But at least they don't paint themselves blue any more

Brad DeLong passes along this tidbit:

Caesar, in writing home, said of the Britons, “They are the most ignorant people I have ever conquered. They cannot be taught music.”

Would Handel have disagreed?

Alas, DeLong's update suggests that a better rendering of the source (Cicero writing to Atticus, 4.16.7), as this by Shackleton-Bailey, is less amusing:

... A letter from my brother contains some quite extraordinary things about Caesar's warm feelings towards me, and is corroborated by a very copious letter from Caesar himself. The result of the war against Britain is eagerly awaited, for the approaches to the island are known to be 'warded with wondrous massy walls.' It is also now ascertained that there isn't a grain of silver on the island nor any prospect of booty apart from captives, and I fancy you won't expect any of them to be highly qualified in literature or music!

Walsh's new Oxford translation has "sliver of silver," but does silver come in slivers? "Grain" seems more plausible.

Froomkin's finale

Dan Froomkin, indispensable White House Watcher whom the WaPo fired in its relentless (and very successful) war on journalistic quality and independence, posts his final column today, reviewing the Bush years and the media's failure to provide the public service they pretend to offer:

I started my column in January 2004, and one dominant theme quickly emerged: That George W. Bush was truly the proverbial emperor with no clothes. In the days and weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the nation, including the media, vested him with abilities he didn't have and credibility he didn't deserve. * * *

How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. * * *

Obama is nowhere in Bush's league when it comes to issues of credibility, but his every action nevertheless needs to be carefully scrutinized by the media, and he must be held accountable. We should be holding him to the highest standards – and there are plenty of places where we should be pushing back. Just for starters, there are a lot of hugely important but unanswered questions about his Afghanistan policy, his financial rescue plans, and his turnaround on transparency.

Read the whole thing, and when we see where Froomkin ends up, we'll pass it along.

Return of a bookslut

Michael Schaub is back at the Bookslut blog, as acerbic as ever. Yay, Michael!

This piece on Thomas Maier's Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love might actually be the first time the New York Times has printed the phrase "a clear Plexiglas dildo nicknamed Ulysses" since J. Edgar Hoover's obituary.

***

In New Zealand, a school is bribing kids to read with Coke. They're doing the same thing in Miami, only the "c" isn't capitalized.

... Is "How to Love" really quite the right verb for what Masters and Johnson taught America how to do, or do better?

Bar codes, younger than I am

The NYT notes the 35th anniversary of the bar code. First product scanned, presumably in a "real" transaction: a pack of Juicy Fruit gum.

Somewhat shamelessly, the Times repeats its canard about Bush 41 and the scanner:

They even played a role in the 1992 presidential race, when then-President George H. W. Bush, at a campaign stop, seemed surprised by what had already become a technological staple of everyday life.

Snopes.com notes that the Times' Andrew Rosenthal (still dispensing misinformation today) hadn't even been present, and that Bush was really being politely impressed by "a new type of scanner that could weigh groceries and read mangled and torn bar codes."

Anyway, I am old enough to remember vaguely when bar codes came in. Googling hasn't turned up a cartoon that delighted me at the time (it was in Omni, if that tells you anything): two bar codes, having reared up slightly to expose numerous pairs of creepy arthropodic limbs, are shown, with bar code 0000000002 reporting to 0000000001 that "our infiltration of the enemy's food supply network is nearly complete."

Me, I feel fine ... I think.

Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett, I kind of expected.

Michael Jackson, not so much.

Coming to an episode of South Park near you, I'd imagine.

Fortunately, his attorney is Robert Blarney

I'm always charmed by people whose names undermine their goals, like the murder defendant named Butcher.

Add one to the files. A fellow stabbed his cheerleader ex-girlfriend 16 times (then botched slashing his own throat), and his defense at the murder trial is that his acne medication made him do it.

Maybe, maybe not. But does it help that his name is John Mullarkey?

(J/k re: the attorney, one Robert Stewart.)

The "Saudi State Secrets" privilege?

Mark Kleiman has a great post up on "the continuing Saudi-American coverup of 9/11." You should read the whole thing, which begins like this:

So the Justice Department continues to support the legal position of the Saudi government that (1) the families of the 9/11 victims can't sue various Saudi parties they claim were accessories to the crime; and (2) some of the evidence, which is classified, shouldn't be made public.

Not something I remember hearing about in any detail, which is a pity. Fortunately, our vigilant media are doggedly publicizing this story chasing GOP adulterers.

One of our governors (was) missing kissing

If I were a politician, I'd feel like cutting out some of the time too, so I'm sympathetic in principle to Mark Sanford and his little Argentine jaunt.

Yglesias's post I just linked speculates whether Sanford was conducting an affair, which seems silly to me -- there must be a lot better ways to have sex in secret than flying off to Buenos Aires without telling anyone.

Josh Marshall's blog passes along some like speculation, which is all too thinly sourced to mean much.

If there *is* something fishy, I suspect it's along the lines suggested by Matt's first commenter, who says that Buenos Aires is "the gay Mecca of South America." But that's just wishful thinking on my part, I'm sure.

