Author: Seth Anderson

Just another Gen-Xer still posting on a blog

Julia Child WW2 Spy

Seth Anderson0 comment

First, sad news that Ms. Child died1. Even though she was 91, and obviously not at full strength, she was always so full of life. We really love watching her cooking show when they run marathon episodes on PBS.

Second, she was a spy for the OSS? Wacky. Though, there were a lot of famous persons who worked for the OSS during WWII.

Before Julia Child became known to the world as a leading chef, she admitted at least one failing when applying for a job as a spy: impulsiveness.

Details about Child’s background as a government agent come into the public spotlight Thursday with the National Archives’ release of more than 35,000 top-secret personnel files of World War II-era spies. The CIA held this information for decades.

The 750,000 documents identify the vast spy network managed by the Office of Strategic Services, which later became the CIA. President Franklin Roosevelt created the OSS, the country’s first centralized intelligence operation.

Child’s file shows that in her OSS application, she included a note expressing regret she left an earlier department store job hastily because she did not get along with her boss, said William Cunliffe, an archivist who has worked extensively with the OSS records at the National Archives.

The OSS files offer details about other agents, including Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, baseball player Moe Berg, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and film actor Sterling Hayden.

Other notables identified in the files include John Hemingway, son of author Ernest Hemingway; Kermit Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt; and Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The Police.

[From JULIA CHILD, SPY: Julia Child a World War II-era spy — chicagotribune.com]

We’ll miss you, Ms. Child.

Footnotes:
  1. according to the so-far brief obituary, Ms. Child died in her sleep August 12, 2008, at her home in Santa Barbara [↩]

FTC Rule Barring Oil Manipulation

Seth Anderson2 Comments

I’m sure the final rule will have a lot less oomph, and plenty of loopholes.

Under pressure from federal lawmakers concerned about high energy prices, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission proposed a rule prohibiting petroleum-market manipulation, giving the agency authority to levy fines of up to $1 million per violation a day.

The proposed rule — which would cover both spot and futures markets — is designed to increase oversight of the crude-oil, natural-gas, gasoline and other product markets as directed by Congress late last year.

As oil prices surged to nearly $150 a barrel in July, many lawmakers increased pressure on the FTC to promulgate the antimanipulation rule, feeling existing oversight was too weak and laxly regulated. Lawmakers are concerned that excessive speculation — and possible manipulation — in the oil markets helped drive prices to record levels, and are seeking ways to enforce tougher market oversight. Congress is considering legislation designed to rein in speculative trading deemed to be distorting the market.

[From FTC Proposes Rule Barring Oil Manipulation – WSJ.com]

Brass Rust

Potential fines are discussed:

If the agency enacts the rule as it is currently written, it could subject violators with penalties of up to $1 million per violation per day. The FTC said it aimed to conclude the rule-making process by the end of the year. It drew immediate praise from some lawmakers who have been pushing for more stringent oversight of the markets.

This is some serious cheese for violators. As an example, Exxon Mobil’s profit in 20071 was in the vicinity of $4,633,200 per hour, or $111,196,800 per day. A million dollar fine would reduce Exxon Mobil’s daily profit to a paltry $110,196,800 a day! Won’t somebody think of the children! Of course, I’m not sure Exxon Mobil would be covered by these rules anyway, I’m sure nobody at Exxon Mobil is involved in speculation of oil futures, right? but sounds like there will be a lot more discussion before anything gets enacted in any case.

Given that the proposed rule covers the futures market — also the domain of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — it is likely to upgrade a regulatory turf battle between agencies and spur activity by the CFTC.

Lots of discussion and posturing, and lots of profits to be snatched in the meantime. By the end of the year, Obama will be elected, and the glory years of oil companies might start to sputter.2

Footnotes:
  1. so far 2008 is much higher, so adjust all these numbers by numbers that your calculator can’t even handle [↩]
  2. let us fervently pray so, anyway, though there is no guarantee that Obama will have the intestinal fortitude to tell the oil industry and Wall Street to reign their greed in [↩]

Insomniac Voters Unite!

Seth Anderson0 comment

When I’m up in the wee hours1, I tend not to watch television, but that’s just me.

Lonely Zenith

The Obama campaign is the first to use a long-form infomercial during the 2008 presidential campaign. If you hadn’t noticed, that may have been because the nearly 30-minute program aired at 1:30 a.m. Sunday on ION Television.

“This was one more effective way for us to communicate with folks who may not normally see other communications we have with voters who are paying closer attention to the race.,” the campaign said in a statement.

The mostly biographical 28-minute, 30-second program included scenes of the Illinois senator’s keynote speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention as well as scenes from other campaign appearances along with background about Mr. Obama and frequent call-in numbers.

…

“It is a first. I guess they are going after the insomniac vote,” said Evan Tracey, chief operating officer of TNS Media Intelligence’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. He said the unusual airing time in fact appears to allow the campaign to test the effectiveness of the infomercial format without spending much.

[From Chicago Business News, Analysis & Articles | Obama courts insomniac vote | Crain’s ]

Political advertising seeks viewership, and especially viewership that isn’t competed over by political rivals.

Footnotes:
  1. which unfortunately happens more than it should [↩]

Most corporations pay zero tax

Seth Anderson4 Comments

No wonder the US government is constantly in a deficit! Of course, the politicians rub their collective eyes, and say, “I have no idea why that happened. Must be the previous guy’s fault.”

