Can you discern what trait these seven have in common (besides being badasses)?

Think you've got it? Click here for the answer.

One thing that struck me as I was reading Michiko Kakutami's simplistic review of two new Leni Riefenstahl biographies in the New York Times and, to a lesser extent, Judith Thurman's long review in the New Yorker (the new site is better guys, but it's still not quite there): Have we lost the ability to think conjunctively?

Riefenstahl was a genius and a propagandist, an independent artist who also had male mentors, a canny opportunist who really fell for Nazi ideology. And she lied, lied, lied her way into old age.

Is this really so difficult to understand?

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for, big, tough ladies molding history with their strong, womanly hands, but every time I hear those old '70s hosannas to "dangerous women" I don't think of Emma Goldman, I think of Squeaky from the Mason Family and Ilse Koch and about how Eleanor Roosevelt somehow managed to be a historical bad-ass while maintaining the ability to say "please" and "thank you" and about how the whole dangerous-woman-are-great! spin is patronizing anyway—and it is for those deeply feminist reasons that whenever I hear this:

Well-behaved women rarely make history.
—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich^*

I want to say this:

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
—Oscar Wilde

But that's not the point. The point is: Most Dangerous Women, a children's play, will happen this Wednesday at MOHAI, featuring the 7th and 8th graders of Seattle Girls' School playing historical figures like Aung San Suu Kyi. Which sounds nice. And not at all dangerous. And way too late to have made it into this week's theater calendar.

(^* Did you know that the utterer of this bumper-sticker wisdom is Mormon? And teaches at Harvard? And that the trustees of Brigham Young University smacked down a BYU proposal to have her speak at the BYU Women's Conference?)

A tribute to America's father, George Washington.

I heard that motherfucker had like 30 goddamn dicks...

(Hat tip, even though I hate that phrase, to Matt Garman.)

The Hollywood actress Thandie Newton is half British and half Zimbabwean.
Newton is often said to be the daughter of a "Shona princess." Well and good. But what one wants to know, however, is exactly Thandie's tribe. What tribe is she actually from. To say she is a Shona is not to say what tribe she is from, but that she is from a collection of tribes that share a common language. Shona is a nation, rather than a tribe. (In the middle of the 19th century, the Ndebeles, descendants of the mighty Zulus in South Africa, called the tribes they met and oppressed in the area that is now Zimbabwe, "the shonas," which meant something like "the foreigners"--a similar history is behind the name Wales.) My tribe, for example, is a Shona-speaking group called the Manicas, whose homeland is the mountain area near the border between Zimbabwe and Mozambique. If Thandie turns out to be a Manica (which is very unlikely--her name comes from Ndebele and not Shona) that would be a great thing for me to know because, according to my father, a man with the memory of an elephant and manners of an old-world gentleman, my grandmother, a heavy drinker who died last year at a very old age, was the daughter of a princess. Yes, it is a stretch, but allow me to dream, dream, dream.

I promised myself I'd stay away from Slog on my vacation, but eat your hearts out true patriots:

So, I'm in Boston, and over the weekend I saw the famous battlegrounds at Lexington and Concord where the Revolutionary war started. The "Shot heard around the world" ...

And I also went to the site of the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party. The Boston Tea Party museum was actually closed for renovations, but me and my revolutionary friends ducked under the "Do Not Enter" barricade, walked out to the site over the harbor and dumped some Starbucks coffee down into the water.

But here's the thing: It turns out that today, March 5, 2007 is the 237th anniversary of the Boston Massacre and—there's a reenactment tonight! Who knew?

I am psyched. Heading back down now.

I finally got around to exploring the ideas and moves of the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, and in his most famous work, In The World as Will and Representation, discovered this passage, which is supposed to present the ultimate example of strife in the world, the utter cruelty of existence, the deadly force of the will to live:

Many insects lay their eggs on the skin and even in the body of the larvae of other insects, whose slow destruction is the first work of the newly hatched brood. The young hydra, which grows like a bud out of the old one, and afterwards separates itself from it, fights while it is still joined to the old one for the prey that offers itself, so that the one snatches it out of the mouth of the other. But the bulldog-ant of Australia affords us the most extraordinary example of this kind; for if it is cut in two, a battle begins between the head and the tail. The head seizes the tail in its teeth, and the tail defends itself bravely by stinging the head: the battle may last for half an hour, until they die or are dragged away by other ants. This contest takes place every time the experiment is tried.

