things to read

From the Bob the Angry Flower archives, a great little story: "Lovebot Conquers All!"

The Associated Press reports on the 40th anniversary of the "War on Drugs", first declared by Nixon in 1970.

Nixon's initial WoD budget was $100 million; today's is $15.1 billion -- in inflation-adjusted terms, 31 times Nixon's amount. Over those 40 years, we've spent over $570 billion -- that $570,000,000,000, or over $1,800 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. -- just to arrest and imprison over 37 million nonviolent drug offenders. We've also spent billions on foreign interdiction, border enforcement, and anti-drug propaganda.

And according to Justice Department estimate, the consequences of our failed drug policy -- "an overburdened justice system, a strained health care system, lost productivity, and environmental destruction" -- cost us $215 billion each and every year. Says Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron, "Current policy is not having an effect of reducing drug use, but it's costing the public a fortune."

The global trade in illegal drugs is $320 billion annually -- 1 percent of the global economy. Ten percent of Mexico's economy is built on drug proceeds, which ought to explain why the country is in, and will remain in, utter chaos.

Think Obama -- who has admitted to cannabis and cocaine use, and who at one point said he favored eliminating criminal penalties for cannabis use or possession -- will change things? Nope. He is requesting a record $15.5 billion for the drug war for 2011, and according to Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the nonprofit Drug Policy Alliance, "President Obama's newly released drug war budget is essentially the same as Bush's, with roughly twice as much money going to the criminal justice system as to treatment and prevention...despite Obama's statements on the campaign trail that drug use should be treated as a health issue, not a criminal justice issue."

Drug prohibition is an utter and complete failure, and its end cannot come swiftly enough.

Back before Calvin and Hobbes made him a household name (well, at least in households of good taste), Bill Watterson was an editorial cartoonist for Cleveland's Sun Newspapers. This page has a few of his old strips from their archives. A few chuckles, but there's no doubt that we were better served having Mr. Watterson use his cartoons to investigate imagination, love, and the mysteries of life, rather that Ohio tax policy.

I am not Jewish. I can't meaningfully comment on issues of Jewish identity. But I found this essay by Bertell Ollman on Judaism, Zionism, and internationalism very interesting (yes, the site is heavy on Marxism, but this essay has nothing to do with that sophomoric political philosophy):

From what I've said so far, it would be easy for some to dismiss me as a self-hating Jew, but that would be a mistake. If anything, I am a self-loving Jew, but the Jew I love in me is the Diaspora Jew, the Jew that was blessed for 2,000 years by having no country to call his/her own. That this was accompanied by many cruel disadvantages is well known, but it had one crowning advantage that towered over all the rest. By being an outsider in every country and belonging to the family of outsiders throughout the world, Jews on the whole suffered less from the small-minded prejudices that disfigure all forms of nationalism. If you couldn't be a full and equal citizen of the country in which you lived, you could be a citizen of the world, or at least begin to think of yourself as such even before the concepts existed that would help to clarify what this meant. I'm not saying that this is how most Diaspora Jews actually thought, but some did—Spinoza, Marx, Freud, and Einstein being among the best known—and the opportunity as well as the inclination for others to do so came from the very rejection they all experienced in the countries in which they lived. Even the widespread treatment of Jews as somehow less than human provoked a universalist response. As children of the same God, Jews argued, when this was permitted or just quietly reflected when it wasn't, that they shared a common humanity with their oppressors and that this should take precedence over everything else. The anti-Semitic charge, then, that Jews have always and everywhere been cosmopolitan and insufficiently patriotic had at least this much truth to it.

...

As far as I'm concerned, the comedian, Lenny Bruce, provided the only good answer to this question when he said, "Dig, I'm Jewish. Count Basie's Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor is goyish... Marine Corps—heavy goyish... If you live in New York or any other big city, you're Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you're going to be goyish even if you're Jewish... Kool-Aid is goyish. Evaporated milk is goyish even if Jews invented it... Pumpernickel is Jewish and, as you know, white bread is very goyish.... Negroes are all Jews... Irishmen who have rejected their religion are Jewish... Baton twirling is very goyish".

Very interesting interview in the City Paper (Baltimore) with University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole, whose scholastic work has focused on Islam, on the situation in Afghanistan:

CP: One version of events of 9/11 is that it was part of bin Laden's strategy to lure us into Afghanistan and bleed us the way the Soviets were bled . . .

JC: Bin Laden said this explicitly in 1996.

CP: So why do you think we fell for the trap?

JC: It's just so tempting for a great power to have an area to go into. Central Asia is rich in resources--natural gas, and Kazakhstan has petroleum and gold--and there was this opportunity to assert U.S. interests in Central Asia and push Russia back. There are all kinds of reasons for which bin Laden was making us a very attractive offer. He was offering us a very large, delicious piece of cheese. Of course, it turns out that there was a very large mousetrap attached to the cheese.

