All posts in category Periodical Notes

The Nation, July 2008

7 July– Alexander Cockburn points out the shortcomings of the late Tim Russert; Jon Wiener derides efforts to depict the University of California at Irvine as a hotbed of anti-semitism.

14 July– In “The Subprime Swindle” Kai Wright shows that many of those now facing foreclosure because of exotic mortgages are African-American, and argues that those mortgages have had the effect of siphoning away a tremendous share of the accumulated wealth of black America.  Stuart Klawans recommends the film Full Battle Rattle, a documentary about a military training exercise in California meant to simulate conditions in Iraq.   

21/28 July– Naomi Klein labels the current state of our political economy “disaster capitalism” and identifies its main instrument of persuasion as extortion.  The rise of private firefighting firms enables the rich to threaten to shut down public fire departments that serve the rest of us; the deal the big oil companies have made in Iraq, apparently giving them right of first refusal on future drilling, puts them in a position to threaten to shut down oil supplies; genetic modification gives seed producers the power to starve the world.  Klein doesn’t have much faith in the power of market mechanisms to rein in the rich, but then why should she.  

In the same issue, U Penn classicist Emily Wilson reviews John Tipton’s translation of Sophocles’ Ajax.  The play puts her in mind of war’s psychological effects.  “[B]y denying the opposition any humanity, and therefore making them killable, we risk making ourselves something less than human.”  When Ajax responds to a slight by setting out to kill his fellow Greek warriors at Troy, the gods delude him into mistaking a herd of sheep for his companions.  He slaughters them with great efficiency.  Classicists used to call this slaughter “the Ovicide” (from the Latin ovis, meaning “sheep.”)  The Ovicide (Wilson doesn’t mention the term, and it is extremely old-fashioned, but I’m rather fond of it)  occurs before the play, which focuses on Ajax’ attempt to come to terms with the fact that he has made a fool of himself.  In Ajax’ torment, Wilson sees a symbol of every warrior whose training and formation have stripped him of the ability to distinguish between human and not-human.

by acilius on September 25, 2008  •  Permalink
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Posted by acilius on September 25, 2008

https://losthunderlads.com/2008/09/25/the-nation-july-2008/

The American Conservative, 19 May 08

This issue‘s highlights include:

Bill Kauffman praises Students for a Democratic Society Founder Carl Oglesby as a leader of “a humane, decentralist, thoroughly American New Left that regarded socialism as ‘a way to bury social problems under a federal bureaucracy,'” in Oglesby’s words.  Called upon to name the corrupt system that needed to be smashed in order to create a democratic society, Oglesby chose the name “corporate liberalism.”  In Oglesby, Kauffman finds a fellow admirer of the localist, traditionalist, anti-statist Old Right, one who saw virtues in the contemporary libertarian right but who warned those of that tendency that they might well “remain hypnotically charmed by the authoritarian imperialists whose only love is Power, the subhuman brownshirted power of the jingo state militant, the state rampant, the iron state possessed of its own clanking glory.”  Kauffman goes on to argue that another 60’s leader matched Oglesby in his understanding of the importance of rootedness and community, and that leader was George Wallace.  “If you can get beyond Wallace’s reprehensible race-baiting… certain of his policies overlapped with the humane Left.”  “If you can get beyond Wallace’s reprehensible race-baiting” you will have gone further than any of his supporters ever did.  The Guvnah’s whole national career consisted of race-baiting.  Still, anybody William F. Buckley saw fit to attack as a “country and western Marxist” must have had something going for him.  Kauffman does not mention one highly pertinent fact about Oglesby’s standing as a critic of corporate liberalism and bureaucratization, a fact which emerged in an interview Kauffman himself conducted with Oglesby this year.  Oglesby endorsed the presidential campaign of H. R. Clinton, an avatar of corporate liberalism if ever there was one.

Michael Brendan Dougherty reports on the formation of J Street, a lobbying organization that intends to give a voice to American Jews who do not support the hawkish policies of groups like AIPAC, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, etc.  Dougherty devotes some space to the prominent Israelis who have declared their support for J Street and its program.

