hitler hitler hitler!

in the mood for a little crazy? check out the podhoretz zakaria debate on whether to bomb iran.

podhoretz's "argument"--to the extent that term is even appropriate here--is that iran is eeeeeeeeeeevil. that's pretty much it. he repeatedly compares the iranian regume to the nazis and when zakaria raises actual facts about the regime's history and motives, podhoretz doesn't raise any counter-examples. he just compares them to nazis again. for a self-appointed expert on iran, podhoretz doesn't seem to have a clue of the limited role ahmadinejad has in the iranian government, or even the basic motives of the regime.

podhoretz's performance almost be funny. that is, if he weren't advocating the murder of thousands of human beings. it's really stunning just how low the bar is to be considered an expert on iran in the media.

drinking liberally: noz-free for only one week more!

the philadelphia drinking liberally is tonight. now that i'm back from egypt you probably thought i would show up and so it would no longer safe to go. well, think again! today is also mrs. noz's birthday, so you have one more week to enjoy the fine company of the drinking liberally crew without that annoying noz guy hassling you for a ride home.

i'll start going regularly again next week, so this may be your last chance for a little while. don't miss out! tangier, 18th and lombard, 6 p.m. until everyone leaves.

or, if you want to go to another event that doesn't include me, there's always the democratic presidential debate at drexel university. i have no idea if it's open to the public, but maybe the drexeldem can smuggle you in.

disoriented

i'm back. i reunited with mrs. noz yesterday and the pile of work on my office today.

well, the mrs. noz reunion was great.

اليوم الاخير

عندي مشكلة. عندما قررت ان اذهب الى مصر ارادت ان امارس اللغة العربية, ولكن كل اشخاص الذي اقابل يتكلمون اللغة الانجليزية معي. اليوم هو اليوم الاخير في مصر كذلك قررت انني اتكلم اللغة العربية فقط اليوم. لو تكلم فرد بالانجليزية, لاجابت بالعربية --او بالعربي,سمح لي بالاستخدام العامية او الفصحى

(roughly)

full moon

whenever i travel alone, i get really paranoid about losing track of the days. i live in fear that i will show up at the airport only to find that i miscounted and missed my flight home.

the internet has actually made date counting a lot easier. any news site always has the current date at the top of the page. before i used that system, my primary method for keeping track of the date was my journal. each day i would write reflections on what i did that day and put a date at the beginning of the entry. but what if i miscounted the days? that thought always haunted me. so one of the things i always do near the end of my trip is flip through my journal making sure i didn't skip a day or count one twice. that's still the case even in this internet age.

anyway, at some point before i left for egypt i noticed that the friday before i left would be the full moon. it made sense, that friday is exactly 2 weeks after the 'eid that marks the end of ramadan, and ramadan always ends with the new moon. so in the back of my head i thought: when the moon is full, high-tail it back to cairo. for the last two weeks i've looked at the sky each night, watching the moon get bigger as my vacation time trickled away.

the moon is finally full tonight and i arrived in cairo this morning. i still have a couple of days here, but it's all gonna be here here, and not over there here.

unpopular

it took me almost two weeks, but yesterday i actually found someone who doesn't hate mubarak in egypt.

i have yet to find anyone who doesn't hate bush.

security

because egyptian tourism sites have been terrorist targets ever since the luxor massacre 10 years ago, there's a big show of security here. but, in what seems to be a typical egyptian manner, much of the show turns out to be just that. the special tourism police are stationed in every nook and cranny of any even mildly interesting site. the entrance to just about everything has a metal detector and an x-ray machine, like you see in airport security checkpoints.

but the tourism police mostly just sit around, wait for tourists to come and then whisper promises of special favors (like permitting photos in non-photo areas, or unlocking closed sections of an archaeological site, all for a little baksheesh, of course). and with only a few exceptions, i've always been just waved through the metal detector, even when i set it off (and that's on the rare occasions that the metal detector is turned on). my bag has never been searched, just about anything could be in there.

today was a particularly good example of the senselessness of egyptian security. me and a pair of other travelers i met in luxor decided to go to the al-dakhla oasis, about 350 km due west of luxor in the western desert. there was no bus service there, nor did any shared taxis head in that direction from luxor. so we pooled our resources and hired a guy to drive us as far as the al-kharga oasis and figured that we would take a bus from there.

so this morning at 7:00 a.m. the car showed up and we were off to al-kharga. just after we left luxor, however, we passed a police checkpoint and were forced to pull over because the car had foreigners in it. the driver got out to talk to the police as we waited in the steaming car. eventually the driver returned and said that because we were foreigners we could not proceed without a police escort. so we had to wait until the escort car would show up before we could leave the checkpoint. the escort car would be there in 15 minutes, he promised. "if anyone asks you, say that you are from england" the driver added to me and my czech companions. "i told them that i had three english people in the car. if they knew i had an american, they would say we needed even more security and we will wait here even longer."