This is the mean insect Schopenhauer had in mind:
I have no idea if it's true that the bulldog ant, if separated, fights with itself. But that doesn't matter. What's important is the "extraordinary example" itself, the fact that a bulldog ant's self-battle gets to the essence of Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy. (The talking triangle is Spinoza's "extraordinary example," and Hume's is the robot in a forest clearing.)

Below are the videos that are causing such a stir in the comments. But first, here's Wonkette's take on them. And here's the BBC's explanation for how it could have reported the collapse of WTC 7 about 20 minutes before it happened (along with an explanation for how it then lost all original recordings of that day's broadcast).

Plus, here's the BBC's attempt to look at the truth of various 9-11 conspiracy theories. And here's the Popular Mechanics attempt to do the same.

And now, here are the videos. Go, uh, crazy...

When Naomi learned that the wife of her dead son, Ruth, might have the eye of a man with some standing in Bethleham, Boaz, she made this strong and clear recommendation:

Wash thyself therefore, and anoint thee, and put thy raiment upon thee, and get thee down to the floor: but make not thyself known unto the man, until he shall have done eating and drinking. And it shall be, when he lieth down, that thou shalt mark the place where he shall lie, and thou shalt go in, and uncover his feet, and lay thee down; and he will tell thee what thou shalt do.

The seduction worked. But that is not the point of this brief note/post. What is interesting here, and is related to James Cameron's recent claim that he not only found the tomb of Jesus but has proof that his wife was Mary Magdalene and they had a son named Judah, is the "uncovering his feet."

Now with biblical scholarship, the close examination of archaeological sites is often not as rewarding as the close examination of existing texts. For example, in the Old Testament, washing a man's feet is a symbol for sex--"uncover his feet, and lay thee down." Now let's go to the New Testament, to John 12:

Then Mary took a pound of very costly oil of spikenard, anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped His feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil.

Well, if this feet washing happened outside of the context/co-text of the Old Testament, the modern Christian could pretend with some peace that it is nothing more than an act of spiritual love, but that peace is not possible, Matthew's enthusiam made it impossible to imagine the Old and New as separate. What the business of washing feet meant to Ruth is what it must mean to Mary. No need to dig up old tombs to see what's really going on.

This paragraph, from this story about a new-fangled way to drop off unwanted babies, is awesome:

Foundling wheels were institutionalized by a papal bull issued in the 12th century by Pope Innocent III, who was shocked by the number of dead babies found in the Tiber. By 1204, there was a wheel in operation at the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome, next to the Vatican. A 14th-century home for abandoned children in Naples, annexed to a church, is now a museum about foundlings. Many common family names in Italy can be traced to a foundling past: Esposito (because children were sometimes “exposed” on the steps of a convent), Proietti (from the Latin proicio, to throw away) or Innocenti (as in innocent of their father’s sin).

I really wish my last name meant "trash." (But did Innocenti really mean "innocent of their father's sin"? Were all the little ladies miraculous virgins?)

1) One of the 55 British survivors to the Battle of Isandlwana, which happened on 22-1-1879 in KwaZulu-Natal Province of South Africa (20,000 Zulu troops overwhelmed and killed 1,400 British troops), wrote: "[The Zulus] cut everyone up and took his heart out and put it on his breast, and then put his hand right hand [into the hole left by the heart]."

2) After Prince Albert's death on 14-12-1861, Queen Victoria, who deeply loved her husband and outlived him by 40 years, often went to bed holding a plaster cast of Albert's hand.

3) On 7-12-43 BC, the philosopher, speaker, and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero was finally caught and cut down to death by one of his hunters, Herennius. Mark Antony, who ordered the murder and wanted to send a clear message to his other enemies in Rome, had Cicero's head and hands nailed to the speaker's podium in the Senate. (Note: One version of this incident states that Antony had Cicero's tongue and hands nailed to the podium. And another version states that Cicero's head and only his right hand were nailed to the podium. And yet another version claims that Antony's wife, Fulvia, stuck a hairpin into Cicero's tongue.)

While roaming the history of the 19th century, the most important century, the area of time that separates one period of human reality (that leads up to us) from the other (that leads away from us--the separation, the break being with nature and the universalization of industrial discipline: paying close attention to clocks, and the regulation of eating and sexual habits, and so on), I came across this fascinating piece of information. Two years after Britian's Royal Mail decided to use railways to transport mail, in 1848, the institution decided to do the most amazing thing: to make a person who sent a letter pay for it, instead of the other way around.

