for my father

for my father (imdb) is about tarek, a would-be suicide bomber who travels from the west bank to a crowded tel aviv market and then discovers that the firing mechanism is broken. he tries to get it repaired, and then falls in with a group of good-hearted israelis as he waits around for the part he ordered to come in so he can complete his mission. among them, a pretty young former orthodox woman, who falls for tarek in the two days it takes him to get a new firing pin. the implausibility of the premise is the first major hurdle for this film. on top of that, there are a series of major plot holes. like why didn't any of tarek's new friends notice that he never changed his clothes? (he couldn't take off his belt or the bomb would go off) speaking of which, why didn't tarek just unlatch his belt in the market when the firing mechanism failed? and why did everyone assume that tarek was part of the construction crew working down the street but never wondered why he never had to go to work? or why didn't they wonder why he didn't have any place to stay in the city?

there's also a pretty major flaw in the message of the film. the villain is a racist security guard who assumes tarek is a terrorist just because he is an arab. the guard is clearly portrayed as the bad guy of the film, all of the sympathetic characters who are tarek's friends rally to his defense whenever the guard harasses him. and yet, the guard's racist assumption is basically right. on the surface the film seems to condemn racism, but that message is completely subverted by the overall plot. a more complex movie might have been able to deal with that contradiction. "for my father" is just not up to the task.

oh well. i've had a pretty good run with this festival up until now. it was only a matter of time before i saw one that i didn't like. at least i got to listen to some arabic. it was a lot easier to understand tarek than those kids in garbage dreams.

l'archipel de palestine orientale

check out this map which re-imagines the west bank as if israeli settlements were water. the archipelago that results is a stark illustration of the ongoing fragmentation of the west bank. it's a fascinating way to make a political point.

garbage dreams

garbage dreams (imdb) is a documentary about the zaballeen, the traditional garbage collectors of cairo. cairo historically had no centralized garbage collection system, and that's for a city with almost twice the population of new york. into that vacuum stepped the zaballeen, some 60,000 members of the cairene lower class, who for a small fee, would go door-to-door, collect people's garbage, sort it, and mostly recycle it. the zaballeen are remarkably efficient recyclers. they manage to recycle 80% of the trash the collect (by contrast european waste management systems brag when their recycling rate reaches 28%).

the film follows the lives of three young zaballeen, just as their way of life is dying out. the city of cairo, anxious to shed its third world image, hires foreign waste management companies to deal with the city's garbage. the zaballen community scrambles to deal with the threat. with the help of an NGO, two of our three protagonists fly to wales, to observe modern garbage collection and to bring those ideas back to the zaballeen community. at first, it looks like the gambit might succeed. pushing their environmentalist credentials, the zaballeen manage to get the residents on their route to sort their garbage for the first time.

but it doesn't work. the city's garbage collectors often beat the zaballeen to the pick up. after residents observe the city's collectors dump their sorted garbage bags together, the community stops separating and the recycling campaign falls apart. soon individuals from the community start getting jobs with the garbage company. there aren't enough jobs for all of them, of course, so the community's economy collapses. modern garbage trucks take over the old zaballeen route, but the city is left with an even more impoverished community and an end to it's super-efficient recycling.

the film is very effective at championing the zaballeen cause. when it first described the zaballeen at work, the back breaking labor and squalor that comes with that lifestyle, i was hoping that the city would replace the zaballeen with a western garbage collection system. by the end of the film, my sympathies had completely flipped. i was rooting for the zaballeen in their futile efforts to fight off the foreign garbage trucks. what seems like sensible development policies ends up hurting the people it was meant to save, plus we get a shittier environment.

UPDATE: i had no idea when i saw the film (and i missed it when it was on the screen), but my friend dagger aleph has a translator credit on this film.

how demonization of iran is infecting our discourse

i'm going to take a quick break from my film festival blogging to note how bizarre the u.s. media's treats saudi arabia when it comes to israel. check out this example from this morning's NYT:

The conflict also underscored the tension between those officials in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia who are aligned with Washington and support the peace process with Israel...

one of these things is not like the others. egypt and jordan both have a peace treaty and diplomatic relations with israel. saudi arabia does not. both jordan and egypt often act as intermediaries between israel and other entities in the arab world. saudi arabia does not. egypt and jordan permits people with israeli stamps in their passports to enter their country. saudi arabia does not.

but wait, the sentence continues:

...and those in Qatar and Syria who have developed close political and economic ties with Iran.

qatar? why is saudi arabia in the "amenable to relations with israel" camp and qatar is not? unlike the KSA, qatar has trade relations with israel (or at least it did up until the recent gaza conflict). while they don't have full diplomatic relations, qatar's leaders have been talking with israel's leaders. even syria, a regime viewed as overtly hostile to israel, has at least been negotiating with israeli leaders through an intermediary in the past year. saudi arabia hasn't even done that. the only reason that qatar gets to be on the bad list is because they also have relatively good relations with iran.

the u.s. media keeps classifying saudi arabia as a non-hostile-to-israel country (what it calls "moderate"). and yet, it seems to me that the KSA is less compromising than countries like syria, one that is always on the bad-for-israel (i.e. "extreme") list. it is true that the saudi king proposed a peace plan in 2002, but he proposed it through and on behalf of the arab league. as with qatar the only plausible explanation for the saudi's preferential treatment is the fact that their government is hostile to iran. apparently that fact trumps the kingdom's actual hostility to israel and puts it on the non-hostile list. the AIPAC folks keep pushing the idea that iran is the anti-israel. i think this grouping is just a measure of their success. by that logic anyone who is anti-iran, must be pro-israel. and so the KSA, one of the least "moderate" countries in the region in terms of government, human rights, stance towards its neighbors, religion, dress code, etc., gets to be called "moderate" anyway.

