Tropics of Cancer

Insomnia

I have finally been able to find A Prairie Home Companion funny, and all I had to do was stay awake for 30 hours.  Next I will try and find McSweeney's unpretentious by drinking varnish.

More fun with IMDB

As I prepare to travel to China and read various work for my QEs, I thought I'd share some more fun from procrastination featuring IMDB.  This time it's a user comment on the underrated Commando:

This is by far one of the greatest movies of the century. I can't believe what an awesome movie it is. It has no morals, no lessons to teach, no political statements, no coherence, and no sense whatsoever. When Schwarzeneggar's beloved daughter is kidnapped by a psychotic dictator, he doesn't try to reason with the bad guys or take precautions like most action heroes would. He just goes bonkers and starts killing everyone in sight. The movie is packed with fantastic scenes such as Arnie crashing a car at about 80 mph, without a seatbelt, and being perfectly fine, Arnie tearing a phone booth out of a wall, Arnie punching a guy through a wall, etc. It's gloriously entertaining.

Also, despite his reputation for bad acting, he delivers all his lines with perfect comic timing ("Let off some steam, Bennett"). Bennett is also a great character, but no match for Arnold. You'd have to be completely devoid of personality to not find this at least slightly entertaining.

10/10 stars. Seriously.

Poggi and Bess

I'm reading Poggi's The State today, and one of it's passages struck up an interest for me.  Poggi argues that feudalism emerged from the political organization of the Germanic tribes after they sacked Rome.  This reminds me of some work I'm trying to do which examines the origins of "modern" state administrations in imperial settings like British India.

A Russian boy has stolen my dream

A Russian boy named Nikita has stolen my long-time dream of being kissed on the stomach by Vladimir Putin.

"People came up and I began talking to them, among them this little boy. He seemed to me very independent, sure of himself and at the same time defenseless so to speak, an innocent boy and a very nice little boy," Putin told the Web cast.

"I tell you honestly, I just wanted to touch him like a kitten and that desire of mine ended in that act."

I have related this dream to people before, and they usually say something like "Who would want to be kissed on the stomach by the Russian president," and "Sir, this is the middle of Mass.  Either take communion or move on."  But I respond to them: "You fools!  It's not that I want to be kissed on the stomach by The Russian President; it's that I want to be kissed on the stomach by Vladimir Putin.  I would have been just as happy with him doing it when he was head of the FSB."

Clearly, I must find this moppet and make sure that he wanted to be kissed on the stomach for reasons different than mine.

On tap for today

Today's goals: write up notes on Spruyt's The Sovereign State and Its Competitors.  Then get through as much of Poggi's The State as possible.

Anyway, how's this for a quote (from Poggi, quoting Solzhenitsyn): "To the disadvantage of the ruled, and to the advantage of the ruler, man is so constituted that, as long as he is alive, there is always something else one can do to him."  Zing!

Some dialog from On Deadly Ground

I can't resist.  Some dialog from On Deadly Ground:

Stone: My guy in D.C. tells me that we are not dealing with a student here, we're dealing with the Professor. Any time the military has an operation that can't fail, they call this guy in to train the troops, OK? He's the kind of guy that would drink a gallon of gasoline so he could piss in your campfire! You could drop this guy off at the Arctic Circle wearing a pair of bikini underwear, without his toothbrush, and tomorrow afternoon he's going to show up at your pool side with a million dollar smile and fist full of pesos. This guy's a professional, you got me? If he reaches this rig, we're all gonna be nothing but a big goddamned hole right in the middle of Alaska. So let's go find him and kill him and get rid of the son of a bitch!

Now I'm more depressed.  In stead of moving on with my life, I kept reading IMDB.  I'm going to have another beer.  And go to a Promise Keepers dressed as Steven Seagal dressed as the Gorilla from the end of Trading Places.

It's a movie about family (Or, a wondrous journey through IMDB)

I just finished The One, featuring Jet Li, and it is the best movie I have ever seen.  Have you ever wondered what would happen if the movies Total Recall, Highlander, and Double Impact were trains that were heading towards each other at a very high speed?  If you just answered "Yes, and my guess would be that the crash would result in a shitty genre film aimed at the 13-24 male demographic," you'd be wrong!  The result, instead, is a fast-paced, take-no-prisoners action film the likes of which we haven't seen since Steven Seagal's little-regarded gem On Deadly Ground (which featured--I'm not kidding--a major supporting role by Michael Caine.  And what the heck was up the with premise?  The two petty officers with the missile codes decide to take a romantic train ride and then are forced to give up the codes by a computer nerd working for terrorists?  Oh, wait.  That's Under Siege 2: Dark Territory.  But On Deadly Ground really does have Michael Caine in it.  It's about Alaska and Eskimos, who are defended by Steven Seagal.  I'm really not kidding.  Watch it.)  The One even features a cameo by the sublime James Morrison.  If you don't know him, you obviously didn't pay much attention to his role as "Dad" in "The Crossing (2006)."

