Backword: Dave Weeden’s weblog
Tuesday, 01 May 2007
The Imitation Game »
Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal
I am not, in this post, attempting to accuse Ian McEwan of plagiarism, or even of homage.
Unlike David Cameron, I don’t think I’m going to bother even pretending to read On Chesil Beach (nb review which contains plot spoilers, but so does this post). Colm Tóibín may be partly to blame here:
In the background is Harold Macmillan. It is 1962, after the end of the Chatterley ban but before the Beatles’ first LP. As the couple eat their supper, they can hear his voice on the radio in the hotel bar below. He is present in this novel much as Margaret Thatcher is in The Ploughman’s Lunch – to root the story in the real. McEwan uses current affairs much as a rock band uses drums or a salesman uses a smile. The fact that Macmillan is still in power also helps us to be convinced by Florence’s sexual ignorance, although her fear of sex belongs only to herself.
But both the film and the book are flatly realistic - do they need a root in the real? It is not as if the narrative flits between a documented historical event which the author witnessed as a young soldier and the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. The thing is, Larkin was partly joking. Not only was sex pretty well explored in books in the 20th century - not just in the Lawrence of the Chatterley ban, but in Miller and Nin, for instance. There’s a joke in Catch-22 (pub 1961) where Doc Daneeka sees a couple who claim to be infertile; he examines the woman to find that she is a virgin and explains intercourse to his patients with dolls. The man returns a week later and punches him. Oops, that’s practically the plot of On Chesil Beach.
This scene is McEwan at his most controlled. The sound coming from Edward is ’the sort of sound she had heard once in a comedy film when a waiter, weaving this way and that, appeared to be about to drop a towering pile of soup plates’.
Not as good as this:
Billy made a noise like a small, rusty hinge. He had just emptied his seminal vesicles into Valencia.
And then the big moment:
But what actually comes from Edward’s penis is described without any recourse to metaphors or similes: ‘In horror she let go, as Edward, rising up with a bewildered look, his muscular back arching in spasms, emptied himself over her in gouts, in vigorous but diminishing quantities, filling her navel, coating her belly, thighs, and even a portion of her chin and kneecap in tepid, viscous fluid.’
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Saturday, 28 April 2007
Nutters! »
Long, long ago I somehow got myself subscribed to the Christian Worldview Network newsletter. Generally, it’s good for a laugh: it confirms with every email that Bible bashers really are of restricted intellect, and that’s not just a condescending view from over the Atlantic. They’re also parochial (they hate some rival church even more than they hate Muslims, and they hate Muslims like crazy people who hate a lot), but Was VA Tech Massacre A Terrorist Attack? Answer: No. How, exactly, does one learn to write this badly? The King James Bible is a model of English prose.
The following is a letter from a Rabbi in Virginia. Several other sources have confirmed aspects of this story. It truly appears the mainstream media is ignoring what looks like what was a terrorist attack. Officials need to release the audio and/or transcripts of the other videos made by this terrorist.
There’s isn’t any evidence that the Virginia Tech shootings were motivated by anything other than the perpetrator’s chronic mental illness. For reasons I can’t understand this ’Rabbi’ considers Christians and Jews to be ’believers’ but Muslims not to be. They’re all variants on the idiot monotheism of the Middle East. There seem to be only two things that make Christians and Jews find common cause: bashing gays and bashing Muslims.
I also spoke this morning, right after this meeting with a peace officer here in Virginia who had access too and has read some of the transcripts of the other ten videos that are not being shown on the news. The shooter (Cho) was quoting verses from the Koran and had Ishmael written on his arm and as his return address on the package sent to NBC. It appears that he did not randomly pick his targets but rather chose classes that had high concentrations of Christians and Jews in them-he was targeting Christians and Jews!!!!!
This may never come out in the media and some may tend to disregard this but my source is a solid believer and a trustworthy officer who has personally read some of the transcripts. What adds to this is that the press is not mentioning that a very high percentage of the victims were believers.
Give that Rabbi a class in Kahneman and Tversky. I was going to comment, but it’s really unnecessary.
