his threat/promise to take down his personal website, so there's still nothing forcing me to go there. And I get that there's no one forcing people to give their effort to Arianna for free, but no one's forcing Arianna to be all SOCIAL JUSTICE! all the time either so it's fair to call her on it. And as Erik Loomis pointed out, it is a way to at least get the bright serious youngsters of the "progressivesphere" (or as Moe Tkacik has termed it, the consensusphere) to at least talk about labor issues sometimes, even if they would never think of themselves as being laborers.)

2011-06-13T16:47:00.000-04:00

BEHOLD! I AM BECOME GEOFF JOHNS, DESTROYER OF WORLDS: Love Sean Witzke's take on Flashpoint and Geoff Johns. A snippet:

So here we are at 2011, which is a fallow period for every edge of comics concerned...[...]...the now-even-more-corporate DC comics decided that they need to make a move, and they decided that Geoff Johns had the right idea – and streamline everything. But instead of just doing what Johns does, which is essentially write his way out of a corner, they’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater and chucking the entire universe. Worse yet – they’ve hired Johns himself to perform the act of destroying the universe he loves so dearly. I believe that he took the job knowing that if he didn’t take it, someone else would. Someone who probably wasn’t going to apply the care he would (whether you or I agree with this, the simple fact is that Johns loves DC comics in a way few do). So Johns took the job, and decided that it was best to tell the story in an alternate world apart from the DCU he loves.

Man, I actually wasn't that convinced that this would really be the last time we'll see the old DCU, but Sean's logic (that streamlining Green Lantern worked, so Warner thinks to itself, in its simplistic corporate hivemind fashion, that streamlining the whole shebang will work even better) is sound, and it's not like DC hasn't pitched previous versions of its multiverse before, never to be seen again (even post-52 we didn't really get the old Earth-2, Earth-X, Earth-S multiverse back, just something that sort of resembled it but without its vitality.)

2011-06-09T19:24:00.000-04:00

THIS IS NEWTINY, MR CHRISTIAN, NEWTINY: Newt's latest presidential campaign was always going to be a clown show, with not even Bachmann levels of support from the rank and file and limited media interest (he's just not offensively dumb enough to get noticed.) Still it's amusing to see the wheels leave en masse off his clowncar this early in the proceedings.

2011-05-16T17:10:00.002-04:00

DEPARTMENT OF ENTERTAINING THREADS ON OTHER PEOPLE'S BLOGS: The LGM thread on DSK--well I laughed. It starts with people thinking Dan Rather is being invoked and just goes up from there.

2011-05-05T20:56:00.000-04:00

DEPARTMENT OF SEWER MANAGEMENT: Did MattY finally dump his comments section? It was one of the blogosphere's more legendary sewers, probably because Matt rarely descended into them.

2011-05-02T23:11:00.000-04:00

AS IF MILLIONS OF WARBLOGGERS SUDDENLY CRIED OUT IN RAPTURE, AND WERE DEFINITELY NOT SILENCED: Yeah, I mean, the modern political blogosphere has its origins in what OBL did, and now that he's dead, does it just go away? Course not! It's too much fun for all concerned. Much like the wars that were started in his name, the former warblogosphere will just keep churning along. One wonders what it would look like now, without a 9/11 to give Instapundit a whole lot of eyeballs right in the beginning. More corporate? Just as annoying but in a different way? Well, who can say. But you go to war with the blogosphere you have, as they say. So so long, OBL, and thanks for all the blogs.

My own personal reaction was something like faint bewilderment at the fact that people were celebrating this. I mean, I tried to recall my immediate post-9/11 "man, would I love to throw Osama off a skyscraper" anger but it was mostly gone. Guess a lot of people were not over it. Or else it was one of those spontaneous things where people happen to be out and the news starts to spread across people's phones and one's natural joy when something bad happens to a bad person gets amplified. I don't begrudge those college kids dancing in front of the White House one bit, they were quite young when 9/11 happened, they've known Osama as our number one boogeyman for most of their self-aware lives. Sure, it's bad form to celebrate anyone's death, but come on. Any New Yorker who wants to celebrate this, go crazy. Ignore the holier-than-thous in the audience. Yeah, the scold society was producing my least favorite reactions last night (not that they don't have a point, but last night I just didn't care to hear about it.)

Of course this is only important if it changes something other than Obama's reelection chances (and I was LOLing at him last night totally owning the operation that killed OBL. "Killing Osama? Yeah, that was my idea. And of course he did it on the 8 year anniversary of MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. He didn't even run against Dubya and he still found a way to posterize him.) Do I still have to take off my shoes at the airport? Are my choices still a groping or the porno scanner? (I'm still on Team Grope. At least then the embarrassment is potentially mutual.) Are we still bombing Afghan weddings? (Are we? Feel like it's been awhile since the last atrocity.) If we're still afraid at home and killing abroad this doesn't mean too much. And I'm still saving up for Amtrak tickets since the flying experience is so awful (they're pricey, but it's either rent a room and pay or do it cheap and sit in a chair for two straight days. I prefer to travel in both style and comfort when I do.)

2011-04-22T14:14:00.000-04:00

DEPT. OF DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT LINES OF THE BLOGWARS: John Cole's war on Sully remains hugely entertaining.

2011-04-14T13:39:00.000-04:00

MORE RECYCLED SUCKER PUNCH CONTENT: In my spare time I post on message boards:

It took me two viewings but I think I loved this movie. My favorite thing since Scott Pilgrim--obviously I love a good action fantasy. But I loved Pilgrim right away; Punch took some time to digest. Pilgrim, I think, was made for me and other receptive fellow nerds in a celebratory way, but Punch is self-reflective--it wants you to doubt your nerdery to some degree. How successful it is at that is obviously a YMMV situation, which explains the really divergent critical reactions. But my point here is that the movie with the girl in the sailor suit with the gun and the sword might be less of a pander than Scott Pilgrim.

Anyway--at the very least it's a really great live action Heavy Metal with a way better vignette-linking setup than that stupid locknar, right? Obviously intermingled with that Snyder's trying to do other things--perspective on his own obsessions, questions about the nerdy male gaze, the limits of fantasy and much of an "escape" the geek fantasy genres really provide, how empowering the action heroine really is (young geek girl reactions seem to view this film favorably, which I don't think Snyder would be opposed to--I don't think he's saying the female action/fantasy heroine is always a male prisoner...just that she is a lot of the time. Similarly--I don't think he's saying we're supposed to hate the action fantasies because Blue is loathsome--he just wants us to think about it), etc. I mean it doesn't hurt for ambition. And as Depton mentioned upthread--it's got heart. I'm really glad it exists and I wish it wasn't getting a fairly thoughtless critical pileon.

Now I think Snyder was going for his version of, like, a seriocomic tone? Not quite out-and-out camp--though that lounge cover of Love Is The Drug that we see bits of in the credits is blatant, joyful camp--but cool camp, detached camp. Which may be more obvious when we get the full version with the dance sequences...I think it would have been totally obvious with his original Ooh Child ending which will probably never get to see since this movie might make back its stated budget, but not more than that. (He said in that Film School Rejects interview he'd finish the original ending if Punch did well, and I don't think its done well enough for that.) But there's enough fun here, just with what we have. That scene with the Mayor rolling up with those glasses and that Queen/hip-hop mashup in the background is ridiculous, in a great way. And, um, Amber's plane! One wing has a propeller, one side is a jet! Vanessa frigging Hudgens firing a machine gun and screaming "TAKE THAT YOU UGLY MOTHERFUCKER!!!" With the -FUCKER cut off. (The PG-13ization of this movie also hurt it a lot, obviously.)