45 minutes later, we were still waiting for the escort car. the driver went over to talk to the police again, they talked in their radio, and we waited some more. finally the escort car showed up and we were allowed to leave, the police escort driving just in front of us.

only 5 km down the road, the escort car turned off onto a side road and waved us on to go ahead without them. "they were just escorting us until their superior officer couldn't see us anymore. they don't want to go into the desert." which was all well and good until we got to the next checkpoint and they wanted to know where our escort was. this caused another 15 minutes sitting by the side of the road as the police made several frantic calls to find out what to do. eventually, they decided they didn't want to deal with us anymore--and they certainly didn't want to drive out into the desert with us--so they waived us on. we passed through several more checkpoints on our three hour trip through the desert. each time the driver rolled down the window and said "talat ingileezi". and each time the officer manning the check point would seem to briefly think about what to do with us before just waving us on.

at the checkpoint just outside kharga, we got another escort. they followed us all the way to the bus stop and stayed with us when our car and driver left us there and drove away. it was a contingent of 6 officers, 5 in uniform and one plain clothed guy who seemed to be in charge of the others. we had an hour and a half for the next bus, so we decided to walk to a nearby restaurant to get lunch. the plain clothed guy walked with us, and the police car drove slowly behind us the whole way to the restaurant. inside the restaurant the officers hung around as we ate and then followed us back to the bus station and stood around us as we waited for the bus.

they didn't go away until about ten minutes before the bus arrived. as they drove off, seemingly for no reason, i said to my czech companions, "i guess we're safe now." luckily the cops don't seem interested in following us around here in dakhla. but when we checked into our hotel we were asked to write out a statement saying that we do not want a police escort in this oasis.

karnak

karnak is a huge series of temples just north of luxor. luxor is what used to be called "thebes", and before that "waset" and was once the capital of egypt. the karnak complex is really spectacular.

i went late in the day, around 4:00 p.m. the entrance closes at 4:30 (when they stop letting people in), but they don't begin throwing people out until 5:30. so when i first arrived, the place was still mobbed by those annoying tour groups. but over time, as people left but no one was allowed to come in, the crowds began to thin and temples seemed to come into their own. as the crowds thinned the sunset approached, which i think is the time with the best light to see ruins. the time when everything looks a little softer with long shadows.

i lingered until i was one of the last ones in the site, wandering ruins the way they're supposed to be wandered, without strangers pressing against you and in silence under an approaching full moon.

then the mosquitoes came out, and i got the hell out of there. luckily, karnak's on the east bank of the river.

ozymandias

considering how many pharaohs there were in ancient egypt's 2500 year history, it's really remarkable how often ramses the second comes up. about 1/2 the monuments and temples i've seen were built by him and he was actually one of the few pharaohs i knew something about before i got submerged in pharaohnisity here in egypt.

one of the things i knew about ramses 2 before the trip is that he's the pharaoh in the moses story in the bible. i don't remember how i knew that, but that factoid got into my head somehow. it's not only me either. i heard one of the tour guides say the same thing back in the memphis museum (it's also mentioned on ramses II's wiki page). so now every time i see a ramses 2 statue (and there are lots), my first thought is: that guy doesn't look like yul brynner.

anyway, today in the excellent (albeit expensive) luxor museum (in terms of presentation, probably the best museum in egypt) they had a map of the egyptian empire by ramses the second's reign. it stretched not only down the nile, but also along the mediterranean coast, up into what is now syria and lebanon.

so here's the thing: if moses really led the jews to canaan/palestine/israel whatever you wanna call it, he didn't lead them out of egypt. at least not in the time of ramses the second. all of what is now israel was part of the egyptian empire back then.