And via Jim Henley, Mad Melanie Phillips thinks Dave Gaubatz is a reliable source. From his site’s mission page.
So at its core, SANE is dedicated to the rejection of democracy and party rule and a return to a constitutional republic, ...
And, even more barkingly,
SANE’s Mission includes the dismantling of much of the liberal enterprise, including:
A rejection of the Open Society agenda and Multiculturalism that so dominates and permeates our society.
A rejection of the view that Science dictates Certainty in man’s affairs and that Man’s Being is reduced to scientific thinking on matters of life and death, purpose, and values.
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Friday, 20 April 2007
Film Makers Are To Blame, Apparently »
Gerald Kaufman is in today’s Torygraph: Questions film-makers must ask themselves after Virginia Tech because it is, obviously, film-makers’ fault.
The most chilling aspect of the Virginia Tech massacre is that its perpetrator, Cho Heung-sui, a South Korean, was directly inspired by a recent South Korean splatter movie, Oldboy, which won an award at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, as well as by the Columbine high school massacre in 1999, itself the subject of an Oscar-winning film.
Well, inspired or not, tehgrauniad’s Gunman’s brooding disturbed his family makes it clear that Cho Seung-hui was seriously mentally ill.
Back in Seoul, the family are worried that they had not heard from Cho’s parents since the killings. They have wondered if things might have been different had they been able to bring the boy out of his shell. "I just wish he would have talked," says Yong-soon. "There is an old saying in Korea that people who won’t talk will end up killing themselves. That is what happens when the resentment builds up."
In fact, everything I’ve read about him suggests that people thought he was disturbed. BBC: Cho fits pattern of campus killers. Movies had very little to do with it.
Back to Gerald:
The Bill introduces a new test of whether a person’s ability to make decisions about medical treatment is significantly impaired because of mental disorder. Such legislation could help to deal with a man such as Cho. But first of all you have to find your Cho, classify him, and see if any tendency to violence can be controlled.
See above. Finding your Cho is not that hard when his writing alerts university staff and he’s been cautioned as a stalker.
The problem with Cho was that no one knew he would go on the rampage until he did.
His relatives thought he might kill himself, which is reason enough for intervention.
When A Clockwork Orange, with a murder and a rape, looked as though it could inspire yob culture to imitate it, its director, Stanley Kubrick, withdrew the film from circulation for the rest of his lifetime.
Newp. Wikipedia: A Clockwork Orange (film): British withdrawal:
At the time, it was widely believed that the copycat attacks were what led Kubrick to withdraw the film from distribution in the United Kingdom. However, in a television documentary made after Kubrick’s death, his widow Christiane confirmed rumours that Kubrick had withdrawn A Clockwork Orange on police advice after threats were made against Kubrick and his family (the source of the threats was not discussed).
I’ve left a comment which suggested that the paper print a correction.
Films such as 300, about the battle of Thermopylae and based not on Greek history or legend, but on a comic-book, can show images that transcend reality and, without seeking to do so, trivialise death.
Didn’t The Ten Commandments "show images that transcend[ed] reality" and "trivialis[d]e death" (Egyptians mostly, IIRC). Same for the book it was based on.
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Sunday, 15 April 2007
Sexual Perversity In New New York »
Can Doctor Who just go on getting better? Not the plot which didn’t make much sense - almost everybody died after a new chemical was invented AND the world was invaded by giant crabs, which happened to live in the only place the survivors did. Hold it, the plot didn’t make any sense. Personally, I preferred Christopher Ecclestone’s not-so-proactive Doctor whose presence made other people braver and able to take action. (Peter Tyler fixes time by sacrificing himself while the Doctor is ostensibly dead, and so on.) Last night, David Tennant seemed to have a bad case of Daniel Craig envy, and the special effects - I mean, really.
On the other hand, Tennant is simply great and the dialogue (apart from anything actually technical - the ’new chemical’ for instance, or the Macra breathing ’gas’ (no really? whatever next?)) is wonderful.
I liked the married lesbians, and the generally weird people in their cars.