Specific things that annoyed me are Blondie's out-of-nowhere breakdown, and her and Amber's similarly out-of-nowhere deaths, and possibly those two characters in general, which I guess you can partially blame on the actresses (Amber's repeated "WHOA!"'s got on my nerves, but Snyder doesn't have to put them in there either) but they also aren't given nearly as much to do as Cornish and Malone. The breakdown seems to be purely for plot purposes--there's nothing before that to suggest Blondie is the weak link--and the deaths are of the "kill characters to make the bad guy look worse" type, which is always cheap (for me.) I get that he wanted some menace in the fantasies, but yeesh, two executions at once? And of two characters who are paired but I'm never sure why they're a pair, other than "they're the two that aren't sisters." In one of the interviews he mentions the brothel on-screen is less menacing than it's supposed to be (and I don't want to sound like I'm reflexively buying all his excuses for the current state of the film) so maybe before it looked less abrupt. Whatevs! I had a great time. Really curious now about the fuller version we'll get on disc. Right now the credits are teasing us with, like, glimpses of alternate versions of the characters (except Baby? I never notice her in the stage scenes--maybe her "stage" is always the high fantasy scenes) so we'll see how it all feels with those scenes fully integrated into the film.

One random, probably silly thought: the bookishly, scientist-like nerdy Snyder (as opposed to a fast-talking dorky nerd) is our De Palma in waiting. (Ummm, the De Palma who grew up with anime and Heavy Metal instead of Hitchcock. And with a less gutty sexuality. There's sex in a Snyder film but it's 90% mental. Lookm it's a silly thought. But--wait for it...) And Sucker Punch is his Phantom of the Paradise. (BOOYAH.)

2011-04-12T14:13:00.000-04:00

SAINTS PRESERVE ME, I AM STILL THINKING ABOUT SUCKER PUNCH: Thoughts from a second viewing, crossposted from my Tumblr:

Thoughts on a second viewing of Sucker Punch: I think it’s fundamentally about the limits of fantasy. It’s Snyder saying, all those old Heavy Metals and girl action movies and comics and games you loved when you were younger—it’s all right to love them! They’re awesome! But know that there are limits to how far escape can take you. And the root of them is a very male need to control things. I look at the brothel level as “Baby Doll’s” (whoever the lead character was, as I very much subscribe to the theory that all five girls were part of the same mind) literalization of Blue’s pervy, fetishy, can-only-get-turned-on-by-subjugating-womeny consciousness. She keeps trying to escape to the high fantasy level but Blue makes sure she stays rooted in his world, even at the expense of parts of her mind (Rockey, Amber, Blondie, and eventually Baby Doll herself.) I think Snyder intended the end to be a true victory of the main character over Blue, where some part of her gets to escape, but at a cost of the rest of her self.
Now how much mileage you get out of that ending is up to you. If any part of Sucker Punch is misogynist, it’s that it’s a story about woman seeking annihilation, who at least in part embraces partial brain death in the end. In the original version apparently the High Roller has a scene with Baby Doll where he tells her if she gives himself to him willingly, he’ll set her free (which explains Hamm’s “almost like she wanted me to do it” dialogue afterwards—again, it’s a shame this movie was cut apart so much.) Never mind equating lobotomization with sexual penetration here—it’s just not the most feminist thing in the world to have a female character seeking loss of self. Of course, she had to sacrifice herself in terms of the narrative so some part of her could survive. And Sweet Pea obviously chooses to live, and they’re both part of the same mind, so…yeah. Maybe it’s only problematic on a surface level. And of course the surface level of Sucker Punch seems to have stymied the great majority of critics.
A lesser thing I was bothered about in my second viewing was (still) the deaths of Amber and Blondie. The first time I was like “jeez—that was brutal, Snyder!” The second time, I think Snyder was trying to interject some real menace into the brothel level and there just isn’t enough leading up to it to justify two cold-blooded executions out of nowhere. I also think maybe Amber and Blondie were just there to get killed later, so there would be some “real” menace in the movie, which is sort of cheap, especially since they had little in the way of characterization previous in the movie. All I can get out of those two is Amber represents safety or something like it—she’s always removed, piloting or in a giant mech, safely away from the ground level action. Blondie is…just the weak link? The main character’s cowardice or impulsivity? Rocket is her confidence, so when she dies, it’s her confidence going. Baby Doll is her sense of self, so I guess Sweet Pea is her strength and, in the end, her reborn self. But yeah, Chung and Hudgens, the Real World refugee and the High School Musical refugee, needed more to do. Maybe they did in the earlier cuts…they’re both prominent in the musical numbers that were cut but reappear in the credits.
Anyway, yeah, this movie is both the live-action Heavy Metal and a meditation on what your relationship to Heavy Metal and Heavy Metal-like things is, should be, should not be. In Snyder’s opinionz.

Wondering if I'm giving Snyder too much credit for actually thinking about this stuff, some of the other Team Sucker Punch people think it's an unintentionally interesting movie. But listening to Snyder's interviews about the movie, he definitely was trying to play with genre expectations.

2011-04-10T13:31:00.001-04:00

THE ORIGINAL ENDING TO SUCKER PUNCH: Sounds better than what we got...or at least less bleak, or maybe more bleak but in a black humor way:

I’m curious, if you don’t mind talking about it, what was the originally shot and intended ending?
The very first ending I wrote the order was: Babydoll was being lobotomized, she got chained in the basement, Sweet Pea escapes – well, let me back up. There’s a scene you’ll see on the Director’s Cut with Jon Hamm. When Jon Hamm arrives as the High Roller – and we took this scene out because of the MPAA – when that guy punches Babydoll in the face, she wakes up in the High Roller’s suite. He basically makes a deal with her that if she gives herself to him, and willingly and not against her will, then he’ll give her freedom and get [her] out of that place. He’ll make it so that Blue will never touch her and she’ll be free. She’s seduced by that concept, and right when they go to kiss each other, that’s her being lobotomized. When they kiss, it’s her being lobotomized.
The very end of the movie was: you see Sweet Pea steal a dress from a clothesline, then after she’s lobotomized and Blue says, “Do you remember me? Take her downstairs,” and then you see Sweet Pea getting on the bus, then after her getting on the bus, it cuts back to Babydoll in the basement and that whole scene happens of the cops taking him away. When he shines the flashlight on her, she gets up, and the camera dollies in on her and then goes around her head – and you see that she’s on a stage in the theater and she signs “O-o-h Child” at the very end. After that, all the dead girls come out and they sing together, then the curtain closes. That’s the end.
Why was that cut?
We tested it, and people just did not know how to… I don’t know. I thought it was awesome, personally. Maybe there’s a cult version of it that’ll exist that I can put together sometime [Laughs], but for a mass audience, it just played as this super culty, bizarro ending. I love it, personally. I could tell that people just didn’t know how to take it, though.

I hope we get the original ending on the DVD at least...though I don't think we'll be getting the "cult version" anytime soon:

Would you say the Director’s Cut is that fuller, crazier version?
It’s fuller, but it’s not all the way.
What’s missing to make it ‘all the way’?
It doesn’t have the “O-o-h Child” ending.
Why can’t that be put back in?
It’s just money and everything. The effects were never finished. If the movie is successful, I would absolutely go back and do it for sure.

