I think I have just found my new slogan.

The C.I.A. assessment warned the White House that it would be a mistake to conclude that the failure to find a secret nuclear-weapons program in Iran merely meant that the Iranians had done a good job of hiding it. The former senior intelligence official noted that at the height of the Cold War the Soviets were equally skilled at deception and misdirection, yet the American intelligence community was readily able to unravel the details of their long-range-missile and nuclear-weapons programs. But some in the White House, including in Cheney’s office, had made just such an assumption—that “the lack of evidence means they must have it,” the former official said.

Awesome!

"The main Middle East expert on the Vice-President’s staff is David Wurmser, a neoconservative who was a strident advocate for the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Like many in Washington, Wurmser “believes that, so far, there’s been no price tag on Iran for its nuclear efforts and for its continuing agitation and intervention inside Iraq,” the consultant said. But, unlike those in the Administration who are calling for limited strikes, Wurmser and others in Cheney’s office “want to end the regime,” the consultant said. “They argue that there can be no settlement of the Iraq war without regime change in Iran.”"

So what he is saying is that the only way to end one war is to start another one?

My home town

The Sopranos is an American television drama broadcast on HBO about a fictional Italian-American Mafia family in Northern New Jersey not far from South Orange. It has enjoyed six successful seasons — filming began on the last episodes in July 2006. It was announced in November 2006 that an additional episode was ordered to the final episodes. The last 9 episodes will begin airing on April 8, 2007 they are scheduled to be broadcast starting on April 8, 2007.

Huh?

Can anyone make sense of this Dahlia Lithwick op-ed. It is so illogical and poorly reasoned that I am unsure what her argument is.

I also despise how our media overlords claim a clear idea of what the American polity thinks and feels. For example, "Public opinion now turns on which of our leaders makes the best case for having been persecuted, and which has most effectively used the words "I've suffered" as a substitute for "I'm sorry."" And "How else can we explain an American polity horrified when Rush Limbaugh mocked Parkinson's sufferer Michael J. Fox last month, yet willing to look past a Senate ad campaign that cast black Democrat Harold E. Ford Jr. as a masher who preys on white women?" Are both cases the opinion of the general American public or the opinion of our media overlords?

Constructing Narratives

"More than forty years ago, conservative began to tell their story, the one concerning liberal bias. Every voter has heard it now. We haven't even begun to tell ours. Example: Seven years after the War Against Gore, you still can't make liberal "leaders" discuss it. Voters will never understand our world if we refuse to describe it. Often, we liberals seem thankful for the right to doze and gaze off into air."

Indeed, why cannot the Democratic Party construct narratives (factual) to compete with the inane and false Republican Party narratives? Narratives are arguably the most effective way to transmit information. Media, advertising, political, and sport narratives bombard the public everyday. Does a left-wing narrative not have anything to stand on in the "marketplace of ideas." Or are we simply failing to construct? Or, more sinisterly, is someone obstructing our narrative?

Miles Davis

"In 1959, Miles Davis recorded his sixth album for Columbia Records, a small group session that would eventually be titled Kind of Blue. More than forty years after its release, it is still one of the most- sought-after recordings in the country; in fact, as late as 1998 it was the best-selling jazz album of the year. In both Rolling Stone and Amazon.com end-of- the-century polls, it was voted one of the ten best albums of all time--in any genre--and it is the only jazz album ever to reach double-platinum status. Yet its popularity is not the only extraordinary thing about Kind of Blue, In addition to being an uncontestable masterpiece, it is also a watershed in the history of jazz, a signpost pointing to the tumultuous changes that would dominate this music and society itself in the decade ahead."

"March 2, 1959 ... was the first of two dates on which Kind of Blue was recorded. Miles had worked on the tunes right up until the morning of the session. He had been thinking about this album for a while and had specific goals in mind. On was to steer a new course for jazz, away from Western musical theory [to explore the idea of using modes, or scales, instead of chord progressions]; another goal, even more important, was to record an album on which musicians were forced to play their solos with complete spontaneity. ... Musicians have often brought new compositions to a recording studio, but the Kind of Blue sessions went far beyond that. Not only had the the musicians (with the exception of [pianist Bill] Evans) not seen the tunes in advance, they had never before played music with the very structure of these tunes. ...

