William Rodney Herring

If democracy isn't here but is to come, then preparations are in order. What kind? First, acknowledgement of non-democracy. It's not here and now, so what is here and now should not be defended as democratic but rejected as non-democratic. Second, insofar as democracy is not here and now, pretenses to democracy, here and now, are distractions, fantasies, efforts to displace the intrusion of the Real of non-democracy. They are lures into thinking that we are already democrats. Third, democracy requires the production of democratic subjects. But this isn't a project of democracy (which would presume democracy here and now). It's a project for democracy. Don't pretend there is a 'we' capable of ruling itself (a multitude of singularities might be productive, but it isn't self-governing). Fourth, the production of democratic subjects is a challenge; if it has been done before, it has only been achieved temporarily. The production is neither certain, secure, nor robust. There are lots of glitches and faux democrats out there on the market. Fifth, part of the challenge is knowing what is necessary for a project or form of life that doesn't exist and when it has has been fragile. Some possible ways to produce democratic subjects: --rule and be ruled in turn: being ruled is as important as ruling; in practice, this means frequent changes in position (to enable people to learn new skills in ruling and being ruled as much as to prevent the not yet democratic from doing really major damage); --censorship:... Jodi

I’m over there today, just because.

Update:  I’ve decided that it is not neighborly of me to send people over to CT empty-handed.  OK, here’s that song that we talked about in that thread:

Now my work here is done.

Because it makes little sense to write a book about visual rhetoric and ignore the fastest growing sector of the market, but as my reading experience follows the typical trajectory of Claremont X-Titles (X-X?) to Sandman and Vertigo books to Fantagraphics lust, my experience with manga comes almost exclusively from some mid-90s flirtation with Ghost in the Shell.  I know about manga and its many varieties, but I lack the sort of fluency with its conventions that I have with American mainstream and independent books.  My question to you is this:

What should I read to acquire a robust, intuitive working vocabulary with manga?

Few write on the history of evolutionary theory as compellingly as John Wilkins. (Had his Species: the History of an Idea and Defining Species: a Sourcebook from Antiquity to Today been available in 2002, I could've avoided years of thankless legwork and finished my dissertation with normative time to spare. Not that I'm bitter.) So I can think of no better way to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin than to listen to Wilkins speculate about what would have happened had it never existed. My only qualm is with this paragraph:

Lamarckism, by which I mean the progressivist view of evolution, not the “acquired inheritance” version that has little to do directly with Lamarck and anyway is set up as a contrast with Weismann not Darwin, would have played an even greater role in people’s thinking than it did. It may still be with us now—we would be trying to figure out how progress occurs out of necessity, rather than it being the rather odd view of people like Conway Morris.I think scholars who focus more on the scientific literature underestimate the popular appeal of what amounts to quasi-Lamarckian thought both then and now ... but then again, as I'm the person who wrote my dissertation, I would.

Staffers on Capitol Hill were calling it the Louisiana Purchase.

Global warming skeptics are attacking climate scientist Phil Jones for encouraging trickery in an email recently stolen off the webmail server at the University of East Anglia in which he wrote:

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.

Over at RealClimate, the skeptical response to the word "trick" is to treat it as a colloquial:

Trick:
“a cunning or deceitful action or device; “he played a trick on me”; “he pulled a fast one and got away with it”
“Something designed to fool or swindle; ”
“flim-flam: deceive somebody; “We tricked the teacher into thinking that class would be cancelled next week”To which one of the hosts, Gavin A. Schmidt, responds:
Wrong. Wrong and wrong.The skeptics reply:
[S]ince this happens “often”, it would be good to see a couple of examples of the word’s usage from other fields to understand why it is not problematic.Schmidt obliges:
Sure. It's mostly used in mathematics, for instance in decomposing partial fractions, or deciding whether a number is divisible by 9 etc.etc.etc.The skeptics rejoinder:
This is nonsense. Both are examples of teaching or explaining concepts to lay people. The first intentionally places “tricks” in quotations marks to emphasize its non-technical use.The problem with nonspecialists reading the private correspondence of experts is that their ignorance transforms all the technical points into nefarious inkblots. To continue with the example above, skeptical nonspecialists encounter the word "trick" and ask for clarification. Schmidt provides evidence that the word is innocuous, but because nonspecialists can interpret neither the context of the original nor that of the further examples, they redouble their efforts: now the rhetorical situation in which the word "trick" is uttered matters; now the appearance of quotation marks matters, etc. They are convincing themselves that those black blobs represent what they insist they represent, and when experts inform them that those are not Rorschach blots to be subjectively interpreted—that they are, in fact, statements written in a language that skeptics simply do not understand—the nonspecialists look over them again and declare that it could be a butterfly, or maybe a bat.

