Karen Armstrong reviews Spencer's The Truth About Muhammad!
Karen Armstrong's second hagiographical and highly selective (i.e., quasi-fictional) biography of the Islamic prophet Muhammad appeared around the same time as my book The Truth About Muhammad. Armstrong, however, declined all invitations to debate me, turning down, among others, an O'Reilly Factor segment. (The truth-challenged Edina Lekovic of MPAC ultimately appeared with me, using her time to get in as many lies about me as she could.)
However, Armstrong has let loose in the Financial Times (thanks to Katherine), in a review almost as concocted and fantastic as her own book.
...The criminal activities of terrorists have given the old western prejudice a new lease of life. People often seem eager to believe the worst about Muhammad, are reluctant to put his life in its historical perspective and assume the Jewish and Christian traditions lack the flaws they attribute to Islam. This entrenched hostility informs Robert Spencer’s misnamed biography The Truth about Muhammad, subtitled Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion.
Spencer has studied Islam for 20 years, largely, it seems, to prove that it is an evil, inherently violent religion.
Silliness. I am not out to prove anything except what Islam is. If it teaches warfare against unbelievers, as all its orthodox sects and schools of jurisprudence do, then it does no good for anyone except the jihadists to ignore or deny or minimize that fact.
He is a hero of the American right...
Uh-oh, "the American right." That's mainstream media code for "a bad guy who should not be accorded respect or taken seriously."
...and author of the US bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam. Like any book written in hatred, his new work is a depressing read.
This is, of course, a familiar tactic of Leftists, jihadists, and those who sympathize with them: characterize any accurate report of their activities as "hatred." Never mind that my book works strictly from the earliest extant Islamic sources, and only reports what they say. If there is any "hatred" in it, it comes from those sources, not from me.
Spencer makes no attempt to explain the historical, political, economic and spiritual circumstances of 7th-century Arabia, without which it is impossible to understand the complexities of Muhammad’s life.
Reading this, I doubt Armstrong actually read the book. Or maybe she just wants to make sure no one else reads it. In fact, anyway, the beginning of chapter three, and many other passages throughout the book, are devoted to explaining "the historical, political, economic and spiritual circumstances of 7th-century Arabia."
Consequently he makes basic and bad mistakes of fact. Even more damaging, he deliberately manipulates the evidence.
The traditions of any religion are multifarious. It is easy, therefore, to quote so selectively that the main thrust of the faith is distorted. But Spencer is not interested in balance. He picks out only those aspects of Islamic tradition that support his thesis. For example, he cites only passages from the Koran that are hostile to Jews and Christians and does not mention the numerous verses that insist on the continuity of Islam with the People of the Book: ”Say to them: We believe what you believe; your God and our God is one.”
Oh, Karen. Do you really think no one will check your work? Not only do I mention the verse you claim I don't mention (Qur'an 29:46), but I do so twice, on page 17 and again on page 51.
Islam has a far better record than either Christianity or Judaism of appreciating other faiths. In Muslim Spain, relations between the three religions of Abraham were uniquely harmonious in medieval Europe. The Christian Byzantines had forbidden Jews from residing in Jerusalem, but when Caliph Umar conquered the city in AD638, he invited them to return and was hailed as the precursor of the Messiah. Spencer doesn’t refer to this.
Of course I don't. And why not? Because my book is a biography of Muhammad. Muhammad died in 632. Thus events of 638, and of hundreds of years later in Spain, are beyond its purview. But in fact I discuss Muslim Spain at some length in my book Onward Muslim Soldiers, and Islamic and Christian anti-Semitism, also at length, in my forthcoming book Religion of Peace?.
Jewish-Muslim relations certainly have declined as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but this departs from centuries of peaceful and often positive co-existence.
As long as the Jews knew their place. Watch for Andrew Bostom's new Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, which provides a superabundance of evidence that Jews never enjoyed equality of rights with Muslims in Islamic societies.
When discussing Muhammad’s war with Mecca, Spencer never cites the Koran’s condemnation of all warfare as an ”awesome evil”, its prohibition of aggression or its insistence that only self-defence justifies armed conflict. He ignores the Koranic emphasis on the primacy of forgiveness and peaceful negotiation: the second the enemy asks for peace, Muslims must lay down their arms and accept any terms offered, however disadvantageous. There is no mention of Muhammad’s non-violent campaign that ended the conflict.
I don't know to which Qur'an verse Armstrong is referring. Perhaps someone can help me out here. I've read the Qur'an innumerable times, but don't recall any verse saying that all warfare is an "awesome evil." I looked around in it just now, and searched through the helpful Index of Qur'anic Topics by Ashfaque Ullah Syed, but came up empty. Search here for "warfare and evil" and "war and evil," and you don't come up with anything like that. There is this, but it is hardly the same thing: "Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not" (2:216).
Having exposed in The Truth About Muhammad Armstrong's misrepresentation of Tabari's evidence about Aisha's age when she married Muhammad (see page 170), and seeing her false statement above about my not quoting Qur'an 29:46, I am not inclined to take her word for the existence of this verse. Anyone who has an idea of what she's referring to, please let me know. And "Muhammad’s non-violent campaign that ended the conflict" is not a specific reference to anything -- which conflict? But if she means his conquest of Mecca, when there was little resistance, I discuss it on pages 145-147.
