Negative Outlook?

"Don't touch it, it's evil."

NPR interview with Terry Gilliam.

When I was 10 or 11 I saw Time Bandits and loved it. When I was 15 or 16 I saw Brazil and was blown away. According to Wikipedia:

Robert Hewison, in his book Monty Python: The Case Against, describes the dwarfs [in Time Bandits] as a comment on the Monty Python troupe, with Fidget (the nice one) as Palin, Randall (the self-appointed leader) as John Cleese, Strutter (the acerbic one) as Eric Idle, Og (the quiet one) as Graham Chapman, Wally (the noisy rebel) as Terry Jones and Vermin (the nasty, filth-loving one) as Gilliam himself.

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Isn't it Ironic? Don't you think?*

In Pennsylvania last week, a citizen, burly, crew-cut and trembling with rage, went nose to nose with his baffled senator: "One day God's going to stand before you, and he's going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies up on the Hill. And then you will get your just deserts." He was accusing Arlen Specter of being too kind to President Obama's proposals to make it easier for people to get health insurance.

In Michigan, meanwhile, the indelible image was of the father who wheeled his handicapped adult son up to Rep. John Dingell and bellowed that "under the Obama health-care plan, which you support, this man would be given no care whatsoever." He pressed his case further on Fox News.

In New Hampshire, outside a building where Obama spoke, cameras trained on the pistol strapped to the leg of libertarian William Kostric. He then explained on CNN why the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots."

The above is from Rick Perlstein's piece "In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition: Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage."

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Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger*

We end "beautiful woman month" with Tabrett Bethell who portrays the Mord’Sith Cara on the television series Legend of the Seeker. The show is produced by Sam Raimi who previously had done the Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules shows, as well as the Evil Dead and Spiderman movies. The show is based upon Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth book series.

The Mord’Sith are a cult of elite warrior women who dress in skin-tight leather outfits and have an S&M motif going on. According to Wikipedia:

They were created to defend the master of [the land of] D'Hara, Lord Rahl, from creatures or people with magic. A Mord’Sith has the unique ability to capture others' magic and use it against them.** A Mord’Sith is selected from the gentlest and kindest girls in D'Hara and is trained from a young age on three levels. Each time, she must be "broken." The first breaking is a time during which she is tortured to the point of obedience so strong that she would do absolutely anything her master/mistress tells her, without question or hesitation. This part of the training breaks her of her sense of self and personal desires. During the second breaking, she is forced to watch as her teacher slowly and brutally tortures her mother to death. This is to break her of compassion. The third, and arguably the most difficult, breaking is when she is given the instrument of torture*** and must inflict pain and suffering upon her own father until she finally kills him. When she has completed this task, the Lord Rahl instills in her the magical ability to take the magic of anyone who uses magic against her. Once a magical being uses magic against a Mord-Sith, she can inflict intense pain upon him/her with a thought. He/she has no defense.

The show recently had an episode which explored how Cara was "made." Indeed as a child, Cara was so gentle and kind that when her father took her and her sister fishing, she became incredibly sad and shed a heartbreaking tear when she saw the recently caught fish stuck in her father’s water bucket. Her father saw his daughter's distress and returned the fish to the river. And then the Mord’Sith came, took Cara and made her one of them. From Wikipedia:

When Mistress Denna failed to kill Richard Cypher [aka the Seeker], Cara was personally recruited by the evil ruler Darken Rahl to eliminate the Seeker once for all. But instead of fulfilling her mission, Cara was forced to work with Richard to save herself, which ultimately led to the Seeker fulfilling the prophecy, killing Rahl and ending his reign of tyranny. From the Underworld, Darken Rahl commands the Mord'Sith to dispose of Cara for her role in his demise. They beat her and leave her for dead, after which Richard helps Cara. Deserted by her people and sworn to protect Richard, the heir to the title Lord Rahl, Cara joins the Seeker and a wary Kahlan and Zedd on their new quest. Richard trusts Cara, and believes her unique abilities could prove invaluable in finding the Stone of Tears and defeating the Keeper of the Underworld.

The show's hero Richard is good-natured and believes people can change if given a chance, even Cara. His companions Kahlan and Zedd are more skeptical.

You have to wonder why they need to take the "gentlest and kindest" girls. Maybe they need to have those qualities for Darken Rahl to be able to instill his magic in them. Creepy.
_________________

*unless it breaks you.
**magical jujutsu
***The Agiel. The only weapon Mord'Sith carry is an Agiel, which has the power to inflict unbearable pain, break bones, or kill with only a touch. An Agiel appears simple. It is a plain red leather rod, about a foot long, and about as thick as a finger. It also inflicts pain on the Mord-Sith in charge of the torture. Mord-Sith use the same Agiel that was used on them in their training. Simply holding her Agiel causes the Mord-Sith terrible pain. The power of the Agiel stems from the bond of all D'Harans to the Lord Rahl.

