おろかしい。

Stan Lee's recent interview with former President Gerald Ford will be posted as soon as I can think of something–anything!–more bone-headed than a joint American-Turkish operation against Iraqi Kurds.

えんそうか。

Legendary funk musician James Brown died on December 25. He was recently interviewed by Ramesh Ponnuru.

Ramesh Ponnuru: Good morning.
James Brown: Bitch.
RP: Excuse me?
JB: I called you a bitch, bitch. Why you hating?
RP: Is this about my book?
JB: Bet your ass it's about your book.
RP: Okay, when I titled it Music of Satan, what I meant was that the music had–
[crosstalk]
JB: Just whatever, man
RP: Now, I appreciate how good it is for your image when you claim to be the hardest working man in show business, but can you really back that up? Is there some sort of quantifiable–
JB: I work hard for my money.
RP: Yes, but in any verifiable way? That we can compare to other men in show business?
JB: Talking to you is hard work.
RP: Yes. [laughs] I appreciate that. That wordplay there. It was funny. But you are making a claim, and I have an obligation to verify it. Like calling yourself "soul brother number one." Isn't it possible that there were other black men who could credibly, realistically, claim that they were soul brothers before you were a soul brother?
JB: No.
RP: But what if you're soul brother number two? Or number four, or five?
JB: Bitch.
RP: You shilled for Nixon.
JB: Elvis shilled for Nixon!
RP: Hold on. Okay, hold on. Now, hold on. I don't think that's valid because, logically, okay: let's say you stole the idea to shill for Nixon from Elvis. Everyone knows Elvis stole all his ideas from well, put it bluntly, black music. Most of what he stole his ideas from could be called soul. And you are the godfather of soul, so doesn't that mean you a parental–or at least god-parental–responsibility for the entire idea of schilling for Nixon?
JB: This is a bad trip, man.
RP: Now that you mention drugs.
JB: Oh, hell no.
RP: It's a valid subject for debate. And naturally you say you're against young people abusing drugs, and most musicians say that. I'm not saying you're going out there explicitly advocating fourteen-year-olds shoot heroin. You're not. But I don't think you've thought through the consequences of your beliefs. Let me give you an example. You're song "I Got You (I Feel Good)" is about feeling good, right?
JB: Sure.
RP: Well, the lyrics are all about feeling good. That's the idea.
JB: Okay.
RP: I don't oppose pleasure. Some conservatives do, though not as many as the media reports, and I am not one of them. But if you're lyrics don't explain how pleasure can become self-destructive, or even become addiction, you're creating a paradigm that doesn't include responsible restraint. And that set of basic principles, when applied to drugs like cocaine can easily result in addiction–
JB: Crack is whack! I said crack is whack!
RP: Of course. No one is questioning the whackness of crack. That's a given. But you're lyrics don't enforce the principles that help people avoid addictions. Maybe you sell more records that way. I'm not saying you have a financial incentive to encourage drug abuse. You don't have–
JB: That's right, I don't. If someone spends their money on drugs, they can't give it to me.
RP: For you to spend on drugs.
JB: Right. I mean no! I mean fuck you.
RP: My point is that–
JB: No, really, I mean it.
RP: Oh, right. I'll go. One last question first. Real quick.
JB: Fine.
RP: How can you be black and proud?
JB: I'm James Brown, bitch.

きちがいじみている。

Saparmurat Niyazov, the President of Turkmenistan, died on December 21. Martin Peretz had interviewed him last month.