And Sucker Punch is tanking like Scott Pilgrim (which I loved without much reservation, unlike my more ambivalent feelings for Sucker Punch.) But even unfinished, I'd like to see that first ending. The ending we got is sort of faux-hopeful/genuinely hopeful, though it takes the form of a quasi-"happy" stock ending. Yes, both faux and genuine...like the movie itself, which moves on false and sincere tracks throughout, sometimes simultaneously. It's strange and sometimes annoying and fairly bleak overall. The fun action scenes are blunted by the overall knowledge that the girls in their guns and planes and superhero/schoolgirl outfits are just as trapped as the girls in the "brothel" (reviewers keep using that word, but it seems to be more of a burlesque house) and as the girls in the asylum. I don't think Snyder's own feelings about his material are at all clear to him, so he adopted this stance of ironic distance from pretty girls in swords and it leads to the film's undoing. I think he needed to get more personal with it, really own his fetishes like Tarantino does (and asking Snyder to be more like Tarantino is probably an unreasonable demand) but he didn't or couldn't and so we're left with this halfway there interesting mess of a movie. Maybe it was more personal early on and the studio process diluted it. Shame it flopped as bad as it did, just because now we're probably never going to get that bizarro cult version.

EDIT: Forgot the link to this interview:

http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/interview-zack-snyder-on-the-sexuality-and-world-of-sucker-punch.php

2011-03-26T15:53:00.002-04:00

A LATE ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF THE FACT THAT THE LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE IS OVER: Duke lost.

2011-03-16T16:17:00.000-04:00

TSUNAMI RELIEF: If you're looking for a place to donate here's one in Japan: Second Harvest. They're set up to take credit cards with a minimum 1000 JPY donation.

2011-03-08T13:53:00.000-05:00

COMMENTS FOUND ON OTHER PEOPLE'S BLOGS, THE CONTINUING SERIES: Davis X. Machina at Balloon Juice:

Their preferred future is the ‘Winner-take-all” model.
One guy, in a studio, ‘teaching’ all the geometry classes in the country on a network, and 6500 ‘teachers’, provided by Aramark, making $11.50 an hour taking attendance, and doing discipline, and answering the few questions they can actually answer.
Aramark makes a fortune. The one winner makes a fortune. The kids get screwed, and the ‘teachers’ are grateful for the work.

The "they" in "their" being the usual suspects who hate those no-good teachers unions, suckling at the public teat and all that. And the comment also reminds me that in many ways "efficiency" has made people's lives worse...

2011-02-14T14:35:00.000-05:00

ADDENDUM TO PREVIOUS APHORISM: Note that there are countries where writing political fan fiction has, umm, sub-optimal consequences.

2011-02-12T19:08:00.000-05:00

APHORISMS THAT SUDDENLY OCCUR TO ME AND ALSO CAN ONLY BE APPROPRIATELY EXPRESSED IN THIS VENUE: Blogging is political fan fiction.

...am I the first to this one, O Google? YES! (Not googling it without quotes. Can only handle so much disappointment.)

2011-01-21T19:06:00.000-05:00

SO YOU SEE, OBAMA JUST NEEDS TO STOP SCARING THE BUSINESS COMMUNITY: "From time to time I get to meet people in what you would call the Professional Class. Lately I’ve noticed there’s a common critique of President Obama. Are you ready for it? It goes something like “He’s alienating business. No wonder employment is suffering if he’s done a terrible job with including the business community.” I wish I could tell you I say something clever in response, or drop a neat factoid or statistics, but normally I am just concentrating on keeping my head from exploding like in that movie Scanners." --Rortybomb. Good thing Barry's listening now, and he replaced Volcker with the CEO of GE. The Professional Class had no one looking out for them!

Also: credit contraction to small businesses the work of the capital-b Banksters, not local, traditional, non-financial system destroying banking.

2011-01-17T22:52:00.000-05:00

DEPT. OF BOOKMARKING RECIPES FOR FUTURE USE: Oh I would love a plate of suicidally spicy curry tofu right about now.

2011-01-17T01:01:00.002-05:00

DEPT. OF LESS THAN HELPFUL GOOGLE SEARCHES: I thought someone would have tackled in an explicit way the important "hipster vs slacker" question, but no.

2011-01-13T21:57:00.000-05:00

DEPT. OF COMMENTS FOUND ON OTHER BLOGS: I'm not the only one who does that! And so this comment was given wider circulation:

The cherry-picked anecdotes of blue-collar, self made executives used to suggest that entry into the ranks of the ultra-rich is somehow “meritocratic”, despite extensive evidence showing that the relationship between heriditary wealth, education, and socioeconomic status is strengthening; the suggestion that these elites somehow “produce wealth”, despite the clear evidence than in fact most of them do little but extract it; the absolutely laughable assertion that attending elite wank-fests like TED talks or Davos conferences somehow constitutes engagement with serious ideas; the absurdity of claiming that the handful of billionaires with significant philanthropic contributions to their pet causes shows us that the ultra-rich are legitimately attempting to better the condition of their inferiors- I’m amazed this trash got past any editor, anywhere.

This in response to that "Rise of the New Global Elite" article that's been passed around. In answer to that last line--it's The Atlantic, scaring the top half of the middle class--in this case with anecdotes about how it isn't working hard enough--is how it stays in business.

2011-01-01T02:18:00.000-05:00

HEY--HAPPY NEW YEAR: Will start updating around here hopefully in the near future. Or at least do a NaNoWriMo postmortem (SPOILERZ: I won!)

2010-11-27T14:42:00.000-05:00

I'M SURE THIS REFLECTS POORLY ON ME BUT: When I read about the "19 year old Oregon State student arrested for attempted terrorist bombing in Portland" my very first thought it "well I wonder how badly this poor schmuck was entrapped." Which I don't stop thinking when I learn he was carrying a fake bomb the FBI had provided him.

2010-11-15T01:02:00.000-05:00

NANOWRIMO UPDATE AFTER TWO FULL WEEKS: Well over 30,000 words, so I am on pace for a victory. Actually winning my novel, though, may take more than 50,000 words, and another draft to get it to the point where I'd actually show it to somebody. A task that may require more strength than I can summon, though I haven't had a problem yet pumping out 2,000 words on a daily basis. When I have to worry more about the quality of those 2,000 words though, I might encounter problems.

2010-10-31T19:05:00.000-04:00

SO IT'S NOVEMBER: And it's National Novel Writing Month. Gonna give it the ol' incredibly expensive private university try. Follow my progress here. Posting will hopefully be light for awhile.

2010-10-31T17:26:00.000-04:00

QUICK RALLY TO BE IRONIC RECAP: Like most gatherings of crowds of people, you definitely will have a better time following everything on television and the Internet. I don't think they were expected a couple hundred thousand people so we either needed more volume on the speakers or more speakers in general because it was really hard to follow near the back. Quite possibly they could have used some more jumbotrons near the back too, I got caught in this terrible crush between people watching the few jumbotrons they had and people trying to cross the street and it felt like the opening stage of good old fashioned panicky trampling. Luckily sanity triumphed over fear and that did not happen. Missed most of the funny signs. Saw a lady dressed like a pimp whose sign said "It's hard out here for a pimp" on one side and "Pimp my Government" on the other. Also saw GOD HATES TEA. Restaurants blocks away were completely full, I don't think they anticipated the business they got either. People were defiantly not angry, so I guess the Rally worked!

2010-10-29T15:21:00.000-04:00

CONCERNED ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT BUT HATE AL GORE?: Become a climate hawk!

And a third thing: I don’t mean to brag, but I’ve been at some of the cutting edge of ignoring, hand-waving and justifying away tail risk in a manner profitable to the top 0.1% of Americans and that maximized the social costs to everyone else. So I’m also conscious of that move by elites as well.

So you see the dilemma. Severe warming, impossible to reverse once it has happened, with serious tail risks. But my natural reaction is to hate hippies. What can I do? And how can I think of myself?

And then Rortybomb linked to an article introducing climate hawks. And notes that if you have climate hawks, then you have climate doves, who are the Pollyanna-ish faith-in-human-progress types who think if we just keep investing in technology and stuff, things will work out on their own! But now that we have climate hawks they'll be taken seriously by the media because hawks are always serious people who get to go on tv and have the debate revolve around them. Yes, I'm sure this will totally work.