But in any case, the existence of this verse, if it exists, doesn't negate the fact that Armstrong's assertion that "only self-defence justifies armed conflict" and that the Qur'an directs Muslims to "lay down their arms and accept any terms offered, however disadvantageous" is wholly false. In fact, as I outline in the book (pages 76-78), Muhammad's earliest biographer, Ibn Ishaq, traces three stages of development in the Qur'anic doctrine of warfare, culminating in offensive warfare to establish the hegemony of Islamic law by force of arms. That has been understood throughout history by mainstream Islamic teachers (Ibn Kathir, Ibn Juzayy, As-Suyuti, Ibn Qayyim) as the Qur'an's last word on jihad. Contemporary jihad theorists have picked up on that and used it to revive jihadist sentiments among peaceful Muslims today.
People would be offended by an account of Judaism that dwelled exclusively on Joshua’s massacres and never mentioned Rabbi Hillel’s Golden Rule, or a description of Christianity based on the bellicose Book of Revelation that failed to cite the Sermon on the Mount. But the widespread ignorance about Islam in the west makes many vulnerable to Spencer’s polemic; he is telling them what they are predisposed to hear. His book is a gift to extremists who can use it to ”prove” to those Muslims who have been alienated by events in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq that the west is incurably hostile to their faith.
Ignorance? I'd be happy to debate Karen Armstrong anytime. But I will not allow her false statements to go unchallenged. And that is why such a debate will probably never happen.
UPDATE: In the comments field below, Jihad Watch reader "Great Comet of 1577" has found the Qur'an verse to which Armstrong was referring. It's Qur'an 2:217:
"They question thee (O Muhammad) with regard to warfare in the sacred month. Say: Warfare therein is a great (transgression) [or an "awesome evil"], but to turn (men) from the way of Allah, and to disbelieve in Him and in the Inviolable Place of Worship, and to expel His people thence, is a greater with Allah; for persecution is worse than killing. And they will not cease from fighting against you till they have made you renegades from your religion, if they can. And whoso becometh a renegade and dieth in his disbelief: such are they whose works have fallen both in the world and the Hereafter. Such are rightful owners of the Fire: they will abide therein."
Thus, contrary to Armstrong's statement that this verse refers to "all warfare" as "an 'awesome evil,' in fact the verse refers only to warfare during the sacred month as evil at all, and then goes on to say that "persecution is worse than killing."
In context, this verse was revealed to justify a Muslim raid on a Quraysh caravan: the raid took place during a sacred month, during which war was forbidden. But the Quraysh were allegedly persecuting the Muslims, so this verse absolves the Muslims of guilt for the raid -- since "persecution is worse than killing."
So in fact, the verse that Armstrong is using to argue that the Qur'an teaches that war is an "awesome evil" actually teaches that moral precepts, such as the prohibition on fighting during the sacred month, may be set aside to benefit the Muslims.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Friday, April 27, 2007
gawker.com
Ed. note: As we mentioned a few weeks ago, we're doing away with our semi-regular "Everybody's A Wenner" feature, in which we would analyze Rolling Stone's famed review section; not only was "Everybody" running out of steam, but we wanted to spread the love to the other music magazines on the newsstand. And so we're happy to introduce Rock-Critically Correct, a recurring write-up that will take the current issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Spin and Vibe to task. In order to avoid conflicts-of-interest with your Idolators, the column will be written by an anonymous music scribe--one who just happens to contribute to several of those titles. Or maybe all of them! We're not saying. After the click-through, our first installment cover, which covers the just-released fortieth-anniversary issue of Rolling Stone.
Greetings.
Your correspondent begins the first installment of Rock-Critically Correct by taking a look at the May 3 edition of the big ma-moo of popular music publications, Rolling Stone, which also happens to be the 40th anniversary edition. Jann Wenner, you see, has a thing about anniversaries (as do his advertisers), and no American magazine holds celebrations for itself as often as RS. Last year saw the release of the 1000th issue, which employed boundary-pushing 3D technology in order to evoke the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a cultural artifact that RS never, ever tires of reminding us is the GREATEST ALBUM EVER.
And so we come to the fortieth anniversary issue. The front of the book contends with such matters as EMI's decision to do away with copyright protection, while the reviews section awards NIN's Year Zero four stars, after which the three-star review-a-thon so beloved of Idolator's curators resumes.
But these are merely bookends to the feature well, which is a valentine to the real greatest generation: The Baby Goddamn Boomers! Step right up for 20 interviews that hit all the expected beats, from how rock music is inseparable from political action, to how drugs--while perilous--can have mind-expanding properties, to "how we never seem to learn any lessons from Vietnam," to Hunter S. Thompson, to how key RS has been to the proper evaluation of all these things. An editor's letter promises two subsequent 40th anniversary issues, one devoted to "The summer of love" (apparently because you cannot rehash that topic enough) and another to the "Challenges of the future" (which will likely conclude that any challenges can be met by evoking participants in the summer of love).