Martin Peretz: Good morning, President Niyazov.
Saparmurat Niyazov: Please, I am not Saparmurat Niyazov. I am Turkmenbashi, father of the turks. In Turkmenistan, my friends call me Bashi.
MP: Like the doctor from Star Trek.
SA: You mean Doctor McCoy?
MP: No, no. Doctor Bashi, from Deep Space Nine.
SA: He was Doctor Bashir, not Bashi.
MP: I was always a Next Generation fan, myself.
SA: In Turkmenistan, I have renamed Star Trek: The Next Generation as Star Trek: Turkmenbashi.
MP: After yourself.
SA: No, after the other Turkmenbashi. (Laughs.)
MP: You have named mosques and towns after yourself.
SA: I do not not like it. But the people demand it. You cannot reason with them. They are worse than my wife.
MP: You don't think it's at all arrogant to name Sunday after yourself?
SA: In Turkmenistan, Sunday -- excuse me, Turkmenbashi -- is the beginning of the work week, and Friday and Saturday are the days off to rest, and to keep holy the Muslim sabbath. And also to drink.
MP: So it would be like me renaming Monday after myself.
SA: Exactly. No one likes Monday. It's a gesture of humility.
MP: When you translate Garfield into Turkmen, does he talk about how much he hates Turkmenbashi?
SA: In Turkmenistan, I have banned cartoons about talking cats. That tiger from Calvin & Hobbes was spreading subversive ideas. The people won't allow subversive tigers.
MP: The people? Not you?
SA: I would love to have the basis for my authority questioned by a crudely drawn tiger. But the people will not allow it. They demand patriotic cartoons that promote the heroism and superiority of the Turkmen.
MP: I've been experimenting with cartoons in my magazine.
SA: I hope you won't do a cartoon of me.
MP: They're mostly about Republicans. We did a guide to Republican D.C. and that kind of thing.
SA: I certainly don't want to do a cartoon celebrating my rule. But the people might have a different opinion.
MP: See, there was this incident a while back. I don't want to name names, but we had to fire this young guy.
SA: The people would only want you to do a glorious cartoon. In Turkmenistan, the cartoons are celebrations of the heroism of the Turkmen.
MP: Ever since, whenever my editors bring me some piece by some smart kid that they think is brilliant, there's a little voice that says "you could get in trouble for this."
SA: I don't find any pleasure in it, but the people demand it, because of their mentality.
MP: And that voice says, "don't get in trouble. Make fun of the Republicans, or do a cartoon."
SA: Could you do a cartoon of my mother instead?

かくはいきぶつ。

Utah won a surprising victory in last fall's elections. Specifically, the new Democratic majority—and the new Democratic majority leader—are almost certainly going to block any further development of the Yucca mountain nuclear waste dump. Like the rest of us, Senator Reid is always annoyed with NIMBY politics except when the backyard is his own, and his own backyard is precisely where Yucca mountain was to be built.

At first glance this seems to be a victory for those opponents of nuclear power who I would never be tactless enough to call dirty hippies. And my first thought was to rail against the damnably good intentions of the people who want to make the world safer by keeping three decade old coal-fired power plants spewing greenhouse gases and also poison across the Midwest in specific and the atmosphere of this planet in general. But a few discordant notes in the article left my complaints oddly off-key:

''The problem is the concept that the public wants the waste moved,'' said Michele Boyd, the legislative director and nuclear expert at Public Citizen. ''That's a 20-year-old concept.'' …

''We want Diablo Canyon plants shut down,'' [activist Jill] ZamEk said. When it comes to the plant's waste, however, she said, ''the risk of transporting it is so great it needs to stay where it is.'' …

[Senator Barbara] Boxer said that if a way to reprocess nuclear waste safely could be found, it would help with the waste issue, produce new fuel for reactors and ''make me feel more positive about nuclear power''

Well, obviously it occurs to remind Boxer that there is are safe reprocessing operations at the La Hague plant in France; the Mayak plant in Russia; the Thorp and B205 plants in Britian; and the ろっかしょ plant in Japan. And of course there was the West Valley plant in New York that safely recycled nuclear fuel rods until President Carter shut it down in 1977 out of environmental concerns that India might get the bomb. Today, India has the bomb, and the Tarapur, Kalpakkam, and Trombay reprocessing plants.

But Boxer's comments are really very reasonable in the context of a movement whose adherents are often unclear on the difference between Three Mile Island and Cherynobyl, and who fear even the smallest laboratory reactor could unleash—what? Giant ants?