eldorado

eldorado (imdb) is a surreal road trip across belgium. belgium isn't that big and they stay in the french part, so the trip only takes 85 minutes.

but it ended up being a pretty entertaining 85 minutes. these oddball road trip kind of films sometimes work and sometimes don't. this one worked (at least for me). in a sense, the film was a series of wacky scenes. i'm not sure what the overall arc was supposed to be. but i enjoyed it, so who cares?

salt of this sea

salt of this sea (imdb) is about soraya, a brooklyn-born palestinian woman, who travels to ramallah to withdraw the money her grandfather left her from a palestinian bank. in the first scene she's trying to clear customs in ben gurion international airport. she is pulled aside because of her arab name, questioned, strip searched, questioned again, et cetera. that pretty much sets the tone for the entire film.

soraya makes it to ramallah and tries to claim the money from her grandfather's account. her request is denied because the account dates back to before 1948. "that money is lost", they tell her. soraya won't give up. she appeals her claim to the british head honcho of the bank, but he also turns her down. so soraya and two local friends, emad and marwan, rob the bank, and then escape to israel by stealing israeli license plates and posing and jews to get them access to the settler-only road system. once in israel they travel to the places they have only heard about in stories: tel aviv, jaffa and the ruins of emad's ancestral village. i was amused to see that this t-shirt that i photographed in jerusalem last august had a significant role in the plot.

"salt" is a straightforward palestinian polemic of a film, and makes no apologies about it. to the extent that soraya represents the moral compass of the story (and i think that is what the filmmaker intended) there are parts of the movie that are somewhat problematic. two bit in particular stand out. the bank robbery is seen by soraya as a way to claim what is rightfully hers. while she believed that the bank should honor her claim, the bank has a bit of a point that the account disappeared when the jaffa branch fell under israeli control in 1948. it's not at all clear to me that the bank is the one that took it. by robbing the bank, probably all that soraya was accomplishing was taking money out of ramallah and further impoverishing the community. the film seems to approve of the robbery as justice for soraya's grandfather's disappearing account. but that logic only works if you don't think about it too much.

and then there's the scene at her grandfather's house in jaffa. the trio arrive and announce to the current resident that the house is rightfully soraya's. surprisingly, they are welcomed into the house. the israeli "owner" (i used quotes because the legitimacy of that ownership is one of the things the film draws into question) is a young liberal with "peace now" mugs in her cupboard. emad and marwan seem satisfied when the israeli tells them they are welcome to stay indefinitely, but soraya is upset that her grandfather's furniture is no longer there and offended by the notion that she has to be invited to stay in what is rightfully her own house. it's hard to understand soraya's expectation that the furniture would still be there after 60 years. when soraya directs her anger at the current "owner", insisting that the israeli acknowledge that soraya is the real owner and becoming upset when the resident resists saying those words, the anger seemed to me to be misplaced. if the purpose of the film is to make us empathize with soraya's exploration of the displacement of her people, the scene really backfired. i ended up having more sympathy for the israeli who took soraya and her friends in, let them stay at her house for free, and then got yelled at by soraya for her trouble.

nevertheless, "salt of this sea" is very good at illustrating the daily humiliations and hardships of palestinians both in the occupied territories and in israel proper. one thing i was really curious about is how they managed to film the thing. the scenes in the airport seemed to have really been filmed there--at least the place where soraya was initially questioned looked just like the place that i was pulled aside last august. but i can't imagine that the airport security authorities would agree to cooperate with this film. they certainly weren't thanked in the closing credits. in fact, at the end of the credits the filmmakers thanks "all the palestinians who risked arrest to help make this film." that certainly piqued my curiosity.

before the fall

just after "back soon", i saw the much more intense before the fall (imdb). in "before the fall" the governments of the world announce that a meteor will hit the earth in three days, ending all life on the planet. most of the world freaks out, and somewhere in spain all the guards of a prison abandon their post. the prisoners escape, including a serial killer with a beef with the family who stopped his killing spree 20 years before. the film is from the point of view of alejandro, the younger brother of the guy who foiled that serial killer, who lives in a small city in andalusia. alejandro ends up holed up in his brother' house, trying to defend his four nieces and nephews from a killer who has a penchant for slaughtering children.

i'm not spoiling the ending when i mention that everyone dies. the "end of the world" genre can be a way for a filmmaker to explore the futility of human existence, or it can be used just to show us how people act when the rules of human society break down. "before the fall" does more of the latter. it's quite effective at getting you to root for the good guys to avoid being killed by the bad guys, even though they're all about to die anyway. i guess i just wanted them to have a good final twenty minutes.

i should also add that it was beautifully filmed. some of the scenes were really striking. it doesn't surprise me that the film festival used an image from this movie for the cover of the festival guide. i think this is the first time i've actually seen the film that has the cover image.

back soon

back soon (imdb) is an icelandic pothead road movie. and like any good drug hazed journey, the characters don't go all that far. the main character, anna, is a drug dealer in reykjavik. after she puts the "back soon" sign on her door, she doesn't seems to rove beyond the rural areas just outside the city. but it still takes her more than a day to get back and not surprisingly, hilarity ensues, you know, the one-of-these-geese-swallowed-a-cellphone kind of thing. meanwhile, the film looks back at anna's house, where her customers breeze past that "back soon" sign, let themselves in and proceed to throw a big party. in between anna's odyssey, we cut back to see how the party is going. the answer is nowhere. it's not clear what the point of that subplot is.

i put "back soon" in a solidly okay category. it definitely was a step above cheech and chong. and there were some entertaining moments. it's just that in six months i don't know if i'd be able to remember much of this one.