Possible science fiction rip-offs. There was a story in one of Lester del Rey’s ’Best of Year’ collections about a young entrepreneur who becomes one of the most powerful men in the US, and two doctors (IIRC) show him a corpse they’ve found, which they claim is a smog-breathing alien. And they go through an autopsy of this body to show him how it’s adapted to carbon monoxide and they claim that he’s part of an advance party who are trying to make Earth suitable for colonisation - but polluting the whole planet. So the guy devotes himself to ecology and alternative fuels. I think the doctors invented the alien for that purpose, because I read it about 30 years ago and can’t remember the point, other than that it was an anti-pollution and fossil fuels story. The macra living at the bottom of the motorway and breathing air no human could reminded me of that.
There’s also a Fritz Leiber story which opens "Gummidge was a superkitten." It’s about a kitten which thinks it will grow up to be human, because human adults are clearly intelligent and active (like kittens) while human babies (it lives with one) lie around and sleep all day, like the kitten’s mother. It ends, as I remember, rather sadly with the kitten growing older and losing interest in being human.
Hmm. If I were to write a Doctor Who script, I think I’d have a serious go at using ’The Preserving Machine’ by Philip K Dick as a starting point.
Above: ’American Gothic’. Wonderful pre-credit reference.
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Saturday, 14 April 2007
Poo-tee-weet? »
I bought the Torygraph this morning but didn’t open it (farting around with Google spreadsheets if you’re interested). So I only found Sam Leith on Kurt Vonnegut through a search which found me (which shows how fast Google crawls here).
Vonnegut was a liberal humanist when it was fashionable, and remained a liberal humanist when it was unfashionable.
That’s what I loved in Vonnegut and what I see in Sam Leith too. I’ve no idea who the famous relative is who people assume is the reason he’s appears in the Torygraph thrice weekly. I think he deserves to. Maybe it is very small-minded of me, but I find that knowing someone promotes liberal humanism in the Telegraph pleases me enormously.
BTW, I’m pretty sure that the idea for ’Ice 9’ came from an Isaac Asimov (see last post) essay on the various forms ice was found to take. (IIRC, Ice IV was withdrawn after it was found to be glass sampled in error from the very thin (for reasons I forget) test tubes it was created in.) My own favourite Vonnegut bit of criticism was his opinion of ’Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg. He thought the best minds of any generation were probably in the sciences rather than pissing about San Francisco looking for drugs. I suspect he was right.
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So It Goes »
Kurt Vonnegut died.
That should please Gary Farber.
Ellis is very good on Slaughterhouse 5 (and the David Irving thing). Lance Armstrong has a great story about Vonnegut (and his humour and humanity) which I hadn’t heard before.
I thought of titling this post "Kurt Vonnegut’s in Heaven now." That’s because Vonnegut, delivering the eulogy at a friend’s funeral, opened with what he thought was a great joke. "Isaac is heaven now."
The friend was Isaac Asimov. The joke was that Asimov was a humanist who did not believe in an afterlife. So was Vonnegut. He believed Asimov would have liked the joke.
If I remember correctly Kilgore Trout was named after the Schubert piece, which I’m listening to now. As good a way as any to remember Vonnegut.
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You Say You Want A Revolution »
I don’t play chess any more. I don’t even use the only game which came with my Mac - because it’s too damn good. The last time I played, I think, was on AC’s stag weekend in Brussels which must have been in 2004. DL and I played with the owner of a restaurant. She beat me, which was a bit of a pig; though I blame all the beer that I drank, and DL kept me talking all the way through, and we were both trying to chat her up, so all that was a bit distracting.
But I’m interested in chess. And I’m disappointed to learn that [Gary] Kasparov [was] arrested at Moscow rally. Putin is such a sick, ruthless bastard that I know we can’t count on Karparov being famous to help him.
I’ve blogged a couple of times on Bobby Fischer (here and here). Maybe I’m wrong about chess players - I think they’re all nutters, but I wouldn’t want Kasparov as leader of anything. That’s mother Russia for you, they go for the worst leaders in the world. This isn’t going to end well, is it?