To my mind, the only way to convince them that the word "trick" operates innocuously in the particular linguistic community of climate scientists would be to demonstrate that the word "trick" operates innocuously in the particular linguistic community of climate scientists. Show the skeptics that on 11 July 2001, Jean-Charles Hourcade wrote:
This passes first through ... a macroeconomic framework insuring the consistency between prices and quantities at any point in time without necessarily resorting to the modeling tricks relying on the conventional neo-classical growth theory; these 'tricks' assume indeed perfect foresight, efficient markets and the absence of strategic or routine behaviours; new conceptual frameworks about endogenous growth theory allow for such a move, but there is a gap between advances in pure theory and empirical modeling[.]I don't know what that means any more than I know the science behind Phil Jones's statement, but I do know that this email demonstrates that the word "trick" is used both with and without quotation marks in this particular language community. Moreover, I know that even though the information leaked was designed to be do maximal damage to that community, there is still evidence internal to it that resists attempts to mischaracterize the intent of its members. Should skeptics insist that "trick" doesn't mean a quick-and-dirty way to explore some possibility, show them that on 12 January 2008, John Lanzante noted that
a quick-and-dirty way to explore this possibility using a "trick" used with precipitation data is to apply a square root transformation to the rejection rates, average these, then reverse transform the average. The square root transformation should yield data that is more nearly Gaussian than the untransformed data.If, by some miracle, that satisfies them on the matter of "tricks," they will start complaining about the phrase "hide the decline," which was, of course, the real object of their objection in the first place.

Needless to say, I don't envy climate scientists the tsunami of stupid they're about to suffer.

Last week, distraught over the end of "Mad Men," I watched some of "The Prisoner." What captured my attention was the sense of entrapment. The inhabitants of the village are made to think that there is nothing outside the village. This is all there is. Some, though, are dreamers. They think there is more beyond, something else out there. If they pursue these dreams, they are punished, tortured. The decline of symbolic efficiency is a loss of the law that intervenes between the Real and the imaginary. The symbolic is the set of ideals, principles, norms that hold open a difference between what is and what else. Hardt and Negri's smooth world of Empire, a world with no outside reminds me of the village. There is nothing else. We are here, in this place, with no where else to go. Just repeat, just continue, just do the same old thing, eating wraps, enjoying the sunshine, watching television, focusing on work and family. Just doing the same old thing. With the internet, and with tourism and postfordist economic approaches that remake cities and towns attractive to tourists, everything is in reach, visible. If we can imagine it, we can find it. It's Real. Just search and click. If you're lucky, you'll find some other things that you hadn't seen before and those might distract you for thirty minutes or so. Then you can have another drink. The good thing about limits that are explicit and acknowledged is that they maintain the... Jodi

The following exchange between Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin would, were we talking about any other politician, mark the end of a career. The emphasis is mine:

PALIN: With Israel, we cannot get into Israel, for instance, and say we're going to tell you whether the Jewish community can expand or not expand within your borders. Instead, what we need to do is tell Israel that we will—we'll go to bat for them.

O'REILLY: Well, what does that mean though? Look, say Israel, say Netanyahu says—calls you up and says, I'm bombing them, I'm bombing Iran, they're too close, I'm not going to let it happen. What do you say? You say go ahead, Netanyahu, go bomb them? What do you say?

PALIN: Oh my gosh, any kind of war strike is the absolute last option.

O'REILLY: All right, so you, you say no.

PALIN: That anybody would …

O'REILLY: But he's saying to you, you guys aren't going to be able to stop him.

PALIN: That's why we cannot let the world get to the place that you're talking about right now.

O'REILLY: Well, we're already there.

PALIN: No, we're not. We're not quite there yet. There is still hope. But what we have to do is exert the pressure that America can put on our allies and on those who are not so friendly.

O'REILLY: Obama says he's doing all that.

PALIN: He's bowing to world leaders and I think any other president in our country …

O'REILLY: Do you mean that literally, the Japanese emperor?

PALIN: I mean that literally.

O'REILLY: Do you think Obama's weak abroad?

PALIN: I believe that his approach to diplomacy is not what history has shown us works. What works in my mind, reading the history book, is what Reagan did.

