Who Is IOZ?

Deny, Disparage

2009-11-04T13:25:00.003-05:00

What you see in the continuing extension of sovereign immunity to all official and semi-official actors and acts is a reversion to the historic mean in civilizational history. If we are frank, then we can admit that the notion of sovereignty residing in and emenating from the people--being merely embodied by their duly elected, representative government--was out the window, along with the 9th and 10th amendments, about ten minutes before those two long-abandoned adages were even promulgated. Sovereignty resides in the sovereign and in his duly deputized court. Whether you are Mahar Arar, a G-20 protester in Pittsburgh, or a man wrongly imprisoned for decades, you are forbidden from seeking recourse either in the criminal or civil courts. It is not simply that high barriers have been erected so as to prevent the use of lawsuits as political cudgels, but that the acts of government have been placed in a separate category of law, a moral, ethical, and legal universe wholly autonomous and independent of the laws affecting citizen-subjects. Nixon famously suggested (and all subsequent presidents have faithfully ratified) that Presidential fiat makes any action legal. In retrospect this seems an antiquated and almost naively limited claim. In fact, any action taken by the government is by presumption legal unless some higher government official decides otherwise--that is to say, the presumption of legality requires no positive decree on the part of the ruler; it is implicit in all official acts.

Now Libertarians and Constitutionalists and their cute little forest-creature friends will tell you that this traduces the foundational principles of limited government, but to my mind that is rather like saying that the lion's carnivorous nature belies his pacific, Edenic veganism, i.e., it appeals to (all together now!) a past that did not exist. There are practical limitations of government power that change as economies and technologies mature and evolve, but the notion that sacrosanct social compacts govern government is simply a fallacy.

Constitutional Rights

2009-11-04T09:29:00.003-05:00

The Council Bluffs prosecution team, while still maintaining that Harrington and McGhee are guilty, contends that even if the men were in fact framed, prosecutors, under established Supreme Court precedent, have total immunity from being sued.

The Supreme Court has indeed said that prosecutors are immune from suit for anything they do at trial. But in this case, Harrington and McGhee maintain that before anyone being charged, prosecutors gathered evidence alongside police, interviewed witnesses and knew the testimony they were assembling was false.

The prosecutors counter that there is "no freestanding constitutional right not to be framed." Stephen Sanders, the lawyer for the prosecutors, will tell the Supreme Court on Wednesday that there is no way to separate evidence gathered before trial from the trial itself. Even if a prosecutor files charges against a person knowing that there is no evidence of his guilt, says Sanders, "that's an absolutely immunized activity."

-Morning Edition

I like it. "No freestanding constitutional right not to be framed." Well, there is no freestanding constitutional right not to be raped, chopped into a million pieces, fed to the goldfish which are subsequently flushed down the toilet, and yet . . .

Immunizing prosecutors from lawsuits is a far more drastic and intervenionary step than simply heading off most suits of this type by offering modest restitution and recompense for time served after an illegitimate conviction. Why should families be paid millions of dollars in estimated future compensation because one member died in a terrorist attack when families and individuals cannot be compensated to the tune of forgone past income for the time they spent wrongfully imprisoned?

Dumbocracy

2009-11-03T12:08:00.003-05:00

As benedictory aphorisms go, "every vote counts" is right up there with your mother telling you that everyone is special and your coach reminding you that it doesn't matter if you win or lose, it's how you play the game. Obviously some poeople are more special than others, and no one remembers the sportsmanlike conduct of Dallas in Superbowl X. The conceit of representative democracy, particularly when linked to state capitalism, is that procedural participation makes citizens into shareholders. There is a certain truth to this. But just as getting a yearly proxy statement and invitation to the annual meeting does not confer upon each small investor even marginal influence on the direction of GE, or whichever, nor yet does the franchise offer citizens much more than a semiannual opportunity to pretend that they matter, should they so desire. And, hell, that is part of the bargain. The small investor becomes a shareholder in order to gain benefit even though he holds no particular authority, has no say, exerts no influence, and bears no special responsibility. He's just along for the ride, but for the PR purposes of our so-called free markets, we are willing to entertain the ritual but un-literal truth that each shareholder is an "owner." Meanwhile, most shareholders haven't even got so direct a link as the independent investor, but simply gain by membership in some larger, institutional investment pool, some mutual fund or pension plan or what have you. Our democracy tracks similar lines via voters and affinity groups, and so long as the percieved value of our tiny shares is on the increase, we are content; when it decreases, we are not; but at no point do we have any say in the decisions made by those who actually own the joint.