Until that point, 1850, the receiver paid for the letter. It was a letter meant for them, the receiver, and so he/she must pay for it. What I have not yet established, and what challenges my mind at this moment, is what does this switch mean? What has happened in the larger transition from agricultural to industrial society, from rural to urban modes, for this new understanding to happen? For the sender of a message to bare the cost of its delivery? Clearly, there was a reason for the receiver to pay for the letter: it's his/her letter, it has his/her name on it, it is addressed to them, they own this letter. But why make the sender pay when it is not their letter? The sender did not write the letter to the sender; his/her name is not on it. What does this switch say about authorship? What does it say about the reader? The sender is one type of individual; the receiver is another type. Now what has happened in this new society--the society that will eventually become the world society--for it to see the sender, this particular type of individual, as the one who must pay for the service of mail delivery?

Lee Harvey Oswald Lives.

And because Schmader likes it when I say this: Lives rhymes with knives.

Lee Harvey Oswald Lives is, of course, the name of my unfinished novel.

I don't think highly of the Founding Fathers but this image even hurts my hard Marxist eyes:

George Washington/George Bush. Important American President/Important American President. On the occasion of the image, Bush went as far as to compare the the American War of Independence (Washington) with the present War on Terrorism (Bush).

President Bush honored the 275th birthday of the nation's first president on Monday, likening George Washington's long struggle that gave birth to a nation to the war on global terrorism.

"Today, we're fighting a new war to defend our liberty and our people and our way of life," said Bush, standing in front of Washington's home and above a mostly frozen Potomac River.

Frozen indeed.
Bush then turned to Hegel for some "march of freedom [God] across the world":

"And as we work to advance the cause of freedom around the world, we remember that the father of our country believed that the freedoms we secured in our revolution were not meant for Americans alone."

Bush then visited the tomb of the man, Washington, whose founding presidential spirit is the spirit that he wants you to see and believe is in him--this imagined pure continuum from tomb to Bush happens in what Benjamin called "homogeneous, empty time":

He and first lady Laura Bush helped lay a wreath at Washington's tomb, then the president gave a speech from a platform on the bowling green lawn of the estate.

(CATHARSIS) The Stranger's annual feel-good smash returns for the 10th and final time. Bring mementos of love gone wrong--wedding rings, ancient mix tapes, painful mash notes--and Dan Savage, our very own love and vengeance expert (mostly vengeance), will destroy them live onstage before a packed house. Maybe he'll use a sledgehammer. Maybe he'll use a blender. Maybe he'll even fire up the blowtorch. Regardless, it will be hilarious and healing. (Neumo's, 925 E Pike St, 709-9442. 8 pm, free, 21+.) BRADLEY STEINBACHER

Xenophanes, my favorite of the Pre-Socratic philosophers (the sophist Gorgias is second on that list), is famous for mainly one thing: he attacked the anthropomorphization of Greek gods with the reasoning that "if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,/And could sculpture like men, then the horses would draw their gods/Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape." The habit of imaging God as a human being is as common today as it was 2400 years ago, during Xenophanes's age of the gods. We will grant that. But here is something truly strange to consider. About 400 years ago, the greatest philosopher of the 17th century, Spinoza, wrote this in a letter to a man, Hugo Boxel, who was not happy with the philosopher's concept of an impersonal and asexual God that lived not in the sky, looking down on us with human eyes as He sat on a seat that fit his human behind, but in the world, through all of life, as the "universal individual":

Further, when you say that if I deny, that the operations of seeing, hearing, attending, wishing, &c., can be ascribed to God, or that they exist in Him in any eminent fashion, you do not know what sort of God mine is; I suspect that you believe there is no greater perfection than such as can be explained by the aforesaid attributes. I am not astonished; for I believe that, if a triangle could speak, it would say, in like manner, that God is eminently triangular.

What is strange about this letter, and tells us so much about the time in which Spinoza lived, and as a consequence the mind of Spinoza and his whole philosophical project, is that it imagines a talking triangle. This is the actual change that has occurred between his time and that of Xenophanes. Spinoza believes that a human life is nothing more than (and can be understood as) a geometric shape. And he says as much in his geometrically shaped masterpiece The Ethics. Such faith in geometry, which, admittedly, can be traced back to the Pythagoreans and also Platonic forms, defines the "age of reason," a period of time that could dream up talking triangles.

But what of this passage from Nietzsche's wonderful essay "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense":

[H]ow aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world.

