tonari no shibafu

Who writes history?

I had the good fortune to take a class with the author of Victor's Justice, Dr. Seuss Goes to War and many other titles. He had the unenviable task of trying to present about 2000 years of Japanese history and mytho-history in fourteen weeks. He did an admirable job of giving us background on the main currents leading up to his period of interest: pre-/post-war Japan. We read some eye-opening books and heard some stunning seminar-style lectures -- though he managed to make a 20-plus person class interactive -- and, all the while, he was trying to teach us about his discipline: the study of history. We were given a sheet that had short bios of all the authors that we read as well as some more authors and people of interest mentioned in their books. In our sections (the only time the ratio was closer to 1:10) we had quizzes each week about the salient details of that week's author's bio and other nuts-and-bolts background stuff. It was my first exposure to systematic, academic skepticism. "Who writes history?", he would ask involuntarily.

The class might have been large in spite of his charisma and rigor because it satisfied a history requirement. Nonetheless, I'm sure he scared away a few folks early with the reading list and three papers, but still likely, over the years, gained more, by word of mouth, than he lost.

The following clip and my immediate reaction to it left me thinking about Minear and his insistence that we be critical -- his bio was included on that sheet as well -- and how he gave name to and sharpened my embryonic scrutiny.

Two divergent views of past events and circumstances. With no clear victor, whose story is (should be) given more credence? Why?

Colin Powell's former chief of staff comments about Dick Cheney's new memoir.

Academe, Empire, History, Imperialism, Militarism

Free documentaries online

A rich resource.

Some selections I'm interested in:

The Fog of War

Supersize Me

Outfoxed

Sicko

White Light/Black Rain

Like the Pope?

I have a friend who has called to mind, not to my mind mind you, Fisk and Armitage, and who also, in spite of being from one of the whitest places in America, loves him some Tupac. Apparently the Holy Father, or more likely, his minions, have a similar bent.

comics

It's about time

  

White House blog post about high speed rail.

Examined Life

Gotta see this

Cornel quote: I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind; I'm a jazz man in the world of ideas.

Intellectual History

Whassup

Ok, so I'm about 6 weeks late to the party. Still, on Ry's recommendation I checked this out and got a few good laughs. Well done.

Change

I wish my Dad was still alive to see this.

Catch phrase fatigue

I think if I hear one more person use the phrases 'Wall Street' and 'Main Street' in the same sentence, I'm gonna scream. Are all the political experts, pundits, and newspeople really so unimaginative?

Somebody buy a thesaurus.

David Foster Wallace

I've never read any of his stuff before but this commencement address is compelling.

In looking around for stuff on Wallace I noticed something odd. In last November's Atlantic, Foster wrote:

Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”?* In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price?

I could have sworn that Bill Maher (or perhaps one of his panelists) made this very case last week or the week before. I searched around the web and couldn't find the video to double-check.

Anybody know anything about this? Is someone plagiarizing?

Bill Maher, David Foster Wallace

Setting the record straight

Here's what I expect to be the first of many pages about Sarah Palin at factcheck.org.

Thanks again Bill

Bill Moyers talks again with Kathleen Hall Jamieson. This time (mostly) about the Republican National Convention.

Anyone planning to go to China?

If so, you should read about these changes to visa rules from the Practical Nomad.

James Fallows on David Brooks in China

The last line of the post:

Take a little time and look around, David. The parts that don't fit what you theorized before arriving are actually the most stimulating.

On my radar thanks to Gen.

Journalism

Polls

Even though a good friend, probably Nate, told me years ago that sample size (after a certain point) does not significantly affect error, I've continued to have a bee in my bonnet about media sources not citing the margin of error when they cite poll results. It seems to me easy to do and therefore a red flag that they were hiding something from me.

Listening to the Bryant Park Project just now, they cited the results of a gallup poll which irritated my old wound and sent me a searchin'. So it seems to be true that the sampling error based on sampling size is fixed, but a greater determinant of the accuracy of a poll turns out to be the response rate, which is rarely reported.

Introduction to Sampling page at UC Davis

I just noticed this at the end of Big Bang Theory.

A discussion of John McCain's economic proposals

At economist's view what I found an enlightening discussion of some of the misperceptions and distortions that are being endorsed by economists that support McCain's presidency.

For what it's worth.