ADDENDUM (3/29/09): i saw the film with glomarization. her short take about "back soon" (as well as quick reviews of several other films) is here. it's on her recommendation (and the recommendation of a couple i met at a party last night) that i'm going to try to see eldorado later today.

westchester... dead

can you spot our very own commentator?


"The Institute of Séance" trailer from kevin corcoran on Vimeo.

i wish i could make tonight's showing. does anyone out there want to go in my place?

revanche

revanche (imdb) is an austrian film with a french-sounding name. the festival program calls it "a thriller" but i don't think it really is. and it's hard to describe without giving too much away. the title means "revenge", but even that's something of a twist that i really shouldn't talk about.

what i can say is that the first third, hell, the second scene, of the film was much more sexually explicit than i expected from a best foreign film nominee. at times gratuitously so. but that's really just part of the set-up. once the film gets going, it mostly leaves that behind. the film starts with tamara, a prostitute, and her boyfriend, alex. alex helps her flee the world of prostitution and the city only to get intertwined with the lives of a rural police officer and his wife.

in the beginning i had my doubts whether there was much to this film other than an excuse to put naked people on the screen. but once it found its stride, it was really intensely character focused and pretty compelling. ultimately the film is about dealing with loss. and i thought it dealt with that quite well.

i met glomarization on the way out. she was in line to get in to another film. just before i ran into her, another person told her that "revanche" was the worst film she had ever seen. so i guess it's not for everyone. but i really think it's a solid film if you can resist writing it off in the first third.

sign of the LA times

yes, laying off your editorial staff actually has an effect.

(via MatthewB on FB)

PFF/cinefest

the philadelphia film festival/cinefest kicked off last night. i'm going to my first film later today. which means that for the next ten days or so i'll be mostly writing about films you've probably never heard of. just a friendly warning.

meanwhile, a PFF/cinefest link has appeared under the "fun" category to the right. feel free to look over the list of films and leave your recommendation in the comments. (and thanks for the recommendations from my prior post) i don't buy most of my tickets in advance or make a comprehensive schedule. instead, i circle the films that i have an interest in seeing, making little notations and pluses for things that give the film a little more preference (a director i know, arabic language, a recommendation, etc). then i carry the schedule around with me. when i have time to see a film, i see what's playing and decide which ones to go to on the fly. sellouts just make my scattershot approach a little more fun!

anyway, if any of you are going to any, i do give a preference to screenings where i might see some friends. ciarán has already emailed me his schedule, glom has posted hers, and simon gave me a list of titles he's going to see (but not which screening). if you want to try to meet me during the fest, let me know what you're interested in seeing. at this point the only one i know i will be at is the april 3rd screening of tulpan. these days, i basically have to see any kazakhstani film.

and if you want to know which films in my every shifting cloud of possibility i am leaning towards seeing, email me. i can usually throw together a list of either-ors for any given day. if you have a strong preference either way, it might influence the one i choose.

living in the past

a lot of people have remarked over the years that american policy towards pakistan makes no sense. but it's also true that pakistan's policy towards afghanistan makes even less sense. i understand why the ISI supported the taliban in the 1990s. the pakistani government feared india and afghanistan was a mess. the taliban seemed to be the group that could finally bring afghanistan under control of a single government. that would bring stability to pakistan's western neighbor and allow the rest of the pakistani defense establishment focus their attention on india and kashmir to the east.

the policy had a certain logic to it in the 1990s, but that logic doesn't apply anymore. nowadays it's the taliban that threatens stability of the central government in afghanistan. if the ISI still wants a quiet western border, supporting the taliban is exactly the wrong way to do it. on top of that, these days the taliban and the related militant groups are the biggest threat to pakistan, not india. the 1990s policy is out of step with current conditions on two levels, it both misdiagnoses the threat and prescribes the wrong remedy.

i realize that the pakistani government is pretty factionalized. the ISI elements that are aiding the taliban are just one faction and there are plenty of others who see things differently. it just seems like the bits of the ISI that are aiding the taliban are working on outdated assumptions. it's not the mid-1990s anymore.

teleprompter

i've gotta agree with point number 3 in michael scherer's post. i've been looking on in amusement as the wingnutosphere harps on the teleprompter line. it's really a sight to behold. teleprompters have been around for decades and have been used by every president pretty much since they were invented. obviously using a teleprompter improves the speaker's delivery, that's why so many presidents have used them for their speeches. pointing out that obama's public pronouncements are better when he uses a teleprompter is like noting that a professional runner does better when he wears running shoes. it's such an unremarkable observation it borders on ridiculous.

but what really seems to be going on here is that the right is trying to spread the idea that obama isn't such a great communicator when he isn't reading off a script. except that to most people that's simply not true. while he sometimes stumbles or says "uh", on the whole obama is a lot more clear and coherent than most politicians when he speaks off the cuff. at least that's how i see it. and i think that's how most people see him as well.