The remains of a couple were recently found in the northern Italian city of Mantua:

The archeologists believe the two died young and were buried in this loving way for reasons that will never be known. To some archeologist and reporters the discovery of the "hugging" skeletons is touching and sweet. "...I've never been so moved because this is the discovery of something special," says one archeologist. But there is nothing "special" in this or any other grave. As there was sorrow on the day the two were buried, there should be sorrow even on the day they were exhumed by scientists. Death is eternally the negative, the final event that destroys all joy, the blackness that snuffs out even children, the nothingness above which each living thing is held by only a string of existence, the void from which there is no return, no hope, no signs of life, salvation, regeneration. Between the daylight of the now there are twin nights. From one we are departing; to the other we are going. 5000 years and you are still dead. 5000 more years and you will still be dead. These lovers are nothing and nothing else.

I'm not a football fan, so I missed the whole first-black-coach-to-win-the-Super Bowl buzz.

All I can say is, what is up with the NFL?

The first black coach to win an NBA title (and at $125,000, definitely one of the top-paid people in the NBA at the time) was Bill Russell in the 1967/68 season. That's nearly 40 years ago. 40 years ago!

Oh, and Russell wasn't a supa Christian. He'd taken to calling himself Felton X, and was actually a bit of a black power freak.

Today, Russell lives on Mercer Island, I think.

I found this cool web site.

Oh, and this one too.

This man is Pierre Bayle:

He lived a long time ago (November 18, 1647 – December 28, 1706), he was French, a Calvinist, and author of Historical and Critical Dictionary, a book that was enormously popular in his day. Bayle is now forgotten. Little thought is spent on his turbulent life and the great influence his writings had on the enlightenment. Why dig up this forgotten thinker now? For the eyes and edification of forgetful American Christians.

Central to all of Bayle's brilliant ideas and opinions was his position that reason could not explain God. Human reason was too limited to comprehend Him and so faith in Him could not be reasoned. Like God's ways, faith had to be mysterious. Bayle's famous illustration of this point was made in the Historical and Critical Dictionary. It concerned King David, who, Bayle explained, was a criminal, a murderer, a rapist, an adulterer, and adored by God. Evil King David was chosen, elected, loved by the King of Kings. To human reason, this is clearly unacceptable; it wants to judge King David as a criminal and have him punished. And so, Bayle concluded, human reason is not compatible with His mysterious reasoning. If this were not the case, then God would have punished the bad man and rewarded a good one. Because humans have no idea what God is really up to, Bayle advocated humility and tolerance in all areas of life. To be an intolerant Christian, to force your beliefs on other people, was to act as if you knew God's mind, grace, and plan. But the only thing you, as a Christian, as a human, could know about God is simply and finally your belief in God. That's it. To reason Him to yourself and to others is to be arrogant, overconfident.

Bayle died in tolerant Rotterdam.

Here it is at last: Mix Vico's theory of historical stages with Plotinus' concept of the "One" (and not Spinoza's absolute) with Aristotle's "entelecheia" and what you get is the "World Mind" that appears in Philosophy of History. Four is the number of years it took me to realize that solution, and four is now the number of years it will take me to determine why I wanted that solution in the first place.

Malcolm X was always pretty good at being macho. Here he is circa 1963 putting down the wimpy civil rights movement:

An old woman can sit. An old man can sit. A chump can sit. A coward can sit. Anything can sit. Well, you and I been sitting long enough. And it's time today for us to start doing some standing. And some fighting to back that up.

Of course, in his bombast, Malcolm X missed the significance of the sit-in movement. Namely: You bet anyone can sit. That is precisely why the civil rights movement—built on sitting down at lunch counters and on buses—was so powerful.

I'm sick of the conventional "contrarian" wisdom—among hipsters, anyway— that casts the early civil rights movement as soft, while the post-civil rights/Black Power crowd was supposedly the real deal.

You see: You didn't have to be Muhammad Ali to bring the fight. You could, in fact, be a small woman. In particular, you could be Diane Nash—one of my all-time heroes from American history.

And so, I was thrilled to see this article about Nash and her former civil rights comrades ( James Lawson, John Lewis and Jim Zwerg) in today's NYT.

Zwerg, Lawson, and particularly Lewis and Nash (both college students at the time), were superstars of the Freedom Rides during the summer of 1961, when groups of integrated activists rode from bus station to bus station in the South to compel the federal government to enforce the 1946 and 1960 US Supreme Court rulings which had supposedly desegregated interstate bus travel. (Speaking of macho: Lewis and Zwerg, who was white, withstood bloodthirsty mob beatings when their group arrived in Montgomery, Alabama.)