not that i'm shocked when some story relating to the bible turned out to be horseshit. i just wonder how the bible story was first linked to ramses 2. i wonder if the originators of the myth didn't choose ramses 2 because he was one of the most powerful pharaohs. you know, to raise the stakes in the moses/god vs. pharaoh face-off.

no hassle

the people in the markets of tourist towns like aswan and luxor are really aggressive. any foreigner who passes by gets swarmed by shopkeepers insisting that they come and look in their shop. a lot of visitors understandably get really turned off by the markets. but there are a handful of shops i've seen with signs saying "no hassle" hanging in the window. it's interesting that not harassing people can be a selling point.

then again, i'm not sure all the shopkeepers have completely gotten the "no hassle" thing. once when i walked by a "no hassle" shop the other day the owner ran out to tell me it was a "no hassle" shop (in case i didn't see the sign). when i kept walking, he grabbed my arm and tried to pull me in, i yanked my arm free and kept walking. the guy followed me for almost a half block, yelling "no hassle! no hassle!" at me the whole way.

hassle

a few days ago on the aswan corniche:

"hola amigo! meester, wait wait, do you want to ride a falucca? very cheap."

"لا شكرا. انا مش عاوز"

"مش عاوز؟ ليه؟"

"اكره الفلوكة. تقتل فلوكة امي"

it would have been even cooler if i didn't stumble over my words at the end. also i'm not quite sure that my sentences were correct. but it did surprise the guy enough to make him go away.

valley of kings

this morning i bummed around the west bank of the nile river, visiting the valley of kings, the valley of queens, the temple of hatshepsut, and the colossi of memnon. i don't know if you guys were aware of this, but this county is littered with all this giant old crap. back by cairo, they had these awesome big triangles, like in giza and shit. every time i saw them i though: "damn, that's a big triangle"

luxor doesn't seem to have triangles. they got big buildings like palaces (thus the name الاقصر) and stuff. and they got these big holes in the ground for storing dead people. all the dead people are gone. first they were turned into mummies and then they shuffled off after people, arms stretched straight out in front like we've all seen in the movies. at some point most of them shuffled their way to the cairo museum (though many were also kidnapped and shipped to places like the british museum). so now the tombs are mostly mummiless.

nature, however, abhors a vacuum. and so, instead it has filled the tombs with tourists, packing them in at a far greater rate than those ancient egyptians ever did. that means the tombs are hot and humid from all the body heat. you know it's bad when you can't wait to get back into the sun to cool off and you're in the sahara.

pathetic

i check the u.s. dollar to egyptian pound exchange rate almost every day. and almost every time, i notice that the dollar has slipped a little more.

it's rather pathetic if the dollar can't even hold it's own against the egyptian pound. so c'mon people over there, get your act together! you only have 5 days left to restore some of my buying power.

awe overkill

one problem with a trip like this is overkill. egypt is packed with big old archaeological sites, any one of them could be the highlight of my trip in another country. certainly i've never climbed on any 3000 year old ruins before now. the problem is that my well of amazement is finite, or at least it has to be given time to replenish. it doesn't take long before the impact is a little dulled.

also, i think that ancient egyptian motifs have been abused a bit in the u.s. it's almost become a shorthand for tacky. i wonder if faux ancient may have dulled the effects of actual ancient.

not that i'm not enjoying the sites. i'm just hoping that i'm not too burned out before i venture into the valley of kings and/or queens tomorrow.

not dead yet

i'm in luxor (not the casino). sorry i was out of touch, i spent the last 3 days, 2 nights sailing down the nile on a falucca (a traditonal nile boat which shockingly lacks internet access).

luxor's got a ton of those big rocky things built by dead people that i seem to like to look at. but i'm more than 1/2 way through so i'll probably have to pick up my pace a bit after that lazy sail down the river.

أهل الكتاب 3

i'm hanging out in a cafe in the aswan souq, practicing my arabic by talking to strangers. as always, eventually some egyptian starts talking to me exclusively in english.

"you don't believe that they say about egypt in newspapers." he said at one point. "egypt is a peaceful country. in my shop i have four people working for me, two christian and two muslim. i make no difference between them. i don't pay the muslims extra money because he is like me. everyone is equal here.

"do not believe what they say about us. you should talk to real egyptians. they will tell you it is okay here. it does not matter if they are christian or jew. listen to what they have to say. that is the truth."