The Great Patriotic War

2009-11-03T09:16:00.002-05:00

Championship Insane Person, Masha Lipman, warns us that . . . well, something! Look, it turns out that the figure of Joseph Stalin occupies an ambiguous place in the Russian psyche. On the one hand, he was one of history's great monsters. On the other hand, he preserved the Russian nation and destroyed Hitler. History is in fact full of such figures, both monstrous and grand. Augustus was cruel to the point of sociopathy, and yet he carved the West's most enduring political entity. Chiang Kai-Shek was a monster too, but we santify his movement in order to anathematize Chairman Mao. You know the drill. History might be more telgenic if it were composed of a panel of judges with little score-cards, like Olympic diving. Alas, it is not.

There are many actual trends toward authoritarianism and revanchism in Russia today that might worry a truly sympathetic observer, but the replacement of a few lines of lousy patriotic poetry in an historical architectural restoration, for Lenin's sake, is just lazy propoganda for ignorant Americans. According to Lipman

Russians cling to the image of Stalin as the embodiment of the great state, and he is particularly inseparable from the triumph of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany. The implication is that individuals may have been cowed, and that the ferocious state treated them mercilessly, but the state was the vehicle that inspired Russia's victory in world War II, its greatest achievement of the 20th century.

I guess this is supposed to be tendentious somehow? It is, of course, what happened. Individuals were cowed, from dragooned peasants right up through the highest ranks of the the Red Army. The ferocious state treated them mercilessly, and was the vehicle that inspired Russia's victory in World War II. The Russian victory in World War II was its greatest achievement in the 20th Century. Is this even debatable? How about a little pause for historical irony, in that Russia sacrificed tens of millions of its own people to defeat Nazi Germany, so that six decades later, the editorial page of the Washington Post could perpetually agitate for imperial conflicts under the banner of defeating all those little Hitlers before they become like the big Hitler that America did not defeat in the first place. Zing.

He's Just Not That Into You

2009-11-02T09:41:00.003-05:00

Apparently, the Iranian "green" opposition is a nationalist movement that does not desire to replace the existing regime, which it opposes, with a capitulatory puppet government toeing the America-dictated pro-Israel line as it gleefully forgoes its rights under the NPT, because, as the saying goes, "the world cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran." Astonishing. Astounding. What is Jackson Dielh supposed to think?

The persistence of the American belief that all things, everywhere, always constitute referenda on America is really something.

She's No Lady, She's My Wife

2009-11-01T08:15:00.004-05:00

According to Thomas Friedman, President Obama has a narrative problem. I completely disagree. I think he has a characterization problem. No, a world-building problem. No, a continuity error problem. A dialogue problem? No, a description problem. A gameplay problem? A user interface problem? A design problem? I think there is a script on his page that is causing errors on this page. I think that a misprint on the RSVP page accidentally listed the event as the Tuesday after when it actually occurs. I think those black shoes clash with that navy suit.

Floater

2009-10-30T09:37:00.005-04:00

[Laura Dern digs elbow-deep in a pile of triceratops shit]

JEFF GOLDBLUM: She's . . . tenacious.

SAM NEILL: You have no idea.

-Jurassic Park

David Brooks circles the categorical imperative like a turd in a toilet, but will not flush. Is Obama, in Afghanistan, acting only according to maxim that he can will into universal law? Yuuuuuhhhhh, Dave don't know. But he suspects not. In a Friedmanesque turn of phrase, he diagnoses the dilemma: "a determination vacuum." Well, sure. Or a mineshaft gap. The point, ladies, is that while Obama's mind grasps the probability cloud of the newly re-coined AfPak conflict like a goddamn quantum computer, he lacks the will. The tenacity. The stick-to-it-ive-ness. That certain je ne sais quoi. He is not Lincoln. Not Churchill. He is one of us, only, pure prose. Or, no, that was Lowell describing Mussolini. What day is this?

Lost in the fester of words is one of those gloriously, unintentionally telling sentences that pop out of ruling class from time to time, like a prom-night dumpster baby:

It would be shameful to deploy more troops only to withdraw them later.

Yuuuuuuhhhh, Dave? Uh, you think you might want some kind of limiting clause in there? Some kind of sunset on the later. Oh well. As another famous American Lowell once wrote, Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.