And so, for nearly 100 pages, we are privileged to read toothless interviews with what that editor's letter calls "part of (the magazine's) extended family," among them Mick Jagger, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Jane Fonda, Michael Moore, and Jackson Browne. These are the oracles of our culture--or more specifically, oracles of the worldview of Wenner's moneyed liberal pals. Each interview is conducted by an elite squadron of Wenner's favored baby-boomer Boswells (Anthony DeCurtis, Kurt Loder, and David Wild, take a bow), complemented by a couple of sympathetic paleo-establishment journalists like Tom Brokaw and Douglas Brinkley. Wenner himself even sits down for a chin-wag with Bob Dylan. Permit your correspondent the indulgence of compressing the interview:
WENNER: "The sixties were very, very important, weren't they?"DYLAN: "Uh, well, they were okay."WENNER: "Please tell everybody that your most recent album, Modern Times, is about how the world is being ruined by George Bush."DYLAN: "No. Let's talk about how modern music isn't very good."
Elsewhere, for perhaps the eleventy-jillionth time, Paul McCartney genuflects before the memory of John Lennon. Lennon worship is catnip for Wenner: Here McCartney says that he "always marvel(s) that (he) was the guy who sat down with John Lennon to write all that stuff." Hasn't this guy earned the right to not have to jump through Rolling Stone's hoops by suggesting that he's merely a bystander to Lennon's nigh-omnipotent genius?
Then we hear from Jimmy Carter (he too likes Dylan! And the Allman Brothers!) and George McGovern, two men that are more or less shunned by the mainstream Democratic Establishment with which Wenner is tethered. One wonders if this amounts to a mea culpa for Wenner's support of Ronald Reagan in 1980, not to mention RS's notorious early-'80s Republican-courting Perception/Reality ad campaign. Or maybe he's just trying to make up for RS's mid-period political indifference, which only was shaken off when a triangulating baby boomer with his eyes on the prize emerged in 1991.
Each interview hews very closely to this template, with most subjects taking the bait and concluding that A) the spirit of the sixties must be revived before all is lost; B) Rolling Stone was and is essential for any complete understanding of music, culture and politics; and C) President Bush is the worst president ever (the latter phrase is one that crops up in nearly every issue of RS in some way or another).
Although Wenner's interest has seemed to wax and wane, it's clear that RS will always be immensely personal to him. The magazine afforded his entry to a rarified social stratum, and despite covers devoted to the likes of Panic! at the Disco and Lindsay Lohan, his DNA is imprinted upon it.
But what does the 25-year-old Dave Matthews Band fan--the one who got a RS subscription from his aunt, and knocked one out to last issue's cover image of Rose McGowan and Rosario Dawson--make of all this? Is he shamed, thinking, "So this is why my peer group so insufficient compared to that of Mr. Wenner's! They got it right, and me and my top ten MySpace friends are so, so shallow." It's easier to imagine a party-goer at some function on the Upper West Side--perhaps a Clinton fundraiser, or a cocktail party at Graydon Carter's place-- congratulating Wenner for the dutiful, loving tongue-bath administered by his magazine to his peer group. If, that is, they're not too preoccupied with Vanity Fair or The New Yorker.
And the whole process will repeat itself, not only in two more 40th anniversary issues, but most likely several times before 2017.
Greetings.
Your correspondent begins the first installment of Rock-Critically Correct by taking a look at the May 3 edition of the big ma-moo of popular music publications, Rolling Stone, which also happens to be the 40th anniversary edition. Jann Wenner, you see, has a thing about anniversaries (as do his advertisers), and no American magazine holds celebrations for itself as often as RS. Last year saw the release of the 1000th issue, which employed boundary-pushing 3D technology in order to evoke the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a cultural artifact that RS never, ever tires of reminding us is the GREATEST ALBUM EVER.
And so we come to the fortieth anniversary issue. The front of the book contends with such matters as EMI's decision to do away with copyright protection, while the reviews section awards NIN's Year Zero four stars, after which the three-star review-a-thon so beloved of Idolator's curators resumes.
But these are merely bookends to the feature well, which is a valentine to the real greatest generation: The Baby Goddamn Boomers! Step right up for 20 interviews that hit all the expected beats, from how rock music is inseparable from political action, to how drugs--while perilous--can have mind-expanding properties, to "how we never seem to learn any lessons from Vietnam," to Hunter S. Thompson, to how key RS has been to the proper evaluation of all these things. An editor's letter promises two subsequent 40th anniversary issues, one devoted to "The summer of love" (apparently because you cannot rehash that topic enough) and another to the "Challenges of the future" (which will likely conclude that any challenges can be met by evoking participants in the summer of love).
And so, for nearly 100 pages, we are privileged to read toothless interviews with what that editor's letter calls "part of (the magazine's) extended family," among them Mick Jagger, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Jane Fonda, Michael Moore, and Jackson Browne. These are the oracles of our culture--or more specifically, oracles of the worldview of Wenner's moneyed liberal pals. Each interview is conducted by an elite squadron of Wenner's favored baby-boomer Boswells (Anthony DeCurtis, Kurt Loder, and David Wild, take a bow), complemented by a couple of sympathetic paleo-establishment journalists like Tom Brokaw and Douglas Brinkley. Wenner himself even sits down for a chin-wag with Bob Dylan. Permit your correspondent the indulgence of compressing the interview:
WENNER: "The sixties were very, very important, weren't they?"DYLAN: "Uh, well, they were okay."WENNER: "Please tell everybody that your most recent album, Modern Times, is about how the world is being ruined by George Bush."DYLAN: "No. Let's talk about how modern music isn't very good."