أهل الكتاب 2

i'm crammed in a microbus just setting off for cairo from alexandria. after hearing me speak to the driver, the guy next to me asks, "why did you learn arabic?" "it is an interesting language. i began because i like to travel, but now i like it for it's own sake" i said. "which is interesting to you, arabic language or culture?" he asked. "both. you cannot separate one from the other. you cannot understand the language without the culture as a context and the culture influences the language." "i am sorry," my seatmate said, "but you are wrong."

ten minutes later, he asked again, "which is better, arabic language or culture?" and i gave him the same answer again. "do you like egypt?" he asked. "yes," i replied, switching to arabic, "egypt is sweet." "no, it once was great, but now it is filled with stupid people." outside a car horn honked as a man rushed in front of a car. "see?" he added.

still later, he pointed towards one of the cotton fields out the window. "near here is where matthew came to preach. you know the apostle matthew?"

near the end of the trip he said, apropos of nothing: "egypt is a mess because the people lie. you understand?" he asked me. i mumbled something like "people lie everywhere." "no," he said, " people lie here. they come with a new book that is all lies. why do you need a new book?"

أهل الكتاب 1

so i haven't always been mistaken for spanish. 4 or 5 days ago, when i was still in cairo, i went to the coptic section of town. it contains both a bunch of old christian sites and egypt's oldest synagogue.

when i entered the neighborhood, i ended up in a small souq with sellers crammed with pedestrians along a narrow footpath. most of the sellers were shouting the usual sales pitches at me, so i ignored them and kept walking. then one guy looked me in the eye and said "shabbat shalom." it was different enough to get me to stop. "where are you from?" the man asked. "amrika", i said. "where is your grandfather from?" he asked. "lithuania," i said. but when he looked puzzled, i corrected myself, "russia." "ah, you are ashkenazim," the man concluded. "i am sephardic."

he then proceeded to tell me the history of the jewish community in cairo. how it went from being an ancient community of 50,000 a century ago to now, when it is very very small. "how many?" i asked. "110." "110 people? you mean, if you leave there will be only 109?" he nodded. "how is it for you?" "not good," he said. "it is not very bad anymore, but it is still difficult."

scale

i went to abu simbel today, a huge temple complex in the far south of the country only 40 km from the border with sudan. these days it sits at the edge of lake nassar, the largest artificial lake in the world that was created by the aswan dam. however the original abu simbel was be in a spot that is now underwater.

when the dam was constructed, UNESCO instituted a crash program to save the ancient sites that would be submerged by the new lake. they moved the complex, stone by stone, and grafted it into the side of two hills on higher ground.

so is the temple authentic, or is it a reconstruction? either way, imagining the scale of the project was mind boggling--both projects, actually. both the original effort carving it by hand out of the rock 3,200 years ago, and the modern project moving it stone by stone and recreating it so precisely in a different location.

but there was also a problem, another issue of scale: the scale of the crowds that descend on the complex all at once. since the luxor attack¹ foreign visitors have to visit the complex by a convoy of buses that is escorted by the police. but that means that everyone arrives at the site at once. the flood of people can easily take away from the experience. the best thing to do is to just look up.

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1-i hope this link works. it seems to be blocked in egypt

curses, foiled again

i was gonna post a photo. i got my pictures transferred to a CD and everything. but none of the computers here have a CD drive.

elephantine

yesterday i wandered around elephantine island, an island on the nile, just a short ferry ride from aswan. the island has a small museum, some egyptian ruins, a pair of nubian villages and an ugly high priced resort hotel (which is walled off from the rest of the island to keep the nubian villagers out)

i spent a bit of time wandering the villages. at one point i ran into H, and he became my make-shift guide. the nubians once had their own kingdom that clashed with the ancient egyptians. the two civilizations wrestled back and forth for thousands of years, and there were a handful of nubian pharaohs. aswan was once the border city between egypt and nubia, though at other times the town itself was nubian.