Margaret Liu McConnell argues against institutionalizing same-sex marriage on the grounds that a same-sex couple can become parents to a child only if one or both of that child’s biological parents relinquishes his or her parental role.  She doesn’t argue that same-sexers should be prohibited from adopting children or from using donated genetic material.  Her last sentence: “To those who ask how reserving marriage for one man and one woman is any different from yesterday’s vile prohibition against interracial marriage, the answer is evident in the faces of the… children of mixed-race couples, belonging to and loved by both parents, relinquished by neither.”  Liu McConnell’s argument doesn’t convince me, but it is the first conservative argument against gay marriage I’ve ever seen that actually has any substance at all.  I did see a radical argument against it 10-15 years ago in a law review, but I haven’t been able to track the article down.

by acilius on September 25, 2008  •  Permalink
Posted in The American Conservative
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Posted by acilius on September 25, 2008

https://losthunderlads.com/2008/09/25/the-american-conservative-19-may-08/

The Atlantic Monthly, July/ August 2008

The cover story of this issue asks “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?”  If that article had run in The New Yorker, it would have begun with the sentence that in fact opens its 11th paragraph:  “Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter- A Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise.”  That story closes with Nietzsche observing that “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”  The article draws on recent neurological findings about the malleability of the adult brain to expand on Nietzsche’s insight, suggesting that just as those findings suggest that literacy triggers a large-scale rewiring of brain circuitry, so the web can be expected to give rise, not just to a new kind of research method, but to a new kind of human mind.  Homo Googlieticus, perhaps.  

Hanna Rosin’s “American Murder Mystery” notes the changes in the geographic distribution of crime reports in American cities in recent years and suggests a correlation between these changes and the breaking up of the big housing projects of the Great Society era.  As the poor have spread out through Section 8 housing programs, not only have the criminally-inclined among them come along; the old gangs that terrorized the projects have been dispersed and ambitious young thugs have seen an opportunity to create new gangs.  Creating a new gang tends to be a hyper-violent process, leading to spikes in homicide rates in midsize cities around the USA. 

Benjamin Schwarz goes to Brazil (home of our old friend Benjamin Swartz, but that’s a different story) and looks at the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer.  In his first sentence, Schwarz declares that Brasilia “was a heroic and inhuman scheme.”  Leaning on Styliane Philippou’s book Oscar Niemeyer: Curves of Irreverence, Schwarz defends Niemeyer as a blithe spirit who “offered a jaunty alternative to the geometric severity of the International Style” and whose “highest achievements are profoundly informed by a Brazilian aesthetic, which has long made sinuous forms a basic element of its vocabulary.”  Such buildings as the presidential palace, the Foreign Ministry, and the Supreme Court move Schwarz and Philippou to heights of lyrical rapture.  Even so, Schwarz describes Brasilia as “an awful city,” an “horrendous error,” “a colossally wrong turn in urban planning,” “soullessly set in immense paved fields that offer few places to sit and little refuge from the blinding sun.”

by acilius on September 24, 2008  •  Permalink
Posted in The Atlantic Monthly
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Posted by acilius on September 24, 2008

https://losthunderlads.com/2008/09/24/the-atlantic-monthly-july-august-2008/

This June’s Issues of The Nation

It’s been a few months since any “Periodicals Notes” have gone up here about The Nation.  In part that’s because it’s so topical that there aren’t many articles in each issue that I think I’ll want to have notes about, in part because I’ve been busy and have been slacking on “Periodicals Notes” generally, and in part because it comes out every week, so that as soon as I’m done reading one issue another shows up.  Anyway, here are a few notes about recent issues.

2 June- A lot of presidential campaign coverage, an essay about Nick Cave’s career and his latest album, and a review of a book about the game Second Life.

9 June- The Spring books issue.  Michael Massing voices reservations about Samantha Power’s biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, concluding that the books shortcomings might be due to the difficulty Power faces in transitioning from “an independent critic working outside the system to being a high-profile figure operating within it.”  Massing never sees fit to mention that Power was a propagandist for “humanitarian intervention” long before she joined the Obama campaign.  This omission especially compromises Massing’s ability to analyze Power’s treatment of the Balkan wars of the 90’s.  For example, “Power’s chapter on Vieira de Mello’s time in Bosnia (which is based on her own eyewitness research) is devastating, and after reading it I fully expected her to draw the obvious conclusion- that his vaunted pragmatism too often degenerated into simple amorality.  But this she refuses to do.”  Because, Massing suggests, Power’s feelings just won’t let her stop “clinging to her image of him as an exemplar of democracy and multilateralism.”  Consider Power’s role in the mid-90’s as a cheerleader for the war party, and a far less innocent explanation for her resistance to fact and her rosy account of Vieira de Mello’s antics begins to emerge.  The West’s anti-Serb policy in those years was “simple amorality” from the beginning- there was no lofty height of idealism from which it could have degenerated.  

