Month: September 2008

A friend tipped me off to this last night. It had somehow escaped the attention of the vast research team at the Daily Dish for several months (it was published last March). But no longer. It’s an interview with the elusive Dark Man X, also referred to in some circles as DMX, a hip-hop artist. It explores many themes, crossing many cultural currents, and is worth a thorough pondering. But here is a perspective on the Obama campaign that I must say is refreshing in its candor:

Are you following the presidential race?

Not at all.

You’re not? You know there’s a Black guy running, Barack Obama and then there’s Hillary Clinton.

His name is Barack?!

Barack Obama, yeah.

Barack?! Barack. What the f**k is a Barack?! Barack Obama. Where he from, Africa?

Yeah, his dad is from Kenya.

Barack Obama?

Yeah.

What the f**k?! That ain’t no f**kin’ name, yo. That ain’t that ni**a’s name. You can’t be serious. Barack Obama. Get the f**k outta here.

You’re telling me you haven’t heard about him before.

I ain’t really paying much attention.

I mean, it’s pretty big if a Black…

Wow, Barack! The ni**a’s name is Barack. Barack? Ni**a named Barack Obama. What the f**k, man?! Is he serious? That ain’t his f**kin’ name. Ima tell this ni**a when I see him, “Stop that bullshit. Stop that bullshit” [laughs] “That ain’t your f**kin’ name.” Your momma ain’t name you no damn Barack.

And this reflection on the artist’s life:

What were you doing in between—from the last album to this one, that whole time? What have you been up to?

Life. I been up to that. It’s been crazy. Fuckin’ police keep on fuckin’ raiding my house and shit for nothing. They took all my fuckin’ guns. All they did is take is take my guns. All they fuckin’ do is fuck my house up and take my guns. That’s all they did. Straight robbed me—that’s what they did.

Maybe he’ll vote for Palin.

Dave Weigel on Obama’s foreign policy:

Obama’s advisers don’t pretend that their candidate is moving very far from the legacy of Bill Clinton—a legacy of humanitarian interventionism that provided some of the moral and legal justifications for Iraq. The problems of this decade, in their view, came because the Bush administration looked at unilateral action as a first course of action and multilateralism as a patina, gathering allies after military decisions had already been made. That’s the reverse of what Obama says he wants: multilateralism first and unilateralism as a last resort.

Basically: a blend of Clinton and H.W. Bush. Doesn’t seem so risky after the last eight years, does it?

Glenn Greenwald isn’t happy:

Can anyone point to any discussion of what the implications are for having the Federal Government seize control of the largest and most powerful insurance company in the country, as well as virtually the entire mortgage industry and other key swaths of financial services? Haven’t we heard all these years that national health care was an extremely risky and dangerous undertaking because of what happens when the Federal Government gets too involved in an industry? What happened in the last month dwarfs all of that by many magnitudes.

The Treasury Secretary is dictating to these companies how they should be run and who should run them. The Federal Government now controls what were — up until last month — vast private assets. These are extreme — truly radical — changes to how our society functions. Does anyone have any disagreement with any of it or is anyone alarmed by what the consequences are — not the economic consequences but the consequences of so radically changing how things function so fundamentally and so quickly?

Where does Obama stand?:

I’m puzzled about Obama’s unwillingness to take a stand against the Bush administration’s latest bid to exit with one last burst of executive prerogative-taking: the bill to renew the Authorization of Military Force. As Neal Katyal and Justin Florence pointed out in Slate this week, the AUMF of 2001 has been the main underpinning of the worst Bush excesses. And the new law doesn’t just restate congressional support for fighting a war against al-Qaida and Co. It also "reaffirms" what would really be a new power: that "the President is authorized to detain enemy combatants in connection with the continuing armed conflict with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces, regardless of the place of capture, until the termination of hostilities."

Ezra is upset by how reporters use un-named sources:

At the end of the day, a lot of the failures in journalism are a collective action problem. If the profession set some standards for when they’d allow background, and when a proven lie would lead them to out a source, flacks and operatives would stop pulling this crap. But they don’t, because there’s always some reporter willing to play stenographer on the off-chance that it will, down-the-road, lead to useful access.