2010-10-28T14:12:00.000-04:00

OBAMA AND THE BLOGGERS: Atrios is big time.

2010-10-27T15:05:00.000-04:00

STEWART MANDEL ON BIG EAST FOOTBALL: Troof:

I've long said the Big East's highs and lows tend to be exacerbated by the league's small size. When West Virginia, Louisville and Rutgers all rose into the top 10 in 2006 and stars like Ray Rice, Pat White, Steve Slaton and Brian Brohm were pushing for the Heisman, we in the media were rightfully trumpeting the conference's rise from the ashes; but if the 12-team SEC ever had three good teams and a bunch of also-rans, we'd be ripping it. Four years later, the entire league is struggling. No Big East team is currently ranked, and that might be the case the rest of the season. Obviously, that would never happen in the Big Ten.

(Mentions how easily Big East coaches are poached.)

It's hard to maintain success with such instability, which means the Big East will inevitably have to make some changes. Some of the schools may need to start investing more heavily in their programs (no small feat in the current economy) to make it enticing for good coaches to stay. But most likely, the league will need to expand. We know the Big East has been discussing just that, with TCU in particular. Even a 10-team league provides greater assurance of having at least a couple of bell cows in any given year to help avoid debacles like this season.

Highs and lows just look worse or better when you're an 8-team league. This is still my go-to board for pointless Internet Big East expansion talk.

2010-10-27T13:22:00.000-04:00

WE CAN REBUILD YOU--SO WHY NOT ENLIST?: Darpa wants better, more responsive prosthetics. Danger Room's had a lot of cutting edge technology updates lately, so if you want to know what our absolutely uncuttable military budget is going towards, check them out. (Not that better prosthetics should be cut, obviously. But maybe we need not squander cash on Johnny 5's lil brudda. Well, actually that's kind of cool too. Since military spending is untouchable it's the easiest way for the government to fund science. Just make up some random military application and you got your grant! And then the military application fails but we still have the science done and it leaks into "private" (heh, indeed) industry and maybe we all get to retire with robot butlers.)

2010-10-26T15:09:00.000-04:00

GOOD THING WE'RE ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN ELENA KAGAN WILL NOT FAVOR CORPORATE INTERESTS: The Roberts court hearts the Chamber of Commerce.

2010-10-26T15:01:00.000-04:00

THE LIMITS OF "A POX ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES" IN ONE PARAGRAPH: DougJ. If I had to pick one reason why I've gradually stopped paying attention to Reason as a whole (not including individual writers that I like), it would be their fidelity to the idea that both sides are just as bad. No no, I lived through the double-Os, I remember the double-Os, and there is definitely a more destructive party, which is halfheartedly opposed by an incompetent party.

2010-10-25T14:40:00.000-04:00

OMAR KHADR'S PLEA DEAL: Daphne Eviatar points out that the former child soldier plead guilty to more crimes than he was charged with. So yay rule of law yet again. This is of course after the judge in the trial ruled his certainly-coerced testimony was admissible; the deck was obviously stacked against him from the beginning. At least he won't have to be in jail much longer, he gets transferred to Canada in a year where his illegal sentencing will be invalid. Seriously though, making an underage criminal confess to things he hasn't been charged with? Even Florida prosecutors wouldn't do that! Though they're probably taking notes, Florida is close to Guantanamo after all...

2010-10-24T14:58:00.000-04:00

JEEZ, JOHN YOO IS RIGHT THERE, THEY COULD HAVE JUST ASKED HIM: Dave Weigel is embedded in a conference in Berkeley hosted by the Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements, dedicated to understanding the Tea Party movement. Often I wonder if the Berkeley higher-ups understand how brand-destructive it is to keep Yoo around. I certainly think "Yoo" first when I think about the place, and the hypocrisy therein, and how ridiculously easy it must be to get tenure in law school provided you went to the right schools, and why didn't anyone tell me that was such an easy path in high school? Stupid guidance counselors, tellin' me I should learn metalwork...(not really.)

Article suggests, by the way, that Dave does quality work when reporting on partisan movements in general, not just rightwing movements. But he said mean things on Journolist once!

2010-10-23T20:52:00.000-04:00

THANK YOU, AUBURN TIGERS: For preventing the embarrassing spectacle of the 2010 incarnation of the LSU Tigers continuing to be a viable candidate for the fake national title game. The Hat even tried his patented "mass confusion after an LSU timeout to try and get the other team to do something stupid" at a 4th and 6 and it didn't work. Ordinarily I'm all for chaos in college football but it's the chaos of established powers going down, not chaos as embodied by Les Miles.

2010-10-22T13:38:00.000-04:00

IT'S THE RATFUCKING, STUPID: Would it really surprise anyone that a Republican activist called Anita Hill a few weeks before the election just to get her name out there and get the usual suckers agitated about ancient culture war bullshit again? Katha Pollitt is just making that obvious point here.

2010-10-21T12:08:00.000-04:00

YOU WOULD THINK NPR WOULD SUPPORT AN IRONIC RALLY: But no, NPR employees banned from the Million Moderate March/Rally To Keep Fear Alive. (Late to this, I know.)

2010-10-20T13:57:00.000-04:00

I'M NOT EXACTLY A SOCCER IN AMERICA CONSPIRACY THEORIST BUT: Every time I see a couple of soccer highlights in those ESPN Top Tens I'm a little bit mystified, especially when they're from Euroleagues which, to my knowledge, ESPN barely covers. They can't even pronounce the team names correctly ("Ajax" does not sound how it looks) but there they are, big soccer shots in the best plays of the day or the week or whatever time period they're covering. Curious. Softening us up for the black helicopters, taking away our native football, making us care about the World Cup, et cetera.

2010-10-19T14:16:00.000-04:00

BLOGISTAN IS BACK BABY: I may even have, like, links and stuff again! But nothing today. I think I may have slept twelve straight hours last night. Vacations really wear you out.

2010-10-16T17:41:00.002-04:00

GONE FISHIN': Be back Tuesday maybe.

2010-10-14T15:41:00.002-04:00

DEPT. OF HISTORICAL SARTORIAL INTERNET MOMENTS: Put This On has discovered Craig Sager.

2010-10-13T13:54:00.000-04:00

THREE LINKS: No time for thinking:

Silly article arguing because there's no undefeated teams left in the NFL in a year with no salary cap, socialism always fails. Mmm-hmm.

People angry the latest Nobel laureate for literature isn't left-wing enough.

Illario Pantano, congressional candidate, fears Chinese radarmen from the moon.

2010-10-12T16:03:00.000-04:00

DEPT. OF MOVIES I HAVEN'T YET SEEN (YET FEEL COMPLETELY QUALIFIED TO POST ABOUT BECAUSE IT'S THE INTERNET): Here's a Pandagon thread where Amanda reacts to people who didn't like her positive review of The Social Network. Hearst didn't have a sled, biopics never tell the whole story, etc. As far as I can tell, though, the problem with The Social Network isn't just that it fictionalizes its subject, it's that it links Zuckerberg's success with his misogyny while omitting his long-time, present-at-the-founding-events-of-Facebook girlfriend, Priscilla Chan. This Priscilla Chan:

"Hey Priscilla, do you want a job at the facebook?" Zuckerberg asked a passing friend. "I'd love a job at facebook," Priscilla Chan '07 responded, offering him a Twizzler.