16 June- HBO’s John Adams miniseries was based on David McCullough’s biography of Adams, a book which The Nation gave to Daniel Lazare to slam for its whitewashing of Adams’ genuinely catastrophic presidency.  Unfortunately, Lazare didn’t get to review the TV show.  They gave that job to Nicholas Guyatt, who takes a much more sedate appriach.  Fatema Ahmed reviews two reissued novels by 30’s literary cult figure Patrick Hamilton, whose work leads her to say that “Neglected writers are often overestimated in rediscovery.”  Movie reviewer Stuart Klawans pans some summer blockbusters, then praises Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin’s Auf der anderen Seite (called here The Edge of Heaven) for its anarchic moments and Canadian Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg because it “refutes the conventional wisdom that other people’s dreams are always boring.”

23 June- Reviewing Jacob Heilbrunn’s They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer’s Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970’s, and a reissue of Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, Corey Robin writes “Conservatives have asked us not to obey them but to feel sorry for them- or to obey them because we feel sorry for them.”  Barry Schwabsky reviews the touring exhibition “Jess: To and From the Printed Page,” arguing that the exhibition’s insistent historicism goes too far and obscures the whimsy that gives that collagist his real worth. 

30 June- “A Special Issue: The New Inequality.”  The highlight is “Ending Plutocracy: A 12-Step Program,” by Sarah Anderson and Sam Pizzigati.  The 12 steps are written as a tribute to Alcoholics Anonymous-style programs and a suggestion that the USA is not only saddled with plutocracy, but addicted to it.  About 20 policy prescriptions appear under these 12 steps.  Most of those policies have been proposed in Congress in the last few years, and the rest have been proposed in state legislatures.  It’s rather an upbeat article, suggesting that something can be done about our #1 problem and that there are at least a few people in positions of power who would like to do it.

by acilius on September 22, 2008  •  Permalink
Posted in The Nation
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Posted by acilius on September 22, 2008

https://losthunderlads.com/2008/09/22/this-junes-issues-of-the-nation/

Chronicles Magazine, September 2008

The theme of the issue is the importance of historianship; interesting pieces praise the historical works of David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and Ray Allen Billington. 

Elsewhere in the magazine, William Watkins reports a case in Stoke-on-Trent, England, in which non-Muslim boys attending a state school were punished for refusing a teacher’s instruction to pray to Allah as part of a diversity lesson.  Watkins is most disturbed that these boys must seek redress, not by appeal to the traditional rights of Englishmen, by under the European Convention on Human Rights.  Here is a news story about the case; here is a news story about a deadly encounter between a Muslim man and his anti-Muslim neighbor in Stoke-on-Trent, suggesting why the school there may have been nervous about diversity issues. 

Lefalcon’s idol Srdja Trifkovic takes the arrest of Radovan Karadzic as an opportunity to relate the recent history of the Balkans, demonstrating the plain falsity of much of the anti-Serb mythology Westerners have been fed since 1991.  Read a slightly different version of Trifkovic’s article here.

Chilton Williamson, whose contributions lately have tended to be barely readable stories about preposterously stereotypical characters in Mexico, writes an 11 paragraph column, the first 10 of which are surprisingly cogent.  He analyzes the notion of an “American Dream,” arguing that such a dream is “inherently inflationary, and therefore ultimately destructive.”   Destructive not only of prosperity, but of the bonds of family, faith, and tradition.  Just when it seems Williamson has abandoned his creepy racism and found a genuinely humanistic topic to explore, he concludes with a paragraph beginning “Barack Obama, the mulatto presidential nominee sprung from the loins of a white Kansas woman and a black man from Kenya, embodies the American Dream as it has been understood at least since James Truslow Adams’ day.”   

