“CIA interrogators used the waterboarding technique on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the admitted planner of the September 11 attacks, 183 times.”
Oh, really? How about 2,974 times?
Baby Watchers: Have You Seen This Mysterious Phenomenon?
My 33-year-old nephew Matt, a new father, described watching his baby daughter’s face “scroll through” the full repertoire of human expressions and emotions — in her sleep. And only in her sleep.
I’ve seen this too! But thirty years ago, when my niece, Matt’s cousin Paloma, was a baby in the first few months of life. Awake, she had about four basic, dazed expressions; she looked the way you might expect a newly minted person to look — foggy, vague, not yet fully here. But when she slept, her face knew the Greek comedy and tragedy masks, and so much more: hilarity, amusement, disgust, despondency, sly cynicism, wistfulness, ennui — sophisticated, seasoned expressions that you’d think an old Frenchwoman would have had to earn by six or seven decades of hard living. Non, je ne regrette rien!
What is this?? What stage of sleep does it correspond to, what’s going on in the brain? Is the baby dreaming, or in deeper, dreamless sleep? How would a neurologist or a child-development expert explain it? I’m not sure they could. It’s been shown that emotions are inseparable from their physical expression: to make the face is to have the feeling, and vice versa. So we’re hardwired for emotions we have yet to grow into? Expressions we regard as exquisitely cultural and social, like full-blown language, are actually biological? What?
A baby that can manage at most a wail, an unfocused stare, and a goofy, convulsive smile when awake appears, in its sleep, to rehearse the dramas of a lifetime. I wonder if this was one of the things that inclined people to believe in reincarnation. A sleeping baby lets its mask slip, reveals its old soul, remembers its long, rich lives and tumultuous experience.
Have you seen this?
Songs for the Times
I wanted to post up “Depression Blues” by Gatemouth Brown, but I couldn’t find it anywhere online. Never mind, this one will do:
Look at all the Germans just standing around. How can you stand around when Gate plays? Europeans may respect the blues, but they don’t effing get it.
-Miles Lascaux
Dylan Covers
While driving today I heard Bob Dylan’s song, “Lay Lady Lay.”It is hard to think of anyone with as much talent for writing music and as little a gift of vocal range. It got me thinking of how many recording artists have done covers of Dylan songs. Here is one of my favorites:
Stevie Wonder does a version of the same song that makes my hair stand on end. Do any of you have particular favorites?
Ripple Effect
At The Glittering Eye, Dave asks a friend in the construction business how it’s going (the exact same thing I do to feel the pulse of the body economic) and hears a story of concussion waves of work loss pulsing outward from banks’ hunkered-down refusal to issue a perfectly routine performance bond.
It might be true that this is just a temporary situation and, once the shock has worn off, things will get back to normal, the appetite of banks and insurance companies for risk will increase, and the business activity that was supported by the willingness to take risks would come back again.
Or it may be true that we’ve been living with an unrealistically low perception of risk for some time that’s supported a similarly unrealistic level of economic activity. If that’s true, this may be the new normal and the coming times could be very hard, indeed.
Riddle Me This
Everything I’ve read about caps on executive pay suggests that such measures are at best a bad joke. Not only do such measures impinge on the freedom of the marketplace*, but they are also impossible to enforce. Salaries can become bonuses, bonuses can become salaries. Executives can be compensated $1 on payroll, along with $9,999,999 in “consulting services.” And so forth.
So given this theory: why is the management of Goldman Sachs claiming that they are going to pay off their TARP financing as soon as possible? As this fellow points out, they have other obligations that constitute a greater burden on shareholder returns. Surely the executive compensation limits imposed by this financing are no burden for them to work around, right**?
* Presuming, of course, that the pay of finance industry CEO’s is presently determined by an actual market, rather than through cronyism laden with conflicts of interest.
** Never minding, of course, that as responsible agents under effective corporate governance they would NEVER put their own needs above those of their principals.
~ Maxwell
Slap My Assets
Wednesday, the Obama administration proposed a “choke the money” strategy to solve complex problems. Obama slapped financial sanctions on three of the most vicious Mexican drug cartels and threatened to prosecute Americans who do business with them. The same day, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the administration will try to seize the financial assets of Somali pirates.
Fighting drug lords and pirates by pinpoint surgical strikes on their cash streams sounds like a bad joke in a country where we can’t even discover what our own financiers are doing with our own trillions until it’s too late.