Of course we are all used to American journos and politicians spouting off about Will with more regularity than a gathering of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Perhaps that is not a coincidence. Anyway, the idea that our borderlands messing-about in Asia is best understand as a recapitulation of World War II (Churchill) or, even more absurdly, our American Civil War (Lincoln) evinces a dissociative confusion that one rarely encounters outside of a deep Ketamine binge. Perhaps the various Roman campaigns in Gaul and Britain would be more instructive, less totally insane as comparisons. The American psyche requires each conflict be puffed into a world-ending struggle against the Darkness lest we lost our shiny self-image as the world's greatest repository of peace-lovers. Ever.

More honestly and accurately viewed, Obama can afford . . . how did Cheney put it? To dither. Indeed, that may very well be the point.

Quod. Erat. Demonstrandum.

2009-10-29T17:41:00.003-04:00

Oh my god. John Stossel Of course, I do not trust any man whose mustache I can see so prominently featured on 19-year-olds at the Xiu Xiu concert. Otherwise, take it away, La_Rana:

What none of these libertarians realizes is that she is not proposing a different interpretation of the tragedy of the commons, or a different solution to the tragedy of the commons. What Ostrom has worked to demonstrate is that, in many situations, there is no such thing as the tragedy of the commons. People can, over time, develop mechanisms for successfully managing common property. There is no need for private property enforced by a state.

You know what Ostrom's work is really an argument for?

Anarchy.

Or, of course, communism!

Things We Like: Bach Covers Pergolesi

2009-10-29T14:55:00.003-04:00

Pergolesi's Stabat Mater setting is one of those immediately recognizable tunes, so familiar that we can easily forget just how magnificent it is. Do you know who else thought it was magnificent> Bach, that's who, and so he set a psalm to it.

In a Universe Where Nothing Is True, Nothing Is Permitted

2009-10-29T10:57:00.002-04:00

Via Prof Crispy, a suprisingly interesting article on the Twitter Anarchist. Any additional commentary would be supurfluous, so I'll just pass on this bit of wisdom from my uncle, a trial lawyer in Pittsburgh. We both worked Downtown and used to carpool together. I once asked him if, in his experience, the clients he defended were more often guilty or innocent. He said: "They're all guilty. Everyone is guilty. This is America. The only question is: are the guilty of what they've been accused of?"

Nobody's Business but the Turks

2009-10-28T10:05:00.003-04:00

So. Turkey. How about it? Well, it has been a reasonable interlocutor between "The West" and whomever it is that we're not talking to because a) we don't speak their langauges and b) terrorism! Boo! It wanted to join the EU but France was like we have enough Muslims, kthnx, buhbiyee, bisous, kiss-kiss, ciao, nique ta mère, etc. Turkey's PM chastised Israel for needlessly killing Muslims when Israel was needlessly killing Muslims, which is worse than needlessly killing Muslims. Turkey suggested that those crowing loudest about nuclear disarmament might do a little themelves. It behaved peacefully toward its neighbors and is seeking a partnership with Russia, the most powerful regional player beside the EU. In other words, Turkey is behaving as a rational, transparently motivated, easily understood political entity. Naturally, we are very, very worried!

Renouncing Libertarianism Is Cuter than Kittens Riding on Puppies In Wagons Pulled by Miniature Ponies

2009-10-26T12:17:00.004-04:00

Libertarians are just republicans who want to smoke weed.

-The Internet

When Kerry Howley made the irrefutable and yet quixotic point that any proper concern with liberty, whether practical or, ahem, merely philosophical, must grapple with the strictures of cultural mores and social conventions, for they affect the lives and freedom of those individuals with whose liberty libertarianism supposedly concerns itself equally to and sometimes more than the official acts and proscriptions and promulgations of the government-même, I made no comment, because honestly, this again? I like and respect Kerry. She is probably smarter than I am. I am sure she looks better in heels. Her efforts along these lines are perhaps noble, but nonetheless doomed. It is not so much that they lack merit--on the merits, she is correct--as that they make a sort of category error. The problem is not that many libertarians are unwilling to consider the broader implications of their philosophy, but rather, that libertarianism is not a philosophy, not even a "political ideology," as the more careful bet-hedgers might have it.