Look at that! That's adorable. That's a movie moment. Think of Wes Anderson doing this story (and yes, I am thinking of Rushmore here, since it's a similar sort of "young genius" story (not that I think Facebook is a work of genius) and of course because of the races of the couples in that movie.) Why exclude Chan? Why make a Zuckerberg movie about misogyny when--I mean--you can't even argue "well, okay, we left people out, but he was really super misogynist, we're getting the essence of the story correct"? Because he complained about a girl on his Livejournal once? That's absurd, and clearly the work of a person who said ""I've heard of Facebook, in the same way I've heard of a carburetor." This is not a person who understands the way people use the Internet. (This is a person who can't even use Google, apparently.) So this is where Sorkin fairly leaves himself open to criticism: he made a story about bad people and attached real names to those bad people that just isn't fictionalized, it's directly opposite to reality.

(Let's not get into poor Brenda Song doing the "crazy Asian chick" role. London Tipton apparently is more nuanced than her TSN character. And when your Disney channel role is more complex than your Fincher-Sorkin role...yeah.)

2010-10-11T13:08:00.000-04:00

DEPT. OF THINGS AMERICANS ACTUALLY DON'T DO WELL: Toxic sludge versus Hungary: one executive arrested. Oil leak versus Gulf of Mexico: zero executives arrested. Compare and contrast!

2010-10-11T12:57:00.000-04:00

DEPT. OF THINGS AMERICANS ACTUALLY DO WELL: Free speech. Or at least free speech as it relates to religion (qualifier added as I am sure there are some kinds of speech the Europeans are freer about than we are--pornography maybe? I mean, it's definitely not illegal here, but it's easy to legislate out of public spaces.) A veil ban would never be legal in this country. The closest we've come to that is--what was that lady's name who wanted to wear a veil for her driver's license? Ah yes, Sultaana Freeman. Apparently her case is still ongoing (what Wikipedia says, and I can't quite google up the final resolution to her case at the moment.)

2010-10-10T15:14:00.000-04:00

MANKIW'S NOT EVEN TRYING ANYMORE: I'll spare you his actual words and go straight to the K-Drum rebuttal:

Do you see the card he palmed? Basically, the effect of letting the Bush cuts expire is so tiny that the only way to make it noticeable is to compound it over 30 years, which reduces his eventual payout from $2,000 to $1,700. (And even that's probably overstated, since it assumes Mankiw pays all his taxes at their full statutory rate, which virtually no one does.) The rest of the reduction down to $1,000 comes solely from the estate tax. But even on the heroic assumption that you should take this year's zero rate as the baseline for comparison, the estate tax has an exemption of several million dollars. Unless Mankiw leaves his kids a helluva lot more than they need for a down payment on a house, they won't pay a dime of estate tax.

In general estate tax agitating is the most nakedly cynical Republican plank, as--given the income distributions in this country--it gets a whole lot of people to at least vote for something that doesn't affect them at all, if it doesn't get them to vote against their own economic interests.

2010-10-10T15:07:00.000-04:00

ORDINARILY ALABAMA LOSING WOULD BE A FANTASTIC VICTORY FOR TEAM CHAOS: But now we have to deal with the far worse alternative of Ohio State--whose best victory is a win over an ACC team--as number one team in the country. Exhibit A in the "not only do AP voters not watch games, they also don't check if wins were quality wins either" thesis. You know who should be ahead of Ohio State? Nevada, whose best win is at least over a Pac-10 team. But no, Sweater Vest State won a title awhile back, and they have lots of fans, so...yeah, totally number one material.

2010-10-09T16:12:00.000-04:00

GOOFIEST CROSSOVER EVER?: Infestation! IDW's line-wide crossover. What's IDW's line? GI Joe, Transformers, Star Trek, and Ghostbusters. It's also the most instantly-dated crossover ever, as it has all those properties versus--yes--zombies. George Romero, what hath you wrought? At least Abnett and Lanning are writing it, so it'll at least be professional.

2010-10-08T17:09:00.000-04:00

AND SOME DAYS YOU GOT NOTHING: So you go to the recipe box: Kimchi bacon fried rice. Bacon makes everything better! Kimchi makes everything better! So this should be doubly better. Two issues: 1. I have to go to the Korean supermarket miles out of my way to get good kimchi. 2. I'm not allowed to eat much bacon anymore, due to a questionable LDL number. Thus making this will require careful planning.

2010-10-07T20:18:00.000-04:00

ELIZABETH WARREN HAS A POSSE: And some days I like Obama again: Obama "not signing" HR 3808. Warren: "The President is exactly right. It’s important to think through the unintended consequences on consumer protection before we finalize a bill like this." Not that I completely clear on the effects of HR 3808, but nobody else seems to be, and then there's the whole thing of Congressmen staring at each other, saying "Did you vote for this? I didn't vote for this!" And I may be a simple man, but if Warren says it shouldn't be put into law, than dadgummit, it shouldn't be put into law, blast yer ornery hide.

2010-10-06T14:33:00.000-04:00

MOSS TO VIKINGS: Heard people theorize this is basically Belichick conceding that they can't win this season, so they might as well get something for Moss. But did you see that Dolphins game?? Belichick has basically concluded his special teams are unstoppable. Moss was thus superfluous.

2010-10-05T13:21:00.001-04:00

I MEAN LOOK AT THESE GUYS: They probably have every scene from Heat memorized:

No wonder they're shooting people, running guns, and still getting big government contracts.

2010-10-04T18:55:00.000-04:00

ONE MUSTACHE TO UNDERSTAND THEM ALL: Tom Friedman wants a party more responsive to Tom Friedman. Via. I mean, Friedman is fish-in-a-barrel obviously terrible, but I'm glad people are still making the effort with him. Involves phrases like "[t]he phenomenally wealthy New York Times columnist" and sentences like:

According to Friedman, "at least two serious groups"—presumably within his usual plutocrat/technocrat circles—are planning third-party challenges, because it is time for a "superconsensus to do the superhard stuff we must do now."

The smart people are always in charge! They just need a Mustache to be their mediator.

2010-10-04T18:48:00.000-04:00

ONE MORE CFB TIDBIT: Dennis Dodd:

There was bad, bad news for the Broncos on Sunday. They were jumped in both polls by Oregon for No. 3 in the rankings despite having superior accomplishments and super schedule strength to this point. Oregon has played a I-AA (Portland State) and a team that might as well be I-AA (New Mexico). Boise has played two ranked teams, one in the top 10 on the "road" (Virginia Tech at FedEx Field).
For the previous two weeks Boise, at No. 3, had gained on No. 2 Ohio State and pulled away from the No. 4 team. After one week of WAC play -- against admittedly horrible New Mexico State -- the voters have fallen in love with Oregon and are already damning the Broncos for their schedule.

So even though this is the year Boise State was double pinky-swear promised that if they won out, they would get to play in the fake title game, voters are already voting an Oregon team with a lesser resume over them. Yep. Not that the AP Poll contributes to the BCS standings, but the polls that do are usually even more predictable than the AP, so--yeah. Boise gets screwed again.

2010-10-03T15:42:00.000-04:00

THE WEEKEND IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL MEDIA MEMBERS KINDA SORTA WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Well they managed to bounce Texas out of the Top 25, so they at least watched that game. But there's no way Ohio State deserves to be ahead of Oregon, Boise and TCU after a cruddy performance against Illinois, other than, you know, the institutional inertia of CFB media types. I certainly hope they do not keep this "Bama and Team Sweater Vest on a collision course!" narrative for the whole season, because nobody wants to see tOSU lose that crystal football game again.

2010-10-02T15:12:00.000-04:00

BECAUSE WE NEED A LITTLE CORRECTIVE TO THE CONTINUING PORTRAYAL OF DHARUN RAVI AND MOLLY WEI AS HISTORY'S GREATEST MONSTERS: This looks pretty good. A little biased obviously due to the poster's relationship with the accused, but still. People, please, there was no sex tape. And contra what I linked to, there's no evidence that anything was actually livestreamed on iChat.