Two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005, according to a new report from Congress.

The study by the Government Accountability Office released Tuesday said about 68 percent of foreign companies doing business in the U.S. avoided corporate taxes over the same period.

Collectively, the companies reported trillions of dollars in sales, according to GAO’s estimate.

“It’s shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country,” said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who asked for the GAO study with Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.

[From Report says most corporations pay no federal income taxes; lawmakers blame loopholes — chicagotribune.com]

and the investigators don’t want to know either:

An outside tax expert, Chris Edwards of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, said increasing numbers of limited liability corporations and so-called “S” corporations pay taxes under individual tax codes.

“Half of all business income in the United States now ends up going through the individual tax code,” Edwards said.

The GAO study did not investigate why corporations weren’t paying federal income taxes or corporate taxes

Can’t really blame the corporations: if there is money to be had by slightly duplicitous behavior, a corporation worth its shareholder’s trust should take the free money. No, the culprit is a shoddy tax system which encourages abuse, and a corrupt Congress which writes a business-favorable tax code.

More than 38,000 foreign corporations had no tax liability in 2005 and 1.2 million U.S. companies, or 66.7 percent of them, paid no income tax, the GAO said. Combined, the companies had $2.5 trillion in sales. About 25 percent of large U.S. corporations — those with at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in receipts — did not pay corporate taxes.

The GAO said it analyzed data from the Internal Revenue Service, examining samples of corporate returns for the years 1998 through 2005. For 2005, for example, it reviewed 110,003 tax returns from among more than 1.2 million corporations doing business in the U.S.

How about shifting the tax burden away from individuals, and back on corporations? An Alternative Minimum Tax1 for Fortune 500 companies? Something, please.

The report is here or the complete report (PDF)

Concerns about transfer pricing abuse have led researchers to compare the tax liabilities of foreign- and U.S.-controlled corporations. (Transfer prices are the prices related companies charge on intercompany transactions.) However, such comparisons are complicated because other factors may explain the differences in reported tax liabilities. In three prior reports, GAO found differences in the percentages of foreign-controlled and U.S.-controlled corporations reporting no tax liability. GAO was asked to update the previous reports by comparing: (1) the tax liabilities of foreign-controlled domestic corporations (FCDC) and U.S.-controlled corporations (USCC)-including those reporting zero tax liabilities for 1998 through 2005 (the latest available data) and (2) characteristics of FCDCs and USCCs such as age, size, and industry. GAO analyzed data from the Internal Revenue Service’s Statistics of Income samples of corporate tax returns. GAO does not make any recommendations in this report. In commenting on a draft of this report, IRS provided comments on technical issues, which we incorporated into this report where appropriate.

FCDCs reported lower tax liabilities than USCCs by most measures shown in this report. A greater percentage of large FCDCs reported no tax liability in a given year from 1998 through 2005. For all corporations, a higher percentage of FCDCs reported no tax liabilities than USCCs through 2001 but differences after 2001 were not statistically significant. Most large FCDCs and USCCs that reported no tax liability in 2005 also reported that they had no current-year income. A smaller proportion of these corporations had losses from prior years and tax credits that eliminated any tax liability. By another measure, large FCDCs were more likely to report no tax liability over multiple years than large USCCs. In 2005, comparisons of FCDCs and USCCs based on ratios of reported tax liabilities to gross receipts or total assets showed that FCDCs reported less tax than USCCs. FCDCs and USCCs differed in age, size, and industry. FCDCs were younger than USCCs in that a greater percentage had been incorporated for 3 years or less from 1998 through 2005. In 2005, FCDCs were larger on average than USCCs in that they reported higher average gross receipts and assets than USCCs. A comparison by industry in 2005 showed that large FCDCs were relatively more concentrated in manufacturing and wholesale trade, while large USCCs were more evenly distributed across industries. GAO did not attempt to determine the extent to which these factors and others, such as transfer pricing abuse, explain differences in tax liabilities.

Footnotes:
  1. apparently there is something like an Alternative Minimum Tax for Corporations, but obviously it is pretty easily manipulated [↩]

Guam 1974 redux

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Our far-flung correspondent1, Shannon Murphy, adds some corrections to the record re: Roger Gale’s article excerpted in Guam in 1974.

Spain first occupied the Marianas (named after Queen Mariana), to include Guam, in 1668. Legaspi claimed the island in 1565. So that means the Marianas have been colonized for 443 years if you go by Legaspi or 340 years if you go by when the Spanish first settled there – not 250. The US took Guam from Spain during the Spanish American War in 1898, so its been under American rule for only 110 years, minus the 2 and a half years of Japanese occupation during World War II.

Guam changed the most just after World War II then any time during Guam’s history as the island was badly bombed and then 150,000 American military occupied the island for three years or so making it a staging base for the planned attack on Japan and Asia. The villages were destroyed and then relocated, much of the land was seized (by writ of eminent domain to non- U.S. citizens) and the bases were built. The 22,000 Chamorros on the island were marginalized to the military mission. They had no rights and no voice and those who survived a brutal Japanese occupation (the Japanese punished them for being loyal to the Americans) were sickly and starved.

[The United States military] built something like 6 runways, 6 field hospitals, filled in land to make a better harbor and port, built hundreds of quonset huts all over the island. Then they dropped the bombs on Japan (taking off from next door Tinian) and the war was over.


