Fantastic Images

These chalk pavement pictures will blow your mind. Seriously!

If that doesn't do it, how about this house, complete with dragons and demons?

No pictures yet, but how about finding your lawn filled with ornaments?

Having trouble seeing pictures? Liquid Crystal Bifocals may provide the answer. Someday...

A response on Rumsfeld's Ahistoricality

From The Rev. Vicesimus Knox, a still-popular view of historians:

"So little credit is to be given to historians, even in the recital of facts of public notoriety! how much less to their delineation of characters, and descriptions of motives for actions, secret counsels and designs, to which none was a witness but the bosom which entertained them! Yet many historians kindly communicate all. You would think them of the privy-council of all nations; that they possessed the attribute of omniscience, though their intelligence never came from a higher source than an old woman’s tale."

The host of the most recent History Carnival, from which the above came, decided not to leave out anything... which is probably the clause under which my critique of Rumsfeld's post-Nazi analogy made it in! The good news is that it looks like most of the rest of the carnival is actually good stuff, well worth reading. Of the stuff I hadn't seen already, Phil Harland's discussion of Satanic Conspiracies looks most promising.

Speaking of my rejoinder to Rumsfeld, I got rejoinded myself. Robert Tumminello after taking on big name critics for their failure to provide detailed (and convincing to him, specifically) responses to Rumsfeld's hip-shot shorthand, deigns to offer a comment on my mere blogging. Unfortunately, the sense of the mark being missed is mutual: Mr. Tumminello takes my rhetoric too literally when he discounts the ways in which the US indeed failed to protect Germany (especially East Germany) or punish Nazis, the ways in which the US had no choice in its stewardship of West Germany. (Just as an aside, I find it wonderfully hypocritical that Republicans knock liberal attempts to make historical analogies with Nazi Germany, even when they're made reasonably clearly, whereas Republicans can do it with ablomb.) And he completely failed to note the utter falsity of Rumsfeld's claims about Eastern Europe, which are just as bad, if not worse.

Even if we give full credit the US for its stewardship of Japan and Germany, Gary Leupp makes it clear that Iraq "is no" Japan or Germany

The propaganda of the occupiers requires that we believe things have improved since his fall. But the evidence suggests otherwise.

Women were better off under bad Saddam, one-time U.S. ally. ...
Christians were better off under bad Saddam, one-time U.S. ally. ...
Gays were better off under bad Saddam, one-time U.S. ally. ...
Intellectuals were better off under bad Saddam, one-time U.S. ally. ...

People in general were better off under bad Saddam, one-time U.S. ally.

According to John Pace, former director of the human rights office of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq, "Under Saddam, if you agreed to forgo your basic right to freedom of expression and thought, you were physically more or less OK. But now, no. Here, you have a primitive, chaotic situation where anybody can do anything they want to anyone." Under Saddam the scale of abuse was "daunting," but now, "It extends over a much wider section of the population than it did under Saddam."

I doubt it was the intention of the Bush administration, once it decided to conquer Iraq and humiliate its former ally, to empower the religious fundamentalists who've launched their reign of terror on all these communities. ...

Nonetheless, that's been the effect. With regard to Japan and Germany after WWII, we had a plan and we had allies and we put a lot of money and manpower into the reconstruction and reorganization of our defeated enemy nations. If "Islamic Radicalism" (or whatever they're calling it these days) was the actual enemy and Iraq's alliance with that enemy was what justified the Iraq war, then what we're doing in Iraq is exactly like turning post-war Germany back over to the Nazis.

Other Carnivals:

• Blogmandu is growing, it seems, including very interesting posts on avoiding puffery (seems like an oxymoron for bloggers, but Buddhist often revel in these inherent illusory contradictions) and the possibility of meat without murder through evolving science.
• The Carnival of Kid Comedy is worth reading just for the quoted stuff; if you must click through, my favorites were comparative biology and the exceedingly well-written "If you give a mom a muffin" (which makes more sense if you've read the classic "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie" but it's not required; it's still funny).

Because It's April Fool's Day, I'll Be Honest...

I am 23% Idiot.

I am not annoying at all. In fact most people come to me for advice. Of course they annoy the hell out of me. But what can I do? I am smarter than most people.

Take the
Idiot Test
@ FualiDotCom

Via 11% Idiot Orac. also from 30% Punk Orac, no surprises here:

I am 4% Punk Rock.

It's not a fashion craze, or even a cool thing to do. I should just swallow it, get lost, and take my friends with me.

Take the
Punk Rock Test
@ FualiDotCom

A few more interesting things

Via Natalie Bennett's weekly Ten Female Bloggers roundup (and a hearty congratulations on hitting half a millenium!), I found two interesting pieces: Tammy Duckworth for Congress (a veteran of the Iraq war, and old-fashioned progressive, in an important state) and Whiny Christians after being told that "separation of Church and State" includes Christianity.

Really Good Historians Should Be In Charge

Caleb McDaniel says:

if you want to protect a person's human rights, you had best argue, not for the irrelevance of national citizenship altogether, but rather for an expanded and flexible definition of the national community that finds a place for illegal immigrants under the legal umbrella of the United States.