It is instead a lame, purely American third-party movement that sometimes appropriates the trappings of ideology in order to justify self-perpetuation in the face of a plurality-takes-all electoral system wholely inimical to minor parties. In reality, it is no more an ideology, let alone a philosophy, than is "Democrat" or "Republican." It is moderately more consistent than either major American political party because it has no constituency. In the absence of a coalition, coherence. This is nothing to brag about. Still yet, as Eugene Volokh et al. so often and ably demonstrate, in the classic Henley sumnation:

It’s not like Eugene Volokh thinks much of me, either, but I’ve always considered his specialty to be showy moral handwringing on the way to siding with Power anyway.

This is particularly apropos because Will Wilkinson finds Ilya Somin, who is not quite the patented moron as that blog's eponymous proprietor, undermining any notion that libertarianism constitutes anything other than an uproariously unsuccessful effort to turn classic American anti-Federal paranoia into a difference-splitting political third way that abjures both the moral paternalism of Republicans and the economic paternalism of Democrats (whatever any of that means) and thus gathers all together toward a new gilded age. Or something. Somin writes:

These points are distinct from Todd Seavey’s tactical argument in his critique of Kerry, where he points out that identification with one set of cultural values is likely to drive away potential allies for libertarianism. If libertarians are seen as aligned with cultural liberalism, it is likely to alienate cultural conservatives, and vice versa. Linking libertarianism to a narrow cultural agenda would be a mistake similar to Ayn Rand’s insistence that libertarianism entails atheism — a stance that did much to alienate potential supporters who were religious. At the same time, cultural “wedge issues” sometimes do make for good political strategy.

To which I say, Oh, please. Even a bastard term like "political ideology" encompasses more than mere coalition-building. The phrase "alienate potential supporters" is a dead giveaway.

I think it is high time that people like Kerry, who are rightly and righteously concerned with actual liberty, the actual freedom of human beings as individuals to construct and determine the paths of their own lives within their own families, communities, and countries, behave in their own rational best interest and stop calling themselves libertarians. I did! It was not difficult. Indeed, I would go so far as to call it . . . liberating to be unyoked from the ceaseless burden of shit-polishing. Libertarianism is the plaything of cossetted white Americans. That is a fact. In its relentless insistence on state-supremacy, it commits precisely the sin that Kerry identifies: it reifies that which it claims to seek to undermine. It is narrow and parochial, American. What has libertarianism got to say about life within failed states, or clerical democracies, or about Japan, or China, or Myanmar, or Nepal, or occupied Palestine, or Israel, or South Africa? What has it got to say about the construction of community, the nature of cooperative endeavor in the absence of coercion? Most libertarians aren't even willing to accept that property, their central fetish, is itself a cultural artifact, not a constant of nature.

And if the question finally becomes: well, then, what will we call ourselves? Then I suggest a question in reply: why must you call yourselves anything at all?

A Wise Man Once Said . . .

2009-10-26T10:09:00.003-04:00

We didn't learn about the horrific bombings until we landed in the Green Zone. I guess that tells you something about the difference between life, close up, and what you see from several hundred feet.

-David Ignatius in the WaPo

Alors. Columnist makes above observation. Columnist fails to apply above observation to the column in which it is embedded.

Watch Your Six

2009-10-24T18:25:00.003-04:00

Everyone wants to know how Northwest Flight 188 managed to overfly Minneapolis by a hundred and fifty goddamn miles. The FAA is all like, "The pilots were sleeping," and the pilots are all like, "We were embroiled in a serious discussion of the coterminousness of God and nature," or some shit, but me, I just think the two of them were fucking.

The Ineluctable Return of Steelers Blogging

2009-10-23T13:34:00.003-04:00

Let me just say that I can't remember looking forward to a regular-season game as much as I'm looking forward to the Steelers-Vikings pile-up this Sunday. Which is to say, poised between elation and despair. To be a true Steelers fan is to live in perpetual agony, fully believing the league, Chris Collinsworth, and all the football deities stacked against you, whatever your actual record or fortunes. Only in Pittsburgh could a number three-ranked total defense appear as a disappointment; only in Pittsburgh can the boys at Kelly's Korner lament the stupendous performance of this year's top-five offense; only in Pittsburgh can you still grumble about Ben Roethlisberger and the Steeler pass, which currently sits second only to the superhuman Colts air game. But perhaps a bit of an inferiority complex provides discipline, and if there's an appreciable difference between this squad and the 8-8 defending champs of Bill Cowher's final year, it's that these guys seem to be playing as if they've got something to prove.