“We Fought the Navy and Won: Guam’s Quest for Democracy (Latitude 20 Books)” (Doloris Coulter Cogan)

Doloris Coulter Cogan’s book has been highly recommended if you are interested in this history. From the blurb:

We Fought the Navy and Won is a carefully documented yet impassioned recollection of Guam’s struggle to liberate itself from the absolutist rule of the U.S. Navy. Doloris Cogan concentrates on five crucial years, 1945-1950, when, fresh out of journalism school, she had the good fortune to join the distinguished team of idealists at the newly formed Institute of Ethnic Affairs in Washington, D.C. Working as a writer/editor on the monthly Guam Echo under the leadership of the Institute’s director, John Collier, Cogan witnessed and recorded the battle fought at the very top between Collier (assisted by former Secretary of the Interior Harry L. Ickes) and Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal as the people of Guam petitioned the U.S. Congress for civilian government under a constitution. Taken up by newspapers throughout the country, this war of words illustrated how much freedom of the press plays in achieving and sustaining true democracy.

Part of the story centers around a young Chamorro named Carlos Taitano, who returned home to Guam in 1948 after serving in the U.S. Army in the Pacific. Taitano joined his colleagues in the lower house and walked out of the Guam Congress in 1949 to protest the naval governor, who had refused their right to subpoena an American businessman suspected of illegal activity. The walkout was the catalyst that introduced the Organic Act of Guam, which was signed into law by President Truman in 1950. Many other Guamanians, including the men and women who testified before the U.S. Congress, were involved in this historic struggle. We Fought the Navy and Won is the first book to tell their story and the first detailed look at the events surrounding Guam’s elevation from possession to territory.

Our far-flung correspondent continues:

It took another several years before Chamorros were made US citizens and then many more before they could elect their own governor. We still can’t vote for President or by a meaningful part of Congress.

All the rest of the corrections are just because this is a 30 year old article:

Our population by the last census update was 162,000.

The military gave some “excess” land back in the 90s so now they only have about 1/4 of the island, rather than 1/3. They might take some more again though.

We have our new airport and lots of airlines now.

The Political Status Commission isn’t doing anything anymore. Sen. Frank Lujan died already as have others who spoke up so well. Most people now have accepted the status quo and are just trying to figure out how to make this all work out. We don’t believe there is anything we can do about the military build up here. Many people welcome it, seeing it as an opportunity to make some money.

Your last paragraph was right on – Guam is an occupied territory. Chamorros (they don’t call themselves Guamanians anymore as that was an American idea to give them a new name to differentiate themselves from Chamorros who were considered a thing of the past!) are a minority in their own home due to US immigration policies which they have no control over. We are nowhere near getting a new political status.

There is a cool group of Chamorro graduate students who are trying to raise awareness and wake people up at http://famoksaiyan.blogspot.com/

Also the PDN is not owned by foreigners but by Gannett Corp. But if the point is that it is not locally owned you got it! There is another paper and two TV news stations that are locally owned though. But the PDN is the big news organization.

Thanks, Shannon, for the informative, brief history. Care to fact-check this anecdote too?

Footnotes:
  1. borrowed title from the New Yorker I think, always wanted to use it [↩]

The Most Happy Bordello

Seth Anderson0 comment

The historic bordello district was slightly south of where I currently reside, the city still has certain residues of days gone by, if one knows where to look.1


“Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul” (Karen Abbott)Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul sounds like an interesting overview of the period.

The Most Happy Bordello – WSJ.com:
One doesn’t hear much nowadays about bordellos, also known as cathouses, brothels, houses of ill repute or simple whorehouses. When I was an adolescent in Chicago, in the early 1950s, the trip to such a place was a rite de passage for nearly every male youth of unambiguous appetites. In my day the chief such institutions, operating on assembly-line principles, were to be found outside the city, one in Kankakee, the other in Braidwood. Students at the University of Illinois relieved the tedium of their sound liberal arts or business educations by visiting establishments in Danville, birthplace of Dick Van Dyke and Bobby Short.
…But the great cathouse era of Chicago was in the first decade or so of the 20th century. This era and those cathouses have now been described with scrupulous concern for historical accuracy and in clear, lively prose by Karen Abbott in “Sin in the Second City.” Lavish in her details, nicely detached in her point of view, Ms. Abbott has written an immensely readable book. “Sin in the Second City” offers much in the way of reflection for those interested in the unending puzzle that goes by the name of human nature.

Ms. Abbott’s account of fleshly sin and the response to it in the city of Chicago in the early 20th century centers on a bordello known as the Everleigh Club, which even now is talked about in Chicago by men interested in the sporting life. The club was the creation of two sisters, Minna and Ada Everleigh, who themselves had earlier worked the hard trade of harlotry in Omaha and elsewhere.

The Everleigh Club opened on Feb. 1, 1900, and closed on the morning of Oct. 25, 1911. In between times, the sisters accrued assets, by Ms. Abbott’s estimate, worth more than $20 million in today’s dollars, while their establishment acquired world-wide fame as one of the wonders of the city of Chicago, which, in the words of First Ward Alderman Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, “ain’t no sissy town.”