the funny thing is that the teleprompter meme is really a replay of a tactic that was tried and failed during the presidential election. you may recall that just before the first presidential debate, they were spreading the idea that obama was gaffe-prone when he wasn't working off of a prepared text. at the time, i was a little mystified by the tactic as it suggested that the right didn't know how to play the expectations game. the idea is to lower expectations about your own candidate's speaking ability prior to the debate. by lowering the bar, your candidate can more easily beat expectations and be deemed the winner of the debate. last september both the mccain campaign and right blogistan seemed to have it completely backwards.

in any case, the gaffe-prone-guy-who-says-"uh"-a-lot just didn't catch on, at least it didn't outside the confines of mccain's own partisans. in the general population, obama was generally views as the winner of all three debates. to the extent the "bad speaker" meme was picked up at all, it probably helped obama because his performance in the debate clearly wasn't bad at all. as paul from powerline acknowledged just after the first debate: "Certainly, his performance should end the mantra of certain critics that Obama can't handle himself without a tele-prompter."

don't get me wrong, i'm not saying that rightwingers are lying when they keep returning to this bad speaker idea. i just think that they can't distinguish their own bullshit from other people's reality anymore. no matter what obama actually does, they will see what they want to see. if you hate obama and keep telling yourself he's a bad speaker without a teleprompter, every time you see him without one you will be able to convince yourself that he's speaking terribly. but the real problem (for them) is not just that they have convinced themselves of their own reality, but also that they can't seem to conceive that others see things completely differently.

which is why to me, from the outside, the "teleprompter" thing is so entertaining. it's not just a weak line of argument (to the extent it can even be characterized as an "argument"). to someone not already wrapped in the wingnut cocoon, all this teleprompter talk just looks a little crazy. i, for one, hope they keep it up.

charcoal not understanding

i was going to use this photo and its caption to make a joke about how there doesn't seem to be much understanding in umm al-fahm. unfortunately, it's really امّ الفحم‎ not امّ الفهم‎.

stupid transliteration system.

like your dead hamster on christmas morning

apparently this customer complaint letter has been circulating around. i just saw it when my cousin BB emailed it to me.

dow

digby quotes tamron hall:

Tamron Hall: Paul Krugman, he says that the plan "fills me with a sense of despair." Is he alone in that criticism? The Dow is up 313 points.

this is one of those annoying things that the media does: it uses the performance of the dow on a single day to evaluate how the entire economy is doing. if the administration does or says something and the dow goes down that day, that something is deemed to be "bad for the economy". if, on the other hand, the administration does something and the dow goes up, that something is said to be "good for the economy." the latter is what happened today. geitner announced his plan and the dow went up. so, of course, the powers that be will deem the geitner plan to be great!

but that's just stupid. two years ago, i wrote about how the dow isn't a good way to measure the stock market, much less the economy as a whole. the dow isn't a grade, it's an average of a handful of stocks in the stock market. all it represents is the value of those stocks according to the shareholders who are in the market.

obviously, a plan to bail out troubled banks at the expense of taxpayers while letting the shareholders get off scot free is going to be popular with shareholders. if geitner had instead announced a swedish-style nationalization plan, where shareholders bear the brunt of the loss, that would be unpopular with shareholders, and it would remain unpopular with that crowd even if that were the best way to fix the economy as a whole. in that scenario, the stock market would tumble. but it may be the only way out of this mess.

all else be equal, i'd rather the market were going up than down. but the daily stock market gyrations aren't the only thing in the economy. sometimes you just have to yank the band aid off.

karzai bypass operation

how the hell can the u.s. just appoint a new afghan prime minister to "bypass karzai"? doesn't afghanistan have a constitution, one that these same western powers basically wrote for the country? don't they remember that the document has a process for choosing leaders of the country that doesn't involve outside nations simply installing one? the constitution doesn't mention a "prime minister". are they just going to scrap the system of government they've been trying to instill for the past 7 years and start over?

this is an election year in afghanistan. if the afghan people don't like karzai, they can dump him for someone else. maybe the western powers fear that the situation in afghanistan won't allow a free and fair election. but if that's the problem, the solution would be to try to improve the security situation. if foreign powers simply appoint a new leader, it will just send a message that afghan democracy is a sham.

anything to avoid nationalization

i wonder how long it will take before the obama administration once again trashes the "trash for cash" approach, spends a few more weeks regrouping to come up with a "new plan," and then proposes another gussied up version of the same thing again.

i should add that not everyone thinks the geitner plan is horrible, brad delong has been arguing in its favor over the past few days. although his latest post suggests that the two differ more in their political calculations than on the economic issues. they both think that temporary nationalization is the ultimate answer. krugman thinks that the geitner plan makes nationalization less likely (or at least more painful when he eventually comes around to it), delong thinks that nationalization won't pass now and that by taking this half-assed measure it will lay the groundwork for eventual nationalization.

something you have to accept

can not accepting a resignation actually work? i've wondered about this for years. people talk about refusing to accept resignations as a way of showing support for the would-be resignee. but slavery is illegal. you can't force anyone to stay in a job or make them work if they don't want to.

if i ever tried to resign from a job and the resignation wasn't accepted, i just wouldn't show up for work anymore. what are they going to do, fire me? that would just giving me what i want.

against twitter

i don't like the current rush of politicians and beltway media personalities to set up twitter feeds. tweets are limited to 140 characters. there's no way you can send out a substantive policy argument via twitter. the rise of political twittering is an embrace of sound bites over substance. you can't engage the other side. it's like exchanging bumper sticker slogans rather than ideas.