Labels: embarrassing admissions

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Back in the Saddle Again.

The Baffler is back.
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I, For One, Welcome Our New Overlords
(or We'll Make Great Pets)


Especially when they are dressed as sexy minxes. The ABC television series V has ended for the moment but resumes in March. It's a remake of an Eighties miniseries in which alien visitors come bearing gifts and talking of peace. But ultimately they are only interested in planetary imperialism, regime change and taking our natural resources.

In the current series, Party of Five's Scott Wolf plays a George Stephanopoulos-like TV news anchor named Chad. He gives the aliens good PR in exchange for access. And yet he's skeptical. Chad inquires on-air, "Is there such a thing as an ugly Visitor?" Morena Baccarin (above) plays the aliens' maximum leader Anna. Says Baccarin: I am not Obama.

I don't think we're saying Anna is President Obama. But she is the leader of her people, and she is coming down to Earth and offering healthcare, and offering cures for diseases, and things that sort of clean out and give people hope, and there are definite parallels to be drawn and our intentions are to create a show that people relate to. And I think this is something that's been on people's minds, even before Obama... finding hope again, and healthcare, and finding a leader, and someone who can save us from the hole we've gotten ourselves into.

Their plans for invasion include using the regular or Swine Flu vaccine, I forget which. Jonathan Chait argues the show plays into the Teabagger's ideology.

They target the young by enticing them to join an idealistic (but, in reality, sinister) youth group. A few perceptive humans warn of the dangers of hopping on the bandwagon before we know what the bandwagon is really about. The alien leader, Ana, promises to use futuristic technology to heal humans. "You mean universal health care!" gapes a reporter, who, naturally, has been co-opted by the aliens. Anna soothes skeptics by declaring that accepting change can be difficult. A small band of human resistors forms. The lead character is skeptical--what proof do you have she asks, besides some scary thing "you read on the internet." But the seemingly hysterical message from the internet is true! The charismatic new leader is masking her true identity! The death panels are real! Etc., etc.

If this scenerio really happened, I'd probably be gung-ho about the visitors as I'm enthusiastic about Obama. But then again I have always been the one to accept candy from strangers.

An interesting subplot of the show is about a group of alien traitors trying to undermine Anna's plan of domination from within. Will they succeed? Tune in and find out!


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Dean Baker blogs about the housing bubble very well so I'm going to reproduce this post in its entirety.

The WSJ is effectively covering up for the Fed and the economics profession by implying that there was something difficult about recognizing the 70 percent jump in real house prices as a bubble or realizing that its collapse would lead to serious economic damage. The bubble was not difficult to spot for any serious analyst of the economy. The run-up was a sharp divergence from a 100-year long-trend that could not be explained by any change in the fundamentals of the housing market. It also was not accompanied by any notable increase in rents.

It also should have been evident that the bursting of the bubble would devastate the economy. This article wrongly focuses on the financial aspects of the collapse. While this is important for Wall Street, the real aspects are far more important for the economy. The bubble added more than 3 percentage points to GDP in the form of excess housing construction and another 4 percentage points of GDP in the form of excess consumption driven by bubble generated housing wealth.

This demand was absolutely certain to disappear when the bubble burst. The Fed has no mechanism that can readily replace a drop in annual demand equal to 7 percent of GDP or more than $1 trillion. (The downturn was exacerbated by the collapse of a bubble in non-residential real estate which is still in process.)

This is all very simple. None of this requires complex economic analysis, just competent economists.

It is also worth noting that the WSJ refuses to discuss what could be one of the Fed's most important tools against an asset bubble: talk. If the Fed had devoted its enormous research capacities to documenting the existence of a bubble and the likely implications of its bursting, and the Fed chairman used his enormous megaphone to widely disseminate this information at congressional testimonies and other public appearances, it would have almost certainly been sufficient to burst the housing bubble.

While economists question this possibility, since the cost is trivial (talk is cheap), there is no excuse for the Fed not following this route in addition to whatever other measures it may take.

 As George Harrison says, "with every mistake, we must surely be learning." And Ben Bernanke did thoroughly study the Great Depression and based his policy responses on what he had learned. And it worked this time around. Unlike Baker, I think Bernake did pretty well given the circumstances and given the natural inclinations of conventional wisdom. He thought outside the box in other words.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, author of Too Big To Fail, argues that Treasury Secretary Paulson was more the main driver, but I havn't read the book yet.