H claimed that aswan was always a nubian town, although a lot of the nubians around here were relocated from areas upriver when the aswan dam was constructed. as we walked through fields he explained how he worked as a teacher in cairo before moving home to elephantine island where he wanted to teach village children the nubian language, as well as arabic. "the egyptian government is not interested in such a school," he said, "when we proposed the idea they said: yes. yes. but when it comes to supporting the project they will not do anything."

condi?

was here?

it's amazing how easy it is to not pay attention to such things.

hard time

i'm walking along the nile earlier today when i see a truck stuck in a rut on the side of the road. the truck has the seal of the egyptian military police on the side and the back of the truck is a big rectangular box with small windows with bars. the stuck truck appears to be a paddy wagon.

behind the truck are about a half dozen guys pushing, three of them in police uniforms. despite their efforts the truck won't get out of the rut. one of the non-uniform people sees me watching and waves me over to help. i think, "why not," and run over to the back of the truck.

as i'm leaning forward pushing, my hands straight out against the truck and my head facing down. i notice that the guy next to me has handcuffs locked around one wrist and dangling down towards the bumper. i look at the hands of the other guys and discover that everyone not in a police uniform has cuffs dangling from one wrist (except me, that is). the guy next to me notices me noticing and says, in heavily accented english, "it's okay, it's okay." he pointed at one of the officers and adding, "police."

shortly thereafter we got the truck out of the rut.

the moral of the story is that it's too friggin' hot here to push a truck in mid-afternoon.

alexandria

i spent yesterday in alexandria. walking along the corniche to the citadel, then climbing to the top. then heading back to the bibiotheca alexandria, and then to the catacombs of kom ash-shuqqafa (or as the locals say "ash-shu'afa"--i'm still not used to that disappearing qaf in the local accent), and then on to a couple of other smaller archaeological sites, dodging baksheesh demanding tourism police at each step. the catacombs were the best part, largely because i mostly had them all to myself. it was really great to wander through a 2000 year old underground tomb all alone, with shadowy statues of greek and egyptian gods adorning the room.

after seeing the mob scene at the sites around cairo it was strange how empty alexandria seemed. the citadel had a lot of tourists, but they were all egyptian tourists. i was one of, if not the, only foreigner there.

anyway, today i'm pretty much on the other side of the country in aswan. i'll tell you about that when i got something to say.

hola hola coca-cola

i walked through khan khalili last night. it's the local touristy market. like the merchants in several other countries i have visited, the sellers of khan khalili can pitch their stuff in a dizzying array of languages.

i first noticed the phenomenon when mrs. noz and i were in tunisia 7 years ago. whenever i passed a shop, people would yell at me in spanish. it happened in multiple markets in different tunisian cities. eventually i asked a merchant why he thought i was a spanish speaker. "most of our tourists here are from three countries," he explained, "france, spain and italy. you don't look french," he said, "you don't dress like an italian," which i took as a way of saying that i have no style (fair enough), "so that leaves spanish," he concluded.

however, the explanation only made sense in tunisia.other arab countries don't get most of their tourists from those three places. and yet, i noticed it again when i was in syria: if they guessed, syrians often guessed that i came from spain.

and the phenomenon has appeared again here in egypt. as we walked through the market last night, and in other shopping areas i passed by today, merchant after merchant called out "hola, amigo!" to me.

so last night i asked several why they thought i was spanish. they all said pretty much the same thing, "your face. from your face it is obvious that you come from spain." sometimes as they said this they moved their hands around on their own face, pantomiming cheek bones and other facial features, as if that somehow made things clearer.

the funny thing is that i don't think i look spanish at all. all of my great-grandparents were born in eastern europe and i've never been told anywhere other than in markets in arab countries that i look spanish.

random observations about the egyptian museum

1. parts of the egyptian museum feel like a warehouse, stacked with badly-labeled yet jaw-droppingly impressive relics from egypt's ancient past. about half of the second floor was taken up by hundreds of ornate sarcophagi, almost all from pharaohs i've never heard of, and any one of them would be the premier attraction in almost any other museum in the world.

2. i now get why tutankhamen is such a big deal. his stuff had far and away the best preserved, most pretty and sparkly stuff of all the mummies in da mathaf. unfortunately, seeing the sparkle involves putting up with hordes of annoying tour groups, which pretty much cancels out all the pleasure of seeing tut's riches.