The Everleigh Club was a cathouse with a vast difference — it was more like the Ritz, with, of course, added attractions. Sumptuous food was served (entrées on the buffet included guinea fowl, pheasant and broiled squab), music both serious and popular played while a basso continuo was supplied by the popping of champagne corks, and the downstairs décor included a gold piano that set the sisters back no fewer than 15 grand.

Unlike their consoeurs in the Levee, as the whorehouse district on Chicago’s South Side was called, the sisters Everleigh enforced a high standard of luxury, carefully culled their clientele and monitored the behavior of staff. They also treated their girls — known as courtesans, and sometimes as the butterflies — with fairness and an utter absence of cruelty, which was far from the case in other houses in the Levee. Girls working at the Everleigh Club made more than a hundred dollars a week, a fine wage at the time. To give some notion of the general tone of the place: While customers were upstairs frolicking with the girls, downstairs their suits were being pressed.

Although Ms. Abbott does not describe what went on in the girls’ rooms chez Everleigh, she informs us that corporate accounts were available to good customers, and she chronicles the gaudier scandals. These include one of the Marshalls Field, of the famous department-store family, being shot in the Levee; and, later, Herbert Swift, of the great meatpacking family, dying of unknown causes after supposedly departing the Everleigh Club with one of its girls. The heavyweight champion Jack Johnson served time in jail under the Mann Act for transporting an Everleigh butterfly named Belle Schreiber across state lines.

The characters of Minna and Ada Everleigh and their thoughtful way of going about their business are intricately delineated by Ms. Abbott, who, I think it fair to say, views them affectionately and with measured admiration. But her book is ultimately a saga of a clash between the forces of vice and those of reform in the city of Chicago. In this battle, reform has right but absolutely no humor on its side — right, that is, if one assumes that human weakness is easily eradicated through the changing of institutions.

The methods proposed for dealing with the extensive prostitution in Chicago early in the last century were, first, to segregate it in a particular part of town, and, second, to root it out and eliminate it altogether. Ministers, ambitious young lawyers set on forging political careers, anti-smoking campaigners, temperance workers, the B’nai Br’ith, vegetarians, and others on the side of sweetness and light naturally enough went for complete elimination.

I did finish reading this book several months ago, well worth reading if you have a chance.

Footnotes:
  1. reposted because there is something wrong with the original movabletype post from 2007 [↩]

Infrared Bridge for Sale

Seth Anderson3 Comments

A very nice woman pleasantly asked me for a free copy of this photograph of the Hoan Bridge in Milwaukee to

hang in a local, non-profit rehab hospital? I just think the image is very soothing and the patients would just love it. If you approve, I would like to know your first and last name so I could give you full credit for your beautiful work.

Two views/treatments of the same bridge near the Historic Third Ward area in Milwaukee.

Bridge Milwaukee IR2

Bridge Milwaukee IR

I told her that I was uncomfortable giving away my art, but that I would discuss a non-profit rate1 that was significantly cheaper. I hope she doesn’t just print out a copy anyway. There really isn’t anything one can do; once an image is digitized and placed on the web, what happens to the image is difficult to control. All one can do is depend upon the ethics of others. I upload less-than-ideal resolution, but if someone is willing to print out a less-than-ideal print, how would I ever even know?
I did print this image out in 20″ x 30″ size, and gave the print to a friend, but that’s a much different category.
So if anyone is ever visiting2 a rehab hospital3 and sees a copy of this print, please let me know. At least she asked me first.

Footnotes:
  1. Harlan Elison’s words were ringing in my ears: get paid! Don’t give away your work for free! [↩]
  2. I won’t ask what you were doing there, ahem. [↩]
  3. possibly in Milwaukee, or nearby, or somewhere else entirely [↩]

Waterboys Deluxe

Seth Anderson0 comment

I owned this album on vinyl a gazillion years ago, and repurchased it recently on CD. What a great album. Nostalgia aside, reminds me of the best of Arcade Fire: talented multi-instrumentalists jamming to crescendos of passionate Celtic-inspired indie-rock with interesting lyrics. Actually, I like this album better than anything I’ve heard by the Arcade Fire1, probably because I heard the Waterboys first. Helps if you like Irish/Celtic music, or Van Morrison even, but that is not required for full enjoyment.


Fisherman’s Blues

 

The Waterboys were formed in London in 1981 and led by the singer/songwriter Mike Scott, the group’s only constant member – with the supporting musicians ever changing around him. 1988’s Fisherman’s Blues is the Waterboys’s 4th album for which the band were joined by traditional Irish players like fiddler Steve Wickham, drummer Dave Ruffy, keyboardist Guy Chambers and bassist Marco Weissman, resulting in a stripped-down, folky sound which was a marked step away from the “big music” he founded and pursued in previous albums. It has been called their ‘warmest and most rewarding record’. Complete with a bonus disc of previously unreleased tracks and packaged in a digipack with pvc slipcase – it follows on from the successful re-issues of the first 3 Waterboys’s albums ‘The Waterboys‘, ‘A Pagan Place‘ and ‘This Is The Sea‘2

Allmusic:

Mike Scott had been pursuing his grandiose “big music” since he founded the Waterboys, so it came as a shock when he scaled back the group’s sound for the Irish and English folk of Fisherman’s Blues. Although the arena-rock influences have been toned down, Scott’s vision is no less sweeping or romantic, making even the simplest songs on Fisherman’s Blues feel like epics. Nevertheless, the album is the Waterboys’ warmest and most rewarding record, boasting a handful of fine songs (“And a Bang on the Ear,” the ominous “We Will Not Be Lovers,” “Has Anybody Here Seen Hank?,” and the title track), as well as a surprisingly successful cover of Van Morrison’s breathtaking “Sweet Thing.” Fisherman’s Blues was reissued in 2006 with a bonus disc containing fourteen outtakes, alternate versions and late-night studio jams.