Elsewhere, for perhaps the eleventy-jillionth time, Paul McCartney genuflects before the memory of John Lennon. Lennon worship is catnip for Wenner: Here McCartney says that he "always marvel(s) that (he) was the guy who sat down with John Lennon to write all that stuff." Hasn't this guy earned the right to not have to jump through Rolling Stone's hoops by suggesting that he's merely a bystander to Lennon's nigh-omnipotent genius?
Then we hear from Jimmy Carter (he too likes Dylan! And the Allman Brothers!) and George McGovern, two men that are more or less shunned by the mainstream Democratic Establishment with which Wenner is tethered. One wonders if this amounts to a mea culpa for Wenner's support of Ronald Reagan in 1980, not to mention RS's notorious early-'80s Republican-courting Perception/Reality ad campaign. Or maybe he's just trying to make up for RS's mid-period political indifference, which only was shaken off when a triangulating baby boomer with his eyes on the prize emerged in 1991.
Each interview hews very closely to this template, with most subjects taking the bait and concluding that A) the spirit of the sixties must be revived before all is lost; B) Rolling Stone was and is essential for any complete understanding of music, culture and politics; and C) President Bush is the worst president ever (the latter phrase is one that crops up in nearly every issue of RS in some way or another).
Although Wenner's interest has seemed to wax and wane, it's clear that RS will always be immensely personal to him. The magazine afforded his entry to a rarified social stratum, and despite covers devoted to the likes of Panic! at the Disco and Lindsay Lohan, his DNA is imprinted upon it.
But what does the 25-year-old Dave Matthews Band fan--the one who got a RS subscription from his aunt, and knocked one out to last issue's cover image of Rose McGowan and Rosario Dawson--make of all this? Is he shamed, thinking, "So this is why my peer group so insufficient compared to that of Mr. Wenner's! They got it right, and me and my top ten MySpace friends are so, so shallow." It's easier to imagine a party-goer at some function on the Upper West Side--perhaps a Clinton fundraiser, or a cocktail party at Graydon Carter's place-- congratulating Wenner for the dutiful, loving tongue-bath administered by his magazine to his peer group. If, that is, they're not too preoccupied with Vanity Fair or The New Yorker.
And the whole process will repeat itself, not only in two more 40th anniversary issues, but most likely several times before 2017.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Cats!
From today's Times obituaries:
Dr. James R. Richards, a prominent veterinarian who was a recognized authority on cat care, died on Tuesday in Johnson City, N.Y. He was 58 and lived in Dryden, N.Y.Dr. Richards died of injuries he sustained in a motorcycle accident on Sunday. According to Sgt. Kelly Daley of the New York State Police, he was thrown from his motorcycle after he tried without success to avoid hitting a cat that had run into the road.
Very sad. Say this for the guy: He died as he lived. Caring way too much about cats.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/obituaries/26richards.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&oref=slogin
Dr. James R. Richards, a prominent veterinarian who was a recognized authority on cat care, died on Tuesday in Johnson City, N.Y. He was 58 and lived in Dryden, N.Y.Dr. Richards died of injuries he sustained in a motorcycle accident on Sunday. According to Sgt. Kelly Daley of the New York State Police, he was thrown from his motorcycle after he tried without success to avoid hitting a cat that had run into the road.
Very sad. Say this for the guy: He died as he lived. Caring way too much about cats.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/obituaries/26richards.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&oref=slogin
VDH
It’s a short attention span kind of world these days, and Victor Davis Hanson asks:
Is the war on terror over?
Jihadists have already scored successes in all sorts of ways beyond altering the very nature of air travel. Cartoonists now lampoon everyone and everything - except Muslims. The pope must weigh his words carefully. Otherwise, priests and nuns are attacked abroad. A single false Newsweek story about one flushed Koran led to riot and death.
The net result is that terrified millions in Western societies silently accept that for the first time in centuries they cannot talk or write honestly about what they think of Islam and the Koran. ...
Radical Islamists largely arise from the oil-rich Middle East. Since 9/11, the price of oil has skyrocketed, transferring trillions of dollars from successful Western, Indian and Chinese economies to unsuccessful Arab and Iranian autocracies.
Terrorists know that blowing up a Saudi oil field or getting control of Iraqi petroleum reserves - and they attempt both all the time - will alter the world economy. Even their mere threats give us psychological fits and their sponsors more cash.
This is a strange war. Our successes in avoiding attack convince some that the real danger has passed. And when we kill jihadists abroad, we are told it is peripheral to the war or only incites more terrorism.
But despite the current efforts at denial, the war against Islamic terrorism remains real and deadly. We can’t wish it away until Middle Eastern dictatorships reform - or we end their oil stranglehold over the world economy.
Is the war on terror over?
Jihadists have already scored successes in all sorts of ways beyond altering the very nature of air travel. Cartoonists now lampoon everyone and everything - except Muslims. The pope must weigh his words carefully. Otherwise, priests and nuns are attacked abroad. A single false Newsweek story about one flushed Koran led to riot and death.
The net result is that terrified millions in Western societies silently accept that for the first time in centuries they cannot talk or write honestly about what they think of Islam and the Koran. ...
Radical Islamists largely arise from the oil-rich Middle East. Since 9/11, the price of oil has skyrocketed, transferring trillions of dollars from successful Western, Indian and Chinese economies to unsuccessful Arab and Iranian autocracies.