This past weekend, taking along busloads of students, Nash and her aging colleagues retraced the route of the 1961 Freedom Rides as a rolling history lesson.

Nash, no chump nor coward, is also noteworthy for being one of few women who emerged as a leader in the civil rights movement.

That's Nash second from the right (wearing glasses), sitting down at a lunch counter.

If any of this piques your interest, here's a great book about the Freedom Rides.

One of my favorite anecdotes about World War II involves condoms and cooperation between nations. I think my father first told it to me. The story goes like this:

During the war, Russian soldiers would place condoms over the barrels of their rifles to prevent water damage. As the war grinded on, condoms were in short supply, leading Stalin to send a request to president Roosevelt for a shipment of "standard small U.S. condoms."

Roosevelt agreed, with one request of his own: The condoms were to be extra large in size and stamped with the words "Standard U.S. Size."

At least, that’s how I had heard the story. But after recounting the anecdote to a friend the other night, who found it all very dubious, I decided to do a little investigating. Wikipedia told me nothing, but some time with Google led me to a comment posted here by one “markm”:

In WWII, the Russians complained about the condoms sent with the Lend-Lease supplies. Stalin claimed they were too small. Finally, Roosevelt had extra-extra large special ordered--and shipped in packages marked "Texas Medium."

This is similar to the story I’d been told, save for the "Texas Medium" bit. But after a bit more sleuthing I found this comment on a site called Creative Cow:

Ran across this in a "Straight Dope" article. Don't know if it is true but it's the Cold War in a nutshell:

Seems that in the latter part of the cold war Russia was allowed some limited trade with the U.S. Some nameless institution ordered 50,000 condoms from an American plant (located in Texas, I like to think).

The order specified that the condoms were to be 11 inches long. The Americans scratched their heads, called the Russians to verify the measurement, and were rudely told that the order was correct, all of the condoms should be 11 inches long.

So the Americans proceeded to fill the order and shipped the Russians 50,000 11-inch condoms--in boxes labeled "medium." Heh heh heh.

Again, similar, only this time the tale has been transferred to the Cold War. And seeing as how I couldn’t find one reputable source to verify my story, I was beginning to think it was all horsehockey—a feeling backed up when I came across this:

There is a story--probably untrue--that during the war, one soldier learned how to keep his gun's firing mechanism warm in freezing weather by stretching a condom over it. News got back to Churchill, and it was suggested that Durex be approached to manufacture 18 inch condoms. Churchill is said to have agreed, on two conditions--that the condom be labeled 'Made in Britain,’ and 'Medium.'

And then this, from the site Anecdotage:

During World War II, British soldiers discovered that placing a condom over a gun's barrel would keep the weapon dry and prevent it from corroding (near the sea) or icing up (in winter conditions).

No such condoms existed for larger weapons, however, and it was suggested to Winston Churchill one day that 18" long specimens be made to cover larger artillery pieces. Churchill agreed, with two stipulations. First, the larger condoms would clearly be labeled "For Use By British Servicemen." And second? The condoms would also be labeled "Small."

So it appears my favorite WWII anecdote is complete trash—and if something close to it did happen it probably belongs to Churchill, not Roosevelt. Which is too bad, because the one I thought was true was funnier.

Still, Googling "Franklin Roosevelt + condoms" did turn up this bit of history:

One of the most intense policy debates during the war was whether to provide American troops with condoms. The secretary of the navy, Josephus Daniels, rejected the idea, fearing that it would corrupt the troops' morals…While Daniels was on vacation, however, his undersecretary, Franklin Roosevelt, authorized prophylactics for sailors.

So there you go.

Just seven days away from Black History Month! Time to start thinking about the things blacks have done in history. Today we begin with an incident that happened on June, 25, 1807, at around 6 am.

In a room that's small and drafty, a black man wakes up and sees the sun rising in the sky. He cant remember his dream. A piece of something he ate the night before is caught between the teeth near the back of his mouth. He yawns and goes back to sleep for another 10 minutes.

Man. I was perusing the Slog, killing time earlier today as I was waiting for Governor Gregoire to emerge from her 2 hour and 40 minute Viaduct meeting, and Bradley's Muhammad Ali post came up... and before I could actually focus on what it said, my throat caught, and I thought...

And man, I almost started bawling right there in the Governor's office.

Here—from memory (so I may have it wrong)—is that Amiri Baraka poem I referenced yesterday. The one I was lucky enough to come across while doing detention after school in my high school library:

Note to America
You cannot hurt Muhammad Ali
and stay alive.