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Monday, 09 April 2007
Back To The Stone Age »
Jesus Fucking Christ! And I make no apology for the seasonal epithets. What is it with people? Is there some kind of conspiracy trying to make me agree with Polly Toynbee? (Oops link fixed; originally went to similar article by Jessica Valenti.) Well, it won’t work. I mean, yes, she’s sort of right, though I think Vicki Woods in the Torygraph is infinitely better.
Look, there are some web conventions, ably illustrated by Matthew Turner.
Oliver has another go at political blogging (which of course is a very small subset of blogs, but the one we tend to concern ourselves with), partly because it narrows the amount of comment available.
Now, as far as I know, Matthew Turner has never met Oliver Kamm, but he uses the latter’s given name because in blogging terms Oliver has presented his calling card and introduced himself. Matthew knows Oliver. I know Oliver. Oliver may not know me; it’s not a necessarily reciprocal relationship. Not all bloggers are as intimate as Brad DeLong, but once you’ve read a few posts, you are marginally acquainted with the author. These people have made their opinions free.
Now this is tasteless: [BBC:] Man charged over Krystal killing. If Ms Hart had been male, would they have used the familiar first name? Perhaps if he’d been three. The good thing about English is that we’ve lost the formal/informal forms to the second person (’Vous’/’tu’, etc). The bad thing is that lazy writers can’t see when they’re letting condesending forms into their prose.
This isn’t really about Ms Hart, but about the appalling press coverage (not web coverage) of the Iranian Hostage thing (which I mean to write about as well). Here’s Google News: Faye Turney. Good god, even the Scotsman, which used to be a respectable paper has While sailor Faye could net up to £100,000, Scots captive tells his story over a pint. And the rest are just as bad. She’s Leading Seaman Faye Turney (as the article has it), not ’Faye’. You don’t know her; I don’t know her. Treat her, and any other woman in the news, as you would a man. That is all.
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Wednesday, 04 April 2007
Two Movies I’d Like To See »
Via Cute Overload
Via Peter Black.
Lawyers, Guns, and Money. Sam Leith. Gary Farber. And many, many more.
I’ve thought Frank Miller was a wanker ever since I first heard of him - in the Daily Mail (or Sunday) of a flatmate when ’Batman’ was published. He didn’t like the classic 60s TV series, preferring stories about a millionaire who devotes his life to fighting crime in fancy dress to be serious. His version was "grown up." More grown up than this? Nope. I’ve watched a lot of the old series on YouTube. It’s just perfection.
The Batmobile has been stolen, so Alfred the faithful butler suggests Batman ride on the ’Alfredmobile’ - a backy on his pushbike. "I don’t think we’ll attract much attention, sir."
Millionaire Bruce Wayne and his ward Dick Grayson change into the Dynamic Duo in the back of Bruce’s limosine. The problem - to get to police headquarters. "We’ll have to leg it, Robin." "Leg it? Couldn’t we take a taxi?" "A taxi might be seen as ostentatious, Robin." (He’s only a millionaire, but then those costumes don’t have pockets. - Another Wodehouse lift?) Cue B & R running through the streets, suspiciously like this.
Why, why didn’t I realise that Burgess Meredith as the Penguin offered the perfect role model?
But Frank Miller thinks ’something nasty happened in his childhood’ is deep.
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A Bit Harsh, Surely »
I’m confused. Has Channel 4 ’pulled’ ’controversial’ war drama or not? Apparently, "the decision was announced this lunchtime just a few hours before Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared the sailors would be released" though C4’s listings (I think that link goes to whatever is on tomorrow, but I’ve no real idea) say the film is being shown. It went down pretty well on Newsnight Review and I’m at a total loss to see how a fictionalised account of events - Deepcut and Abu Ghraib - which have been in every paper and news programme can affect negotiations with Iran.
Still, Tony Marchant wrote about writing the drama in the Torygraph.
One comment:
If Steven Merchant had served in the front line fighting and defending himself mainly against an unseen enemy, he might have just about understood the realities of the situation. Saying he and his team had interviewed a hand full of the many thousands of service personnel facing death on a daily basis gives him a right to create an interpretation that is in return portrayed as a reality, is utter nonsense. The TV Company and the participants in this film will be used by the enemy as a portrayal of the truth and as a consequence cause the additional death of our young service personnel. A literal case of ego killing people.
