This Atlantic interview with historian Niall Ferguson is excellent. Well, I obviously think that, otherwise I wouldn’t have linked to it.

It is the habitual fantasy of many Americans that if the U.S. would just stop intervening abroad everybody in the world would enact the lyrics of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” History suggests otherwise.

For years now, Christopher Hitchens’ writing on and from the Middle East has displayed a humanity lacking in many other commentators. While skimming his enjoyably vitriolic Reagan obit, I noticed this interesting and persuasive defense of Ahmed Chalabi.

I don’t know the specifics of the Chalabi case – which is to say I know many mutually contradictory things – but I’m generally well-disposed towards the guy because he has a mathematics Ph.D. Liberal, relatively secular, a democrat – all of these are a good start, but a math Ph.D. really wins me over.

This is also worth a look during the afternoon foreign policy break.

From Scenic Delaware (actually a lot more pretty and scenic than I expected it to be, go figure), some sort of blogging on my part will commence later today after I take a final. Also, never fly America West.

The Gipper gave up his ghost three hours ago.

My first thought upon hearing the news was “Well, better that than Red!”

Insensitive, or a fitting epitaph? I report, you decide.

UPDATE BY TIM: Tacitus has a most fitting obituary.

Here’s some just plain bad reporting from CNN:

Bill Clinton
Few vice-presidential possibilities boast the accomplished resume — or political baggage — of former President Bill Clinton. Clinton studied at Georgetown, Yale and Oxford (as a Rhodes scholar) before returning to his home state of Arkansas. He taught at the University of Arkansas’ law school for three years before, at 30, being elected the state’s attorney general. Clinton later served six terms as Arkansas’ governor (he won in 1978, lost a 1980 race, then was re-elected two years later), before defeating incumbent George H.W. Bush to become U.S. president, starting in January 1993. While federal law prohibits a person from seeking a third presidential term, the Constitution does not specify whether or not a former commander in chief can become vice president.

The problem with the last sentence is that, as far as I know and I could be wrong, the VP must be legally allowed to hold the office of President. Meaning that Clinton, who can only hold two more years as President, could not be VP. Am I remembering correctly? I’m kinda drunk and don’t want to bother trying to look this stuff up.

As I was pretty bored this evening, I took my digicam out and tried to get some pictures of the moon and things. As my camera is only 2.0 megapixels and doesn’t have as many nifty features as I might like, only about 30 of the 50 or so that I took turned out at all. Further, only the handfull contained below turned out well enough to share. Enjoy! That is a command, plebians!

Apparently I’m Cleveland. I demand a recount.

An epoch is drawing to a close. Soon we will no longer have Aaron Shakra’s biweekly attempts to alert us to the insidious evils of a media-dominated culture through the medium of a column in the newspaper. He’s leaving us with a treat, though: a meeting of minds (given his incongruous affection for Star Trek, I should probably say “melding”) with local nutjob, green anarchist, and professional babysitter John Zerzan. Interview here.

The questions are mostly softballs (“Do you feel that art in popular culture is a tool of social control?”) but we learn that Zerzan’s principal objection is, in fact, to symbolic representation of all types:

It’s representation, most basically. That urge or desire to represent reality. Art is just part of the symbolic culture, symbolic communication.

So: speech, gestures, sketches on cocktail napkins, the Mona Lisa, and Green Anarchy magazine. Best to cast a wide net, I suppose. And what’s the alternative?

For example, one thing that really struck me, is some of the anthropological data, for example that we were cooking with fire almost 2 million years ago, and doing other interesting things. Another recent thing is, they’ve determined that humans were able to navigate on the open sea 800,000 years ago. And yet, art is very recent. Art is only like 30,000 years old. So people were obviously intelligent for a couple of million years, and they didn’t seem to need art.

Always good for a laugh, that guy. And he’s right: why bother doing anything? Art, communication, technology, anything to improve the lot of his fellow man strikes Zerzan as a further estrangement from our natural state of poverty, disease and squalor – a state in which people evidently once thrived. Or, to put it another way: “Apparently, people were satisfied with just digging nature…”

The philosophy of Zerzan (and Shakra, for that matter) is a weird kind of solipsism in which society’s perceived indifference to them must be cast in terms of being “cut off from nature” for maximum rhetorical heft. As you can tell, I’m a big fan.