CP: What about the terrorism component of this--the fear that the Taliban will shield al-Qaida and provide a safe haven that will give them a staging area to plan another attack on the United States?

JC: First of all, that premise is flawed. There is virtually no al-Qaida in Afghanistan. As we speak, something on the order of 10 to 15 percent of Afghanistan is more or less controlled by Taliban. And yet, there is virtually no al-Qaida in Afghanistan. So if the idea that Taliban equals safe harbor for al-Qaida isn't true in the present, why would it be true in the future?

In fact, why is it we don't think the Taliban can learn? They're pretty smart people. They took on the Soviets and defeated them. Surely they're dismayed at what happened to them after al-Qaida attacked the United States. I imagine a lot of them would slit al-Qaida's throats if they came anywhere near, out of anger at them for ruining the good deal the Taliban had in Afghanistan.

I've been re-reading Huxley's Brave New World. There's an exchange near the end, between Mustapha Mond, World Controller of the insane civilization that encompasses most of the world, and "the Savage", product of the lunatic barbarism outside, that rather sums it up:

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

I think I shall have to spend some time rereading Huxley's Island next to balance things out. Written near the end of Huxley's life, Island is in many ways his alternative to Brave New World, his portrayal of a thoroughly sane society.

You've probably not heard of this book; its positive outlook on the use of psychedelics, and its positive portrayal of free sexuality, means that you're unlikely to see it added to any high school reading lists. The philosophy found on Pala is a blend of secular humanism and Mahayana Buddhism; its key text, quoted throughout the novel, is Notes on What's What, and What It Might be Reasonable to do about What's What.

Me as I think I am and me as I am in fact---sorrow, in other words, and the ending of sorrow. One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. it is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world entirely indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two-thirds of sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.

...

Dualism. . . Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.

"I" affirms a separate and abiding me-substance; "am" denies the fact that all existence is relationship and change. "I am." Two tiny words, but what an enormity of untruth! The religiously-minded dualist calls homemade spirits from the vasty deep; the nondualist calls the vasty deep into his spirit or, to be more accurate, he finds that the vasty deep is already there.

From The New Yorker, this story of how Texas executed a man for homicide by arson, on no reliable evidence, will chill you:

As Hurst looked through the case records, a statement by Manuel Vasquez, the state deputy fire marshal, jumped out at him. Vasquez had testified that, of the roughly twelve hundred to fifteen hundred fires he had investigated, “most all of them” were arson. This was an oddly high estimate; the Texas State Fire Marshals Office typically found arson in only fifty per cent of its cases.

Hurst was also struck by Vasquez’s claim that the Willingham blaze had “burned fast and hot” because of a liquid accelerant. The notion that a flammable or combustible liquid caused flames to reach higher temperatures had been repeated in court by arson sleuths for decades. Yet the theory was nonsense: experiments have proved that wood and gasoline-fuelled fires burn at essentially the same temperature.

Bathrobe's "Chinese, Japanese & Vietnamese Language Site" contemplates how the sentence "On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur", from Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince), has been rendered in English (and Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese) by various translators:

All five English translations are a little different as each translator has made certain choices. The five English versions are:

Name of translator	English version
Woods 1943	It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.
Cuffe 1995	You can only see things clearly with your heart.
Testot-Ferry 1995	It is only with one's heart that one can see clearly.
Wakeman 1997	We only really see with our hearts.
Howard 2000	One sees clearly only with the heart.

Of the five versions, Howard's is virtually a word-for-word translation from the French. The other translations vary in certain well-defined ways. Here we make a point-by-point comparison with the French and see where the translations vary...

I know jack about French (the only class in which I ever received a failing grade!), but the issues involved here are fascinating to the poet. These versions all have the same literal meaning, so what is difference? The big one is, I think, rhythm. Woods and Testot-Ferry's versions have it: "It is ONLY with the HEART that ONE can see RIGHTly." "It is ONLY with one's HEART that ONE can see CLEARLYly." You can imagine singing these over four measures of 4/4, a line for a blues or rock song.

Try it: think of, say: "You Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog":

You Ain't NOTHIN' But a HOUND Dog / ROCKIN' all the TIME

It is ONLY with the HEART / that ONE can see RIGHTly.

or even, for a more exact parallel, move the break:

It is ONLY with the HEART that / ONE can see RIGHTly.

The other translations just don't have that driving beat.

Good news everyone! Comedy Central and 20th Century Fox TV have made an agreement to 26 new episodes of Futurama, Matt Groening's animated SF comedy series. Look for it as early as mid-2010.

(We first brought you rumors of a return of Futurama back in 2005, which turned out to be a set of direct-to-DVD features. But now we're looking at a return to the standard episodic format. Woo-hoo!

He's a doctor. He's a ninja. He's Dr. McNinja..

I'm reading my way through the archives of this fine web comic and enjoying it immensely. The only thing I can compare it to is The Tick -- if you enjoyed that comic (not the cartoon, which was quite good but in a different vein) I think you'll like this.