Terrorists know that blowing up a Saudi oil field or getting control of Iraqi petroleum reserves - and they attempt both all the time - will alter the world economy. Even their mere threats give us psychological fits and their sponsors more cash.
This is a strange war. Our successes in avoiding attack convince some that the real danger has passed. And when we kill jihadists abroad, we are told it is peripheral to the war or only incites more terrorism.
But despite the current efforts at denial, the war against Islamic terrorism remains real and deadly. We can’t wish it away until Middle Eastern dictatorships reform - or we end their oil stranglehold over the world economy.
The Big LieThe Associated Press casually slips a falsehood into a story about congressional efforts to investigate the administration:
By 21-10, the House oversight committee voted to issue a subpoena to Rice to compel her story on the Bush administration's claim, now discredited, that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa.
The New York Times, in a story posted on its Web site yesterday, similarly referred to the claim as "discredited," but this reference later was edited out. Reuters refers to the "administration's warnings, later proven false, that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger for nuclear arms."
In fact, the claim has not been disproved or discredited at all, as the nonpartisan Factcheck.org explained in 2004:
After nearly a six-month investigation, a special panel reported to the British Parliament July 14 that British intelligence had indeed concluded back in 2002 that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy uranium. The review panel was headed by Lord Butler of Brockwell, who had been a cabinet secretary under five different Prime Ministers and who is currently master of University College, Oxford.
The Butler report said British intelligence had "credible" information--from several sources--that a 1999 visit by Iraqi officials to Niger was for the purpose of buying uranium:
Butler Report: It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999. The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.
The Butler Report affirmed what the British government had said about the Niger uranium story back in 2003, and specifically endorsed what [President] Bush said [in that year's State of the Union Address] as well.
The erstwhile Iraqi regime's quest for uranium appears to have been in vain. But the claim that Iraq didn't seek uranium is simply false. News organizations that repeat it are serving, wittingly or unwittingly, as propaganda outlets for those who oppose the U.S. war effort.
By 21-10, the House oversight committee voted to issue a subpoena to Rice to compel her story on the Bush administration's claim, now discredited, that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa.
The New York Times, in a story posted on its Web site yesterday, similarly referred to the claim as "discredited," but this reference later was edited out. Reuters refers to the "administration's warnings, later proven false, that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger for nuclear arms."
In fact, the claim has not been disproved or discredited at all, as the nonpartisan Factcheck.org explained in 2004:
After nearly a six-month investigation, a special panel reported to the British Parliament July 14 that British intelligence had indeed concluded back in 2002 that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy uranium. The review panel was headed by Lord Butler of Brockwell, who had been a cabinet secretary under five different Prime Ministers and who is currently master of University College, Oxford.
The Butler report said British intelligence had "credible" information--from several sources--that a 1999 visit by Iraqi officials to Niger was for the purpose of buying uranium:
Butler Report: It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999. The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.
The Butler Report affirmed what the British government had said about the Niger uranium story back in 2003, and specifically endorsed what [President] Bush said [in that year's State of the Union Address] as well.
The erstwhile Iraqi regime's quest for uranium appears to have been in vain. But the claim that Iraq didn't seek uranium is simply false. News organizations that repeat it are serving, wittingly or unwittingly, as propaganda outlets for those who oppose the U.S. war effort.
Stone Cold Tony Stewart Tells It Like It Is
If only Don Imus had thought of this. Tony Stewart says he was fighting a fever on Tuesday night on his weekly radio show when he accused NASCAR of rigging their races like professional wrestling, which is a big insult to either NASCAR or professional wrestling, we're not sure which.
"I guess NASCAR thinks 'Hey, wrestling worked, and it was for the most part staged, so I guess it's going to work in racing, too,"' Stewart said on his show on Sirius rado. "I can't understand how long the fans are going to let NASCAR treat them like they're stupid before the fans finally turn on NASCAR. I don't know that they've run a fair race all year."
NASCAR officials said that there were an abundance of caution flags during Sunday's Subway Fresh Fit 500 at the Phoenix International Raceway due to "debris on the track." All the flags caused a number of lead changes, with Jeff Gordon edging Stewart for first place. NASCAR will not fine Stewart for his comments; you get to talk smack about officials in racing! However you cannot do this.
If only Don Imus had thought of this. Tony Stewart says he was fighting a fever on Tuesday night on his weekly radio show when he accused NASCAR of rigging their races like professional wrestling, which is a big insult to either NASCAR or professional wrestling, we're not sure which.
"I guess NASCAR thinks 'Hey, wrestling worked, and it was for the most part staged, so I guess it's going to work in racing, too,"' Stewart said on his show on Sirius rado. "I can't understand how long the fans are going to let NASCAR treat them like they're stupid before the fans finally turn on NASCAR. I don't know that they've run a fair race all year."
NASCAR officials said that there were an abundance of caution flags during Sunday's Subway Fresh Fit 500 at the Phoenix International Raceway due to "debris on the track." All the flags caused a number of lead changes, with Jeff Gordon edging Stewart for first place. NASCAR will not fine Stewart for his comments; you get to talk smack about officials in racing! However you cannot do this.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
BURRITO IN MASKED MOLESTER'S TIGHTS
By TODD VENEZIA
X-MAN:A bar-spangled "Captain America" (above) got busted for fondling a woman and showing her his burrito during a boozy Florida jaunt. Cops said the superzero's secret identity is Dr. Raymond Adamcik.