"Mile's commitment to spontaneity was in itself a key innovation of Kind of Blue. ... This is how Miles put it: "If you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that--but he's got to think differently in order to do it. He has to use his imagination, be more creative, more innovative; he's got to take more risks.' "

Eric Nisenson, The Making of Kind of Blue, St. Martin's Griffin, 2000, pp. ix, 134-136

WTF?

Why on earth would the default Blogger setting be for the title and link fields to be off?

WTF? Now the Marxists are advertising?

This seen on my gmail:

Related Pages

The Louis Althusser Internet Archive

Includes "Contradiction and Overdetermination," and "Marx vs Engels" ...

www.marxists.org

PS: Why can't I add titles to posts? And why not links? Help!

Merde

I apologize for posting about shit for my first post. But maybe geeky internet humor requires it.

I will write an introduction in a later post.

I am not sure I will ever understand how and why the French live the way the live. They are a very traditional people, and as a consequence, sometimes a very irrational people. Take, for instance, shit. The French are generally as hygienic as Americans, but each culture seems to have a very distinct attitude towards shit. First, some background: the American toilet bowl is at least quarter-filled with water so the shit hits the water and not the bowl. The French toilet bowl has very little water filled only near the drain so the shit indeed hits the bowl. The French remedy this with a much more vigorous flush than the American one. The American flush just sends enough water down the bowl to send everything down the drain. The French flush attempts to clean the bowl with powerful water flow. Side note: Which system uses less water per flush? Another bit of background: Both American and French people love dogs. The love is especially strong in New York City and Paris, where one supposes that a dog soothes the alienation of city life. The problem with dogs in the city is that they cannot just go shit in the woods. Hence, dogs shit on sidewalks or streets. Now, New Yorkers, being a pragmatic and sensible people, pick up their dog shit with some apparatus and dispose of it properly. Hence, on any given day, New York City streets are clean. Parisians, on the other hand, being a prissy and inefficient people, just leave their dogs' shit on the streets and sidewalks. I guess Parisians just don't give a shit. Hence, on any given day, Parisian sidewalks are filled with shit. I haven't taken a statistics class recently, but I would say that there is at least one pile of shit every 5 meters. Not only that, but at least 1 out of 5 shit piles has been trampled and smeared everywhere. Sometimes one pile of shit has been smeared all the way to the next pile of shit. It is disgusting. The Parisian solution to their dirty sidewalks is the requirement that the supers of every building (residential, commercial, governmental, museums, schools, whatever) to occasionally wash the sidewalk with a hose.

Back to the toilet bowls. Because the French toilet flush method sucks shit, one is usually left with shit stains on the bowl even after the "vigorous flush of water." Hence, every single French toilet that I have seen has a brush that you are supposed to use to clean the bowl after each use. Moreover, not only are you supposed to brush the bowl, but you are also supposed to use some sort of toilet bowl cleaner. I'm not sure the exact chemical, but it is most likely a bleach compound. I have been scolded because I haven't always left the bowl spotless after dropping the boys off at the pool. Now, I think this is retarded and wasteful. It's a good damned toilet bowl. Of course there is going to be shit there. It's its natural place. And it's hardly a hygienic problem. Bacteria from the bowl is not going to suddenly jump from the bowl to some place of human contact. Copious dog shit on the streets, on the other hand, inevitably comes into human contact.

One can probably infer that Parisians think the best way to clean shit is to wash it away with water. However, it is totally ineffective in the toilet bowl and the sidewalk setting. A better (more efficient, hygienic, simpler) solution: Don't let the shit from staining either setting in the first place!

Now let me ask you this, my kind readers: which is more disgusting: leaving dog shit on the street or leaving human shit residue inside a toilet bowl?