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I haven't posted in a while, so it is unfortunate that my reappearance is to share with you the demise of our beloved Yankee Doodle. No, not the one with the macaroni. The famous lunch counter in New Haven, wedged between Tyco and a corner spot with a rotating assortment of proprietors. (It was a Wawa when I was a student, but has since been a swanky shoe store, inter alia.)

Some may say that the place was doomed in an age of no trans fats and increasing flexitarianism. Or it could be that as Yale has spiffed up the area surrounding it, students had more and better choices for their comestibles. Less well known, though, is that the Doodle record went to a professional competitive eater some years back, which I think took away some of the attraction for the plus-size men on campus.

In any case, its doors are closed, apparently for good, and we will miss you, O fair Doodle!

Hours after the announcement, The Onion already has the street's opinion on Gonzalez's resignation. Do you think they have been going out everyday and asking people "What do you think of the AG's resignation today?" secure in the knowledge that one day they would be right?

"Lauren Nelson, 20, of Lawton, Oklahoma, worked with police in Suffolk County to target would-be Internet sexual predators, taped for an episode of the TV show "America's Most Wanted."

She posed as a teenager and lured men into chatting online and meeting her at a home, where police and crews were waiting. Eleven men were arrested in the sting."

Not only is Lauren Nelson clearly not a minor, she is undeniably beautiful. In fact, she is...Miss America!

Last Saturday, at EFNY, Richard and I were talking about avoiding the news. The news is so bad lately, we agreed, that it was time to just stop reading it altogether. If there's anyone I would put toward the bottom of the list of people who would stop reading the news, it's former political operative Richard. That he came to the same decision as I did helped me come to terms with it.

I decided several weeks ago, actually, that it was time to wean myself of current events. I've stopped reading the New York Times -- the front section, at any rate. I've stopped reading political blogs. So long, Eschaton. It's not to say that I'm going to completely insulate myself from the world. I will of course keep reading Big Ink and Ennis' posts on Sepia Mutiny and all our friends' blogs many of which cover politics. And certainly, my fellow Ishers are free to post about politics and the news here. I am just no longer taking responsibility for what goes on in the world.

It's a strange thing to think about. Political involvement has been part of my identity for a good twenty years. Ever since I started a political journal in high school I have considered it my civic duty to be ever informed on current events. But hey, guess what? I'm not a politician. I'm not a journalist. I don't have to always know what's going on or have an answer for everything.

Phew. That's a world off my shoulders.

Who knows? Maybe someday the news will be safe again. For now, though, for the sake of my mental health, I'm a recovering news junkie.

Footnote: The title for this post is of course lifted from The Illuminatus! Trilogy where the phrase recurs reFnordpeatedly. I read it my freshman year of college, before the interwebs, so I was forced to use a dictionary (gasp!) to figure out what it meant! Immanentize, to make immanent, therefore to realize or bring about. The eschaton, of course, meaning the end of the world. (Atrios took the name Eschaton from the Wargames-meets-tennis game described in Infinite Jest.) So "don't immanentize the eschaton!" = "don't hasten the world's end!"

Well, sort of. According to Wikipedia, the phrase actually comes from the Gnostics, by way of William F. Buckley (really!) and basically means "don't try and bring about heaven on earth" or "stop being such a goddamn idealist." Although the Dispensationalist Christians do use the phrase in the sense that I thought it meant. So I wasn't completely wrong. Darn, does this mean I have to read Illuminatus! again?

My personal favorite, from the Dallas Morning News:

Norma Adams-Wade's June 15 column incorrectly called Mary Ann Thompson-Frenk a socialist. She is a socialite.

Via Poynter.

Following up on our post of a couple of days ago, in which we quoted a Slate piece that mocked the Administration for "rebranding" the War on Terror. According to Media Matters, Bush has frequently criticized the phrase "War on Terror":

We actually misnamed the war on terror, it ought to be the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world.

I stand corrected.

The New York Post cries: "Enough!"

Previously seen on the cover of the New York Post:

[or, "He, Brooks, a Racist"?]

Why is David Brooks pushing, on the NYTimes OpEd page, the work of a man, Steve Sailer, who thinks:

_________

"[A]n infectious disease itself could cause homosexuality. It's probably not a venereal germ, but maybe an intestinal or respiratory germ."