i'm not really against twitter. though i don't do it myself, i don't see a problem with using it as a social networking tool. all i'm saying is that using twitter as a medium for political discourse can only further dumb down our already really dumb discourse.

i guess i shouldn't be surprised that people like john mccain and jake tapper have jumped on the twitter bandwagon. there are a lot of people who seem to think that one-liner zingers are what politics is all about. i suspect the rise of D.C. twittering will only make matters worse.

taxing argument

calling a cap-and-trade system a "tax" is nothing but a semantic game. a cap-and-trade system is a system where the government issues a finite number of pollution permits and private parties have the right to buy and sell those permits. the cost of such permits would go to the seller, not necessarily the government although initially the government would sell the permits, later private parties could buy and sell them to each other. it's not a tax. it's a market.

back when i was in law school, cap-and-trade was the new innovative republican supported system for environmental regulation. the idea was to abandon the top-down approach of simply banning pollutants and to replace it with something that used market forces to put a value on clean air and water. cap-and-trade was first tried in this country when the first president bush won the passage of the 1990 clean air amendments, which included a cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide (the substance blamed for acid rain). that system has proved to be "immensely successful in achieving its goals" so the obama administration is seeking to extend that success to other pollutants.

unfortunately, the republican party has changed a lot in the past twenty years. it has gone from a party that believed in using market forces to solve problems to one that has knee-jerk opposition to any environmental proposal and calls anything it doesn't like a "tax." so now we're in this weird situation where a democratic president is proposing an originally republican solution, with the modern senate republicans opposing the plan. they don't really have an alternative. they just don't like it, so they call it a "tax", even though it clearly isn't. if carbon trading is a "tax" because it costs the permit purchasers money, then every purchase in the economy would also be a "tax." if you follow their argument to its logical conclusion, capitalism vanishes entirely.

why do senate republicans hate capitalism?

delagostti industries

this is really freakin' awesome.

(via coeruleus)

psycho

the british prime minister doesn't have access to a multi-region DVD player? i know times are tough, but you can get one from amazon.uk for £42.99.

suze!

while i can't say i go out of my way to watch her, my impression is that suze orman is the only person on CNBC who deserves a little respect and isn't all about trying to talk up stock prices. so good for her.

while i think the AIG bonuses were pretty egregious, the blame-AIG-for-everything mood sweeping the country is really quite stupid. the real problem is that the leadership of this country washed its hands of regulating the financial markets. to some extent the blame is systemic. but if you need to pin it somewhere, it's with the people who made the rules (and by that i mean "didn't make the rules").

jonathan sharkey on the big little screen!

you can now see "impaler" on hulu.

just in case you haven't gotten enough of the greatest vampyre/politician ever from this blog over the past 3+ years. and yeah, i neglected to blog about his arrest for threatening a 15 year old girl few months back. it's just not that funny. who would have thought that a self-proclaimed vampyre would turn out to be a sicko?

(no, i haven't seen the documentary yet. thanks to hulu, that will change soon!)

crashing the SCO meeting

i'm surprised that the SCO is letting them attend. i thought the whole point of the shanghai cooperation organization was to create an international security group that didn't have the world's lone superpower as a member (which inevitably leads to american domination)

maybe with a more multi-laterally inclined president they're not as prickly about the american presence. or maybe this is just an elaborate set-up, like a blind date. the SCO members think if they just can get the u.s. and iran alone together in a room, something like love will blossom.

abu what?

hey remember when abu sayyaf kidnappings made big news? i didn't even notice that the group had totally fallen out of the headlines, until i saw this story about their agreement to free some hostages. free hostages? i didn't know they had any, and i try to follow this stuff.

gone are the days of jeffrey schilling and the burnhams. it looks like the group found the quickest route to obscurity: it stopped kidnapping americans.

drinking o'liberally

wow, st. patty's day falling on a tuesday! what are the odds?

to celebrate, i'm wearing green underwear. also i'll be at the center city philadelphia drinking liberally tonight. you can too! (provided you can make it to philadelphia. if not go somewhere else instead)

triumph brewing co
117 chestnut street
6 until later.

i didn't bring the set so there will be no head chopping this week. sorry.

ah what the hell? i might as well repost this video:

the joys of faculty housing

the college electricians are finally upgrading some of the outlets in our house this week. woo-hoo! that blue room will finally achieve the lofty heights of three-prong technology!

they were working in our place today while me and mrs. noz were at work. how do i know? it's not just the wires sticking out of the baseboard on the second floor. it's also because the front door was wide open, flopping in the wind, when i came home from work. the electricians were gone. mrs. noz wasn't home yet. i guess they just forgot to close the door.

two down...

mr. geekazoid sez that the iphone 3.0 will include a copy/paste. woo-hoo! it's about time.

now all i need is arabic support. it's really odd that they haven't done that yet considering that the iphone is currently available in a several arab countries (even former members of the taliban are hooked). i realize that dealing with a script that goes backwards with letters that change shape depending where they appear in a word is tricky (desktop computers still have a hard time with switching between the two scripts). i've googled around and found a bunch of methods for making an iphone arabic compatible, but i'm suspicious of unofficial patches because apple is so prickly about them.

also i just want my phone to be able to display arabic while keeping the english-based operating system. i don't want to switch everything over to arabic. there's got to be a way to get the iphone so that it can handle both. maybe iphone will be the answer.

the deal

it looks like we got a crazy rightwing government in israel. the irony is that if a european country had brought an openly racist politician like lieberman into their government, israel would probably have withdrawn its ambassador. that's what it did to austria in 2000. i wonder if austria will retaliate this time around? so far all we got is a vague warning from javier solana.