April 25, 2007 -- A doctor in a Captain America costume went from superhero to super villain when he stuffed a burrito in his tights and groped a woman in a bar, cops said.
Dr. Raymond Adamcik - who hails from New Jersey and attended the state's University of Medicine - was busted Saturday while partying with a group of doctors all dressed as comic-book characters in Melbourne, Fla., according to published reports.
Things got ugly when he and his costumed comrades arrived by bus at the On Tap Café for a few libations.
"It was just a group of doctors that were traveling throughout the city going from bar to bar," a Melbourne police spokeswoman told a local TV station.
The red-white-and-blue-clad "captain" allegedly staggered up to a woman, pointed out the Mexican delicacy in his spandex pants and grabbed her in a private place.
Her boyfriend turned into the real hero when he fought off the mauling medic, knocking him to the ground before calling cops.
Police had trouble finding the real perp because so many of the other doctors at the party were also dressed as Captain America.
The officers had to take everyone dressed as the patriotic hero - at least five revelers - out of the bar and place them in an impromptu line-up.
The victim picked out Adamcik as the graphic groper.
"I guess when you add liquor and superhero costumes, it creates stuff like this," tavern owner Darlene Munson told the Orlando Sentinel.
The Brevard County, Fla., doctor allegedly made things worse for himself when he was caught trying to flush a marijuana joint down a toilet in the town's jail.
The internal-medicine doc - who had reportedly never been in trouble before - was charged with battery, disorderly conduct and drug possession.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Potentially Habitable Planet Found
Email this StoryApr 24, 7:00 PM (ET)By SETH BORENSTEIN
WASHINGTON (AP) - For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for "life in the universe."
The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a "red dwarf," is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun.
There's still a lot that is unknown about the new planet, which could be deemed inhospitable to life once more is known about it. And it's worth noting that scientists' requirements for habitability count Mars in that category: a size relatively similar to Earth's with temperatures that would permit liquid water. However, this is the first outside our solar system that meets those standards.
"It's a significant step on the way to finding possible life in the universe," said University of Geneva astronomer Michel Mayor, one of 11 European scientists on the team that found the planet. "It's a nice discovery. We still have a lot of questions."
Email this StoryApr 24, 7:00 PM (ET)By SETH BORENSTEIN
WASHINGTON (AP) - For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for "life in the universe."
The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a "red dwarf," is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun.
There's still a lot that is unknown about the new planet, which could be deemed inhospitable to life once more is known about it. And it's worth noting that scientists' requirements for habitability count Mars in that category: a size relatively similar to Earth's with temperatures that would permit liquid water. However, this is the first outside our solar system that meets those standards.
"It's a significant step on the way to finding possible life in the universe," said University of Geneva astronomer Michel Mayor, one of 11 European scientists on the team that found the planet. "It's a nice discovery. We still have a lot of questions."
Friday, April 20, 2007
BBC Series: Anti-Americanism Examined
'Death to US': Anti-Americanism examined
The US is perceived by many as an international bully, a modern day imperial power. At this critical moment in history, Washington correspondent Justin Webb challenges that idea.
He argues anti-Americanism is often a cover for hatreds with little justification in fact. His three part series takes him to Cairo, Caracas and Washington but it begins where anti-Americanism began - in Paris.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6547881.stm
The US is perceived by many as an international bully, a modern day imperial power. At this critical moment in history, Washington correspondent Justin Webb challenges that idea.
He argues anti-Americanism is often a cover for hatreds with little justification in fact. His three part series takes him to Cairo, Caracas and Washington but it begins where anti-Americanism began - in Paris.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6547881.stm
"Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious."
-- Ayatollah Khomeini, quoted in Amir Taheri, Amir Taheri, The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution, Adler and Adler, 1986, p. 259.
-- Ayatollah Khomeini, quoted in Amir Taheri, Amir Taheri, The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution, Adler and Adler, 1986, p. 259.
PEGGY NOONAN
Cold Standard
Virginia Tech and the heartlessness of our media and therapy culture.
Friday, April 20, 2007 12:01 a.m.
I saw an old friend on the Acela on the way to Washington, and he told me of the glum, grim faces at the station he'd left, all the commuters with newspapers in their hands and under their arms. This was the day after Virginia Tech. We talked about what was different this time, in this tragedy. I told him I felt people were stricken because they weren't stricken. When Columbine happened, it was weird and terrible, and now there have been some incidents since, and now it's not weird anymore. And that is what's so terrible. It's the difference between "That doesn't happen!" and "That happens."
Actually I thought of Thoreau. He said he didn't have to read newspapers because if you're familiar with a principle you don't have to be familiar with its numerous applications. If you know lightning hits trees, you don't have to know every time a tree is struck by lightning.
In terms of school shootings, we are now familiar with the principle.
Dennis Miller the other night said something compassionate and sensible on TV. Invited to criticize some famous person's stupid response to a past tragedy, he said he sort of applied a 48 hour grace period after a tragedy and didn't hold anyone to the things they'd said. People get rattled and say things that are extreme.
But more than 48 hours have passed. So: some impressions.