-"If we didn't want blacks to engage in ethnocentric politics, well, our ancestors shouldn't have dragged them here in chains. We can, however, moderate the amount of diversity we import in the future."

and quoting from a profile on him

-"once the 'Mexican invasion' engulfs the country, 'high teenage birthrates, poverty, ignorance and disease will be what remains.'"

_________

Moreover, Sailer, Brooks' go-to guy for insightful election analysis, gives high marks to the Pioneer Fund, which "encourage[s] a higher birth rate among the best of the white race."

Is this more "code language" -- like Bush citing Dred Scott in the debates -- to mollify the far (far, far) right? I'm even willing (nay, eager) to consider that it's only sloppy reporting and not a true underlying racist agenda that drives Brooks to promote this guy's worldview. If so, it's merely disgusting and irresponsible.

Can we please throw Brooks over the side now please? Sycophant or hack, he's no one to be trusted.

OK, so first the kids who sang "we don't need no education" on The Wall are suing Pink Floyd for back royalties. Now "Pink" Floyd (that's Richard "Pink" Floyd) is suing Richard Linklater for character defamation and "negligent infliction of emotional distress" for the portrayal of his character in Dazed and Confused.

Tort reform now!

(Dazed and Confused story via randomWalks.)

RNC sponsored get out the vote (GOTV) effort is accused of only registering Republicans and throwing out the paperwork for Democrats in Nevada.

The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.

Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.

Hardly airtight, right? A democratic dirty trick would be to accuse the RNC of trying to disenfranchise voters. However, there is some evidence beyond the accusations of these employees:

Eric Russell managed to retrieve a pile of shredded paperwork including signed voter registration forms, all from Democrats. We took them to the Clark County Election Department and confirmed that they had not, in fact, been filed with the county as required by law.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Alan Keyes said Monday that women who choose to undergo abortions and the physicians who perform the procedure are essentially terrorists because "the evil is the same."

The remarks came as Keyes was explaining why three months ago he said that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were a "warning" from God to "wake up" and stop "the evil" of abortion.

I just read about Mike Wallace's arrest. It certainly appears that he was cuffed and arrested just for asking cops questions:

"He became overly assertive and was reported to be disrespectful to the inspectors," Fromberg said. "He was asked three times to step away from the vehicle and cease interfering. At one point Mr. Wallace appeared to lunge toward one of the two inspectors. The other inspector became concerned with his partner's safety and at that point cuffed Mr. Wallace."

But Luigi Militello, owner of Luke's, said that when Wallace, a regular at his restaurant, stepped outside to talk to the inspectors one of them told Wallace, "Don't give me any lip."

Ernesto Cavalli, owner of Due, a restaurant next door, backed up Militello's account, adding that Wallace replied, "I'm not giving any lip."

"He kind of stepped back and asked, 'I would like to know what happened,'" Cavalli said. "The TLC officer grabbed his shirt and pushed him very strongly against the car and handcuffed him." Cavalli said the inspector then turned to the crowd and said, "Anybody else?"
[from the Chicago Trib, subscription necessary]

Now, who knows if Cavalli is telling the truth; as a restauranteur he has an interest in getting publicity and kissing up to famous people. Wingnuts from the right have used Wallace's arrest to argue that he is depressed, angry, and emotionally volatile.

Still, the TLC seems to be backing away from its initial story:

The New York Post quoted a spokesman for the commission, Allan J. Fromberg, as saying that Mr. Wallace "was observed to be overly assertive" and "lunged" at the inspectors - comments Mr. Fromberg backed away from yesterday after the commission began investigating the incident. [NYT]

This story comes at a time when there are also reports of security guards cracking down on people who read D&D books with lurid covers on ferries, in order to increase RNC related security, and california security officials say that "you can almost argue that a protest against that [the war in Iraq] is a terrorist act."

If Wallace is getting treated this way, can you imagine what happens to taxi drivers? I suggest that Wallace do a "Brown like me" segment, where he goes undercover as a cabbie, with brown skin, facial hair, and an accent. As for the rest of the Upper East Side, time to practice your Steppin Fetchit acts for the fuzz, it looks like "Don't you know who I am?" wont cut it any more. Next stop, little old ladies wearing mink and walking yappy dogs, followed by Republican outrage.

Thanks to Liz for the link to the D&D / Ferry story.

Always the trend setter, the USMC has invented kevlar shorts to be worn over one's fatigues for the sake of keeping shrapnel out of one's sensitive bits and upper thighs. I sense a new fashion craze just on the horizon:

Click here for pictures:
Kevlar Shorts

CAMP RAMADI, Iraq(July 5, 2004) -- Marines here from 3rd Battalion, 11th Marine Regiment are currently testing lower body armor developed by the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico, Va.