There are worrisome spots. Turnovers, obviously, and some poor special teams work (although Stefan Logan as a return man continues to impress, playing very smart ball for such a new player). Although Mendenhall so far seems to be a great back and a real complement to the passing game, OC Bruce Arians, always a few yards short of a full field if you ask me, seems intent on giving the disappointing Willie Parker some touches. (Pittsburgh despises Fast Willie right now, which, I think, is a bit unfair: he's a marvelous natural athlete; he's just not a great football player. And of course, no one is The Bus.) The pass defense has suffered without Polamalu, and the smart money doubts he's quite the 100% player the organization wants you to believe him to be, but even at three-quarter strength he's just a monster on the field. The pass rush started cold this year, but has seriously picked up over the last few games. Hines Ward continues to be one of the best, if not the best, near-field receivers in recent memory, and holy shit! dude leads the league by total yards.

I like the odds on this one, though I suspect it'll be a brawl. The Vikings are tough and resilient, and whatever you want to say about the guy (nothing good, here), Farve clearly knows how to lead a team and win games. Their D-line is fantastic, and Ben does like to hold onto that football. Still. Sunday looks to be another perfect fall day in Pittsburgh. Steelers, 21-17.

Dollars and Dense

2009-10-23T09:27:00.006-04:00

By the way, I happened upon this rare archival footage of Doc Krugman delivering his Nobel lecture:

Anyway, a few days back, the inimitable Owin' Pain caught the Scarecrow of the Fed yipping about something or other. Fortunately, OP was able to translate the Bernakular for us. Now, the Krugman agrees with Maestro Paine: we need a weaker dollar! And he knows just who to blame.

The Red Chinese! The fault, dear Brutus, lies not with ourselves, but with the stars!

This kind of transparent buck-passing, you'll pardon the expression, is the general strategy of Prog mouthpieces who ever sing the righteous tunes while never . . . delivering. America's strong-dollar policy is just as much to blame. Kruggo thinks the damn Chinamen are swiping subsistence cents from the rest of the world's poor, but from the average Chinese's perspective, things can't be all that bad. Sure, the environment's a mess, but they're beating 8% a year in economic grown. Eight percent! Meanwhile the Obama gang dithers on whether or not to cut bonuses at our several recently acquired State Banks.

Hey, let the Eurozone absorb the higher unemployment of holding an overvalued reserve currency. Fuckers have welfare and shit. A fiddy-cent dollar would do nicely for the farms and factories. Meanwhile, though I do love me some French cheeses, I could get by on Amish, and since I buy my lamb local, it's no skin off my faggot ass if imports go through the roof. Buy local, bitches, and burn the New York Times for heat.

Freedom. Whiskey. Hairpiece.

2009-10-22T11:34:00.002-04:00

America. Though we never tire of haranguing other countries, cf. Russia, Iran, etc., for the unpardonable crime of interfering in the politics and behaviors of those nations that sit in close proximity to them, we also never tire of telling other nations to interfere in the politics and behaviors of those nations that sit in close proximity to them. It's like the pot calling the kettle and asking it to reverse the charges and then yelling "You're black!" and then shooting the kettle in the head and then blowing up the moon! Hurrah.

“Twenty years ago, the world watched in awe and admiration as the men and women of this region broke the shackles of repression and emerged a free people,” Mr. Biden said in the auditorium of the rebuilt library. Now, he said, Romania and its neighbors must help countries like Armenia and Azerbaijan to develop their own democracies. “You delivered on the promise of your revolution. You are now in a position to help others do the same.”

Now. You may be asking yourself, What in the world can Romania do to make Azerbaijan a democracy? Well, Azerbaijan is already sort of a democracy, and the Romanian government fell last week after a Parliamentary vote of No Confidence, so, for the moment, nothing! But maybe when they form a new coalition, they can invade, or something.

Armenia is also a practicing, if flawed democracy. You know, it goes to elections, but not every Sunday, and it's been a while since it was totally free and fair. And all of this raises the question of how many times Joe Biden can eat his own foot, pass it through his GI track, shit it out, and eat it again, before the tightening knot of his extraordinary feat of Ouroboran malapropism actually cuts him in half and spills his steaming guts all over the dais.