Boyd and ZamEk also demonstrate an acceptance of the immutable existence of nuclear waste that did not exist on the left twenty years ago—when, to be fair, much of the waste did not exist either. The immutability of radioactive waste tends to force even the most committed hydro-electric enthusiast to accept some sort of plan to deal with it. Accepting a plan for nuclear waste in turn makes it hard to think of nuclear power as beyond the pale. Instead, one finds oneself comparing nuclear plants to other forms of power generation and looking for the one that is, if not the best, at least the least unpleasant option.

And while the words 'least unpleasant option' are not for most people synonymous with 'nuclear power plants,' in a better world they probably would be.

けがまけ。

Colin Powell is joins the ranks of the disenchanted.

"It's grave and deteriorating," Colin Powell said of the situation in Iraq on CBS News' "Face the Nation." "And as Secretary-designate of Defense Bob Gates said at his confirmation hearing, we're not winning. So if it's grave and deteriorating and we're not winning, we are losing…

"Over this summer, the United States and Iraqi forces launched Operation Forward Together," he said. "It began in June, and then phase two began in August with thousands of American troops going into Baghdad to try to stabilize the situation. They haven't stabilized the situation. So we have tried this surge of troops over the summer. I am not persuaded that another surge of troops into Baghdad for the purposes of suppressing this communitarian violence, this civil war, will work."

More importantly, Powell also calls the Army "just about broken."

``There really are no additional troops'' to send, Powell said… ``The current active Army is not large enough and the Marine Corps is not large enough for the kinds of missions they are being asked to perform.''

When Powell was at State, we all hoped that he would speak truth to power and would generally be impossible for Bush to ignore. It may be a bit late, but even now the White House still has to pretend to listen.

Press Secretary Tony Snow says Powell's comments were "pretty consistent" with what the Bush administration's saying. … But Snow won't say if the White House agrees with Powell that America's losing the fight. He says, "I'm not playing the game any more."

Tony Snow is far from the first press secretary not to play the game of talking about what's going on in the world. The fact that even Powell, the consummate soldier, is now trying to talk Bush down from the crazy tree is encouraging. There's a double moral here: the forces of self-destruction will always be able to take us farther down the road that's paved with good intentions than we'd like; but even the worst men of power eventually lose their control as completely as the best.

A final thought on Colin Powell: a few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me what I thought of Condoleeza Rice. I replied, "well, she wouldn't be the first intelligent and capable black person to have a real shot at the presidency ruined by being too loyal to George W. Bush."

あとのまつり。

Cliff May's response to the ISG report concludes that

We ought to consider what Brookings scholar Michael O’Hanlon calls the Bosnian model: Each of Iraq’s ethno-religious groups would establish autonomy within a unitary Iraqi state. Oil wealth would be shared by all cooperating and stabilized areas of the country.

To be considering—considering!—this now, in December 2006, is what's called being late to the party.

あいどく。

The recent months have not been what you'd call a productive period of my life, with the singular exception of my productivity as a reader. I have read several books in mere weeks, some of them insightful. Just today, I picked up a copy of Intellectual Liverwurst: Selected Poems & Stories by Clarence von Lipkenstein. The first poem reads, in full:

The Jewish man makes
more money than you,
and he deserves it—
because you are an asshole.

Intellectual Liverwurst is not one of the insightful books. P.J. O'Rourke and Gore Vidal are a bit more insightful, such as when O'Rourke argues, quite persuasively, that "government itself is an immoral act" in the final chapter of Parliament of Whores.

Vidal, meanwhile, attempts to describe all creation in a novel called, fittingly, Creation. In the fifth century B.C.E., the grandson of Zoroaster travels widely as an ambassador for the Persian court. He encounters the Buddah in India, Confucius in China, and finally a young Socrates in Athens. Two highlights:

Lais always had the gift of knowing what it is that people most want to hear. Although she would ascribe this to witchcraft, I suspect that she is simply more intelligent than most people--the ultimate magic.

And:

I have never visited any city in the world where I was not told that I had just missed the golden age. I seem never to be on time.

Insightful. I'm planning on spending some time tomorrow in the basement of Sam Weller's Bookstore (third-best bookstore in the country; best basement in North America, maybe ever) looking for gifts. Other goals: teach myself the new language of Blogger code (it's called widgets) and get rid of the pre-fab I've got going on here.