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/

by acilius on September 12, 2008  •  Permalink
Posted in Balkans, Chronicles

Posted by acilius on September 12, 2008

https://losthunderlads.com/2008/09/12/chronicles-magazine-september-2008/

Chronicles Magazine, June/ July/ August 2008

June- Paul Craig Roberts, of whom Lefalcon so memorably exclaimed “I savor his golden words!,” writes on “The Decline and Fall of the American Economy.”  Roberts writes: “John Williams, proprietor of Shadow Government Statistics (www.shadowstats.com), has been following US economic indicators for decades.  He notes that each administration has tinkered with the official statistics in orderto make itself look a little better; the cumulative effect over the decades is that the statistics greatly understate the problems.  Williams finds that the real rates of inflation and unemployment are about twice the reported rates.”  Here is Roberts’ article; here is W. John Williams’ inflation calculator.

July- Lefalcon’s beau ideal, Srdja Trifkovic, looks at John McCain and George Soros and sees “The most dangerous man in America, bankrolled by the most evil man in the world.”  Kenneth Zaretzke presents the moral issues surrounding the question of abortion in as clear and dispassionate a way as anyone could; unfortunately, Zaretzke’s article is not online.  George McCartney reviews Iron Man, seeing in it a film that teaches the young an important lesson.  “This movie teaches youngsters that it’s righteously cool to kill Middle Easterners by the caravanload.”  After a progressivley more outraged exposition of the plot, McCartney writes:

I suppose I wouldn’t mind all this if it were happening in some comic book never-never land.  But this action takes place in present-day Afghanistan where, in pursuit of a just goal, our actual Armed Forces have inadvertently wrought incalculable havoc on innocent people.  This is not fantasy land; it is the sorry site of our failure to capture Osama bin Laden andhis Al Qaeda forces because of our current administration’s infamously wrongheaded decision to wage a larger war in Iraq.  To make this the background of a children’s fantasy is flatly obscene.

August- George McCartney joins the ranks of those film critics, like Stuart Klawans of The Nation, who have written love letters to the suit Cary Grant wore in North by Northwest.  Well, it is a great suit. 

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/

by acilius on September 12, 2008  •  Permalink
Posted in Chronicles
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Posted by acilius on September 12, 2008

https://losthunderlads.com/2008/09/12/chronicles-magazine-june-july-august-2008/

The high cost of living

The June 16-30 issue of Counterpunch ran a piece I’ve been meaning to note.  “How Bush has pushed up oil prices,” by economist Michael Hudson.  The first sentence: “The American people are being misled about the cause of soaring oil prices, and deceived about how easily the Bush administration could cut the oil price in half simply by following the policy that Bush Sr. did at the outset of the First Iraq War.”  At the outbreak of the Kuwait war, the USA released oil from the Naval Petroleum Reserve onto the open market; in consequence, the oil price remained generally stable throughout the August 1990-February 1991 period.  By contrast, for the last several years the Naval Petroleum Reserve has continued to buy oil.  A passage is worth quoting at length:

At the just-ended 10th Post-Keynesian Economic Conference at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, my friend Paul Davidson (who, like me, used to work for Continental Oil and has a long oil background) pointed out that if the Bush administration did want to lower oil prices, all it would have to do is sell 10% of the oil reserve on the forward oil market.  Right now, he points out, the forward prprice of oil is higher than the spot price.  That means that buyers and sellers think the the price will rise, and hence that it pays to hold onto oil to sell later rather than to sell now.  But if the US Naval Petroleum Reserve would start selling the oil it has been buying since the start of the Iraq War, this supply would abruptly stop the price rise.  Speculators would dump their positions, and, in Prof. Davidson’s estimate, oil prices would fall back to about $90. 

Of course,  some parts of this three month old story are now dated.  Oil prices are falling now.  But the Naval Petroleum Reserve is still buying oil. 

Here is an article Davidson wrote for the July/ August issue of Challenge in which he explains his views on this summer’s oil prices.