The Kevlar shorts were designed to repel razor-sharp shrapnel from improvised explosive devices detonated by anti-Iraqi fighters along transportation routes throughout the country.

According to Lt. Col. Lance A. McDaniel, battalion executive officer, the artillery unit received ten pairs of the shorts from the Warfighting Lab. The shorts arrived nearly a week ago and were distributed amongst the battalion's batteries.

"The gunners in our vehicles seem to be the most exposed to shrapnel," McDaniel said.
"We've had a lot of Marines receive injuries to their buttocks and upper thighs."

He said these shorts make the gunners, who man crew-served weapons on top of the vehicles, less vulnerable to serious injury during IED attacks.

"The Marines wear flak jackets which protect their backs and chests," McDaniel said. "It only makes sense to have protection for the legs,"

The one-size-fits-all shorts are worn over a Marine's uniform and are held up with built in suspenders. Each pair of shorts weighs close to 5 pounds.

Lance Cpl. Mike C. Suchevich and Pvt. Luis R. Mejia have both tried the shorts a few times.

"The other Marines made fun of me the first I put them on," Mejia said. "I guess they thought it was a joke. They are really funny looking."

The shorts have already acquired a few nicknames from the battalion. One Marine referred to them as "lederhosen," and others call them "fishing shorts."

Still, the two Marines said they are grateful to have the new gear.

"They're not very comfortable and they're hard to move in," Suchevich explained. "But
I do feel a lot more protected than before and that's definitely more important than comfort."

So far, the shorts have not been put to the test during any attacks, but the Marines believe it's just a matter of time.

"I think all gunners should have a pair," Mejia added. "I feel safer wearing them. They can't stop bullets, but they can stop shrapnel."

In an valuable scoop, the Wall Street Journal reports today that the lawyers at the Pentagon wrote in a classified memo that the president has virtually unlimited power to wage war as he sees fit. Relying on legal logic that one might call "tortured," neither Congress, the courts, nor international law have any authority to stop him from ordering torture.

I'm pretty sure that I genuinely dropped my jaw while sitting at my desk. Jerry of Infoshop wrote: "The United States has AIDS. We have begun the descent into dictatorship and the political system can't seem to generate any antibodies against it." Now ordinarily that sort of metaphor seems to me to be pure anger rather than thought. But one line from the 100-page classified memo has creeped me out all day long: the executive branch of the government has "sweeping" powers to act as it sees fit because "national security decisions require the unity in purpose and energy in action that characterize the presidency rather than Congress." Imagine yourself standing in a phalanx on the field of a stadium, saying: Unity in purpose! Energy in Action! Unity in purpose! Energy—." Uggggh.

This feels like a turning point to me, even more than Abu Ghraib. One doesn't want soldiers in combat to get ragingly punchy while guarding the prisoners, but it was not that hard to imagine. I'm surprised we haven't heard about the wanton strafing of a village yet. But when they're sitting around a conference table in D.C. explaining to each other why WE CAN TORTURE people--isn't that civilization just plain cracking?
Consider that ghastliness next to another front-page story, (or, with a subscription) from a few days ago, in the Times. This was the one about the colonel who went too far and fired a gun next to an Iraqi policeman he suspected knew of a plot to ambush his men. Reflecting a civilized stance, he was booted out of the forces, even though he didn't actually harm the Iraqi.
Thousands of miles away, the Pentagon types were stretching for every possible legal workaround so they could declare that forcing a prisoner to stay awake for 96 hours straight did not count as torture.
All of a sudden, the people running the war seem depraved. I didn't need 829 dead to convince me that combat in Iraq was an ugly disaster, a tragedy produced by venal and errant leadership. Now this military invasion feels toxic right where I live.

I'm generally utterly contemptuous of TV news, especially when it comes to their apparent fear of showing us anything but the most sanitized, Pentagon-approved version of the war, but it seems that ths Friday Ted Koppel will read the names and show pictures of every GI killed since 2003.

Recommended viewing.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3666461.stm

Punchline: We're most violent when we're 2 years old, but we're not able to inflict much harm. At 3, when we get coordinated, our violence proclivities decrease. So it's not about testosterone, or adolescence, it's about human nature. I disagree with Parker however, on the conclusions he draws. I find his nature/nurture dichotomy simplistic. Violent impulses != violent actions.