Jessica Gallucci visits an odd perfume shop:

…loud perfumes are disgusting, yet they are fashionable in America because we like to flaunt the brands we wear. [Perfumer Christopher Brosius] explains that major cosmetic companies are aware of this, and it has long been standard practice to vary a perfume’s formula to appeal to taste in the markets it’s destined for: the American version will be quite bold, but the Japanese version may be even softer than the French one. "Nobody will confirm that for you," Christopher says, "but it’s true".

When my parents visited New York, I gave them a tour of my favourite scents in the shop. This took some time: the accords include clever riffs on the smell of rubber, from the intoxicating Inner Tube to a just-short-of-noxious Rubber Cement. Equally impressive is Wet Pavement, which strikes me as wearable, even pretty. Burning Leaves is startlingly alluring, and Ink smells so authentic that I held up the bottle to show my mother that the fluid was clear and not an indelible blue. Roast Beef is predictably revolting, but still a must-smell. My mother lingered over In the Library, a blend that Christopher describes as "First Edition, Russian and Moroccan Leather, Binding Cloth and a hint of Wood Polish".

Some reaction around the web on the proposed bailout plan. Yves Smith:

This is a financial coup d’etat, with the only limitation the $700 billion balance sheet figure. The measure already gives the Treasury the authority not simply to buy dud mortgage paper but other assets as it deems fit. There is no accountability beyond a report (contents undefined) to Congress three months into the program and semiannually thereafter. The Treasury could via incompetence or venality grossly overpay for assets and advisory services, and fail to exclude consultants with conflicts of interest, and there would be no recourse. Given the truly appalling track record of this Administration in its outsourcing, this is not an idle worry.

Paul Krugman:

… there’s no quid pro quo here — nothing that gives taxpayers a stake in the upside, nothing that ensures that the money is used to stabilize the system rather than reward the undeserving.

I hope I’m wrong about this. But let me say it again: Treasury needs to explain why this is supposed to work — not try to panic Congress into giving it a blank check. Otherwise, no deal.

Henry Blodget:

… the key question is what price the government will pay for those assets. This will determine how much (if any) capital the banks need to raise to offset the losses and, thus, what their stocks are currently worth.

Felix Salmon:

American taxpayers will have new obligations: in order to buy those bonds, the government is going to have to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars. That’s new debt, and government debt. But there’s no government guarantee on anything. And if you own a CDO or some other mortgage obligation, the government is definitively not going to step in and make sure you get paid in full.

Steven Weinberg returns to the old debate about religion and science. One choice paragraph:

The problem for religious belief is not just that science has explained a lot of odds and ends about the world. There is a second source of tension: that these explanations have cast increasing doubt on the special role of man, as an actor created by God to play a starring part in a great cosmic drama of sin and salvation.

We have had to accept that our home, the earth, is just another planet circling the sun; our sun is just one of a hundred billion stars in a galaxy that is just one of billions of visible galaxies; and it may be that the whole expanding cloud of galaxies is just a small part of a much larger multiverse, most of whose parts are utterly inhospitable to life. As Richard Feynman has said, "The theory that it’s all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate."

Oliver Kamm, an atheist, differs from Dawkins on the topic of secularism in politics:

The cause of secularism is politically vital. But there is no political case for atheism. (I do believe, as a pragmatic point, that society would be better off if there were more atheists around; but I also believe that society would be better off if moderate religion, accommodating itself to secular government and education, supplanted religious absolutism. A consistent secularist would be indifferent between these possibilities.) Dawkins, by contrast, maintains (p. 44): "American atheists far outnumber religious Jews, yet the Jewish lobby is notoriously one of the most formidably influential in Washington. What might American atheists achieve if they organised themselves properly?"

Leave aside the tendentious first sentence of that statement. (American Jewry is not "formidably influential" in forming public policy, even with regard to US policy in the Middle East; it genuinely isn’t.) The second strikes me as a thoroughly bad idea. I do not wish to see, and will not sign up to, an organised interest group of atheists, because atheism is a private belief, of no civic significance. So is religious belief. The task of defending state neutrality between those positions is what we, and the President of the French Fifth Republic, should defend.

"A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here’s one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real — you get the idea. But please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue — it’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

People who can adjust their natural default-setting this way are often described as being "well adjusted," which I suggest to you is not an accidental term," – David Foster Wallace.

(Hat tip: Frank Wilson)