You can hear a free track streamed at LastFM

I don’t remember where I read about the re-issue3, but I’m pleased to have rediscovered an old favorite. Check it out.

Footnotes:
  1. and I may be crazy for making the comparison, but hey, these are my ears! [↩]
  2. these are all worth owning too, but Fisherman’s Blues is the best place to start, imho [↩]
  3. if I don’t blog something, fwoosh, there it goes from the rusty sieve of my memory [↩]

Obama sets out his Israel vision

Seth Anderson0 comment

David Horovitz of the Jerusalem Post has met three major American politicians in the last two months: President Bush, John McCain and Barack Obama. Horovitz was much more impressed with Obama than the other two dim bulbs.

Two months ago in the Oval Office, President George W. Bush, coming to the end of a two-term presidency and presumably as expert on Israeli-Palestinian policy as he is ever going to be, was accompanied by a team of no fewer than five advisers and spokespeople during a 40-minute interview with this writer and three other Israeli journalists.

In March, on his whirlwind visit to Israel, Republican presidential nominee John McCain, one of whose primary strengths is said to be his intimate grasp of foreign affairs, chose to bring along Sen. Joe Lieberman to the interview our diplomatic correspondent Herb Keinon and I conducted with him, looked to Lieberman several times for reassurance on his answers and seemed a little flummoxed by a question relating to the nuances of settlement construction.

On Wednesday evening, toward the end of his packed one-day visit here, Barack Obama, the Democratic senator who is leading the race for the White House and who lacks long years of foreign policy involvement, spoke to The Jerusalem Post with only a single aide in his King David Hotel room, and that aide’s sole contribution to the conversation was to suggest that the candidate and I switch seats so that our photographer would get better lighting for his pictures.

Several of Obama’s Middle East advisers – including former Clinton special envoy Dennis Ross and ex-ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer – were hovering in the vicinity. But Obama, who was making only his second visit to Israel, knew precisely what he wanted to say about the most intricate issues confronting and concerning Israel, and expressed himself clearly, even stridently on key subjects.

There is a limit to what can be gauged of a politician’s views as expressed in a relatively short interview at the height of an election campaign. But Obama, who chose to give the Post one of the only two formal sit-down interviews he conducted during his visit, was clearly conveying a carefully formulated message – and it was striking in several areas.

[Click to read more David Horovitz Exclusive: Obama sets out his Israel vision | Jerusalem Post ]

Experience is a false metric for political success, in my estimation. More important is cleverness, and a willingness to be educated on issues. Our current half-assed President has never been interested in learning anything new, nor in parsing the complicated nuances of international diplomacy, and based on all evidence I’ve seen, neither is John McCain. Barack Obama, for all his other faults, is the sort of intelligent human who should be running the Executive Branch of the US.

Putin and His Puppy Named Bush

Seth Anderson0 comment

Dr. Alterman speculates what the media frenzy might be like if a Democrat “lost China”, err, Georgia1

Does anyone doubt that if the President of the United States were a Democrat who tied us down in a costly, counterproductive war based on lies and forged documents and destroyed the respect and sympathy enjoyed by this country in every civilized nation in the world — or even if he did none of those things, but was merely a Democrat — that this column by proud New York Times pundit William Kristol and this editorial by the editors of The Wall Street Journal would have included vicious attacks on that same Democratic president for weakness and incompetence bordering on the criminal — and thereby blame him for inviting Russia to invade its democratic neighbor without having to worry about the opinion of the no-longer-respected-nor-feared United States of America? Now, imagine that said Democratic president had informed the press that he had looked into the invader’s soul and decided he was a good guy because the old KGB hand said he believed in God. (If God really existed, and took an interest in the day-to-day doings of those of us on Earth, he’d let me play poker with a chump like that.) OMG, even the Georgian troops were in Iraq. Putin to Bush: “Go away, silly little boy.” (Bush to Putin: “Thank you, sir, may I have another?)

[From Media Matters – We’re so sorry, Uncle Vladimir …]

Seems as if our President is more interested in attending the Olympics2 than actually doing anything productive. I guess that’s actually a good thing: less Bush incompetence is better for the country, but couldn’t he at least fake being President with as much diligence as he has since 2001?

David Corn writes:

The opening ceremony was rather impressive. Talk about organization and competence: two thousand and eight Tai Chi practitioners forming a perfect circle and maintaining it through a series of elaborate moves.

That was some counterpoint to George W. Bush. Later that night, during the parade of nations, he was practically slumped in his seat, toting a small American flag–was it made in China?–with a bored expression on his face. Prior to the games, there was a debate over whether he should attend and further legitimize the repressive Chinese regime. But as he sat there, that debate no longer seemed so relevant, for he looked irrelevant. There was no one next to him but his wife. And the question was, didn’t he have anything better to do with his time? The apparent answer: no.