You may have seen that earlier this week prof/blogger Dan Drezner posted the long-awaited results of a survey he conducted, asking mainstream media-types which blogs they read. It’s all very interesting, if not hugely surprising.

But what you might not know is that somebody at one of the Drezner-designated “elite” publications mentioned the Oregon Commentator as one of their favorite blogs. It’s a fact! If you like it raw, check out the data tables and scroll down to line 32. (Warning: Excel document.)

The only real positive consequence of my recent and on-going bout with horrible insomnia has been a few hours for some actual pleasure reading. To that end, I’ve just finished a re-read of Neal Stephenson’s The Big U. Written in 1984, it’s a wonderfully sardonic send-up of the American collegiate experience. A few notable excerpts:

And This:

Eventually they came to a long hall lined with the offices of various student activities groups, dark and astonishingly still after their riotous trip. Here they slowed and relaxed, then began to file down the corridor. Soon they smelled sweet incense, and began to make out the distant sounds of chanting and the tingle of bells. Moving along quietly, they paused by each door: the Outing Club; the Yoga, Solar Power and Multiple Orgasm Support Group; The Nonsocietal Assemblage of Noncoercively Systamatized Libertarian Individuals; Let’s Understand Animals, Not Torture Them; the men’s room, the punk fraternity Zappa Krappa Claw; the Folk Macrame Explorers. As they approached the Women’s Center, the sweet odors grew stronger , the soprano-alto chant louder.[emphasis mine]

Lastly, there’s this surprisingly prescient (presentient, anyone?) exchange between the narrator and some journalists…keep in mind this is taking place during a civil war that has broken out at American Megaversity:

The student shrugged. “What do you mean? We protect our crews and equipment. All the barbarians are afraid of us.”

“Right, obviously,” I said. “But I noticed recently that a lot of people around here are starving, being raped, murdered–you know, a lot of bum-out stuff. Do those guards try to help out? You can spare a few.”

“Well, I don’t know,” he said uncomfortably. “That’s kind of network-level policy. It goes against the agreement. We can go anywhere as long as we don’t interfere. If we interfere, no agreement.”

“But if you’ve already negotiated an agreement, can’t you do more? Get some doctors into the building, maybe?”

“No way man. No fucking way. We journalists have ethics.”
Sure, The Big U is no Cryptonomicon, but it’s a great read none-the-less. Get out there and get going, especially if you’re like me and don’t sleep. Ever.

Heh.

Not sure if we’ve had cause to link to it before, but the British group-blog Harry’s Place has become a tasty and nutritious part of my daily reading on Iraq.

This may be because, for some reason, I can’t get enough of political arguments that end up with beat-downs like this:

You see this is a democratic socialist blog.

Today the headquarters of a democratic socialist party in Iraq was bombed and then you come on here comparing the killers with the anti-Nazi resistance.

Like I said – you are simply on the other side and I have no interest in discussing this or any other matter with you.

…but even without the comment section, it’s thoroughly worthwhile.

Dan is famous!

Okay, okay, that’s a severe exaggeration, but I do have more bad reporting, this time from CBS:

Now, I’m not going to argue that the dealings by certain well-known energy firms during the “California Energy Crisis” were wholly ethical; but it seems to me unfair to call a badly run, poorly planned attempt to undo decades of government market interference a “disasterous experiment.” The implication is that the market was at fault rather than a series of bad governmental decisions and some playing by naughty and slightly unscrupulous folks.

Then there’s this little teaser: Tonight’s Evening News will have more of the shocking Enron tapes, plus the outraged reaction from Capitol Hill. Tabloid journalism at its best, that. Take out the adjectives folks, or don’t they teach that in your precious Journalism schools anymore?

Via Asymmetrical Information It appears that some total jerkoff is suing Atkins for making him an unhealthy joker with clogged arteries. Wait just a goddamn minute, this idiot weighed 148 and decided to try to lose weight by dieting? He didn’t think that, gee, maybe eating nothing but fats and proteins would have a negative effect on his health in total? Go for a goddamn run or a bike ride or something you fool! Lucky he wasn’t on the damn diet for long enough to cause renal failure or shut down his pancreas via Type II Diabetes. What a maroon, as they say.