Blawgrole

2009-10-21T16:38:00.003-04:00

Added to blogroll, The Existence Machine, particularly on the strength of this excellent post on the inimitable Coetzee.

Update: Also, stump lane, by our very own Montag, not because he asked, but because we sometimes require a little reminding.

Nothing Is Fucked Here

2009-10-21T16:09:00.003-04:00

Wilkinson, Avent, and Yglesias are all talking about how to fix climate change. (You can find it all via Will's post here.) Some of the things they say are interesting. Let me just say this about that, however. I believe in climate change. I believe that the preponderence of evidence supports the scientific consensus that human activity is contributing to a warming trend, that even if humans are not the sole proximate cause of global warming or climate change or whatever you want to call it, our activities are an immensely significant catalyst at the very least. I also believe that there is fuck-all to be done about it. Let's all emit only what we did in 1985. Hurrah! We are still fucked, one way or other. I believe that developping new means of producing power that do not rely on carbon combustion is an admirable goal that will be more effectively sped along by the diminishing ability of our species to extract carbon fuel from the ground and the resultant crisis of production, not by concerns about changes in the environment, however we might try to legislate against them. I believe that substantial climate change occuring with extreme rapidity on the geologic time scale is inevitable. If human ingenuity is required, it is not to avoid melting ice caps and rising sea levels and the diminishment of the Gulf Stream and so on and so forth; it is to figure out how to live with them.

Newman's Own Economy

2009-10-21T10:10:00.006-04:00

So here is a fairly prototypical Friedman column. Tom goes to meet Name You Might Recognize. Tom meets Businessman who extols neoliberalism in jargony aphorism. Tom relates anecdote about A Friend. Tom gets Ivy League Social Scientist to install sound bite. Tom says We need Education. Exit, pursued by iPhone. Along the way, Tom manages to totally misconstrue what his Harvard interlocutor is saying:

As the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: “If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.”

Those at the high end of the bottom half — high school grads in construction or manufacturing — have been clobbered by global competition and immigration, added Katz. “But those who have some interpersonal skills — the salesperson who can deal with customers face to face or the home contractor who can help you redesign your kitchen without going to an architect — have done well.”

This is in fact so elementary an error of interpretation that it would never have made a publication with copy editors. Katz cites the top half of the college market. A mere paragraph later, Friedman cites the bottom half: "high school grads in construction or manufacturing." Were you listening to the dude's story?

Tellingly, no one seems much interested in the fact that an industrial economy is by necessity pyramidal, that not everyone can be a inventor (or innovator, as goes the preferred neologism) or CEO. You know, even in the Imaginarium of Doctress Rand, it is taken as given that the Atlases of the world must at some point employ and direct the debased lumpenproletariat; there are no illusions that every man is a genius. Indeed, the economy whose passing Friedman perhaps mourns too soon, for from my seat it appears to be sputtering along as before, only at a more modest clip, was not simply a Housing Bubble economy or a Financial Speculation Economy; it was a middle management economy, in which productive labor, accomplished elsewhere and more cheaply, was replaced in the employment world by the bullshit white-collar pseudojobs with which so many of you, reading blogs in the middle of the workday, are surely familiar. Such people were never actually doing much, regardless of their level of educational achievement, and because their jobs were, are, and will forever be extraneous, they are easily cut without the need ever to be replaced.

Friedman:

Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.

Friedman, ever the infelicitous metaphorist, royally fucks the goat on this one. Consider what this strange ice-cream-ism actually propounds: that when the actual substance of the thing is faulty, cover it up! The salad that is the American labor force is wilted. Just add dressing!

Entrepreneurship, innovation, and creativity are lovely words, but they cannot be taught, less yet can they be taught to students who cannot read, write, or add. Nor, in any event, does it make much sense to realign our national program of attempted-indoctrinated self-esteem and civic ignorance, i.e. public education, with the impossible conviction that every single American should own his own business, which uniquely produces the sole example of its own productorservice. In the world. Forever. Because of The Children. You cannot run a society of three hundred million people by requiring that each either invent the iPod or remain broke forever. Which rather brings up a tangential but dearly held point for the whole gang here at Who Is IOZ? Namely:

You cannot run a society of three hundred million people.

The Great Architect of the Universe

2009-10-20T10:17:00.002-04:00

Hey, uh, btw, wut evr hapNd 2 the freedumb twr, k thnx?