... Well, so much for my superficial sense of the plausible:

POLITICO Breaking News:
-----------------------------------------------------

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, apologizing to his wife, children, staff, “and anybody who lives in South Carolina,” says he’s been unfaithful to his wife and has been in a relationship with another woman in Argentina.

A *woman* in Argentina. Sigh.

Anyway, I'm now curious about Gov. Sanford's position on immigration reform.

... My friend has a better line: "No wonder he wouldn't take stimulus money -- he was already stimulated!"

... It's always a comfort to know that, however wrong one is, RedState is more wrong:

First, we need to be clear on the facts — not the media speculation:

-Sanford did tell his staff and family where he was going.
-Because he was traveling without a security detail, it was in his best interests that no one knew he was gone.
-His political enemies — Republicans at that — ginned up the media story.
-When confronted by a pestering media, things went downhill.
-Again though, at all times there was no doubt that Sanford’s staff and family knew where he was.

"Honey, I'm going to Buenos Aires to sleep with my mistress -- tell the staff where I am, but don't let the media know!" "Okay, honey, have a nice time!"

... Hm. The media's known about the mistress since December 2008 & kept quiet, despite having e-mails between Sanford and "Maria":

You have a particular grace and calm that I adore. You have a level of sophistication that so fitting with your beauty. I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night’s light - but hey, that would be going into sexual details ...

Yes. Yes, it would.

Conservatism, and the Bookshelf of the Future

By "conservatism," for example, we do not mean what is meant by the word in the contemporary United States: a blend of American patriotism, evangelical religion and free-enterprise values.

--J.G.A. Pocock, introduction to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France

... Compared to Russell Kirk's definition, for instance, Pocock's has superior plausibility.

I've also picked up Schuettinger's volume of readings in The Conservative Tradition in European Thought (thanks again, CJ Colucci), which annoying reprints snippets of Burke without being particular as to whence they came. Scheuttinger introduces the book with his own five-point definition. Divinely-inspired morality, variety of social forms, and limits of reason overlap Kirk's (1), (5), and (6); Scheuttinger also praises tradition (Kirk's # 3), as a means to "order and stability," and aiming at "the good life, not just life itself," which means placing "honor and duty" before "personal indulgence."

Desultory reading in the first half of the anthology reminds me of a heritage that conservative thought takes from Burke: it's written in opposition to revolutionary change, often quasi-imaginary revolution. "Socialism" for more recent authors plays the role of the French Jacobins. This accounts somewhat for the polemical quality I'd noted in conservative though. It also raises the issue of that thought's utility. Revolutionary socialism was indeed a credible danger in part of the 20th century, and the selection from Jewkes, for instance, has the unusual virtue of actual citations to opponents and empirical facts; but the question today seems to be what kind of capitalist state to have, not whether to replace it with socialism.

So, I hope to read further in conservative thought; but there is so much else to read! Glancing over the bookcases, I see 30 books itching to be read or, less bad, finished (indicated below with a +): 21 nonfiction,

Nabokov, Speak, Memory +

Fukuyama, End of History & the Last Man

Kennedy, Rise & Fall of the Great Powers +

Finkel, Osman's Dream +

Jenkins, Asquith

Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right +

Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

Taylor, Sources of the Self

Roberts, Salisbury

Kendall, Louis XI +

Gibbon, Rise & Fall of the Roman Empire +

Mommsen, Provinces of the Roman Empire

Fox, Pagans & Christians

Benn, China's Golden Age

Heer, The Holy Roman Empire

Churchill, Marlborough

Rounding, Catherine the Great

Freida, Catherine de Medici

Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy

Beschloss, Crisis Years

Friedman, History of American Law

and 9 novels:

The Names

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Empire of the Sun

The Master & Margarita +

Oblomov

The Solitudes (Aegypt vol. 1)

The Death of Virgil +

J R

The Easter Parade

I am taking a semiserious resolution to buy no more books until these have succumbed.

(Oh, and how did I forget Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics 1763-1848? ... Freeman on Rawls? Wolfe on The Future of Liberalism?)

Remembering the *whole* Holocaust

June 22 was significant not just for Operation Barbarossa itself, but for its commencement of the race war on the Eastern Front, which began with the Einsatzgruppen and culminated in the death camps, of which Auschwitz is the best known -- typically, the *only* one known to the guy on the street.

Timothy Snyder reminds us that the symbolization of the Holocaust by Auschwitz has a certain Western European bias to it:

The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent. After World War II, West European Jewish survivors were free to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not. In the West, memoirs of the Holocaust could (although very slowly) enter into historical writing and public consciousness.

This form of survivors' history, of which the works of Primo Levi are the most famous example, only inadequately captures the reality of the mass killing. The Diary of Anne Frank concerns assimilated European Jewish communities, the Dutch and German, whose tragedy, though horrible, was a very small part of the Holocaust. By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete. Two thirds of the Jews who would be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, the Polish and Soviet Jews, had been killed by bullets fired over death pits or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines pumped into gas chambers at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland.