…

This all raised the question in my mind: what does Bush want to get done before the W. years are over. Not much, it seems. He has not pushed a major domestic issue since his Social Security flop. He has not addressed the climate change crisis. He has not taken any decisive steps regarding the sliding-into-a-quagmire war in Afghanistan. He has taken no significant moves regarding health care. It’s as if he is not merely a lame duck but the clockwatcher-in-chief. And is it possible that the last major overseas action of the president who during his second inaugural address said that the mission of the United States was to stand with “democratic reformers” against their “oppressors” will be waving a mini-Stars and Stripes at the Chinese games? How harmonious, as the Chinese say.

Footnotes:
  1. South Ossetia and Abkhazia, to be more precise [↩]
  2. and apparently being bored at the same time [↩]

Franz Kafka porn brought out of the closet

Seth Anderson0 comment

Surprised Kafka’s porn stash took so long to emerge.

A stash of explicit pornography to which Franz Kafka subscribed has emerged for the first time after being studiously ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the iconic writer’s saintly image.

Having stumbled by chance across copies in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford while doing unrelated research, James Hawes, the academic and Kafka expert, reveals some of this erotic material in Excavating Kafka, to be published this month. His book seeks to explode important myths surrounding the literary icon, a “quasi-saintly” image which hardly fits with the dark and shocking pictures contained in these banned journals.

Their additional significance is that the publisher, Dr Franz Blei, was also the man who first published Kafka in 1908 – a series of miniature stories later gathered in his book Meditation.

[From Franz Kafka’s porn brought out of the closet – Times Online ]

Raindrop Porn
[Raindrop Porn will have to suffice unless I find any graphic goodies on the internet]

and the stash, kept locked with a key only Kafka had, was apparently pretty racy

Even today, the pornography would be “on the top shelf”, Dr Hawes said, noting that his American publisher did not want him to publish it at first. “These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action… It’s quite unpleasant.”

“Academics have pretended it did not exist,” Dr Hawes said. “The Kafka industry doesn’t want to know such things about its idol.”

He added: “Perhaps Kafka’s biographers simply don’t like the idea that their literary idol was helped out in this… way in the vital early stages of his career

As far as I can tell, the book is only available in England at the moment. American Puritanism at work.

“Excavating Kafka” (James Hawes)

a different title by James Hawes is available in the US, maybe covering some of the same topics:

“Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life” (James Hawes)

Everybody knows the face of Franz Kafka, whether they have read any of his works or not. And that brooding face carries instant images: bleak and threatening visions of an inescapable bureaucracy, nightmarish transformations, uncanny predictions of the Holocaust. But while Kafka’s genius is beyond question, the image of a mysterious, sickly, shadowy figure who was scarcely known in his own lifetime bears no resemblance to the historical reality. Franz Kafka was a popular and well-connected millionaire’s son who enjoyed good-time girls, brothels, and expensive porn, who landed a highly desirable state job that pulled in at least $90,000 a year in today’s dollars for a six-hour day, who remained a loyal member of Prague’s German-speaking Imperial elite right to the end, and whose work was backed by a powerful literary clique.

Here are some of the prevalent Kafka myths:

*Kafka was the archetypal genius neglected in his lifetime.

*Kafka was lonely.

*Kafka was stuck in a dead-end job, struggling to find time to write.

*Kafka was tormented by fear of sex.

*Kafka was unbendingly honest about himself to the women in his life – too honest.

*Kafka had a terrible, domineering father who had no understanding of his son’s needs.

*Kafka’s style is mysterious and opaque.

*Kafka takes us into bizarre worlds.

James Hawes wants to tear down the critical walls which generations of gatekeepers—scholars, biographers, and tourist guides—have built up around Franz Kafka, giving us back the real man and the real significance of his splendid works. And he’ll take no prisoners in the process.

Palast on McCain and Nukes

Seth Anderson0 comment

Greg Palast discusses John McCain’s love for all things nuclear, a part of McCain’s goofy energy plan.

I’m guessing it was excessive exposure to either radiation or George Bush, but Senator John McCain’s comments from inside a nuclear power plant in Michigan are so cracked-brained that I fear some loose gamma rays are doing to McCain’s gray matter what they did to Homer Simpson’s.

On Tuesday, the presumptive Republican candidate descended into the colon of a nuke to declare we need to build 45 new nuclear plants – that this is the way out of our energy crisis. Nuclear power, declared the senator, is a “safe, efficient [and] inexpensive” alternative to oil.

Really? We can argue all day about whether nuclear plants are safe (they aren’t –period). But there can be no argument whatsoever that these giant radioactive tea-kettles are breathtakingly expensive.

Nuclear plants are cheap until you actually try to build one. Not one of the last 49 nuclear plants cost less than $2 billion apiece. I’m looking down the road at the remainders of the Shoreham nuclear plant which took nearly 20 years to build at a cost of $8 billion – or close to $7,000 per customer it was supposed to supply. When I say “supposed to,” it was closed for safety reasons after operating just one single day.

We’re told that the new generation of plants will be different. Just like an alcoholic child-beater, the nuclear plant builders promise us that, “This time it will be different.” Sure. And McCain believes them.