There seems to me a sort of broad national diminution of common sense in our country that we don't notice in the day-to-day but that become obvious after a story like this. Common sense says a person like Cho Seung-hui, who was obviously dangerous and unstable, should have been separated from the college population. Common sense says someone should have stepped in like an adult, like a person in authority, and taken him away. It is only common sense that if a person like Cho leaves a self-aggrandizing, self-celebrating, self-pitying video diary of himself to be played by the mass media, the mass media should not play it and not publicize it, not make it famous. Common sense says that won't help.
And all those big cops, scores of them, hundreds, with the latest, heaviest, most sophisticated gear, all the weapons and helmets and safety vests and belts. It looked like the brute force of the state coming up against uncontrollable human will.
But it also looked muscle bound. And the schools themselves more and more look muscle bound, weighed down with laws and legal assumptions and strange prohibitions.
The school officials I saw, especially the head of the campus psychological services, seemed to me endearing losers. But endearing is too strong. I mean "not obviously and vividly offensive." The school officials who gave all the highly competent, almost smooth and practiced news conferences seemed to me like white, bearded people who were educated in softness. Cho was "troubled"; he clearly had "issues"; it would have been good if someone had "reached out"; it's too bad America doesn't have better "support services." They don't use direct, clear words, because if they're blunt, they're implicated.
The literally white-bearded academic who was head of the campus counseling center was on Paula Zahn Wednesday night suggesting the utter incompetence of officials to stop a man who had stalked two women, set a fire in his room, written morbid and violent plays and poems, been expelled from one class, and been declared by a judge to be "mentally ill" was due to the lack of a government "safety net." In a news conference, he decried inadequate "funding for mental health services in the United States." Way to take responsibility. Way to show the kids how to dodge.
The anxiety of our politicians that there may be an issue that goes unexploited was almost--almost--comic. They mean to seem sensitive, and yet wind up only stroking their supporters. I believe Rep. Jim Moran was first out of the gate with the charge that what Cho did was President Bush's fault. I believe Sen. Barack Obama was second, equating the literal killing of humans with verbal coarseness. Wednesday there was Sen. Barbara Boxer equating the violence of the shootings with the "global warming challenge" and "today's Supreme Court decision" upholding a ban on partial-birth abortion.
One watches all of this and wonders: Where are the grown-ups?
I wondered about the emptiness of the phrases used by the media and by political figures, and how pro forma and lifeless and cold they are. The formalized language of loss hasn't kept up with the number of tragedies. "A nation mourns." "Our prayers are with you." The latter is both self-complimenting and of dubious believability. Did you really pray? Or is it just a phrase?
And this as opposed to the honest things normal people say: "Oh no." "I am so sorry." "I'm sad." "It's horrible."
With all the therapy in our great therapized nation, with all our devotion to emotions and feelings, one senses we are becoming a colder culture, and a colder country. We purport to be compassionate--we must respect Mr. Cho's privacy rights and personal autonomy--but of course it is cold not to have protected others from him. It is cold not to have protected him from himself.
The last testament Cho sent to NBC seemed more clear evidence of mental illness--posing with his pistols, big tough gangsta gonna take you out. What is it evidence of when NBC News, a great pillar of the mainstream media, runs the videos and pictures on the nightly news? Brian Williams introduced the Cho collection as "what can only be described as a multi-media manifesto." But it can be described in other ways. "The self-serving meanderings of a crazy, self-indulgent narcissist" is one. But if you called it that, you couldn't lead with it. You couldn't rationalize the decision.
Such pictures are inspiring to the unstable. The minute you saw them, you probably thought what I did: We'll be seeing more of that.
The most common-sensical thing I heard said came Thursday morning, in a hospital interview with a student who'd been shot and was recovering. Garrett Evans said of the man who'd shot him, "An evil spirit was going through that boy, I could feel it." It was one of the few things I heard the past few days that sounded completely true. Whatever else Cho was, he was also a walking infestation of evil. Too bad nobody stopped him. Too bad nobody moved.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.
Cold Standard
Virginia Tech and the heartlessness of our media and therapy culture.
Friday, April 20, 2007 12:01 a.m.
I saw an old friend on the Acela on the way to Washington, and he told me of the glum, grim faces at the station he'd left, all the commuters with newspapers in their hands and under their arms. This was the day after Virginia Tech. We talked about what was different this time, in this tragedy. I told him I felt people were stricken because they weren't stricken. When Columbine happened, it was weird and terrible, and now there have been some incidents since, and now it's not weird anymore. And that is what's so terrible. It's the difference between "That doesn't happen!" and "That happens."
Actually I thought of Thoreau. He said he didn't have to read newspapers because if you're familiar with a principle you don't have to be familiar with its numerous applications. If you know lightning hits trees, you don't have to know every time a tree is struck by lightning.
In terms of school shootings, we are now familiar with the principle.
Dennis Miller the other night said something compassionate and sensible on TV. Invited to criticize some famous person's stupid response to a past tragedy, he said he sort of applied a 48 hour grace period after a tragedy and didn't hold anyone to the things they'd said. People get rattled and say things that are extreme.
But more than 48 hours have passed. So: some impressions.
There seems to me a sort of broad national diminution of common sense in our country that we don't notice in the day-to-day but that become obvious after a story like this. Common sense says a person like Cho Seung-hui, who was obviously dangerous and unstable, should have been separated from the college population. Common sense says someone should have stepped in like an adult, like a person in authority, and taken him away. It is only common sense that if a person like Cho leaves a self-aggrandizing, self-celebrating, self-pitying video diary of himself to be played by the mass media, the mass media should not play it and not publicize it, not make it famous. Common sense says that won't help.