There is (relatively) decent discussion at this Sepia Mutiny post and at this Gawker post. Approve of what Abhi said to razib here:

That is the central question Razib. If you think he is a sociopath then he becomes an isolated case and all we have to do to fix the problem is hang him. If you think he is not a sociopath, but a very average kid that made a stupid decision (and this is what I think), then that means that the problem will be a lot more difficult to fix and requires all of us to help. Sexting blackmail, Facebook bullying, casual homophobia, all of these things are rampant and many people are working to make progress in changing how kids view the acceptability of each of these problems. I feel "our" energy would be better utilized in education in these areas (especially as related to the South Asian American community) then in being shocked.

But shock is so much easier! Let's git those no good cyberbullies!

2010-10-01T15:01:00.000-04:00

THE STYLE GUIDE FOR REPORTING ON JAPAN, AS ACTUALLY PRACTICED: Our Man provides it:

2. Do not use pictures of Japanese people behaving normally, such as shopping at CostCo, walking around IKEA or eating a hamburger, as this will imply to potential readers that you don't know the real Japan. As everyone knows, the real Japan is only evident in pictures of geisha, sumo wrestlers and toothless grinning old men, or if 19 and a beddable girl, in cosplay gear, or French maid outfit pouting for the camera making peace signs with her other nubile friends. Bonus points if they are in high school uniforms. Other acceptable cover art include blurry shots of commuters, female fashion victims walking on zebra crossings in the rain, or robots/people in multicoloured motorbike helmets.

Print out the whole guide, memorize it, and you too can be a reporter for foreign media in Japan!

2010-10-01T14:57:00.000-04:00

EVEN WITH ALL THE IRONY IN THE WORLD I COULD NOT BUY THIS: National Collector's Mint 10th Anniversary of 9/11 Collector's Coin:

Then, in two separate strikings, the skyline of the Twin Towers and the silhouette of the U.S.S. New York – clad in a total 14 mg .999 pure silver actually recovered from the vaults beneath the ashes of Ground Zero – are inset with a jeweler’s precision, rising up into a 3-dimensional sculpture. The obverse is double dated: 2001-2011. The special reverse features the United States Department of Justice – FBI insignia, along with the mottos: “WE WILL NEVER FORGET” and “JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL.” This unique and unusual piece is minted under exclusive license, and will never be released for circulation.

I guess the FBI insignia is there so we never forget how bad our intelligence services are.

2010-09-30T19:01:00.000-04:00

THE INTERNET REVENGE SQUAD IS FULL OF SHIT, AS USUAL: This "Rutgers freshman commits suicide after he finds out his roommate caught him doing the act on camera" story is driving me up the wall. I mean the media cannot even get basic facts of the case straight. Read this. According to Tyler Clementi himself at no point were his sexual acts broadcast on the Internet. He made sure they weren't. "[M]eanwhile I turned off and unplugged his computer, went crazy looking for other hidden cams....and then had a great time." Look at Dharun Ravi's twitter page. The only thing he witnessed was two dudes making out. That he watched on his friend's computer. And his friend--Molly Wei--well she needs TO BURN IN HELL too apparently, because it was her computer. Because a whole lot of assholes have a righteous cause or something, and facts are superfluous. Even though it's hard to get "bullying" out of the facts of this case, but still, this must be part of the national gay bullying phenomenon! It just has to. Look, it's not like Ravi has nothing to answer for here (Wei seems to have next to nothing to answer for, but still, shitheads gonna hate) but it's impossible to read that Gawker link above there and get to "Dharun Ravi practically pushed Tyler Clementi off that bridge." Unless you're a member of the Internet Revenge Squad, who always get their man, or woman, because on the Internet revenge is a dish served incredibly easily.

2010-09-29T15:01:00.000-04:00

WELL YES, THERE'S A NEW TAIBBI TEA PARTY ARTICLE: And it's fantastic, as it usually is, but I would like to note this undercurrent of Taibbi hate from odd sources, like erstwhile "liberal" twitterers, or people who post in the Balloon Juice comments section. Think it's closely related to Greenwald hatred. He's just not a blue team member, and the true blue people know this and resent him for it.

2010-09-28T14:13:00.000-04:00

WAIT, THIS ISN'T GOING TO MESS UP THE SOCIAL NETWORK'S PERFECT SCORE ON ROTTEN TOMATOES, IS IT?: Jeff Jarvis did not like it, because it's not very accurate at all about the founding of Facebook or Zuckerberg or anything else. Which, for me, is more reassuring, because the idea of a movie that's about the founding of Facebook and how a rich, entitled Harvard kid became more rich and more entitled is not really something I'm interested in. And since the trailers tell me that's what The Social Network is going to be about I'm thinking the trailers are doing the movie a disservice. The trailers are telling me this is the story of Zuck starring Justin Timberlake and Fake Michael Cera and that's not much of a hook, aside from the "directed by David Fincher" part. A movie that owes its existence to some Hollywood producer saying "Facebook? Everybody uses Facebook! We'll make a mint!" is paradoxically difficult to sell, going by all the people dismissing "that Facebook movie." Because--yes! They are right! A Facebook movie does sound dumb! I'd be avoiding it myself if the reviews weren't so positive.

2010-09-27T18:34:00.000-04:00

WHAT WAS THAT ABOUT FAMILY DICTATORSHIPS RARELY LASTING PAST THREE GENERATIONS?: Meet the Dear Leader in waiting:

Jae H. Ku, director of the U.S.-Korea Institute at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, said there was a stark contrast between this transition of power and the one that occurred when Kim Jong Il took command after the 1994 death of his father—“Great Leader” Kim Il Sung, the nation’s founder.
Ku said the “Dear Leader” was “groomed for the job over a good 20 years” and had solidified his power by the time of his father’s death.
“Now we have a person who has been groomed for the job in less than two or three years,” he said of the Dear-Leader-in-Waiting, Kim Jong Un. “It’s amazing—we know so little about this guy. We have so little to work with.”

Title refers to some article I remember reading that said dictatorships like the Kims do not last beyond one or two transfers of power, that I can't google back into existence at the moment. Kim Jong Un is not the guy who got arrested trying to get into Tokyo Disneyland, by the way.

2010-09-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

FORGOT TO POST YESTERDAY TOO: Whatever, it's the weekend. Good to see Texas get crushed. Shame Alabama lost, more BCS teams with unblemished records means less chance for CHAOS!

Oh, and usually the Big East isn't the worst football league. People always think it is, because it's the smallest, but usually there are at least two BCS leagues behind it (the ACC and whatever other league has a bunch of shameful losses to lower division teams.) This year? I mean there are no losses to FCS teams like the ACC, but there are plenty of head to head losses versus the ACC, and a lack of wins over BCS schools in general. It really is the worst BCS conference, and probably sub-Mountain West and WAC as well since there are no Boise or Utah caliber teams.

2010-09-24T15:01:00.000-04:00

HAYEK FORGOT TO TELL ME ABOUT THE DRUG WAR: Conor Friedersdorf's shortcut to serfdom. In Forbes! I forgot they had bought True/Slant--it looks like they didn't change it at all, just slapped their logo on the top of everyone's pages.

2010-09-23T12:55:00.000-04:00

TWO POSTS CONCERNING JAPAN: To make up for my zero posts about Japan yesterday, and my zero posts about anything yesterday:

1. If you're wondering why a Chinese fishing boat is raising Japan-China tensions to an uncomfortably high level, Shisaku has some answers. China has not forgotten the 19th century--probably a good thing in general since they had a lousy 19th century. But not good in this case, where they are remembering the past a little too clearly.

2. D. finds a Japanese equivalent of a Tea Partier. Or a nativist, or a God-and-guns type, or whatever, these cross-cultural "X is the Y of Z" comparisons are never exact. Love D.'s blog, if you've ever been tempted by the "Japan IS JUST SO DIFFERENT" line of thinking he's always there to beat it out of you. Put it this way: suspecting the politicians you don't like are secretly foreigners is not a strictly American phenomenon.