As to the first embarrassment—her insistence that symbolic gestures are literal—all I can say is that I believe her. She honestly has no idea that she literalized a cliché and then condemned Obama on account of it. She honestly believes that Obama can no longer exert political pressure on reluctant allies because he bowed to the Japanese emperor. She sees not symbolism but causality there. That symbolic gesture is literal proof that Obama is not "exert[ing] the pressure that America can put on our allies and on those who are not so friendly." The mind boggles.

As to the second embarrassment—her belief that there is one history book and it conforms to her ideological predisposition—that is the sort of statement only uttered by people who never read books.* I'm not making a judgment here: I'm saying that the locution "reading the history book" is grammatically foreign to anyone who has read more than one book.** If you ask anyone who regularly reads any question at all that requires reference to a source, you would receive a response that indicated an engagement with a scholarly community. It might be vague ("some have argued"), or it might indicate ignorance of the larger conversation ("the only book I've read on the subject"), but it would acknowledge the existence of competing ideas and conflicting opinions. Put differently: even Jonah Goldberg talks this way.

*That or no one told her Reagan isn't in the Bible.

**The one exception would be Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman and Andrew Dolphin's The Book were the title itself not an arch reference to 1) conventional baseball wisdom and 2) the decades the authors spent talking about their unwritten book.

Jodi

For the very first ARF Friday on this humble but tenacious blog, I turn you over to a Mystery Guest.  Take it away, MG!

_______

Thank you Michael.  All your blogs are belong to Sarah Palin.  But what about me?  And what happens now when I rear my giant looming head? 

America has forgotten.  Yes, you have forgotten when your Palin defends you from me and when your “major party” “Presidential candidate” says that Sarah Palin knows more about energy than anyone in America.  And she does make many energy in your media and blogs!  You say, these nuclear “starbursts” could ricochet around America! You have also forgotten when your Bush saw into my soul, and then later when your Condoleeza Rice told a funny joke about how “it is important that Russia make clear to the world that it is intent on strengthening the rule of law, strengthening the role of an independent judiciary, permitting a free and independent press to flourish.” It is like Alanis Morissette, isn’t it ironic?  What a country!

So.  Thanks to Michael Bérubé colleague Hannah Williams, who works in Gravitational Wave Astronomy Group keeping your homeland safe from undetectable cosmic Putinos, I am insisting to you that you have for yourself Arbitrary But Fun Friday all about me:

And:

That is all.

About the A.I.G. affair: During the bubble years, many financial companies created the illusion of financial soundness by buying credit-default swaps from A.I.G. — basically, insurance policies in which A.I.G. promised to make up the difference if borrowers defaulted on their debts. It was an illusion because the insurer didn’t have remotely enough money to make good on its promises if things went bad. And sure enough, things went bad. So why protect bankers from the consequences of their errors? Well, by the time A.I.G.’s hollowness became apparent, the world financial system was on the edge of collapse and officials judged — probably correctly — that letting A.I.G. go bankrupt would push the financial system over that edge. So A.I.G. was effectively nationalized; its promises became taxpayer liabilities. But was there any way to limit those liabilities? After all, banks would have suffered huge losses if A.I.G. had been allowed to fail. So it seemed only fair for them to bear part of the cost of the bailout, which they could have done by accepting a “haircut” on the amounts A.I.G. owed them. Indeed, the government asked them to do just that. But they said no — and that was the end of the story. Taxpayers not only ended up honoring foolish promises made by other people, they ended up doing so at 100 cents on the dollar. Could things have been different? Some commentators argue that government officials had no way to force the banks to accept a haircut... Jodi

As the first congressional investigation of the Fort Hood massacre began Thursday, a curious collection of witnesses assembled in the committee room.

Like a lot of people, as soon as I got my copy of Hans Robert Jauss’s Toward an Aesthetic of Reception I immediately thought of Sarah Palin.

Immediately, I say. 

Tip of hat.

I suppose this means I have to stop saying “dang” now.

Listening to President Obama and his Chinese counterpart this week, it was hard to tell who was Hu.

Proffer theories as to the avocation I undertook presently. You guessed it! I spent the day marking papers, which, means I had, many reminders of why teaching Writingstudents, even at the Universitylevel, can make even the most mild-mannered academic want to JAB IN EYES JAB IN EYES.

(Actual posts to recommence when the noises in my head resemble English more than English as she is spoke.)