More Wire

Ed Burns on Fresh Air
Burns and Simon on Talk of the Nation
Simon and Pelecanos on Fresh Air
David Simon on Fresh Air

Ed Burns, David Simon, et. al.

The Time Magazine article. Read it.

Who You Should Vote For Barack Obama: 80%
Hillary Clinton: 60%
Ron Paul: 33%
John McCain: 27%
Mike Huckabee: 13%

Who you agree with on the war in Iraq: Ron Paul

Who you agree with on the economy: Hillary Clinton

Who you agree with on health care: Barack Obama

Who you agree with on taxes: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton

Who you agree with on abortion: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama

Who you agree with on gay rights: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama

Who Should You Vote For?

via Ollie

A not atypical Sunday

Woke up today around 8, which constitutes sleeping in for me. Checked email and worked through my newsreader while listening to the NPR 24-hour program stream. Then around 10:00 on to listening to Wait Wait. That brings us current. Now Misa and I are trying to decide what to have for breakfast brunch.

I have some studying to do for the kanken and also have to meet up with my boy Bunshi who's in town from Sapporo. He's staying in Gotanda, but I' not sure where we'll meet up yet. Usually we hang out at The Cow, but I'll have to check what they have on tap before we decide to go there. I might try to find a place in Sangenchaya. It is a really hip place with lots of eateries and drinkeries and is only a stone's throw both from the Yamanote and from Misa's place.

11:00-11:30 Filed some online reports for work.

Lunch and miscellaneous screwing around and trying to troubleshoot intermittent signal dropping on Misa's airport. That's (seemingly) fixed.

2:00-5:00 Kanji study with a small break around 3:30 to try out SKYPE

5:00-6:00 Watching Sumo

Sumo is on tv from about 12:00, but the high-ranked wrestlers don't come on until around 4:00, at which time they also start the English language broadcast on the sub-channel. This is the first tournament since the summer in which yokozuna Asashoryu is competing. He was given a two tournament suspension, but also had surgery to repair an injury during that time. He's been kinda the bad boy of Sumo for the last 5 years in spite of being one of the most dominant sumotori ever. I'm not a big fan of his style of sumo, but his ability is beyond dispute.

...

Just back from seeing Bunshi. It's amazing to me that we could've been such good friends for going on 7 years, as I feel like I'm just starting to understand a reasonable percentage of his Japanese. 運が良かったみたい。

Gonna watch the latest episode of Psych and hen hit the rack.

Who knew that Woody Allen had a talk show

Your Daily Awesome serves up the interview between Woody and Billy Graham.

via Your Daily Slacker

Thanks, Keith.

I'm glad that somebody's got our backs.

A confession

I have been woefully ignorant of the details of 'the Plame Affair' for months now. It's been one of those things that just was under my radar in terms of my regular news gathering activities, but with every mention on The Daily Show or that came up on sites like Crooks and Liars, I felt a little more out of it. Thankfully, I became aware of (forget from which site) this page from Frontline that has streaming videos of their coverage.

Perfect for a rainy Tokyo morning.

Don't have a cow monsieur

I've taken to reading Agence France Press occasionally. Ever since the days when I was living with Spike and Double-O, at which time I had a subscription to The Economist, I've tried to stay abreast of continental opinions of the goings-on in the American political system. I have nothing to say about the substance of this article on Barack Obama's announcement of his candidacy for president, it just struck me as funny that the location of the article is listed as SPRINGFIELD, United States.

Barack Obama Interview

A sober look at the candidate that everyone's talking about by Harper's.

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, puppy

PSA

Anyone back home interested in Fair Trade and farming issues should check this out:

Three Voices: What Fair Trade Means to Farmers
New England Speakers Tour Oct 23-28, 2006

Monday, Oct 23 Burlington, VT

Tuesday, Oct 24 Tufts University, Medford, MA
Fair Trade Banana Banquet, Haley House, Roxbury, MA

Wednesday, Oct 25 Smith College, Amherst, MA

Thursday, Oct 26 Harvard University, Boston, MA

Friday, Oct 27 Putney, VT

A banana farmer from Ecuador, a watermelon and vegetable farmer from Georgia, and an apple grower from New England.

via US Food Policy

Object+participle constructions in political discourse

An interesting and thoughtful post over at Language Log about how conservatives have come to own a particular rhetorical tool.