In a comment to my my earlier post about Amiri Baraka and MLK Day, a commenter writes:

what a wasted opportunity...the stranger's readers are young and could use some updating on the civil rights movement. and what do you do on MLK day? make some kind of cynical, obscure statement about a white hipster.

wow, you all are so cool aren't you?

And let me set you straight:

For something that happened 40-plus years ago, the Civil Rights movement gets an odd amount of ink on Slog and in our paper. From me.

In honor of Stokely Carmichael.

In honor of SNCC.

In honor of John Lewis.

More on John Lewis.

The Emmett Till murder.

Those are just some quick links off the top of my head that, like today's post, evidently went way over your head.

Let me preemptively say that I'm in awe of MLK Jr. and the civil rights movement.

And I certainly don't fall for the pseudointellectual, contrarian hipster stance that MLK was a softy sellout compared to bad Malcolm X.

Having said all that, there is an uncanny, eccentric, and magnetic quote in Sunday's NYT from dissident black poet Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) that does a real number on today's festivities.

Jones was a member of the white Beat literary scene in the late 1950s before exploding like an ANC Molotov cocktail in his own right as an orthodox Black Power Marxist in the mid-’60s. He changed his name upon Malcolm X's assassination to Amiri Baraka. From that day forward, he has been an incorrigible bomb thrower.

(I don't think much of Baraka these days, but he was important to me as a kid. I'll never forget stumbling across his agit-prop poem about Muhammad Ali, "Note to America," while sitting in detention in my high-school library one afternoon—and later, reading Baraka's black music history book, Blues People, where he plays the dozens against the minstrelsy of Al Jolson, Glenn Miller, Elvis Presley, and Mick Jagger.)

Anyway, here's Baraka's hot Marxist quote from yesterday's NYT that, in Baraka's inimitable style, seems perfectly timed to detonate on MLK Day.:

"The civil rights movement," he said, "has just provided more opportunities for prostitution."

Happy day off, everybody.

The Seattle Times reports that Seattle is number four in the nation for bank robberies. Nation-wide, bank heists have only become more popular among thieves hungry for quick cash. But it's a decreasingly noble pursuit. In 132 King County bank jobs in 2006, bumbling bad guys snagged just over $300,000. My grandmother, a swash-buckling crossword menace from Montana, married into the family of James Younger--this was after she parted ways with Grandpa Valdez. Younger and members of his James Gang were real hoods. In the first recorded daylight bank heist in US history, he and others were suspected of making off with more than $60,000 -- that's more than $700,000 in modern ducats.

Based on information provided by a slog tipper, there is a comet in our sky.

The comet is called McNaught and is supposed to be "one of the brightest comets in decades - visible at sunrise and sunset." If the comet is actually in the sky, you will not see it at dusk because clouds are between us and it. But the slog tipper made the important connection that in history, when a comet appears like this, so bright and so evil, it means the end of an empire is near. Have this in mind when Bush makes the announcement tonight that more American bodies are going to be dropped into the hell of a war that can not be won no matter what, no matter how long, no matter how many.

In the summer of 1988, I walked into a huge sports stadium outside of Harare, Zimbabwe to watch a concert that had as its summit Bruce Springsteen on the stage.

Nearly 100,000 Africans were in the Chinese-built stadium, the situation was noisy and chaotic, and when Springsteen finally appeared, around 11 pm, I was certain he wouldn't perform "Born In The U.S.A." to a crowed of people who were mostly born (and never been out of) Southern Africa.

It was the first song he performed.

Not only that, there wasn't a drop of irony in his voice or manner. Not only that, the crowd went nuts at the declaration "BORN IN THE USA." Everyone (from Mabvuku, from Tafara, from Gweru, Mapondera, Mutare--from everywhere corner of Zimbabwe) sang with Springsteen. They were all "BORN IN THE USA." No pop singer from Japan, or Israel, or Iran, or Russia, or even the UK, could have done such a bold thing: sing a song about where they were born to Africans and succeed in having the Africans sing along and indentify with a kind of birth, a country, a way of life that's far in actuality from their own.

One had to admire American power, which was then a soft form of imperialism. There were no army bases in Zimbabwe, the president was supposed to be a Marxist and the country on the long road to socialism, and yet everyone here wanted to be, recognized themselves as part of, what Richard Wright famously called in Black Boy "the American spirit." Being an American was not about being in a nation but being an idea of who you wanted to be. All that it took to be an American was wanting to be one. Desire was everything, not the soil, not history, not race. By the means of this desire, the world was ruled, ordered, made understandable by the American ideal. Watching that concert made this theory a fact. But that was then--1988.