ALSO: Because it's always best to make this plain from the beginning [SEK says to the readers at LGM], on the issue of whether my students know what I'm writing:
With the exception of the text adventure, [what I post is] written to be used in class, then repurposed for the blog. I show them videos of Shatner and ask them if that's what they want to sound like; I have them write blog posts (for their course blogs) in which they're required to substitute every noun and verb with suggestions from Microsoft Word's thesaurus, etc. Whenever I write about conversations in the classroom (for example), I ask the students if they're alright with that ... and as I'm typically the butt of those posts, they always are. In fact, by the end of the quarter, they're actually demanding I write up what happened in a given class (for example). Even the most notorious bit of student writing I've parodied was done with the student's consent. (It was years ago, and he wrote me out of the blue to apologize for writing it.)

The university steals and homogenizes our time yes, our bank accounts also, but it also steals and homogenizes meaning. As much as capital is invested in building a killing apparatus abroad, an incarceration apparatus in California, it is equally invested here in an apparatus for managing social death. Social death is, of course, simply the power source, the generator, of civic life with its talk of reform, responsibility, unity. A ‘life,’ then, which serves merely as the public relations mechanism for death: its garrulous slogans of freedom and democracy designed to obscure the shit and decay in which our feet are planted. Yes, the university is a graveyard, but it is also a factory: a factory of meaning which produces civic life and at the same time produces social death. A factory which produces the illusion that meaning and reality can be separated; which everywhere reproduces the empty reactionary behavior of students based on the values of life (identity), liberty (electoral politics), and happiness (private property). Everywhere the same whimsical ideas of the future. Everywhere democracy. Everywhere discourse to shape our desires and distress in a way acceptable to the electoral state, discourse designed to make our very moments here together into a set of legible and fruitless demands. Totally managed death. A machine for administering death, for the proliferation of technologies of death. As elsewhere, things rule. Dead objects rule. In this sense, it matters little what face one puts on the university—whether that of Yudof or some other... Jodi

Proffer theories as to the avocation I undertook presently. You guessed it! I spent the day marking papers, which, means I had, many reminders of why teaching Writingstudents, even at the Universitylevel, can make even the most mild-mannered academic want to JAB IN EYES JAB IN EYES. (Actual posts to recommence when the noises in my head resemble English more than English as she is spoke.) ALSO: Because it's always best to make this plain from the beginning [SEK says to the readers at LGM], on the issue of whether my students know what I'm writing: With the exception of the text adventure, [what I post is] written to be used in class, then repurposed for the blog. I show them videos of Shatner and ask them if that's what they want to sound like; I have them write blog posts (for their course blogs) in which they're required to substitute every noun and verb with suggestions from Microsoft Word's thesaurus, etc. Whenever I write about conversations in the classroom (for example), I ask the students if they're alright with that ... and as I'm typically the butt of those posts, they always are. In fact, by the end of the quarter, they're actually demanding I write up what happened in a given class (for example). Even the most notorious bit of student writing I've parodied was done with the student's consent. (It was years ago, and he wrote me out of the blue to apologize for writing it.) Scott Eric Kaufman

meat ________preference for, 18 ________deep question about: "If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?" 133 via www.slate.com Jodi

about the people who oppose a civilian trial in federal court for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other four 9/11 conspirators.

Why do they hate America?

I have a sneaking feeling that they hate us for our freedoms.

Besides, over at America’s slowest-loading website, Adam Serwer explains why this wingnut frenzy is even more farcical than their outrage at Obama’s overweening arrogance servile bowing and scraping.

Banks are supposed to serve one primary purpose—putting savers’ money into the hands of borrowers who can make good use of it, making a profit on the transaction. Because of their key role in the economy, banks got special insurance and regulation in the New Deal. The system worked well for many decades. But especially from the 1970s onward, banks became less interested in performing that useful task of “intermediation” and more obsessed with expanding their empires and enriching top bank employees. A diminishing number of banks now dominate the industry. They are too big, and their cost—including salaries and bonuses—is too high. An industry that should resemble a public utility has become a casino. Beyond fighting for tougher regulation, including higher capital requirements, simplification or banning of many derivatives, consumer protection, provisions for resolving bank holding company failures, and many other provisions being debated in Congress, Obama and Democratic legislators should break up the biggest banks and limit their size. A Tobin-style transaction tax will help pay for past and future government interventions and shrink the industry. The banking system needs to be treated as a public utility, with limits on both pay and bonuses, and higher top income-tax rates. Government needs to steer the economy toward ecologically sustainable growth and shared prosperity, heading off another, potentially even worse, finance-driven boom and bust.  via www.inthesetimes.com Jodi