2010-09-21T14:55:00.001-04:00

PROFESSOR HENDERSON'S DAY OFF: Internet retirement, of course, is about as permanent as professional wrestling retirement, and as much of a gimmick, but he has lain down his keyboard. Or fired the person he hired to type things on his keyboard, thanks to that Marxist Obama! But he's not rich though. Everyone he knows has a person to type things into their keyboards. Their jewel-encrusted keyboards made of pure ivory.

Anyway, Henderson deleted his original piece that started all this, but Delong rescued it from the cyberaether. And commented on it. And Felix Salmon, and--John Scalzi?! You know your post has made it when it escapes your little corner of the blogosphere.

EDIT: Though maybe it isn't a gimmick retirement, since the original post was done over the strenuous objections of his wife.

2010-09-20T15:07:00.000-04:00

DEPARTMENT OF UNUSUAL CORPORATE CROSSOVERS: Colonel Sanders guest starring in Phantasy Star Portable 2. Usually it's the video game characters appearing on the limited collector's glasses...

2010-09-19T19:20:00.000-04:00

ARRGH, AND THEN THAR BE SOME DAYS WHEN YE DON'T HAVE TWO POSTS TO SWAB TOGETHER: Thank the ghost of Davy Jone's lockers that those days also happen to be--ARRRR--fictional Internet holidays. Arrrr. Verily. No, wait, that's for International Talk Like An Asgardian Day...

2010-09-18T18:02:00.000-04:00

SHE WAS ON TWENTY-TWO EPISODES OF POLITICALLY INCORRECT?!?: Those poor Media Matters and Think Progress interns are going to be doing mad overtime! Except non-profits don't pay overtime. Well, whatever! The effort will be there for their sub-subsistence wages.

So anyway, she--the one, the only Christine O'Donnell--was on that Bill Maher show quite often. One wonders since she was on so much, and in various other media places as well, during her culture warrior years in the 90s that it won't hold back her campaign that much. This is not somebody running a squeaky clean campaign and somebody finds her college thesis and finds something questionable. No, this is somebody with a huge video trail, and when so much stuff gets leaked at once the overall impact is muted. Like today's OMG SHE DABBLED IN WITCHCRAFT THAT'S HILARIOUS. More or less hilarious than the masturbation stuff? Or thinking God would magically whisk Jewish refugees to safety from the Nazis so she wouldn't have to lie to them? There's just so much there to point and laugh at that perhaps the overall impact is blunted.

Besides: way more attractive than Sarah Palin. Ain't even gonna lie about this. Especially in her S.A.L.T. years.

2010-09-17T18:40:00.000-04:00

YOUR E-MAIL CHAIN FORWARD OF THE DAY: Oh, and happy Yom Kippur:

ACCORDING TO THE JEWISH CALENDAR FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 17,2010 YOM KIPPUR
WILL MARK YEAR 5771

ACCORDING TO THE CHINESE CALENDAR THE YEAR IS 4708

THIS MEAN THE JEWS WENT WITHOUT CHINESE FOOD FOR 1,063 YEARS

Stolen from wlu_lax6 in The Swamp.

2010-09-17T16:31:00.000-04:00

SO IS HAROLD KOH STARTING TO ACT A LITTLE LIKE JOHN YOO?: I'm no legal mind--I'm barely a mind--but: Hmmm.

2010-09-16T13:55:00.000-04:00

THE LATEST IN VIDEOTAPING WHILE NOT BEING A COP: Carlos Miller covers this stuff all the time, but this one looks particularly bad:

It was no surprise to her when she pulled up to the theater and learned that the officer who had detained her son was the same officer who had detained him in March 2009 after he was accused of entering the theater without paying for a ticket.
The same officer who arrested her on wiretapping charges after she videotaped him in a public parking lot of the movie theater.
The same officer who is named in a federal lawsuit she has against the Boynton Beach Police Department.
His name is Robert Kellman.
“He is angry at me for the lawsuit so he’s taking it out on my son,” Ford said. “He is a ticking time bomb.”

Lady gets arrested for photographing cops during her son's initial arrest, which isn't illegal, files lawsuit, son gets arrested as a retaliation. That's a whole lotta abuse of power! Stuff like this is what drives good people to libertarianism..

2010-09-15T18:59:00.000-04:00

WHEN IN DOUBT, LINK TO YVES SMITH: Or Tim Duy posting on her blog:

What it all boils down to is this: There apparently is no motivation for global central banks to stop directing capital inflows at the US in an effort to support mercantilist objectives. If it isn’t China, it will be some other economy. And equally apparent, there is no motivation among US policymakers to address such government directed capital flows. Which will leave politicians falling back on ultimately harmful trade barriers. The absolute inability of US policymakers to seriously address a global financial architecture where a rule of the game is “when in doubt, by Dollars” will ultimately have serious consequences via disruptive adjustment when the system can no longer be maintained, via either external or internal forces.

And to think originally I was just going to post something from this post (actually by Yves):

Big finance has an unlimited credit line with governments around the globe. “Most subsidized industry in the world” is inadequate to describe this relationship. Banks are now in the permanent role of looters, as described in the classic Akerlof/Romer paper. They run highly leveraged operations, extract compensation based on questionable accounting and officially-subsidized risk-taking, and dump their losses on the public at large.
But the subsidies go beyond that. To list only a few examples: we have near zero interest rates, which allow bank to earn risk free profits simply by borrowing short and buying longer-dated Treasuries. We have the IRS refusing to look into violations of REMIC rules, which govern mortgage securitizations. We have massive intervention to prop up real estate prices, with the main objective to shore up banks; any impact on consumers is an afterthought.

Which is disturbing! But it's, umm, known disturbing. This Japan vs China vs us currency manipulation, government-directed dollar flow stuff, it's a bit newer to me, and something that I was looking for more info on. So it goes first!

2010-09-14T12:35:00.000-04:00

AND THE MARCH TO US ALL FLYING TOTALLY NUDE, UNCONSCIOUS, AND HANGING FROM THE CEILING LIKE SLABS OF BEEF CONTINUES: "They’d sit at an angle with no more than 23 inches between their perch and the seat in front of them — a design that could appeal to low-cost airlines that have floated the idea of offering passengers standing-room tickets on short flights." Air travel IN THE FUTURE sort of sucks. Where's my goddam jetpack??? Via Collette Bennett.

2010-09-13T19:12:00.000-04:00

BUT, BUT, SAINT RONALD OF RAY-GUN PROMISED ME IT WOULD TRICKLE DOWN: But it actually doesn't. And it doesn't give the government additional revenue in some silly "a rising tide lifts all boats" way either. Nope, tax cuts for the rich leave the rich in the same state they were before their taxes were cut: rich! How very convenient for them.

2010-09-12T13:47:00.002-04:00

FIORINA WAS JUST PART OF THE GENERAL PATTERN, APPARENTLY: HP's board = total mess. Read! Be appalled! And not just at the board but at the large figures people command for being in charge of fairly terrible companies like HP. There's some talk of reform here:

But when I asked her what could be done about a board like H.P.’s, she lit up. Under the new Dodd-Frank bill, she said, shareholders for the first time will be able to nominate their own candidate for the board. To do so, the nominating shareholders have to hold 3 percent of the stock — for three years.

That was a high bar, but not an impossible one, she believed. She said Calpers — the giant California public pension fund — “and a couple of its buddies could get together” and nominate a director or two.

She added: “It won’t work unless you can leverage extreme shareholder unhappiness. You can’t find a better example of that than at H.P.”