He goes on to argue that the liberal abandonment of the "nation-state" concept has led to the current situation where nationalism and anti-liberalism are more or less synonymous and that liberals need to redefine and reclaim nationalism in such a way as to not only preclude the delegitimation of liberals by conservatives (that's more my interpolation than his, though he does have a bit of defensive language, too) but also to achieve what we want with regard to expanding human rights within the nation-state.

Tim Burke says, with regard to the Duke Lacrosse Rape story:

I would be willing to wager a good deal [ed: never bet against Tim Burke] that if the sick little punk who said those words ["Thank your grandpa for my cotton shirt"] was sitting in a course on American history at Duke and was asked to stand up and provide a narrative of the history of slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, he would profess ignorance, or provide a kind of respectable potted Cliff Notes version sufficient to pass the US History AP but no more. [ed: AP? I don't think so] Maybe his professed ignorance would be relatively genuine, or maybe it would be the suppression of the story he thinks he knows but also knows he cannot tell, because it’s not real or accurate history, only a shambles of racist tropes.

He goes on to point out that historians have a responsibility to deconstruct and reconstruct our ingrained memories, our unspoken shame, in such a way that it becomes visible and, if we have the good will, alterable.

Because Newspapers Always Get Stuff Wrong...

You can go to You Died [via] and write your own obituary. It can be present, future, or fantastical. As the site says, it's a bit scary. Think of it as a goal-setting exercise, perhaps?

Or, if you think you'll live that long, there's the fifty year digital time capsule project. I love this line: "The International Time Capsule Society estimates that there are about 10,000 time capsules scattered around the globe, most of them lost." There's a Society!

In less entertaining news (worse than DIY obituaries? Yes), The Smithsonian archives are subtly, but unquestionably, privatizing their collection. I'm sympathetic to their need for revenue: they do good work and it's not cheap. But if I had donated historical materials to the Smithsonian with the expectation that it would be curated and archived and accessible, I'd be really ticked right about now. Expect some cemetary-based temblors, as former Smithsonian trustees and donors spin in their graves....

Funny Stuff? We'll see.

The Carnival of Comedy and the Carnival of Satire are up.

One thing that they share is links to The Limerick Savant, which is pretty relentlessly funny throughout.

Also, the Skeptics' Circle, and, for further skeptical fun, The Pigasus Awards by James "the Amazing" Randi.

Good News, even if it doesn't make sense

Jill Carroll is free! I first noted her kidnapping here and linked to the recent PSA calling for her release. As Brian Ulrich notes, Carroll herself doesn't have any idea why she was kidnapped or released; that the release came just after the CPT team release might mean that something interesting is happening. Or it might not. Still, since I didn't think the kidnapping was going to accomplish anything positive for the insurgents or other Iraqis, I'm glad to see that it didn't end badly.

Conflating Absurdity with Profundity

In the ongoing conflation of absurdity with profundity, an aborted attempt to spend a week at a 24-hour Wal-mart by a college sophomore with nothing better to do for spring break has turned into a national media sensation. [via] I don't care who you are, there's something about this story you will find disturbingly dumb

• the original idea, because nothing inspires young writers like long exposure to cheap housewares
• the fact that his advisor, a tenured professor of English, "just intuitively thought, 'This is brilliant!' I wasn't quite sure why, but it just sounded like a really good idea."
• the fact that his advisor informed local media that the stunt was underway before it was even two days in
• the fact that nobody at Wal-mart seems to have noticed something was amiss until the second day, and then did nothing about it (though there's a reference in the Des Moines Register article to a frozen debit account; can they do that?)
• the fact that the guy was "hallucinating" from exhaustion after only 41 hours -- with catnaps! -- and decided to go home
• the fact that local news media went ahead with the story anyway and that national news services picked it up and even investigated further
• the fact that the guy now considers his adventure to be a success because of all the attention
• the fact that we're going to hear more about this non-event because "He also talked with a book agent, has been contacted by New Line Cinema about a movie concept..."

Man, I'm working way too hard for my money. I need a gimmick. And a press agent....

Non Sequitur: They're doing what?
Apparently, some people have been inhaling vaporized alcohol with oxygen, for fun. Six states, the article says, have banned the required equipment, and thirteen more are considering it. Something about alcohol poisoning.... Fun.

Eek...

Reading Chris Bray's latest post (a worthwhile and vigorous revisit to the theme of rhetorically diminishing our enemies to mere savages), I clicked through to one of Victor Davis Hanson's pieces (I don't like Hanson; Bray doesn't like Hanson: VDH is a hack who's turned a classical education and testosterone poisoning into a "career" in right-wing punditry) and found the following alleged sentence:

Many of our challenges, then, are not the war in Iraq per se, but the entire paradox of postmodern war in general in a globally televised world.

A rough translation, for the euphemistically impaired: We didn't fuck up, so much as the situation is fucked up. He then continues his panglossian -- we live in the best of all possible worlds, by the good grace of our Dear Leader, despite all evidence to the contrary -- revisionism, even going so far as to note without irony that "Nothing in this war is much different from those of the past" without ever considering the value of learning from past mistakes before making them again. The difference between Hanson and Ferguson is erudition, not theme: both think that we are on God's own mysterious path and all will work out if we only have faith in the goodness of our hearts no matter what kind of dirty shit -- slavery, imperialism, whatever -- we have to do on the way.