one interesting thing about the coalition agreement is that likud seems to be keeping the door open to a different coalition later on. the deal assigns various cabinet posts to israel beitnu and other coalition partners but notes "that should a national unity government be formed with Kadima, it may undergo changes." does anyone know if that's typical for these kind of coalition agreements? is this just boilerplate or is likud still holding out hope for a deal with kadima?

next!

now that jon stewart has destroyed jim cramer, i guess we'll all have to tune in to see what he does to tucker carlson tomorrow night.

i notice that he doesn't wear the bow tie anymore.

debaptism

susie posted this video:



i don't get it. if you really are a non-believer and think that baptism doesn't have any actual magical significance, then why would you care enough to debaptize? the critics of baptism (at least anglican baptism of non-converts) are right to note that the ceremony takes place before the baptizees are old enough to make up their own mind about theological matters. but doesn't that just mean that baptism shouldn't be viewed as significant by a non-believer? the fact that someone was baptize certainly can't be viewed as an indication of their views as an adult. so if you want to make a point about your present views, the historical fact of baptism is simply irrelevant.

i was never baptized so i guess it's not an issue in my non-believing life. but even if i had been born into a christian family, i can't imagine bothering with this debaptism thing. i certainly am not going to write some certificate claiming to taking back my bris or bar mitzvah. besides, those things happened. any effort to undo the theological significance of those things would be like saying that they had theological significance but-for my efforts to undo them. i simply don't think that's the case. there's no reason to undo anything.

watchu talkin' 'bout?

the sears tower will be renamed the "willis tower". as a former chicagoan, it just doesn't sound right too me. i've never really liked having buildings named after their corporate owners. i remember when the stone container building turned into the smurfit-stone building. neither was a good name. they should have just stuck with "the diamond building." here in the philly area, i watched the "core states center" turn into the "first union center" (or, as my brother called it, "the FUC"), and then into the "wachovia center" in just a few short years of corporate takeovers. now that wachovia has been eaten by wells fargo, i'm not really sure what to call it. in texas, the collapse of enron made enron field a joke.

if we've got to name buildings, why can't we just give them names? "the empire state building" has worked well for decades. i work in a building that just barely pre-dates the naming-after-corporations fad. it's just called "liberty one." corporations and their holdings are an ephemeral thing, posing as something permanent. if they're going to insist on naming a building after it's corporate sponsor, there should be a rule that that's the name no matter who buys it later. the world is littered with monuments to dead kings. we don't rename them, they are part of history. our buildings should serve as monuments to our modern corporate overlords.

about that cramer beatdown

what john cole said.

mmm, pi

it's nice to see that global financial collapse has them focusing on the important stuff.

never get involved in a land war in asia

an iranian supply route for u.s. forces will never happen, but based on geography alone, it's the only option other than through pakistan that makes any sense.

a few weeks ago, the pentagon was floating a bunch of alternatives that traveled through various republics of the former soviet union. but they all seemed pretty convoluted if you're familiar with the geography. the area that once was the soviet union isn't one big country anymore. the favored route seems to go from estonia, to russia, to kazakhstan, to uzbekistan. but if you go with that one you're giving four different countries an effective veto over the u.s.' supply lines. you can fiddle with the route a little bit, knock out uzbekistan and replace it with kyrgyzstan and tajikistan, but that increases the number of potential vetoes to five. you could also replace uzbekistan with turkmenistan, that would keep it to four, but turkmenistan has been the least supportive of the afghan operation of any of the central asian republics from the beginning. then again, kyrgyzstan is in the process of kicking the u.s. out of its bases and uzbekistan already did that in 2005, so there are problems no matter which one you choose. plus four to five potential vetoes is just asking for problems. and however you do it, both russia and kazakhstan will get one.

if you want to minimize the number of countries involved (and thus the potential for disruptions when political differences arise) the best overland route from international waters to afghanistan is either through pakistan or iran. that's putting aside politics. which, of course, you can't really do. i just don't see any good options if you're looking for an alternative to pakistan.

speaking of kryptonite...

(via elayne)

political kryptonite for the man of steele

i haven't been following the michael steele follies all that closely. i thought it was vaguely interesting when he mildly criticized rush. and i thought the fact that he had to apologize and kiss up to rush once those remarks got some attention was pretty revealing about the state of the modern GOP.

i was also sort of aware that some republicans were plotting to get rid of him, but didn't really think those plans would go anywhere.

until now. that dude's a goner.

dual use toilet paper

i guess it can be used as a kind of missile.

Flying toilet paper, originally uploaded by joemills2.

freeman cuts himself free

watching the rapid barrage of smears directed against charles freeman in the past week, i'm reminded just how narrow the path of acceptable discourse about israel in this country is. as andrew sullivan points out "having the kind of debate in America that they have in Israel, let alone Europe, on the way ahead in the Middle East is simply forbidden." unless you advocate uncritical backing of everything israel does, you simply are not allowed to hold any foreign policy related position in the federal government. it's an effective blacklist.

i'm not sure that i agree with everything freeman does about the middle east, but this entire spectacle is an absolute embarrassment. apparently, president obama is allowed to have a "team of rivals" among his advisors, indeed he is actively encouraged to appoint republicans and people who have completely different views on just about everything to various positions, except when it comes to this one issue.

freeman's statement about his withdrawal is here.