Here‘s the website of the 10th International Post-Keynesian Conference.  Davidson’s paper there was called “The Sub-Prime Crisis, Securitization, and Market Failure as Analyzed by Keynes’ Liquidity Preference Theory vs the Efficient Market Theory.”  That title doesn’t sound like anything to do with the Naval Petroleum Reserve.  It sounds like what Hudson is citing is a side conversation he and Davidson had at the conference. 

http://www.generaltheory.org/

http://econ.bus.utk.edu/faculty/davidson/challenge%20oilspeculation9wordpdf.pdf

http://www.challengemagazine.com/

http://www.counterpunch.org/

by acilius on September 12, 2008  •  Permalink
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Posted by acilius on September 12, 2008

https://losthunderlads.com/2008/09/12/the-high-cost-of-living/

Funny Times, June 2008/ July 2008

A couple of notable bits in these two issues-

June- Lenore Skenazy, founder of Free Range Kids ( http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/)  explains “Why I let my 9-year-old ride the subway alone.”  Apparently lots of horrified parents demanded to know how she would feel if her son were abducted while out alone in the city.  She told them about statistics showing how safe NYC is these days, and how rare child-abduction is.  I couldn’t help but wonder which is less rare, abduction of children out on their own or violent home invasions.  For all I know the kid might face less danger of attack by strangers while wandering alone through Alphabet City than he would sitting in his own living room.   The column is funny, and so doesn’t treat that question. 

July- Dave Maleckar’s “100 Word Rant” is titled “brain brain what is brain”- some guys over 35 will recognize the reference (http://100wordrant.blogspot.com/2008/03/brain-brain-what-is-brain.html). 

http://www.funnytimes.com/

by acilius on June 29, 2008  •  Permalink
Posted in FunnyTimes

Posted by acilius on June 29, 2008

https://losthunderlads.com/2008/06/29/funny-times-june-2008-july-2008/

The Nation, 12 May and 26 May, 2008

In the 12 May issue, Christian Parenti trots out the old case against nuclear power.  To claims familiar since the 70’s Parenti adds reports of the unpopularity of nuclear power and the consequences of that unpopularity.  Alex Cockburn quotes a RAND study suggesting that the rate of US casualties in Iraq is 101,000 killed or wounded per year. 

The highlight of the 26 May issue is a review essay about Knut Hamsun, prompted by a recent series of translations of his early novels.  Benjamin Lytal argues that the heart of Hamsun’s early worldview was his rejection of social responsibility, his extreme subjectivism and individualism.  This same solipsism, Lytal suggests, accounts for Hamsun’s pro-Nazi stand in later life.  Unwilling to pay attention to more than one person at a time, Hamsun felt quite happy with a regime that put all power in the hands of one person.  Hostile to everyone other than himself, he could support boundless violence against any group of people who differed from him in background. 

www.thenation.com

by acilius on May 16, 2008  •  Permalink
Posted in The Nation

Posted by acilius on May 16, 2008

https://losthunderlads.com/2008/05/16/the-nation-12-may-and-26-may-2008/

The American Conservative, 21 April and 5 May, 2008

In the 21 April issue, Tom Piatak reviews Sidney Blumenthal’s The Strange Death of Republican America: Chronicles of a Collapsing Party, documenting flaw after flaw in Blumenthal’s analysis and pointing out that “any coalition that can survive the Bush presidency is strong, not weak.” 

The 5 May issue starts with a letter from former Harvard TA Christopher Livanos, arguing that “IQ tests are simply another form of cultural dumbing down.”  His students at Harvard all had very high IQs, but “Had I applied the same standards at Harvard that I apply at the University of Wisconsin, few of my students would have received a grade higher than C.”  Allan C. Carlson argues for a federal plan to bail out families with children hit by the subprime mortgage crisis, insisting that it is possible to devise such a bailout in a way that would not benefit big Wall Street firms or speculators.  Philip Weiss (of mondoweiss fame) writes a mash note to Zbigniew Brzezinski.  Matthew Roberts shows that street gangs have penetrated the US military, quoting a Stars and Stripes report to the effect that as many as 2% of the military are gang members.  Daniel McCarthy reviews a book that sounds terrific, Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle American Anti-Imperialism, by Bill Kauffman. 

mondoweiss

 

www.amconmag.com

by acilius on May 16, 2008  •  Permalink
Posted in The American Conservative

Posted by acilius on May 16, 2008

https://losthunderlads.com/2008/05/16/the-american-conservative-21-april-and-5-may-2008/

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