As a later commenter pointed out, the second series of ’Extras’ wasn’t as good as the first, but I don’t think Stephen Merchant is going to be used by the enemy on that account.
Abive, image used by Tehran to back claims that ordinary office workers are routinely abused and humiliated.
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Sunday, 01 April 2007
An Official Member Of The Guild Of Whores »
Via Centauri Dreams, John Updike on The Valiant Swabian or the man who
In 1905 ... had produced in rapid succession five scientific papers that (a) proposed that light came not just in waves but in indivisible, discrete packets of energy or particles called, after Max Planck’s discovery, quanta; (b) calculated how many water molecules existed in 22.4 litres (a number so vast that, Isaacson tells us, “that many unpopped popcorn kernels when spread across the United States would cover the country nine miles deep”); (c) explained Brownian motion as the jostling of motes of matter by invisible molecules; (d) expounded the special theory of relativity, holding that all measurable motion is relative to some other object and that no universal coördinates, and no hypothetical ubiquitous ether, exist; and (e) asserted that mass and energy were different manifestations of the same thing and that their relation could be tidily expressed in the equation E=mc², where c is the speed of light, a constant. Only a few friends and theoretical physicists took notice.
He did it, of course, not as an academic, but as a patent clerk, which his new biographer, Walter Isaacson, thinks was a good thing.
So it was that Albert Einstein would end up spending the most creative seven years of his life—even after he had written the papers that reoriented physics—arriving at work at 8 a.m., six days a week, and examining patent applications.…Yet it would be wrong to think that poring over applications for patents was drudgery.…Every day, he would do thought experiments based on theoretical premises, sniffing out the underlying realities. Focusing on real-life questions, he later said, “stimulated me to see the physical ramifications of theoretical concepts.”
He couldn’t go on being that successful as a mere patent clerk, of course, so:
Yet things happened to him; he had a life. In 1909, the University of Zurich upped an initial offer, and Einstein, “four years after he had revolutionized physics,” resigned from the patent office and accepted his first professorship. “So, now I too am an official member of the guild of whores,” he told a colleague.
Like the blogger at Centauri Dreams, I didn’t think that Abraham Pais’ Subtle Is the Lord could be bettered. This one may have new revelations.
Einstein and women are a complicated story, and Isaacson doesn’t attempt to tell it all. There were a number of extramarital relationships; how many of them tipped from companionship into sex is, like the electron, difficult to measure. (One startling fact, according to Isaacson: beginning in 1941, Einstein was sleeping with an alleged Soviet spy, the multilingual Margarita Konenkova, though the F.B.I., which was keeping close tabs on him, never twigged.)
Updike has written one famous poem on physics: Cosmic Gall, though it’s not, in my view, as good as Auden’s After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics.
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Saturday, 31 March 2007
Splendid Obituaries »
The Torygraph had a couple of really splendid obits recently. On Thursday, there was this more-or-less hatchet job on The Most Reverend John Ward. "Ward himself was arrested by police in London and falsely accused of sexually assaulting a seven-year-old girl ..." which led him to be suspicious of the police, though it doesn’t justify this.
Jordan [who ’had been cleared of a serious sexual assault against a pupil at a school in Doncaster but listed by the Department of Education as unsuitable to work with children’] began his studies for the priesthood under the auspices of the Plymouth diocese; but when the bishop, the Right Reverend Christopher Budd, used the Church’s guidelines on child protection to look again at the case, Jordan switched his allegiance to Cardiff [where Ward was Roman Catholic Archbishop]. Budd wrote confidentially to Ward, urging him to investigate Jordan. Ward ignored this advice and withheld vital information about Jordan’s past from the diocesan vocations board. Jordan was ordained in 1998, and jailed in late 2000 for sex offences against boys which included two since his ordination.
And the subtle knife blow:
His adminstration was not characterised by great vision or marked spiritual leadership.