ADDED: i pretty much agree with what stephen walt has to say about what this all means. his analysis strikes me as a lot more plausible than MJ rosenberg's silver lining post.

DSE opens

world financial markets are collapsing and syria, once again, shows its impeccable sense of timing.

everyone's a critic

this is pretty mean to the watchmen purists. it also spoils the ending of the film (and comic). so watch at your own risk.


(via elayne)

...and check out watchmen as a saturday morning cartoon. (click "WATCH THIS MOVIE!") it spoils nothing.

what are they afraid of?

ezra klein posted a copy of the letter (pdf) from leading senate republicans to president obama drawing lines in the sand concerning any health reform proposal. what i find really interesting is this bit:

Forcing free market plans to compete with these government-run programs would create an unlevel playing field and inevitably doom true competition. Ultimately, we would be left with a single government-run plan controlling the market.

to back up a bit, obama's health reform proposal during the campaign was essentially the plan that was signed by governor mitt romney and is now in effect in massachusetts. it keeps the existing system of private insurers with government efforts to subsidize those who can't afford coverage and guarantee that everyone has access to the system. individuals (or their employers) could still choose among different health plans and those plans would still compete for customers. one open question in obama's proposal was whether a government run plan like medicare would be one of the options. the edwards plan, for example, was a lot like the obama plan but expressly stated that people would be allowed to choose a private health plan or join a government-offered plan. the obama plan didn't say either way whether a medicare-like option would be in the mix.

behind all of this is the data that indicates that medicare is a lot more efficient than private health insurers. usually medicare is said to have 2% admin costs, with private insurers hovering over 20%. but even if you use some of the most conservative estimates, medicare ends up having less than one-third of private insurer's non-health costs. for example this study (pdf) attempting to count all the "hidden costs" of medicate still found that the program's "true" administrative costs were 5.2% of its budget, whereas private insurers have an average of 16.7% in non-health payment costs. of course, opponents of a single payer system like medicare have pushed back against that claim, argued that the percentages are misleading, et cetera.

which brings me back to the above quote. why do senate republicans fear competition between private and public insurers? why do they think that allowing such a choice would automatically favor the government plan? and not just favor them, favor them to such an extent it would effectively doom the private system! if they really believed that private insurers are better than public insurers, you'd think they would be itching for competition between the two. i mean, if private is really so great, why not let the private companies directly compete? the letter looks to me like a tacit admission that public will kick private's ass if heath care market is allowed to choose.

it's that time of year again

the philadelphia film festival (temporarily renamed the philly film festival/cinefest) is coming. i wasn't sure it would actually happen this year, but they managed to patch things together at the last minute.

in any case, i'm going to get my usual ten movie pass, and i'll probably end up buying a few tickets on top of that. the biggest trick is figuring out what to watch. i'm open to suggestions. feel free to browse through the list and let me know if there's anything you recommend that i see or avoid.

i've just started glancing over the program. i did notice that the "cinema of the muslim world" program is not dominated by iranian films this year (as it has been in most years). almost half seem to be palestinian. more chances to practice arabic! also, the documentaries about iraq fad seems to have passed (or at least it's taking a break with this fest). i see that one of the docs adds to the arabic-language films count. but it's pretty unlikely that i'll understand much of the dialect in that one.

anyway, leave your suggestions in the comments.

the democrat party

i realize that a lot of bloggers have written about this issue, but i honestly don't care if anyone calls it the "democrat party." i don't see how what some people call the party makes any difference to anything.

and even if we assume that it is intended to be an insult, it's a pretty lame-ass insult. is this issue really worth so much spilled ink?

better than the library

want to get some work done in a place with plenty of peace and quiet? try an auto dealership showroom.

this place is dead. it's just me and a few bored salesmen reading at their desks. the phones aren't even ringing.

the party of stupid

a bunch of bloggers have been taking pokes at mccain's twitter feed after maureen dowd echoed them in her column this week. (see also brendan's ongoing series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12). but they're all really saying the same thing: mccain's (and dowd's) criticisms are nothing more than mocking spending items because of how they sound. they're ignoring the policy reasons in favor of each expenditure.

actually the best summary of what is going on here is from paul krugman, who wrote the following about bobby jindal, not mccain/dowd. but it think it applies just as well to them:

The intellectual incoherence is stunning. Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.

both the republican and democratic party have always had their share of morons. but in response to their recent electoral defeats the republicans seem determined to become the official party of stupid. when anti-intellectualism becomes central to your message, how can you possibly hope to win the debate over ideas?

the yoo memos

scott horton has a good article about the recently released office of legal counsel memos. this stuff has been leaking out for a while, but it really is stunning to extent to which the bush administration essentially acted as if there was no constitution. this will probably assure that bush goes down in history as one of our worst.

but the craziest thing about all this is john yoo. why the hell hasn't that guy been disbarred? reading his memos is like reading the writings of someone who doesn't understand the most basic premises of the american legal system. it's not just stuff you learn in law school, it's stuff you're supposed to learn in junior high level civics classes. the guy should never be able to find work again in the legal field. the idea that both berkley and chapman hired him to teach in their law schools is a blight on those schools' reputation.

the public relations push of salah gosh

while the indictment of hassan al-bashir is the right thing to do, i'm uncertain whether it will result in more harm than good. meanwhile bashir's intelligence chief is doing a fantastic job convincing the world community that characterizing the regime as a bunch of blood thirsty criminals is a mistake. check it out:

Salah Gosh, the head of Sudanese intelligence, was recently quoted in Sudanese news reports as calling for the “amputation of the hands and the slitting of the throats of any person who dares bad-mouth al-Bashir or support” the court’s case against him.

guinea

it only came to mind today because guinea-bissau is in the news, but for a while i've wondered what's the deal with the name "guinea". we got guinea (aka guinea-conakry), guinea-bissau, equatorial guinea, papua new guinea and regular new guinea. why so many guineas? were europeans just sailing around the world naming random spots "guinea"?

it looks like all the various guinea names trace back to the name of the region in west africa (oddly, this historical map shows a region called "guinea" that doesn't contain any of the countries that currently have "guinea" in their name). according to wiki, the origin of the name "guinea" is as follows:

The name comes from the Berber term "aginaw" via Portuguese; it originally meant "black" (or, in context, "land of the blacks.")

which brings me to another thing i've wondered about: how many countries in africa have a name that arguably comes from the color of the inhabitant's skin? by my count, it's six: guinea, guinea-bissau, equatorial guinea, mauritania, sudan and ethiopia. some probably think there are two more, niger and nigeria, but those two are named after the niger river whose name, in turn, probably comes from the tuareg phrase "gher n gheren" ("river of rivers"), shortened to "ngher". so i'm sticking with six.

i don't know if any other continent has even a single country name relating to the racial characteristics of the people living there.

ADDING: aaron points out in the comments that lesotho, and possibly somalia, also have race-based etymologies. and it also occurred to me that tanzania should also half count. that country was created out of the confederation of the british colony of tanganyika and the british protectorate of zanzibar. the name "tanzania" is the combination of the two words. "zanzibar" means "coast of the blacks." so the count now stands at 8.5. all but lesotho and somalia are names that are derived from outsider's languages.

making a mountain out of a jawa hill

via the delicious links of blood and treasure, i came across this article arguing that news reports that talk about there being a single group called the "taliban" are being misleading. it's a good article, go read it. but that's not what i'm blogging about now.

what i'm blogging about is the bit when the author reprints an excerpt of an email from brandon friedman:

Instead of fighting organized theocratic government forces and their foreign terrorist guests, we're now arrayed against a Tatooine-esque combination actual foreign terrorists, actual Taliban fighters from two different countries, narco-warlords jockeying for regional power and influence, regular warlords jockeying for regional power and influence, angry Afghan citizens who've grown weary of civilian casualties, angry Afghan civilians who've grown weary of foreign forces and their broken promises, regular Afghan citizens who side with the Taliban out of sheer necessity for survival, angry opium farmers, Pakistani agents, and, finally, the invisible blight of government corruption.

(emphasis added) what exactly does "tatooine-esque" mean? is it because of the desert? i don't think afghanistan is as deserty as luke skywalker's home planet. is it because there's a hodge-podge of characters like in that cantina scene? then why did he make the comparison with the whole planet and not just the relevant bar? maybe it's because it's a wretched hive of scum and villainy? but again, that's mos eisley spaceport, not the planet as a whole.

it's also complicated by the fact that there is an actual tatooine in the muslim world. okay, it's spelled tataouine. but that's where george lucas got the name for the planet. he filmed the desert scenes up the road in matmata. (this is as good a time as any to foist my holiday photos of matmata on you. consider yourself foisted-upon)

i realize it's a minor point, but this stuff really bugs a traveling star wars geek like me.

facebook in reality

(via CG)

bad bank plug

this week's this american life episode, "bad bank" is another episode about the current economic crisis. i haven't listened to it yet, but considering just how good the last two TAL episodes about the economy were, it will probably be well worth listening to. "the giant pool of money" remains the best description of the current credit crisis i have found.

the new episode will only be available as a free MP3 download this week. after that you gotta pay 99 cents to download or you can listen to a free stream online. even if you're not going to get around to it until later, you might as well grab it when the "free download" button appears here (it hasn't appeared yet, it probably will tomorrow. if you subscribe to the podcast, it's already available. i'm downloading it now).

mitt victorious!

woo-hoo! not only do i think that mi'ens is a remarkably weak candidate on the merits, i also get to post guy smiley pictures once again!!!

(with apologies to john/drexel dem)

finally

bring it on!

red baiting 2.0

for the past year, the american right has been running through it's greatest hit of the last 20 years, as its struggled to regain its political footing. we've heard about reagan ad nauseam, newt gingrich is back, and, of course, they're still touting tax cuts as the solution to everything. but for the moment at least, it looks like they're going with accusing democrats of being "socialist".

i personally hope they stick with it. red baiting simply doesn't have the bite that it used to anymore. aside from that crazy guy with the hand painted sign who sometimes hangs out on walnut street, people don't worry about a communist revolution around here now that it's 20 years after the collapse of the soviet union. it looks to me like the right keeps reaching back to its glorious campaigns of the past because it has no coherent idea of how to face the future. no wonder the republican party is losing the 18-29 year olds in terms of party identification.the oldest of the 18-29s were nine years old when the berlin wall fell, eleven when the soviet union officially dissolved. they have no first hand memory of a feared communist menace. some have tried to replace dread of the USSR with the specter of "european style socialism" (i.e. democratic socialism), but that comes across as pretty comical to anyone who has actually spent any time in europe. it's also intellectually incoherent if you happen to know even the most basic history of the cold war. if "european-style socialism" is the same as stalinism, what the hell was the u.s. doing defending western europe in the decades following world war two? if you follow that claim to its logical conclusion, it ends up being a backhanded indictment of people like ronald reagan.