Auschwitz as symbol of the Holocaust excludes those who were at the center of the historical event. The largest group of Holocaust victims--religiously Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland, or, in the slightly contemptuous German term, Ostjuden--were culturally alien from West Europeans, including West European Jews. To some degree, they continue to be marginalized from the memory of the Holocaust. The death facility Auschwitz-Birkenau was constructed on territories that are today in Poland, although at the time they were part of the German Reich. Auschwitz is thus associated with today's Poland by anyone who visits, yet relatively few Polish Jews and almost no Soviet Jews died there. The two largest groups of victims are nearly missing from the memorial symbol.

An adequate vision of the Holocaust would place Operation Reinhardt, the murder of the Polish Jews in 1942, at the center of its history. Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in the world, Warsaw the most important Jewish city. This community was exterminated at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. Some 1.5 million Jews were killed at those three facilities, about 780,863 at Treblinka alone. Only a few dozen people survived these three death facilities. Belzec, though the third most important killing site of the Holocaust, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is hardly known. Some 434,508 Jews perished at that death factory, and only two or three survived. About a million more Polish Jews were killed in other ways, some at Chelmno, Majdanek, or Auschwitz, many more shot in actions in the eastern half of the country.

All in all, as many if not more Jews were killed by bullets as by gas, but they were killed by bullets in easterly locations that are blurred in painful remembrance. The second most important part of the Holocaust is the mass murder by bullets in eastern Poland and the Soviet Union. It began with SS Einsatzgruppen shootings of Jewish men in June 1941, expanded to the murder of Jewish women and children in July, and extended to the extermination of entire Jewish communities that August and September. By the end of 1941, the Germans (along with local auxiliaries and Romanian troops) had killed a million Jews in the Soviet Union and the Baltics. That is the equivalent of the total number of Jews killed at Auschwitz during the entire war. By the end of 1942, the Germans (again, with a great deal of local assistance) had shot another 700,000 Jews, and the Soviet Jewish populations under their control had ceased to exist.

Read the whole thing, which goes on to discuss Nazi war crimes eclipsed by the Holocaust as well as Stalin's mass murders.

That torture we collaborated in? It was terrible!

Now perhaps that a new sheriff's in town -- no conscious reference to Blazing Saddles! intended -- the American Psychological Association figured this was good time to reiterate that torture is just awful.

Sullivan links to what the APA left out:

Unfortnately, the styatement, while an improvement on recent communications from APA, is still deeply flawed. Notice that they fail to mention that among the “some psychologists[that] did not abide by their ethical obligations to never engage in torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” were likely several members of their PENS [Psychological Ethics and National Security] task force that formed ethics policy for the association. Any claim that the APA leadership acted in good faith as they confronted this isssue is belied by that leadership’s actions in creating and long standing behind this deeply flawed unethical task force with multiple conflicts of interest at its core.

More details here.

June 22

Today's the anniversary of Operation Barbarossa in 1941.

Also, therefore, the anniversary of Operation Bagration in 1944, which culminated in the Red Army's pushing the Germans back to about where they'd started.

Oddly, neither anniversary came to mind last night, when I received a welcome Father's Day present of Axis & Allies. Which looks to be glorified Risk, but at least playable, compared to this for instance.

NYT on Rafsanjani

The paper of record catches up with the internet: "Former President at Center of Fight Within Political Elite."

It appears that Rafsanjani's daughter & other kin have been released; no telling what to make of their temporary detention. (1) Shot across the bow -- "we nabbed 'em & we can do it again"? (2) Left hand detains, right hand releases?

Other than saying that he's given Moussavi especial support, nothing about the relationship b/t Moussavi and Rafsanjani, which seems to be a major question. But an article worth reading nonetheless.

... Ah, this is pretty much what I'd been thinking:

In a Financial Times article, reporters Najmeh Bozorgmehr and Roula Khalaf tease out evidence that what some analysts have likened to a clerical-state bureaucracy elite are deftly manipulating the legitimate popular outrage against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime as a way of hoisting themselves (back) to power.

The FT story is subscriber-only, but this has seemed correct from early on: how can we harness this political uprising?, Rafsanjani et al. have surely been asking themselves.

Nabokov's mother's faith

Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.

-- Nabokov, Speak, Memory, ch. 2.

... Also in chapter 2, Nabokov manages to drop "palpebral" (relating to the eyelid), "photism" (luminous hallucinatory image), "quinsy" (an abscess of the tonsil), and "aquarelle" (painting in transparent watercolors). Nabokov evidently stands with Faulkner against Hemingway on the value of a reader's pausing to consult a dictionary (or Google). (I kind of knew what an aquarelle is ....)

And some people are better heard than seen

Hendrik Hertzberg, apropos of the Iran (non-)coverage, perfectly encapsulates the uselessness of our 24/7 "news channels":

As many have noted, cable TV news has turned out to be useless; it’s little more than talk radio with pictures of the hosts.

... The regime is now holding hostage Rafsanjani's daughter & other family members. We can see who *they* think is "behind things."