3. the annoying tour groups pretty much ignore everything but tut and the mummies.

graceland

elvis' home town is apparently just a museum sitting on a site where a large ancient capital used to be.

either that or there was a whole other bit that no one told me about.

staying awake in cairo

it's been a long exhausting day. i haven't slept since i last posted. i think i woke up back at home about 31 hours ago. i have three more hours to go before i can finally let myself sleep.

but as long and exhausting it was, i still am having a great time. the trip went really smoothly (considering my main impression of egypt air prior to yesterday was an unsolved airplane exploding in mid-air (the very same JFK-CAI flight i took, in fact), the airline pretty had to meet or exceed expectations). cairo is really great. it reminds me a lot of damascus, only bigger, louder, dirtier, more frantic.

the egyptians have been extremely friendly, and not only the ones who are trying to lure me into their perfume shop. when i arrived i decided that i wouldn't take the taxi to my hotel. it would be more of a challenge to figure out the local buses to a stop almost near my hotel and then trying to navigate to the hotel on my own. i want to force myself to read the signs, ask questions of people, etc. there's no way to do that unless i challenge myself. and it was quite satisfying when i arrived at the hotel. besides, all i have on the agenda for today was trying to keep myself up until 10 p.m. so i adjust to the time here.

anyway, in that sense it worked too well. i arrived here within an hour of landing, so i spent the afternoon wandering cairo, talking to strangers and generally trying to take in the city before i try to run to specific destinations.

the city was empty for much of the afternoon. a lot of stuff was closed because of the 'eid. but once night fell the city came alive. people are clogging the streets in their best clothes, setting off firecrackers, and making a nice spectacle for me to appreciate. and being startled when an 11 year old sets off an explosive as you walk by him on the sidewalk is a handy way to stay awake.

set that climate control

land of the pharaohs

اليوم

have a nice weekend everybody, don't trust nobody!

that was the advice offered this morning by the crazy lady who shouts at people in my train station.

in any case, i leave for egypt this afternoon, just after a frantic morning at the office. my online time will be extremely limited until... well, i'm not quite sure yet. at best, sometime saturday.

rubber hose will probably be a little different for the next couple of weeks. this site is always and will always be a reflection of whatever i happen to be thinking about. and when i break out of my normal routine and hit the road, i tend to think about different things. if my past solo trips are any guide (see the september 2003 and september 2005 archives), the postings here will be more of a travelogue than anything else. i also won't be able to participate as much in the comments, nor will i want to. this is supposed to be a vacation, after all.

as i've said before on other occasions when i travel, i reserve the right to delete or edit comments, or to ban commentators if i think what they might may put me (or anyone else) in personal danger. i don't think that will be a serious problem with egypt, but who knows?

in any case, if you don't like travelin' noz, i'll be back at the end of october.

it looks like ezra was right

this is pretty funny. as part of the push back over the frost howl, a bunch of left wing bloggers noted that slamming the personal choices of the frost family in a difficult situation is not engaging in a good-faith argument over health care policy. in response michelle malkin wrote: "It’s militant leftist bloggers who wouldn’t know a good-faith argument if it bit them in the lip"

so yesterday "militant leftist blogger" ezra klein called her bluff and challenged malkin to a debate over S-CHIP:

Let's have a good faith argument. I will debate Michelle Malkin anytime, anywhere, in any forum (save HotAir TV, which she controls), on the particulars of S-CHIP. We can set the debate at a think tank, on BloggingHeads, over IM. Hell, we can set up the podiums in the shrubbery outside my house, since that seems to be the sort of venue she naturally seeks out. And then if Malkin wants an argument, she can have one. We'll talk S-CHIP and nothing but -- nothing of the Frosts, or Congress, or her blog.

ezra continued:

My sense has been that Malkin doesn't want an argument. Rather, she wants to feed her readers the steady stream of outrage that keeps her traffic numbers up. But I realized tonight that I could be wrong, and I shouldn't assume Malkin doesn't want a real argument unless I actually ask her.

so he asked her. and in response, malkin indicated that she did not, in fact, want to engage in a real argument:

"Debate" Ezra Klein? What a perverse distraction and a laughable waste of time that would be. And that’s what they really want, isn’t it? To distract and waste time so they can foist their agenda on the country unimpeded.¹

yes, talking about the actual S-CHIP law is a "distraction" from the real issue of how much the frosts' home is worth. how silly of ezra to think otherwise.²

UPDATE: Tim F. from balloon juice has actual footage of ezra trying to debate michelle malkin.