[From Greg Palast » The McCain Plan: Homer Simpson without the Donut ]

and the nuclear plant waste issue is still unresolved, as we’ve mentioned previously

While The New York Times reporters following McCain repeated his line about “inexpensive” nuclear power without question, a buried wire story on the same day noted that the Energy Department is putting the unfunded bill for disposing nuclear plant waste at $96.2 billion – nearly a billion dollars per plant operating today. And no one even knows exactly how to do it, or where. Obama has the audacity to ask about the nuclear waste’s cost. “Can we deal with the expense?” he said on Meet the Press.

McCain’s plan to spend endless billions on nuclear plants without a waste disposal system in place is like building a massive hotel without toilets. D’oh! I suppose you can always tell the guests to poop in buckets until someone comes up with a plan for plumbing. But the stuff piles up. And unlike the fecal droppings of tourists, nuclear waste will stay hot and dangerous for a thousand generations.

Read the whole article here

Fake memes and Obama

Seth Anderson0 comment

Jamison Foser dissects some recent anti-Obama press, including a reporter named Amy Chozick’s ridiculous Wall Street Journal article about Obama being too skinny for anyone to vote for.

Chozick apparently had some trouble finding people to support the crackpot premise that Obama’s physical fitness might cause voters to question his fitness for office, so she turned to trolling Internet message boards in desperate search of someone — anyone — she could quote. As the blog Sadly, No! revealed, Chozick posted a Yahoo! Message Board thread on July 15, asking, “Does anyone out there think Barack Obama is too thin to be president? Anyone having a hard time relating to him and his ‘no excess body fat’? Please let me know. Thanks!”

About three-and-a-half hours later, Chozick got her first response — a post ridiculing her for her focus on “totally meaningless drivel.” Nearly an hour after that, Chozick finally got the response she was looking for. A user posting under the name “onlinebeerbellygirl” wrote, “Yes I think He [sic] is to [sic] skinny to be President. … I won’t vote for any beanpole guy.” Chozick quoted the post in her article — one of only two quotes agreeing with the premise of the article. She did not, however, disclose that the quote had come only after she started a thread encouraging people to make such comments. After she got caught, the Journal acknowledged: “The article should have disclosed that the reporter used the bulletin board to elicit the comment.”

There may be more to it than that. A post in a subsequent Yahoo! Message Board discussion thread devoted to Chozick’s article noted that “[n]either Chozick nor ‘onlinebeerbellygirl’ has made any other posts on Yahoo before or since, and both profiles appear to have been created on 7/15, the day Chozick started the topics. It certainly looks like Amy Chozick constructed the whole thing.”

Another post wondered: “Do WSJ reporters make up fake IDs and make up fake quotes?”

Chozick’s original thread has been deleted (a cached copy is available here). Even more curiously, a search of the Yahoo! message boards for “onlinebeerbellygirl” comes up empty. Whether “onlinebeerbellygirl” ever really existed at all or was a Chozick invention, running a 1,300-word article suggesting Obama is too skinny to be president, based upon a random Internet message board post, is insane. As Slate.com’s Tim Noah noted, “In the vastness of cyberspace, you can always find somebody who will say whatever you want.”

[From Media Matters – “Obama coverage finds dark lining around silver clouds”; by Jamison Foser]

Obama is Plugged In to the Nation

No wonder newspaper circulation keeps dropping. Mr. Foser continues on to more serious, but equally insane fake memes, like that Obama is “too Presidential” to be President, or too well-educated. Ummm, yeah.

Guam in 1974

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Today’s tiptoe through history1 comes from an article published in The Nation, October 26, 1974 by Roger Gale.2 I wonder if America’s newest colonial acquisition, Iraq, will have a similar trajectory as Guam did?

I realize most of you are not very interested in Guam, but I am. Avert thy gaze if you are feeling hurried and pressed for time. I won’t reproduce the entire article this time, but I have the PDF if you want a copy.

Guam 1971

First a little background:

Although a speck on the world map, Guam may soon become the hub of America’s presence in Asia. Most distant of all American colonies, the island’s economic potential is now being recognized for the first time. It is within 1,500 miles of both Tokyo and Manila, and is fast becoming part of the Asian economic orbit after long years of isolation and secrecy imposed by the American military. Guam has probably changed more in the past five years than in the 250 years since the Spanish seized the island. A sleepy port of call since it became an American colony during the Spanish-American War, it is experiencing an astounding annual growth rate of more than 25 percent. More than a dozen hotels have transformed – once tranquil Tumon Bay into a junior Waikiki; the newest of them is the tallest building between Honolulu and Manila. More than 6,000 new homes have been completed in the past Jour years alone.

Tourism, almost all of it from Japan, has become Guam’s most visible industry. Last year, 240,000 tourists visited what is now Japan’s most popular “Caribbean” island; it was the destination of almost a third of Japan’s world travelers. Five years earlier, only 3,500 tourists had stopped at Guam.

and the problem:

But despite the sudden tourist boom, the U.S. military, hidden behind its fences, is still the mainstay of the economy. It employ more people and buys more services than does any other activity on the island. According to Navy figures, the $171 million it spent last year constituted a full, one-quarter of the island’s’ economy. It was only a few years ago that the Navy relinquished control of the island’s power, phone and water systems. Until 1963, in fact, permission from the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington was needed to visit the security-conscious island. In the past decade, especially during the war in Indochina when B-52s flew bombing missions from Guam, the military presence has grown immensely, but security has become less of a preoccupation.