After Bush, after his distaterous wars, his political corruption and international indifference, it's hard to imagine that Springsteen (or someone who has achieved his level popularity in the present time) could take to the stage today and sing that song with the same results, reception, understanding. This is precisely the power that America has lost in the world, and it's hard to see how it can repair the damage Bush has done to its once-powerful image. And if America hopes to be at the forefront of other, competing national ideals, models, images--and it must be at the forefront if it hopes to sustain a leading position in the global economy--then it has to reconstitute this soft form of power (which all political thinkers--be they in antiquity or in today--know is the greatest form of political power) from what it is now: a death and blood machine in the Middle East.

This comment by Johnny was made for my post on the expanding war in East Africa:

howabouts, we stop our little experiment in proxy imperialism and allow the people of east africa and the rest of the world to determine their own lives and governments? That'd be novel.

The popularity of this view of things must have something to do with the fact that its intellectual content is terribly weak. It's the kind of relativism that thinks it's special/novel but is in fact just bone lazy. It's postmodernism without effort, without muscles. And even postmodernism with an effort is not much at all, as the work of Fredric Jameson makes evident. Jameson (who aspires to a universalism, but his takes the form of a Marxist nostalgia) thinks big but nothing really moves. His most important idea, cognitive mapping, ends just where it starts to get interesting, where it needs to make a final push toward a new universalism, one that processes the actual state of the world, the vast and varying conditions of humanity. We can not be relativists. Nor can we afford to believe there is no such thing as progress, historical progress, scientific progress. We must find the energy to imagine, and apply to the world of many things, a total system that is not inflexible, that does not convert green life into the fixed gray of thought. The new universalism must be agile, global, and, in the last instance, committed to humanist principles.

(Two quick mid-notes: One, it's easy to imagine global capitalism, but global humanism seems impossible--the source of this failure will certainly be found in the structure of the idealogical apparatus that maintains the power of capitalism. Two, the anti-humanism that springs from Nietzsche, and is finalized by Foucault, must, as a project, be abandoned. We need humanism because we are nothing but humans. Society has no other purpose than improving the living conditions of humans--if we care about the environment, it is because humans live in the environment; if we care about the stars, it is because humans are made by the stuff of dead stars. What is wrong is that which harms the welfare of humans as a whole; what it is good is that which enhances the welfare of humans as a whole: that is the bottom function of the law, anything else is a corruption of this first and final fact.)

Hegel is the grandfather of this human project, but his universalism, shaped by his extermely limited historical narrative of human consciousness (the dawn: China; the noon: Greece; the dusk: Germany), is nowhere near wide or complex enough. His historical concept is nothing more than a toy to us. His successor, Marx, was bold enough to provide humanity with a historical machine, but what we really need today is a historical search engine that does two amazing things: integrates, totalizes a wider area of human experience and history and, in the process, removes the halo from reason--in much the same way Baudelaire removed the halo from the poet in the 19th century. Reason must make its return without the glow of Hegel's giest, nor the specter of class struggle, as Marx, and Vico before him, envisioned it. It is a reason that takes flight at dawn and sees the expanding reality of global humanism. The thinker closest to this new perspective is Mike Davis, particularly in his latest book Planet of the Slums. What he does for the slums of the world must be done for every area of human life.

It bugs me that the picture on the front of today's Seattle Times of Gerald Ford is in black and white. Yes, the 1970s were a stark, gloomy decade of malaise, but they were not in black and white. They were full color: Kiss, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Evil Knievel, Disco, Three's Company, Jaws, Dr. J, Queen, Vietnam, Farrah Fawcett, Love American Style.

Black and white stops in 1965. And so, black and white is evocative of the mid-60s and earlier. It occasionally works to conjure late 60s stuff because most people still had black and white TVs up through the early 70s. (So, for example, LBJ works in black and white.) But the Ford era? 1974? 1975? 1976 (in particular)? They were gaudy color, man.

Sucking the color out of the '70s bugs me because it's an attempt to soften history. To make it quaint. To deny that it happened. To make it irrelevant. People were pissed when Turner Broadcasting started colorizing golden-era Hollywood movies. This is the same thing, in reverse.

In today's Sunday NYT "Word for Word" column, there's an excerpt from an exchange between Henry Kissinger and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Kissinger is meeting Brezhnev in Moscow in 1972 during a secret summit about the Vietnam War.