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1-actually that's just the most focused paragraph. if you'd like a good laugh, read the entire meandering rant (skip down past all the updates at the top until you see a picture of ezra with his hand on his chin)

2-n.b. SARCASM BRACKETS HERE.

frosty howl

i've been too busy plowing through the crap i gotta do before i leave to deal with the graeme frost thing. in any case, it's been dealt with fairly well by other blogs.

all i have to add is that i was totally completely wrong when i tried to guess the next howl. there's just no predicting these things.

flat

"Bush's Approval Rating Returns to Low 30s" says the headline of yesterday's gallup poll report. but that's not really true. the headline is referring to the that that gallup's latest rating approval number, 32% is a drop from his rating of 36% last month. but check out the chart that accompanies the poll report:


the gallup poll has a margin of error of +/-3%. since the beginning of this year the president's approval rating has "ranged" between 29% and 37%, only two points greater than the 6 percentage point wobble you would expect from any poll with a 3% margin of error. (his disapproval score shows the same eight point spread (58% to 66%)).

in other words, bush's scores are not rising or sinking very much at all. overall his ratings have remained remarkably flat. his four point "drop" since last month is probably not a drop at all, but rather just the noise you would expect from any sampling method. bush's "actual" approval among the u.s. populace doesn't seem to change much from month to month. it looks to me like he's remained at around 33% all along. his ratings didn't "return to the low 30s" because they never really left.

drinking liberally

like almost every tuesday, i'll be at the philadelphia drinking liberally tonight. as usual it's: tangier, 18th and lombard, 6 p.m. until later.

this is probably the last time you'll be able to find me there until next month. so if you're dying to meet that asshole who can't seem to find the "shift" key, tonight may be your last chance until november.

georgia on my mind

i felt sorry for the georgian government when i read this quote:

"As soldiers here, we help the American soldiers," Cpl. Georgi N. Zedguidze explained, peering past the sun-scorched checkpoint where he was guarding a bridge over the Tigris River. "Then America as a country will help our country."

if he's talking about military intervention, does anyone honestly believe that is true? russia invaded georgia's airspace and fired a missile just last august. georgian forces were already in iraq at that time and the u.s. did... well, pretty much nothing. russia supports two separatist regions in georgia, regions that are currently outside the control of the georgian government. despite georgia's help in iraq, i don't think the u.s. is making either much of a priority.

the u.s. is happy to use the troops that georgia is offering, but i really doubt they will get back what they expect out of this deal.

de-tex

after the usual fun with flight delays, etc., mrs. noz and i managed to make it home last night.

now i got a whopping three and a half days to do everything i need to do at work before i leave for egypt. this should be a really fun week.

face off

i met golden boy in person today and we managed not to kill each other. actually, golden boy, mrs. boy, mrs. noz and i all had a really pleasant lunch together. there was no acrimony at all, even when we talked politics at the end.

maybe we should start a national "meet your nemesis" day.

the skinny and maplight

check out zipskinny, where you can get the census-data skinny about home zip code, or any other zip code in the u.s.

(via, well, i don't know how to credit this one. i first found out about it from chris a couple of days ago, when i didn't have time to write a post. then i forgot about it, until i saw it again at LGM. but the LGM post credits yglesias who credits henley who credits unfogged who credits chris. since all roads seem to lead to chris, i guess he should win. congratulations chris, you get the exalted credit!)

hey, and that reminds me of something else i forgot to link to earlier: maplight, a site that makes it easy to compare a candidate's voting record with the contributions he/she received. check out your favorite congressional representatives and see the corruption in action!

(via, this one is easy, len by email)

are we sure it was the ipod?

maybe he was lying.

alaska?

did he come up with that himself, or is ahmadinejad a michael chabon fan?

do-it-yourself-post

dammit! it seems that no one has ever uploaded just the opening bit from "blood simple". so much for my idea for this post.

if you want, just go here, watch the first 1:23 and imagine that's what you see here.

travel day

mrs. noz and i are flying away to GBistan this afternoon (and switching planes in tony-the-ponyistan. we can stay at your place if we miss the connection, right tony?). i'm bringing my laptop, so blogging will continue from there. but in the meantime i might actually shut up for a brief period.

liar's paradox

ann coulter, who is unmarried, has decided that single women are too stupid to make rational decisions.

march of the lols

a couple of weeks ago, i mentioned lolthulhu.

then came lolcusts.

and today we have lolcons.

but be careful! that last one might make roger cohen cry.

wake me up in january 2009

of all the posts i've read about today's new york times article documenting the bush administration's secret authorization of torture, hilzoy's post is one of the best. as she writes:

These techniques are not just morally abhorrent; they are flatly illegal. One might think that since the President is required by the Constitution to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed", this might be a bit of a problem. Not for the Bush administration. First, John Yoo wrote his famous "torture memo", in which he argued that interrogation techniques were illegal only if they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or death. When that memo became public, the administration disowned it. But they also issued another secret opinion reaffirming the legality of the various combinations of techniques described above, and then wrote another secret memo saying that none of the CIA's interrogation techniques constituted "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment.