Although Guam is the Navy’s largest home port and will grow even larger next year when six new destroyers are transferred to the island, the military now has a rival for economic predominance on the island. Like the military it does not wish to advertise its presence, but in the past few years investment and land speculation have become a major industry on tropical Guam. A free port, with casual accounting practices, Guam has become a haven for excess Japanese yen and since Nixon’s visit to China, for insecure New Taiwan dollars. Because large contracts are becoming scarce in Vietnam, South Korea’s largest construction firms have moved their major foreign operations to Guam. As a result of all this new money, between 1972 and 1973 bank deposits rose a phenomenal 300 per cent and recorded loans increased almost 700 per cent.

With a population of 105,000 and a density per square mile of 500, Guam’s potential for capital-intensive growth is incalculable. Something more than one-third of the 206 square- mile island is in U.S. military hands so land prices in prime areas have shot up to as high as $1 million an acre. Speculation in tract homes still to be built by Kaiser Industries or by one of the Korean construction firms, has raised the cost of the average two-bedroom house to about $50,000.

…

The military has returned a few small parcels of land in the last year but, as one Guamanian pointed out when the Navy announced its latest offer, “What a joke! The Navy is leasing our own land back to us so we can construct a school for military dependents.” At the same time that it is returning small parcels of land, the Navy is moving to buy Guam’s last undeveloped shoreland for a $250 million ammunition wharf.

and no wonder why Jack Abramoff wanted to do business on Guam with his buddies in the Bush Adminstration, creating clothing sweatshops.

Guam is also a free port and therefore attractive to producers, and retailers of high-cost, low-weight goods like watches and cameras. Watches, which are partially assembled in a number of small factories on the island, can be imported into the United States at reduced tariff rates. In the future, it’s location at the “mouth'” of Asia will be a more important factor in Guam’s growing role as a transshipment point to and from the U.S. mainland. Because Guam’s economy is almost all “store-bought,” with agriculture nearly nonexistent, ships now return to the West Coast almost empty.

As an air hub, Guam has’ grown in five years from a one airline island to being served by six regularly scheduled airlines and a number of charter and transient aircraft. A new $25 million air terminal is in the works. Guam is already the world’s biggest cable crossing, and a new trans-Pacific cable now being laid will make it still more important in this respect. The island is also the “Communications Area Master Station” for the Pentagon, coordinating all military communications in Southeast Asia, Japan and the South Pacific.

Although the local labor supply is small and fully employed by the military and the government of Guam, cheap nonunionized labor from the Philippines and Korea3 is easily imported. Receiving the minimum wage (a good part of which has to be sent home to their families) and living in military-style barracks, workers are hardly in a good bargaining position.

In addition to all these attractions, Guam is virgin territory in an area that is being picked over and ripped off by multinational corporations based in Japan and America.

King and Queen of Guam walk on thin ice of modern life
and of particular interest to me:

This year Guamania’ns became a numerical minority on their own island. If you count “stateside” Americans as foreigners, as the natives do, there are almost as many aliens on Guam as in Hawaii, where the population is eight times larger. The scheduled 20 per cent increase in military personnel and the continued influx of Asians means that in the next three or four years, more than two-thirds of the island will be populated by foreigners.

Even when Guamanians were in the majority, control of the island had long since passed from their hands. Joe Murphy, editor of Guam’s Pacific Daily News, estimates that 70 to 80 per cent of the island’s businesses (including the newspaper) are foreign-owned and that considerably more than half the island’s land is either leased or owned outright by non-Guamanians. But the sudden realization that they no longer even form the majority of the population has provoked the most vociferous reaction’ on the part of Guamanians since the bloody Spanish conquest of the island.

…

The legislature-has also created a Political Status Commission which inspired a series of hard-hitting newspaper columns on Guam’s colonial status. Sen. Frank Lujan, chairman of the commission, says the people of Guam have been kept dependent by a series of “colonial myths” which have led Guamanians to believe that they have no choice but to remain in the American political orbit. The Pacific Daily News refused to run any more columns on the subject after the publisher reportedly deemed them “anti-American.”

I haven’t been to Guam since 1997, so perhaps my information is out of date, but seemed like these same issues exist. Tourism, especially Japanese tourism, is still huge, the military is slightly antagonistic towards the rest of the island, and Guam is an occupied territory without representation in Congress.
—Update – Our far-flung correspondent adds some much-needed corrections to the story. Check it out.

Footnotes:
  1. I had fun with yesterday’s blog from history [↩]
  2. never heard of him, actually, but he was the director of Friends of Micronesia in Berkley, California, and a former chairman of the Department of Political Science at the University of Guam. [↩]
  3. and Saipan [↩]

Brendan Reilly launches new website

Seth Anderson1 Comment

My alderman, Brendan Reilly, announces a new website launch

Alderman Reilly is thrilled to announce the launch of a new website for the 42nd Ward! This website is designed to help local residents, businesses and community groups find quick answers to questions about city services and programs. On this site you’ll find links to the most requested city services and other useful resources located within downtown Chicago’s 42nd Ward. Please visit Alderman Reilly’s “virtual office” at http://www.ward42chicago.com/

Old Fashioned Ways
[Old Fashioned Ways- downtown Chicago]

Still no blog that I can see, however. Would be useful to have a permanent archive of news stories so that external websites, such as mine, could link directly to Reilly’s take on topics. This new site is a definite improvement over the old site at least.