Baker writes of the popping of the bubble: "The Fed has no mechanism that can readily replace a drop in annual demand equal to 7 percent of GDP or more than $1 trillion." The popping of the bubble also caused the Great Panic as credit markets froze and overleveraged, ginormous financial institutions collapsed. (Seems the so-called Free Market/Insvisible Hand of Capitalism isn't very nimble or resilient, which is Krugman's point about the "efficient-market hypothesis" and freshwater economists.)

Via Ezra Klein, how Washington Mutual failed:

Within two hours of the call, regulators took control of a company with $307 billion in assets and sold it to rival JPMorgan Chase & Co. for $1.9 billion, a fraction of what the New York powerhouse led by Jamie Dimon had offered just months earlier.

With these swift actions, tens of thousands of shareholders and bondholders lost billions of dollars, and Washington Mutual became known as the largest bank failure in U.S. history -- nearly eight times larger than the Federal Deposit Inurance Corp.’s previous record failure, set during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s.

Yet despite the size and significance of this event, much of what happened to WaMu has never been reported.

 There was a lot going on at the time. The housing bubble caused the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, WaMu, AIG, Iceland, etc. Bank of America who was in bad shape just paid back its TARP money even though that leaves it in a weaker position. Via James Kwak at Baseline Scenerio, "From a liquidity perspective, it now has about $20-25 billion ($45 billion minus $19 billion raised from new equity minus a few billion from other asset sales) less cash than it did before paying the money back." Why did they do it? To avoid executive compensation caps. Kwak writes "Update: Ted K. pointed out to me that Wells Fargo, which is generally considered less of a basket case than Bank of America, is not paying back its TARP money yet."

 Obama has been very lucky in some ways (mostly during the campaign like when the financial system imploded) and unlucky in others (once in office he had to deal with all of the messes Bush and the Republicans had left). On the radio I heard Christine Romer describe how she told him that that job market lost only 11,000 jobs this past month and he responded "you mean 110,000?" So, finally there's been a pleasant surprise of good news.
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Ahmed Rashid blogs about Afghanistan and Pakistan at the New York Review of Books.

(via Majikthise)
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Zero-Sum Thinking
(or thinking like an insurance company actuary)


The human species is still relatively unevolved. Our adrenal glands are too big and our frontal lobes are too small. So, when pundits try to stoke tribal thinking and fear and paranoia, as Yglesias and Steve Walt do here, it usually works.

But it’s not as though the United States hasn’t started some big public works projects over the past decade or so; it just hasn’t been doing them here at home. We’ve spent billions constructing military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, and another billion or more on a giant embassy in Baghdad and another one in Pakistan. Needless to say, those "public works" projects are a drain on the U.S. economy rather than a source of additional productivity.

Likewise I guess foreign humanitarian aid is a total waste down the rat hole. Dark skin foreigners will never change. (or maybe they will)

Analysts say the deals on three of the country’s top fields show that Iraq, after an embarrassing start, may be on a path to joining the world’s major oil-producing nations, which could in turn upset the equilibrium in OPEC and increase tensions with the neighboring oil giants Iran and Saudi Arabia. Adding to those strains, development rights to 10 other Iraqi oil fields will be offered to foreign companies at a public auction in Baghdad on Dec. 11.

And then Yglesias writes

It seems I should write my official What I Think About Obama’s Escalation in Afghanistan post. Mostly the whole situation makes me want to sigh. I don’t think the kind of effort that as best I understand it we’re undertaking in Afghanistan meets any kind of plausible cost benefit test.

And yet he offers no cost-benefit analysis, not even a heavily spun - i.e. full of lies and ommissions - one.  The main point is that Walt and Yglesias aren't worried about costs, they're not that conservative. No they're just focused on opposing Republican foreign policy whatever that may entail.

I just don't believe Obama is so cynical that he would surge in Afghanistan without believing it was the right thing to do from a security perspective. Granted he is enough of a realist to formally recognize  fraudulent elections in Iran and Honduras as somehow legit, so as not to upset their newly "elected" governments.

Yesterday Yglesias linked to the even worse Alex Massie. Who links to the even worse right-wing Daniel Larison. Who I won't link to because he doesn't deserve the traffic. Massie opines:

To take but one obvious example: if US foreign policy is "largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims" or freeing them from tyranny, then why, the Muslim Street might reasonably ask, does the US support repressive dictatorships in Egypt and Libya and Saudi Arabia and elsewhere?