Which is something, I guess, though giant public employee unions would not be my preferred agents to reform corporate boards. Via the invaluable Felix Salmon twitter.

2010-09-11T19:50:00.002-04:00

HAPPY REPUBLICAN THANKSGIVING!: Trademark Jim Henley. Where "never forget" means "always fight."

2010-09-10T20:36:00.002-04:00

THIS PHIL DAVISON THING: Here (just the first link I saw.) People are mentioning Chris Farley's Matt Foley but I think it has more of the purely energetic cadence of a professional wrestling promo. As the blogger in my link suggests, someone told him passion makes a good speech so passion was what he went with. Though at least part of it was heartfelt--he's between jobs and probably really needed that gig. Well, maybe he can parlay Youtube fame into some actual cash, like that Double Rainbow guy. Though considering he didn't even know what Youtube was before this...well let's hope he has good management. And that he doesn't end up on the wingnut dole like his lifelong Republican profile suggests (and he's pretty emotional in his speech, suggesting he might be a true believer.) Any dole is better than no dole, of course.

2010-09-09T15:01:00.002-04:00

LATEST BREAKTHROUGH FROM BLOGISTAN MEMETIC LABS (FORMERLY THE BLOGISTAN GLORIOUS MINISTRY OF INFORMATION): We'll start calling Barack Obama....wait for it....Status (Qu)O! Get it? Quo sounds like O, and Barry is dedicated to not rocking the boat, and...ummm...it's a humorous sort of thing, to say, since...since they sound alike....yeah. Too Easterbrook?

2010-09-08T22:53:00.002-04:00

THINGS NOT TO CUT OUT OF THE JAPANESE BUDGET: Because--hey! they're hurtin' too--but the JET program should be maintained, argues Debito Aridou. True, it completely fails as an English instruction program, but the real goal of the program is cultural exchange and it succeeds at that. A solution to Japan's well-known problem with teaching people the English language should be sought elsewhere, goes the argument.

2010-09-08T22:48:00.002-04:00

RETAIL INVESTORS CONTINUE TO FLEE THE STOCK MARKET: Zero Hedge. I'm pretty sure "retail" means what I think it means, reg'lar old investors in mutual funds and such, not investment banks and their employees. Just in general I am never quite sure how to take Zero Hedge. All the gold stuff seems to be the purview of cranks. And yet just because one is a crank doesn't mean there isn't an oligarchy dedicated to looting the middle class before it seals itself away in its guarded compounds.

2010-09-07T14:52:00.002-04:00

LOOK, I HATE MURDOCH AS MUCH AS THE NEXT PERSON WHO HATES THE REPUBLICAN PARTY: But this "Murdoch is in business with North Korea!" thing is weak weakass tea. A Fox unit publishing crappy mobile phone games--and only two crappy movie tie-in games, so those are like the worst possible type of games ever, mobile games and movie tie-in games both being on the low end of gaming quality--that were developed in the DPRK is barely greater than nothing. Though I guess it's all right in a "turnabout is fair play" sense. But not in a "being as bad as the villain is bringing us down to the villain's level!" sense.

2010-09-06T21:07:00.002-04:00

WELL--HAPPY LABOR DAY: A holiday when you're supposed to enjoy yourself!

The first-ever Labor Day took place on September 5, 1882. It was dedicated to honoring the efforts of America's working class--and it was founded specifically to provide recreation and amusement to them. Isn't it good to know that the government acknowledges your hard work?

Yes! No supernatural beings! No wars to enshrine! Not even any genocide to feel bad about if you start to wonder who was giving thanks for what. Hope you didn't have to work, whoever you are. Though I know some of you did and that's a darn shame. The government probably hates you.

2010-09-05T15:41:00.002-04:00

ANOTHER ENTRY IN THE "WORTHWHILE COMMENTS FOUND IN OTHER PEOPLE'S BLOGS" DEPARTMENT: And possibly the first entry in the "What Liberals Actually Believe versus Caricatures of What Liberals Believe" Department? Who knows! I post lots of stuff. But surely this is among the first entries in the latter Department.

Anyway Erik Kain wrote something, and Larison responded, and Larison is always worth reading. But then the commenters get talking about what liberals actually believe, and there's some neat stuff there. Here's Spiffy McBang:

More over, lefties today nearly always show awareness of the fact that the theory of government intervention to make lives better and the practical application do not match up, or even close to it. This seems to be what a lot of people look at when they scoff at liberal thinking- aspects of old-school liberalism like the beer regulation Kain wrote about not too long ago that made no sense at all. But the idea of government knowing what’s best is definitely not part of current lefty theory; you don’t read anything like that even from people like Digby or Glenn Greenwald, and you are more likely to see government bashing from them over issues like privacy and war than anything positive.

And Pacific moderate:

Indeed the notion that people on the left are automatically enamored of “ever-expanding government” is a clichéd accusation of right-wing bloggers, and unworthy of someone of Daniel’s intellect and temperament. In fact, my impression of plenty on the left is that they’re particularly suspicious of governmental intervention and control over individuals. Free speech, opposition to censorship, opposition to drug laws, etc., are pretty common themes on the left. Where I think liberals differ from at least movement conservatives is that the former dislikes regulation of individual people but feels that GROUPS of people require regulation (since the propensity for human evil is mainly an issue when they get together in the form of businesses, labor unions, religious groups, militaries, governments, etc.)

And Jim Kakalios:

I think your point, Mr. McBang, regarding liberalism distrusting corporations more than they loooooove big government is exactly right. The false choice opponents of HCR presented was between you, your family and your doctor versus the government making health care decisions. In reality, it is between you, your family and your doctor versus the insurance corporations. My sister in law has dealt with a husband’s cancer, and daughter’s diabetes and another daughter’s need for multiple serious surgeries. The time she has spent arguing with insurance companies, to get them to provide services that they agreed to and that they were paid for – well, she could have used those manhours to build a space elevator to the moon. It is hard to argue that the present system represents the finest of the free market, or that it would change in the basence of major government intervention. The completely rational (in my opinion) lack of trust in the behavior of corporations led many to argue for a single-payer system.

A lot of this resembles my own "liberal" drift. It's not that I'm suddenly OMG I HEART STATISM, it's that I distrust corporate power more than government power, and I would seem to have good reason to feel that way, both post-financial crisis and post healthcare "reform."

2010-09-04T13:54:00.002-04:00

AH, THAT SUBTLE NYT SENSE OF HUMOR: Funning us with article titles: "On Economy, Democrats Face a Lack of Unity." There are very few things that couldn't be substituted for the word "economy" in that headline...

2010-09-03T18:25:00.002-04:00

IF I EVER I AM TEMPTED BY NOSTALGIA FOR THE DUBYA YEARS: And start to think "shoot, he was an amiable doofus, right? It's not his fault he was a cretin" and really, if you just look at him as a comic figure he'll become tolerable, I hope I remember this and the fact that this is on him. And on us too.

Eventually, he found the police report of Muhammad’s death.

Dated July 3, 2005, it read: “We discovered 11 unidentified bodies, their hands bound from behind, their eyes blindfolded and their mouths gagged. The bodies bore signs of torture.”

“All of us were victims,” Officer Hassan told Hamid, in an attempt at sympathy. “Who was the exception? No one was. Not the martyrs, not the policemen, no one.”

“If they just shot them, O.K.,” Hamid said. “But they beat them, tortured them and then they burned them. Why? And those guys” — the politicians, he meant — “ are just watching.”

“Power and positions, that’s all they’re worried about,” Officer Hassan said.

“Let me be honest,” Hamid said, flashing rare anger at no one in particular. “Just to tell the truth. It would have been better if we had stayed under Saddam Hussein.”

The policeman shrugged and stayed silent.

Via Eric Martin.