The techniques in question are repugnant. But in many ways, the administration's disregard for the law is worse. When your policies violate treaties you have signed and laws that are on the books, you are not supposed to come up with some clever way of explaining that appearances to the contrary, what you're doing is not illegal at all. You're supposed to stop doing it. When Congress decides to pass a law banning "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment, you are supposed to stop engaging in such treatment, not to redefine "cruel, inhuman and degrading" so that it doesn't apply to anything you want to do.

but the most shocking thing about these revelations is just how unshocking they are. revelations about how the bush administration authorizes torture, breaks u.s. law, and then hides it from the american public and congress seems like old hat by now. once these were the things i would expect from some two-bit banana republic. but now, thanks to W, it doesn't surprise me when my own country acts this horribly, in utter contempt of the law. i'm tired for being embarrassed for my own country.

the message of the blackwater scandal

via matthew yglesias i read this paragraph from mark kleinman:

Yes, the Blackwater fighters were in a tough spot, surrounded by what they knew was a hostile population; if they'd been guarding someone in New York when a bomb went off, they wouldn't have fired wildly into a crowd of American civilians. But since that hostile Iraqi population is crucial to our effort in Iraq — not to mention being the people we're supposedly in Iraq to help — maybe Blackwater and the State Department ought to be a little bit more careful about increasing their hostility.

not only that, but if blackwater had fired wildly into a crowd of new yorkers the company would be in deep shit, much deeper shit than they are right now. can you imagine the public outcry? especially if it came out that this type of thing has happened before? the government would have no choice but take immediate action, any remaining contracts with the company would be cancelled, there would be arrests (if even there were no legal basis for one, there would be tremendous pressure to make someone pay) erik prince might have spent yesterday in jail rather than testifying before congress. and i don't think my scenario would play out all that much differently if it happened in london or berlin or tokyo instead of new york.

but it didn't happen that way, and it won't. the only reason why is because it took place in baghdad and the victims were iraqi. there's no way to interpret the contrast except that a lot of people don't give a shit about iraqi lives. and that's what the folks in congress who defended blackwater are saying to the rest of the world, including to the iraqis. so why wouldn't they take up arms against the americans and their mercenary allies? who wouldn't under those circumstances? is it any wonder that the use of private contractors in iraq is hurting the u.s.' counter-insurgency efforts?

texas stops executing people

now i can finally visit the state without fear of execution!

the stay will probably prove to be temporary, so i think i'll go this weekend.

dipnote?

i mean "rubber hose" is hardly a masterpiece, but you'd think the state department could come up with a better name.

drinking liberally

i skipped drinking liberally tonight to see an advance showing of lust, caution.

didja miss me?

mr. prince will see you now, mr. bond

i can't be the only one who thinks that erik prince is a perfect name for a rich heir who built a company that supplies mercenaries to conflicts around the world.

1st, 3rd, what's the difference?

joe biden posted a defense of the "soft partition" resolution that i criticized earlier this week. biden claims that the resolution doesn't call for a breakup of iraq, isn't calling for anyone to be relocated, is consistent with the iraqi constitution, and is not any sort of foreign imposition on iraqi affairs.

fair enough, but then what was it trying to do? if it really just was a call for iraqis to "implement their own Constitution" is that any change in policy from what the bush administration wants them to do? and how can it not be a foreign imposition when it is the american congress talking about what should happen in iraq?

if biden's right, if i and others have misunderstood what the resolution means, then the resolution doesn't seem to be saying much at all. it's not a "third way" unless there is a meaningful difference from the first way.

sinking ship

i was really surprised to see this article over the shoulder of a guy on the train this morning. the republicans are losing the business vote? considering that the evangelicals are restless and there are at least some indications that its support among the military is eroding, i wonder if they have any safe constituency left. other than the fine folks of right blogistan that is.

am i missing anyone?

outsourcing the state department's blackwater investigation to blackwater

just in case you were worried that this couldn't get any more absurd.

iraqis unite in agreement...

...that joe biden's plan sucks.