I won't bore you with the whole thing. But I love how cocky Brezhnev is. Brezhnev is saying American foreign policy is reckless because the American people didn't suffer during WWII like the Russians.

He caps it with this fantastic line:

The average American is just not familiar with this, has not gone through this, and his mind is conditioned entirely differently...Americans find life too dull. Rock and roll is dull..."

"Rock and roll is dull" !

Where did that come from?

Here, the Nixon administration is completely freaked out and grappling with the counterculture explosion, and this 65-year-old Soviet guy just levels it.

The shake of the snake.

Once upon a time, I thought Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon schooled Public Enemy's Chuck D in their battle of the sexes, races, hipsters when they squared off during the break of Sonic Youth's "Kool Thing" back in 1990.

Here's the script:

Chuck D: Yeah, tell 'em about it,
hit'em where it hurts

Kim Gordon: Hey, Kool Thing, come here, sit down beside me
there's something I gotta ask you.
I just wanna know, what are you gonna do for me?
I mean, are you gonna liberate us girls
from male white corporate oppression?

Chuck D: Tell it like it is!

Kim Gordon: Huh?

Chuck D: Yeah!

Kim Gordon: Don't be shy.

Chuck D: Word up!

Kim Gordon: Fear of a female planet?

Chuck D: Fear female planet. Fear, baby!

Kim Gordon: I just want you to know that we can still be friends.
Come on, come on, come on ...

Chuck D: Let everybody know.

Kim Gordon: ...come on...

But now I realize the truth: As the sarcasm drips to a crescendo, Chuck D clearly wins this mockery contest.

Here's why. Kim goes through too many poses, while Chuck D remains in place. Ultimately, the shift in her role playing reads a little desperate and uncertain, while Chuck D reads kool and conscious.

She's ultimately pushed to her best line, the "still be friends" line (which, btw, is perfect early '90s pussy power feminism—reversing the gender roles by discarding Chuck D. after their brief flirtation)—but Chuck D doesn't flinch.

At that, Kim switches voices again, and gives us her: "come on, come on, come on." This is both mocking sexy, but—as she swings it back into the song—actually sexy. And so, she undermines her previous aloof "We can still be friends" line. She is unsure of herself. He stands watching.

It's true... as I type I am surrounded by towers of comic and art books, archived work discs, and empty bottles of Talisker. Six years worth of wonderful memories. Today is my last day: I am leaving to turn my freelance work into a career, and passing the torch to two fantastic and enthusiastic designers: Aaron Huffman (our new Art Director) and Aaron Edge (our new Design Director). It's been an incredible run. Here's to the reign of the Aarons.

Every day, some cretin drops his cell phone in the water.

Twenty-one hundred years ago, some Cretans dropped a fucking computer in the ocean.

Here is one of its gears, regular and radiographed:

By turning the gear mechanism, which included what Edmunds [a British astrophysics professor] called a beautiful system of epicyclic gears that factored in the elliptical orbit of the moon, a person could check what the sky would have looked like on a date in the past, or how it would appear in the future.

Epicyclic gears systems—explained here and here—are themselves celestial: They consist of "planet gears" that rotate around a "solar gear," all for the purpose of increasing the output speed. They are also elegant. Here are some modern epicyclic gears:

It's like a little metal solar system.

(In other wonderful science news: "Small nuclear war could severely cool the planet".)

Has anyone actually read this book...for real...cover to cover? It won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in biography and the 2003 National Book Award, but I don't believe anyone has actually ever read it.

I bought the hard cover when it came out and tried to read it. I stalled around page 100 (it's 1100 pages.) Caro was laying out the history of the U.S. Senate and LBJ hadn't been mentioned yet.

I picked it back up again last night and stalled yet again as, still no sign of LBJ, Caro was discussing the infirmities of aged Senators.

This book is impossible to read. No one has read it.

27 years ago today.

I posted Pt. 1 yesterday.

January 27, 1976.

Judged on "Artistic Ability," "Imagination," "Body Flow," and "Fan Response," it's the very first Slam Dunk Contest.

This whole clip— the Ice Man, "rim shakers," "twist around patented dunks," and the Doctor—makes it plain. But you can just watch 5:23—5:33 if you want to see the exact 10 seconds when it truly goes down.

"He brought the ball back from behind himself somewhere as if he were a helicopter"—Carl Scheer

—"Really, none of us did much preparing for the contest; we all sort of winged it."—Julius Erving, AKA: The Doctor.