In contrast, there’s a wonderful obit for Maurice Flitcroft. The first paragraph tells you it’s going to be good.
Maurice Flitcroft, who died on March 24 aged 77, was a chain-smoking shipyard crane-operator from Barrow-in-Furness whose persistent attempts to gatecrash the British Open golf championship produced a sense of humour failure among members of the golfing establishment.
...
Refusing to be beaten, in 1978 he posed as an American professional named Gene Pacecki ("as in pay cheque", he explained helpfully) and blagged his way into the qualifier at South Herts, where he was detected after a few holes and bundled unceremoniously off the course. At a qualifier at Pleasington in 1983, he tried disguise, dyeing his hair, donning a false moustache and masquerading as Gerald Hoppy, a professional golfer from Switzerland. He fared rather better this time, playing nine holes and 63 strokes before officials realised that they had "another Maurice Flitcroft" on their hands. "Imagine their surprise when they discovered they had the actual Maurice Flitcroft," he said.
In 1990 he entered the qualifier at Ormskirk as James Beau Jolley (as in Beaujolais), an American golf professional. He hit a double bogey at the first hole and a bogey at the second; he claimed to be "looking at a par" at the third before he was rudely interrupted by an R&A golf buggy which screeched to a halt in front of him. He remonstrated with the driver, asking to be allowed to finish the hole, but officials were not in the mood to show mercy. Nor did they return his £60 entry fee.
We need more like him, say I.
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Sunday, 25 March 2007
A Message For Scotland Yard »
Please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please caution Tony Blair. That is all. Thank you.
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Oh, Mrs Porter! »
Nicholas Lezard reviewed Nothing Like a Dame: The Scandals of Shirley Porter by Andrew Hosken. Lezard describes Porter as "by a considerable margin, the most corrupt British public figure in living memory, with the possible exception of Robert Maxwell."
Penny-pinching yet weirdly profligate, she sells three cemeteries for 15p to property speculators. She arranges for young thugs to jeer at bereaved families who protest. She kicks hundreds of homeless people out of their accommodation, and spends a fortune locking up the properties. She smears political opponents and fixes an artificially low poll tax. When caught, she is misleading about her personal wealth.
Because he’s reviewing the paperback, Lezard can look back at the hardback reviews.
Jenny Diski, reviewing this book in the LRB, detected a trace of anti-semitism in patrician attitudes to Porter; understandable, but to which one reasonable counter-claim might be that it didn’t stop her from becoming leader of Westminster council. I might also add that one of the very few things in her favour was her Jewishness; in 1960 she helped expose 10 golf clubs across north London for holding anti-semitic membership criteria.
Jenny Diski’s review (now behind the LRB subscription wall: that link goes to her own site) seems to me to be to be looking for offense.
Shirley Porter’s flat in Gloucester Square, where some meetings were held, is described in detail:
Witnesses attest to huge mirrors and a profusion of vulgar ornaments. By common consent, the fittings, furniture and kitsch paintings represented a victory of wealth over taste, and it was a sign of her unpopularity that people laughed about her bad taste behind her back. Porter became so acutely aware of the cowardly mockery of 19 Chelwood House that she was reluctant to allow newspaper interviewers to use the lavatory in case they wrote about gold-plated taps.
Why is mockery ’cowardly’? Garry Trudeau devoted weeks of Doonesbury to mocking the opulent tastlessness of Donald Trump (not Jewish, as far as I know).
She was in other words seen as a working-class Jewish upstart.
There are various interpretations of the term working-class - starting from only including those who work in the mines and extending to anyone who works for a living. Even if we’re generous to use the latter, Prince Charles would qualify before Lady Porter ever did.
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Spreading Democracy »
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
There is a political faction, mostly among bloggers, which seems to think that democracy is nature’s last word. Like the 99 names of god in Islam, it is the highest, the most perfect, and 97 other things. They think everyone around the world should feel the same way - and if they don’t, we should send in the tanks after bombing the shit out of them to illustrate the perils of incorrect thought.
The two best cartoonists in the main stream US press are particularly fine today.
Opus.
I bet those unlucky countries can’t wait to be more like the United States.
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