So, this got a little out of hand. Mike, if it's too long, feel free to kill it. And all caveats submitted (as you'll see). But I wanted to share this adventure I just went on. I was just reading the letters to the Times about the California recall when I came across this:

To the Editor:

It seems to me that the women casting belated accusations at Arnold Schwarzenegger should ask themselves what is more humiliating: to be "groped," or to be used in a political smear campaign attacking a person's character.

The party or parties encouraging the accusers should realize that such transparently manipulative behavior sets back, rather than advances, women's rights and our political process.
LISA KOLE
New York, Oct. 3, 2003

What woman -- I wondered -- would see these women coming forward as a 'smear campaign.' Either the women are telling the truth or they aren't. If they are, then I'm not really sure it's a "smear campaign"; if they're not, then there's something much more serious than a "smear campaign" going on (yea, verily, the very undermining of democracy... oh, wait). Somehow this Lisa Kole is insulting these women to defend women's progress. There may be something to the "belated accusations" issue (though credible accounts don't need to be contemporary to be news), but this just smacked of an agenda.

I immediately envisioned the twisty doublespeak of Ann Coulter. I wondered who Lisa Kole might be. Was she a right-wing pundit, like Ann of the Damned? Was she a soccer mom with congressional aspirations? Anyway, I Googled her.

I could be grasping at straws here, but it may be that she's the same Lisa Kole whose profile appears on the Baker & Botts website.

Baker & Botts? Baker & Botts? I know I've heard that name somewhere. Let's see: who are they, again?

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See also: 2003 California Recall Vote | Arnold Schwarzenegger | Baker & Botts | California | Energy | Enron | George W. Bush | James Baker | Kenneth Lay | Reliant

Germany worries about a resurgence in Neo-Nazi terrorism after a suspected plot to bomb a Jewish center in Munich on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. They had a longer list of planned targets, including Mosques, and Greek and Italian cultural targets.

Couldn't happen here you say ? Well, think hard about Steven J Hatfill, the "person of interest" in the Anthrax investigation. He's a man who used to brag about "his exploits as a member of the Selous Scouts, an elite counterinsurgency unit of Rhodesia's white supremacist army that became notorious for brutality during that country's civil war" and that was even suspected of having used Anthrax as a weapon against Zimbabwean independence fighters.

Or how about Leo Felton, the white supremacist who was tried for plotting to blow up targets in Boston and ignite a "Racial Holy War". People have paid alot of attention to the twist (Felton had one black parent and one white parent), but little to the threat posed.

[There are other examples which have come and gone in the media without much notice. However, rather than writing the rest of the argument, which I've been carrying around in my head for a week, I'll leave you this quote taken from a panel discussion involving Jessica Stern, one of the best experts on terrorism I know, and somebody who has spent time interviewing terrorists all over the world, 1-on-1, unlike most of the armchair pundits who are just blowing smoke]

Al Qaeda, she [Jessica Stern] said, has shifted its mission, even aligning itself with neo-Nazis and white supremacists who are sympathetic to its new focus of fighting a "new world order."

"We know that Al Qaeda is very, very good at finding people who have the right passport and speak the right language" to facilitate a terrorist attack, she said. "They are finding new allies and new sources of recruits."

My point is that we're focusing on the terrorist groups that we're comfortable with (brown skinned baddies) and ignoring those that look "like our neighbors". If we're really trying to strengthen homeland security, we should be attentive to terrorism, no matter what label is attached to it. To do otherwise is to be vulnerable to further attack by our enemies.

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Categorized: News

See also: Race and Ethnicity | Security | Terrorism | Vorks

I found this story of bullying quite disturbing for obvious personal reasons. It also troubles me that while the child was charged with a felony, and will have to live with that for the rest of his life, just for slapping the student who was harassing him. Meanwhile, even though the victim of bullying had to move schools 7 times to escape bullying, no charges were ever filed against the students tormenting him. This is the problem with zero tolerance for violence policies. Unless they are combined with zero tolerance against bullying, and enforcement of the anti-bullying rules, anti-violence policies end up favoring the tormentors since their actions are less overt. Personally, I'd rather see schoolyard fights than this sort of travesty.

[On a lighter note, a friend of mine who endured much worse in the heartland was able to come out of it remarkably unscathed, even though he was not a big guy. His main complaint was that he got tired of beating up all the kids who picked fights with him. But that was in an era when you could stand up and defend yourself]

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See also: Education