Wow, I just really depressed myself, because I just realized that my whole life has amounted to being able to cite Total Recall, Highlander, and Double Impact as influences on Jet Li's The One.  And knowing the plot lines of Steven Seagal movies.  And I've seen Highlander II: The Quickening.  I'm going to have a beer.  And then maybe go to a fanfic con dressed as Christopher Lambert dressed as Rayden form Mortal Kombat.  Which I've also seen.  Shit.

Terms of disengagement (or, a journey through the political muck-pit)

Some of my multiple personalities, who are also avid Tropics of Cancer readers, have wondered why I haven't posted yet today.  So I took a healthy dose of haloperidol and decided to explain myself:

Today I've done something that I'm not proud of: I participated in the blog wars.  As those who know me will testify, I am irritatingly ambivalent when it comes to political commitment.  (My favorite phrase, which I use at least 6 times a night--often inventing reasons to utter it--is "George Murphy, turn down that damn forensics meet; don't you know I'm Swiss?  Of course, that gets hard when no one named George Murphy is around and there's no debate on.)  Anyway, I usually read hard left and right blogs just to get a taste of what people are saying, but rarely directly participate in them.

That changed today.  There is a stupid, stupid, stupid brouhaha going on right now wherein the likes of Michelle Malkin and David Horowitz jumped on a story that ran in the New York Times' Arts and Leisure section that alleged displayed "sensitive" security information about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's vacation homes on the Eastern Shore.  I learned about this controversy from Daily Kos, learned more from Glenn Greenwald's long post, and finally landed myself in a little corner of the Blogosphere called The Autonomist.  Judging from the number of comments, the site doesn't do huge traffic, but it's run by a debatably Italian man named Rocco Dipippo.

Rocco posted a picture of himself along with his personal information, but also posted the personal contact information of the NYT photographer (and subsequently removed it) in attempted "retribution" for the original article.  Sound complicated?  It's mostly just stupid.  At any rate, I posted repeated comments on the site asking for clarification, because I really could not believe the justification that conservatives were mounting on the site.  (I posted under the alias "somethought.")  After a while of waiting for a response, I gave up, especially after being called "effeminate."

All this made me feel dirty.  In the first place, I had no business trying to rationally debate with a bunch of polemicists.  What was I expecting?  Rereading my essays in retrospect makes me feel embarrassed, not only because of the logical errors I see, but also because they resemble intellectual masturbation in a kindergarten.

But something else made me feel slimy.  The comments from many of the liberal "kossacks" who came through the site (I assume they followed the trail from Daily Kos like me) threw around insult after mindless insult.  The maxim about rising to the bait aside, I was disappointed, and it made my responses feel like a glorified version of their vitriol.

So anyway, it's off to a bleach shower for me, and my experience over the last day reminds me that:

(1)It's easy to see why so many people are turned off by politics.  With this kind of rhetoric, who needs war?

(2)It's very disheartening how little interesting discussion takes place on blogs, especially political ones of both stripes.  (This is also my general impression of dKos and MyDD as well.)  There is so little cross-pollination of serious political opinion and debate.  Politics could use a little more of Democrats and Republicans actually talking, and not screaming, at one another.  Thus,

(3)You don't have to agree, but at least talk rationally, dammit, and like it's not a boxing match!

(4)Anonymity on the Internet remains a fascinating issue.

(5)David Horowitz is a big putz.  (Hmmmm, the haloperidol is wearing off.  Time for some risperidone.)

Washing-ton

A friend sent this from YouTube.  The video confirms that people have too little to do, but all that sloth is turning out near-perfect comedy.  Do you want to know what it looks like to throw a knife into heaven?  You know you want to.  In fact, why are you still reading this post?

Happy to be here?

From Jane Mayer's excellent excavation of the next doctrinaire enemey of separation of powers, David Addington:

In the summer of 2002, the [CIA] had sent an Arabic-speaking analyst to Guantánamo to find out why more intelligence wasn’t being collected, and, after interviewing several dozen prisoners, he had come back with bad news: more than half the detainees, he believed, didn’t belong there. He wrote a devastating classified report, which reached General John Gordon, the deputy national-security adviser for combatting terrorism. In a series of meetings at the White House, Gordon, Bellinger, and other officials warned Addington and Gonzales that potentially innocent people had been locked up in Guantánamo and would be indefinitely. “This is a violation of basic notions of American fairness,” Gordon and Bellinger argued. “Isn’t that what we’re about as a country?” Addington’s response, sources familiar with the meetings said, was “These are ‘enemy combatants.’ Please use that term. They’ve all been through a screening process. We don’t have anything to talk about.”

Ugh.  Is it okay to be very, very worried yet?