Dawn Lacks Rosy Fingers, Astronomers Announce

2009-10-20T09:45:00.005-04:00

Oh, no, David Brooks! Um, Homer wasn't a philosopher. Homer was a poet. Homer was an oral poet. All those rosy-fingered dawns and wine-dark seas and cunning Ulysseseseses . . . those were to help him remember the words. You're out of your element.

Seriously. What the hell philosopher is Brooks talking about? "The philosopher’s view is shaped like a funnel. At the bottom, there is a narrow thing called character. And at the top, the wide ways it expresses itself." Ah yes, I recall in the Tractatus, when Wittgenstein elucidates his oft-quoted seventh proposition: Where, or of what, one cannot speak, one pours into a funnel.

David Brooks, if nothing else, proves Pope's adage about a little learning. When he abandons his milquetoast ramblings on coastal Republicans who shop at Williams Sonoma and Appalachian Democrats who prefer Dunkin Donuts, or, you know, whatever, and sallies forth into the Great Books curriculum like a punch-drunk Quixote clutching an extra-large bottle of Tussin in his lance-hand, the Western canon, whatever it may be, better duck and cover. He has read widely, but seems to lack context entirely, and so, for example, he has confused the epic for the philosophical, synechdoche for proposition, metonym for definition.

UPDATE: Looks like Prof Crispy and I were reading the same papers ce matin.

You Can't Fire Me! I Quit!

2009-10-19T11:02:00.003-04:00

Since the United States spent many years blaming Iran for every cough and sneeze in Iraq, there is a certain poetic chiasmus in Iran now blaming the United States (and Britain) for the recent suicide attack against the Revolutionary Guard. Glenn Greenwald found a report from 2005 claiming that the United States was, in fact, funding Jundallah, a Baluchi Sunni group claiming responsibility, noting however that Brian Ross, the creature responsible for the story, is not exactly known for accuracy. (Indeed, "The Secret War Against Iran" is not exactly unsensational.) That said, America has been canoodling with all sorts of Sunni groups in the area recently and has, in fact, made such marriages of convenience the centerpiece of its Mid-Eastern policy. Do I believe that the Iranian regime is somehow more sincere in its condemnation of American subornation than America was and is in its commensurate accusations? Not as far as I can spit. But, you know, what goes around, comes around.

The Golden Corral

2009-10-16T09:28:00.001-04:00

Krauthammer 40,000 declares: The food at this restaurant is terrible. And the portions! So small!

Foodie Friday: Zuppa

2009-10-16T09:08:00.003-04:00

Although it's as yet a bit early for fall squash, a cool summer and early cold snap have brought some good sweet pumpkins and acorn squash to market already. Here is a simple recipe for roasted pumpkin and squash soup.

for the stock

All the reserved bones n gizzards n shit from last night's roast chicken
1 sweet onion, quartered
2-3 cloves garlic, smashed
2 sticks cinammon
3-4 star anise pods
1 tspn whole black peppercorns
coarse sea salt
water

for the roasted squash

1 acorn squash, halved, seeds removed and discarded
1 sweet (AKA sugar AKA baking) pumpkin, halved, seeds removed and reserved
extra virgin olive oil

for bringing it all together

1 cup heavy cream
1 pinch turmeric
fine sea salt to taste

for the garnish

reserved pumpkin seeds, gunk removed, rinsed and patted dry
extra virgin olive oil
fine sea salt

Begin by making the broth. Combine the stock ingredients in a medium stock put, cover with water, salt generously, bring to a slow boil, reduce, and simmer for two hours.

During the second hour of simmering, preheat the overn to 375. Rub the exposed flesh of the squashes with good olive oil and place face down in a lightly oiled ceramic roasting dish. Roast for 30-40 minutes.

While the squash are roasting, toast the pumpkin seeds. Simply toss them with a little bit of oil and a lot of salt, lay on a cookie pan, and throw them in the oven on a lower rack. Keep an eye on them and pull them out when they've browned. Set them aside.

When the squash have roasted, remove from the oven and let them cool until you can touch them. Their rinds should easily peel away at this point. Scoop out the flesh, roughly chop it, and reserve.

After a couple hours of simmering, strain the broth through a very fine sieve. Add the squash. Return to heat. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer together for 5-10 minutes.

Now purée the soup in a food processor, adding the cup of cream and a pinch or two of turmeric for an even bolder yellow color. Serve immediately, piping hot, garnished with toasted pumpkin seeds.