The quickest and cheapest way to undercut the cartels, of course, would be to legalize marijuana, which, according to the White House drug czar, accounts for 62 percent of the Mexican drug cartels’ profits. But Obama doesn’t seem to be moving in that direction.
-Miles Lascaux
Pirate Lessons
The media inhabit an eternal and simplified present tense, and when they try to set up a historical backdrop they usually get it backward or upside down.
For instance, AP and other wire service news accounts of the recent dust-up between the U.S. Navy and Somali brigands (I pitched the headline “Yankees 3, Pirates 0” but was overruled) called it “the first such attack on American sailors in around 200 years.”
It isn’t. Evidently the AP was aware of the Barbary Coast pirates but not later cases. Especially the naval war against Sumatra pirates in the 1830s. Which is a shame because the parallels there are a lot more informative than the ones that can be abstracted from the Barbary Coast war.
A good, brief account of the fight is in Max Boot’s “Savage Wars of Peace.” If I can do the link right, the relevant passages are here,from the bottom of page 46 to the end of page 49.
It involves a lawless Muslim land on the Indian Ocean. It involves U.S. merchant ships seeking precious cargoes (spices) and carrying on dubious trade (opium). And it shows the influence of politics on military decisions and the consequences of disproportionate responses and collateral damage.
It also shows that nothing — hard power or soft power — worked for long. What worked was when the Dutch took over Sumatra and banned all non-Dutch ships from the spice trade there. Then and only then did the pirates stop attacking American ships — because there weren’t any.
Unfortunately for modern sensibilities, when you look at history, the best antidote to piracy is colonialism/imperialism. That’s how the British quelled the nasty gang of cutthroats preying on ships from along the southern Persian Gulf in the early 1800s — they cowed them into submission out of fear of what other colonial powers might do to them, and eventually made them a protectorate of the Empire. The Arab pirates learned to behave, then their descendants discovered the virtues of oil. Now they’re our good friends in Dubai. Who recently aspired to run our ports.
-Miles Lascaux
“You Are a Dog!”
What many Shiite Afghan men call a woman with the courage to insist on her human freedom. Sadly, a good number of women agree.
A Grammarian’s Cri de Coeur
The nation’s collective groan over yesterday’s tax deadline, along with the protests that attended it, may have overwhelmed the more cultish significance of today’s date – the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. But if this little book’s birthday does fail to make the news tonight, there’s at least one vital constituency who won’t be disappointed. In a memorable rant, grammarian Geoffrey K. Pullum dishes the dirt:
The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.
Pullum’s article is far more than your typical ad libris, because he seeks to restore some respect for a venerable institution, one much damaged by Strunk and White’s best-seller – the passive voice:
We are told that the active clause “I will always remember my first trip to Boston” sounds much better than the corresponding passive “My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me.” It sure does. But that’s because a passive is always a stylistic train wreck when the subject refers to something newer and less established in the discourse than the agent (the noun phrase that follows “by”).
For me to report that I paid my bill by saying “The bill was paid by me,” with no stress on “me,” would sound inane. (I’m the utterer, and the utterer always counts as familiar and well established in the discourse.) But that is no argument against passives generally. “The bill was paid by an anonymous benefactor” sounds perfectly natural. Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invented example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.
Moreover, he damningly points out that The Elements of Style demonstrates a miserable understanding of the passive voice, offering four examples of its use of which three are actually in the active voice. They also fail spectacularly to take their own advice:
“Put statements in positive form,” they stipulate, in a section that seeks to prevent “not” from being used as “a means of evasion.”
“Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs,” they insist. (The motivation of this mysterious decree remains unclear to me.)
And then, in the very next sentence, comes a negative passive clause containing three adjectives: “The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.”
That’s actually not just three strikes, it’s four, because in addition to contravening “positive form” and “active voice” and “nouns and verbs,” it has a relative clause (“that can pull”) removed from what it belongs with (the adjective), which violates another edict: “Keep related words together.”
The most striking aspect of Pullum’s critique is the extent to which its echoes reverberate into the present day. As he points out, Microsoft Word’s grammar checker automatically underlines every passive construction in a document, even if it is gramatically correct. But beyond that, Strunk and White’s “overopinionated and underinformed little book” eerily fortells the bloviating world of blogs, text messages, and Twitter, where factual (and needless to say, grammatical) accuracy frequently matters less than the frequency and forcefulness of assertion.
– Maxwell James
Ambiance 