Is Massie really that stupid? Libya was for a long time a pariah, but now the US "supports" Libya by lifting sanctions b/c they gave up their nuclear program. Egypt is supported along with Israel, because essentially we are buying them off from killing each other and blowing up the Middle East. Same with Saudi Arabia, one of the worlds largest oil-exporter. Also the Saudis don't talk about wiping Israel from the map on daily basis as Iran does. Seems like Massie prefers Iran to these Arab countries who receive favorable treatment? Or maybe he doesn't like Israel. Or the US. He certainly attempts to ventriloquize the "Muslim Street" in an anti-American fashion.

But basically Yglesias and Massie misquote Tom Friedman and omit some of the column which proves their theses wrong. The main subject of his column was Major Hasan who shot up Fort Hood. Yglesias and Massie don't even mention that.

Hitchens in Slate:

When the throat-slitters and school-burners and woman-stoners come to the villagers of Pakistan and Afghanistan at dead of night, they have one great psychological advantage. "One day, the Americans and the Europeans will go," they say. "But we will always be here." There's some truth in this: Most of the talk in this country is now of an "exit strategy," and for all the good they are doing, most of the other NATO contingents might as well have shipped out already.

Massie, Yglesias, Walt, and Larison want to divide the world up between the Evil US Empire and the rest of the world. But I see the Afghans and Americans as inhabiting the same planet. We are all residents of Earth and the more privileged among us shouldn't leave the less fortunate in the hands of the  thoat-slitters and school-burners and woman-stoners.
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Victoria was my Queen

Slate is publishing some good writers:

Katha Pollitt on Gail Collins and the Secret History of Feminism.

Women needed their husbands' permission to start a business, get a credit card, or even rent an apartment as a separated spouse. In some states, women were barred from serving on juries. (After all, as Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren was advised in a memo from his clerk, letting women serve "may encourage lax performance of their domestic duties.") Marital rape? Legal. Sports for girls? Forget it. That women were the weaker, dumber, more boring sex was a given.This elaborate structure of law and custom had been in place seemingly forever. And yet within a few decades it was shattered so completely that young women today can be forgiven for thinking it sounds like some science-fiction dystopia.

Dana Stevens writing about popular culture:

Sometimes a critic's aesthetic judgment is impossible to extricate from what you might call her cinematic libido. There are movies that bring us a pleasure that's neither definable nor defensible. These used to be called "guilty pleasures," but that phrase seems too judgmental, too pre-Vatican II, for our postmodern era of omnivorous cultural consumption. The distinction between high and low culture, between what we're allowed to enjoy publicly and what we must sneak off to savor in private, has effaced itself to the degree that "guilty pleasures" needs to be replaced by a more morally neutral term. For our purposes here, I'll go with a term that a friend and I coined in college and that I still deploy on occasion: movies we couldn't intellectually defend but still unapologetically loved we called "juicebombs."

Michael Bérubé reminds us of what National Review editor Rich Lowry once wrote about that juicebomb Sarah Palin now that she is back in the news with the publication of her new book and kinky behavior of her family unit.

A very wise TV executive once told me that the key to TV is projecting through the screen. It's one of the keys to the success of, say, a Bill O'Reilly, who comes through the screen and grabs you by the throat. Palin too projects through the screen like crazy. I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.

I've always given Lowry some grudging respect because he'll argue the conservative side of issues with a lawyerly professionalism and is smart enough to see when his side is losing. So it's funny to see him write something like this, especially after dissing the celebrity aspect of Obama.

And though I don't agree with Lowry about Palin, the room did darken and my heart started beating like a hammer when I witnessed Tina Fey do her famous Palin impersonation live on TV. I've always had Fey up on a pedestal, but to see her hit a home run caused - in Lowry's words - starburst neurtinos to shoot out of the boob tube and melt my inner core and cause my tectonic plates to shift. I believe Ray Davies and the Kinks said it best:

Long ago, life was clean
Sex was bad and obscene
And the rich were so mean
Stately homes for the lords
Croquet lawns, village greens
Victoria was my queen
Victoria, Victoria, Victoria, toria

I was born, lucky me
In a land that I love
Though I am poor, I am free
When I grow, I shall fight
For this land, I shall die
Let her sun never set
Victoria, Victoria, Victoria, toria
Victoria, Victoria, Victoria, toria 

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The Dreaded MSM

My favorite music video of the year.


Lindsay Beyerstein writes about the Stupak amendment for Newsweek. Newsweek also publishes Matthew Yglesias's thoughts on the Republicans' chronic cock-blocking.

I would give anything for Gwen Stefani to be my Muse/green goddess.
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