An excerpt:

The subtitle [of his book] was adapted from the ad that the Club for Growth ran during the run-up to 2004 Iowa caucuses, when Howard Dean was still the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. An announcer asks a middle-aged couple leaving a barbershop what they think of "Howard Dean's plans to raise taxes on families by $1,900 a year." The man responds, "I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading ..." -- and then his wife picks up the litany -- "... body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs."

<snip>

Of course there's no intrinsic reason why the right should have a monopoly on those compounds. Back in the day, people played just as fast and loose with stereotypes in depicting poor white Southerners as cross-burning, Bible-thumping, sibling-shtupping primitives -- not just Northern liberals, but white-shoes Republicans and "genteel" Southerners, too. You still see this sort of thing coming from liberals from time to time -- writing in the Chicago Sun-Times just after the 2000 election, William O'Rourke described Bush's America as "Yahoo Nation":

    It is a large, lopsided horseshoe, a twisted W, made up of primarily the Deep South and the vast, lowly populated upper-far-west states that are filled with vestiges of gun-loving, Ku-Klux-Klan sponsoring, formerly lynching-happy, survivalist-minded, hate-crime perpetrating, non-blue-blooded, rugged individualists� which contains not one primary center of intellectual or creative density.


<snip>


But actually liberals rarely talk this way. On the Web, Volvo-driving liberal outnumbers pickup- or truck-driving conservative by around 50 to 1, and when you do encounter a phrase like beer-guzzling redneck it's almost always offered either as a conservative caricature of liberal speech or in the spirit of a reclaimed epithet (as in, "...and proud of it, son!" In fact the word redneck turns out about 20 times more likely to appear in the pages of National Review or The American Spectator than in The American Prospect or The Nation, almost always set in the mouth of some imaginary liberal.

Whatever they privately believe, most liberals know that this sort of culture-stereotyping is counter-productive for the left, not just because it puts them on the wrong side of the faux-populist divide, but because it excludes from consideration the bowtie-wearing, port-sipping Yalies who are sitting around the National Review office cooking this stuff up in the first place. And even when they restrict themselves to purely political attributes, liberals can't really use those cadences nowadays without implicitly acknowledging the right's ownership of them. In the course of praising the cleverness of the Club for Growth ad, for example, Kurtzman suggests that liberals might think of responding with an ad "telling Bush to take his deficit-creating, war-mongering, gas-guzzling, corporate criminal-coddling, election-stealing, Rush Limbaugh-listening, civil liberty-seizing, Bible-thumping, right-wing dictatorship back to Texas, where it belongs." But that comes off as nothing more than a strained tribute to the right's mastery of this syntax, in something like the way anti-war Democrats' "lie and die" seems to validate the right's "cut and run" as the basic pattern for Iraq War sloganeering.

The great rhetorical achievement of the right, as I argue in the book, is to have reformulated distinctions of class as bogus differences in consumer culture. So it makes sense that conservatives should seize on the object+participle construction, whose function to turn activities into attributes -- politically speaking, that is, you are what you do (or more accurately, what you drive, drink, or otherwise consume). Whereas when people on the left are of a mind to make sweeping generalizations, they tend to draw the distinction characterologically rather than culturally, which is why they favor extended bahuvrihi compounds like narrow-minded, hard-hearted, and mean-spirited.

The Truth About the Estate Tax

An interesting post about the estate tax at Rox Populi.

Roxanne quotes Teddy Roosevelt

As a matter of personal conviction, and without pretending to discuss the details or formulate the system, I feel that we shall ultimately have to consider the adoption of some such scheme as that of a progressive tax on all fortunes, beyond a certain amount either given in life or devised or bequeathed upon death to any individual—a tax so framed as to put it out of the power of the owner of one of these enormous fortunes to hand on more than a certain amount to any one individual; the tax, of course, to be imposed by the National and not the State Government.

Transforming Risk Into Opportunity

I do my damndest not to pay too close attention to US news.  That is, I get my news from distinct places and therefore often don't have a good handle on what plays on mainstream media.  That said, I don't know how much press the Custer Battles thing is getting back home, but I read the article below on Firedoglake and ended up disgusted.  As a fairly staunch liberal...progressive...whatever the heck people are calling themselves these days, it comes relatively easy to spout my opinions about war profiteering in Iraq and Afghanistan.  It wasn't much of a stretch for me to believe that KBR and other contractors were making a killing in Iraq.  That under the premise that "privatization is always better", the American people on the whole were getting taken to the cleaners, and some people with current and former ties to the military-industrial complex were doing their version of the legislator to lobbyist metamorphoses that has been so lucrative in Washington.  But some part of me always wanted to be wrong.  At least by degrees. 

here's an excerpt:

Perhaps it was fate that Scott Custer, a former U.S. Army Ranger, and Michael Battles, a failed Republican candidate for Congress in 2002, joined together to form the "business risk consultancy" Custer Battles, LLC. (Whoever thought that putting "Custer" and "Battles" together would signify "success" was terribly misinformed.)

Custer Battles&#8217; rise from obscurity to winning a $16 million securities contract in Iraq was outlined in an August 13, 2004 article in the Wall Street Journal (full article posted at CB&#8217;s website):


In July [2003], Scott Custer and Michael Battles, two former Army Rangers in their mid-30s, found themselves in charge of a $16 million contract to guard Baghdad&#8217;s airport. Barely funded with credit cards and money borrowed from a friend, their nine-month-old company had neither guns, accountants nor guards. It had to hire Nepalese Gurkhas to staff the project.

[&#8230;]

"For us, the fear and disorder offered real promise," says Mr. Battles, 34 years old, a onetime bull rider who served three years as a Central Intelligence Agency operative. (emphasis mine)


I think that quote pretty much sums of the whole reason why I am doing this series. It&#8217;s not, "we wanted to help" or "democracy in Iraq is a good thing." No, it&#8217;s "show me the money!" Heartless bastards.


The company that became Custer Battles could hardly have sprung from shallower roots. In late 2002, it was still in search of a name. Its co-founders considered Azimuth Partners, after the name of a compass point, but instead chose to name the company after themselves. Mr. Custer, 35, a distant relation of the ill-fated Gen. George Custer, concedes they draw giggles in Iraq, where it&#8217;s often noted that Custer was defeated by the locals. "We don&#8217;t really have a comeback," he says.


Doomed from the beginning.


Two days later, the company won the contract, beating companies with long histories in the business, including Texas-based Dyncorp International, a unit of Computer Sciences Corp., and the U.K.&#8217;s Armor Group International Ltd. Custer Battles&#8217;s bid was cheaper, but more important, it promised to have 138 guards on the ground within two weeks, faster than the others.

"We got that contract because we were young and dumb and didn&#8217;t know better," says Mr. Custer, a former Army captain who studied at Oxford and Georgetown universities. "Anyone with experience would have said they&#8217;d be there in eight weeks." (emphasis mine)



So incompetence was a requirement&#8230; now that makes sense.


Frank Hatfield, the senior U.S. airport official in Iraq at the time, says speed &#8212; not cost &#8212; was the deciding factor. All he wanted, he says, was an assurance Custer Battles could handle the contract.

Custer Battles lacked more than experience. No banks would lend it money. In the end, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority lent it $2 million in $100 bills that Mr. Battles stuffed into a duffel bag and personally deposited in a bank in Lebanon.

They had only two weeks to set up the project. In mid-July last year, new hires mustered in Jordan and had to be convoyed across the desert. The company had to buy all its equipment from the U.S. with only three full-time employees in its Virginia office to help.

[&#8230;]

Less than 10 miles from the city center, Baghdad International Airport quickly emerged as perhaps the safest and best-placed real estate in Iraq. The company took full advantage. Custer Battles built kennels for 18 bomb-sniffing dogs beside the camp and has parlayed the animals into $16 million in Army contracts. It also used a terminal to house 40 Filipinos brought in to provide catering services. Frank Willis, one of several officials hired by the Coalition Provisional Authority to handle aviation issues, watched with shock and awe. As officials tried to get Custer Battles to explain the dogs and the Filipinos, the company had ready explanations. "It was always some colonel or ministry official who&#8217;d given the OK," says Mr. Willis. "These guys were absolute masters at working the chaos of a combat zone and cutting corners to make a profit."

[&#8230;]

They worry that a single calamity or mistake could topple their young operation [&#8230;] (emphasis mine)

The rest here

Another great one

Boston University's World of Ideas series serves up another great one.  This time it is a debate about whether the US should promote democracy in the Islamic world.