And all those big cops, scores of them, hundreds, with the latest, heaviest, most sophisticated gear, all the weapons and helmets and safety vests and belts. It looked like the brute force of the state coming up against uncontrollable human will.
But it also looked muscle bound. And the schools themselves more and more look muscle bound, weighed down with laws and legal assumptions and strange prohibitions.
The school officials I saw, especially the head of the campus psychological services, seemed to me endearing losers. But endearing is too strong. I mean "not obviously and vividly offensive." The school officials who gave all the highly competent, almost smooth and practiced news conferences seemed to me like white, bearded people who were educated in softness. Cho was "troubled"; he clearly had "issues"; it would have been good if someone had "reached out"; it's too bad America doesn't have better "support services." They don't use direct, clear words, because if they're blunt, they're implicated.
The literally white-bearded academic who was head of the campus counseling center was on Paula Zahn Wednesday night suggesting the utter incompetence of officials to stop a man who had stalked two women, set a fire in his room, written morbid and violent plays and poems, been expelled from one class, and been declared by a judge to be "mentally ill" was due to the lack of a government "safety net." In a news conference, he decried inadequate "funding for mental health services in the United States." Way to take responsibility. Way to show the kids how to dodge.
The anxiety of our politicians that there may be an issue that goes unexploited was almost--almost--comic. They mean to seem sensitive, and yet wind up only stroking their supporters. I believe Rep. Jim Moran was first out of the gate with the charge that what Cho did was President Bush's fault. I believe Sen. Barack Obama was second, equating the literal killing of humans with verbal coarseness. Wednesday there was Sen. Barbara Boxer equating the violence of the shootings with the "global warming challenge" and "today's Supreme Court decision" upholding a ban on partial-birth abortion.
One watches all of this and wonders: Where are the grown-ups?
I wondered about the emptiness of the phrases used by the media and by political figures, and how pro forma and lifeless and cold they are. The formalized language of loss hasn't kept up with the number of tragedies. "A nation mourns." "Our prayers are with you." The latter is both self-complimenting and of dubious believability. Did you really pray? Or is it just a phrase?
And this as opposed to the honest things normal people say: "Oh no." "I am so sorry." "I'm sad." "It's horrible."
With all the therapy in our great therapized nation, with all our devotion to emotions and feelings, one senses we are becoming a colder culture, and a colder country. We purport to be compassionate--we must respect Mr. Cho's privacy rights and personal autonomy--but of course it is cold not to have protected others from him. It is cold not to have protected him from himself.
The last testament Cho sent to NBC seemed more clear evidence of mental illness--posing with his pistols, big tough gangsta gonna take you out. What is it evidence of when NBC News, a great pillar of the mainstream media, runs the videos and pictures on the nightly news? Brian Williams introduced the Cho collection as "what can only be described as a multi-media manifesto." But it can be described in other ways. "The self-serving meanderings of a crazy, self-indulgent narcissist" is one. But if you called it that, you couldn't lead with it. You couldn't rationalize the decision.
Such pictures are inspiring to the unstable. The minute you saw them, you probably thought what I did: We'll be seeing more of that.
The most common-sensical thing I heard said came Thursday morning, in a hospital interview with a student who'd been shot and was recovering. Garrett Evans said of the man who'd shot him, "An evil spirit was going through that boy, I could feel it." It was one of the few things I heard the past few days that sounded completely true. Whatever else Cho was, he was also a walking infestation of evil. Too bad nobody stopped him. Too bad nobody moved.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
On this day...
April 19:
1775 - The American Revolutionary War began with the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
Records are made to be broken
DUII driver blows a .47, new Washington state record
Posted by The Oregonian April 19, 2007 08:10AM
A Woodinville, Wash., woman arrested following two car crashes last week registered a .47 blood-alcohol content on a breath test - nearly six times the legal intoxication threshold and a state record, according to the Seattle Times.
Deana F. Jarrett, 54, was taken to Evergreen Hospital as a precaution following her arrest April 11, the Washington State Patrol said Wednesday. She was described as combative and held with soft restraints. No one was injured in the accidents.
"Someone who is an alcoholic will tolerate a higher blood-alcohol level," said Lynne Freeman, a doctor at Group Health's urgent-care clinic on Capitol Hill. "In someone who is not an alcoholic, they could die somewhere between 0.4 and 0.5."
For someone Jarrett's size -- 5 feet 5 inches and 130 to 140 pounds -- it would take about a fifth of liquor, 25.6 ounces, in a short period of time, to reach that blood-alcohol level, Freeman said.
"It would be many drinks," she said, and "probably straight alcohol rather than beer."
Of 356,000 breath tests administered since 1998 in Washington turned up only 35 above .40 - and none of those was higher than .45.
Posted by The Oregonian April 19, 2007 08:10AM
A Woodinville, Wash., woman arrested following two car crashes last week registered a .47 blood-alcohol content on a breath test - nearly six times the legal intoxication threshold and a state record, according to the Seattle Times.
Deana F. Jarrett, 54, was taken to Evergreen Hospital as a precaution following her arrest April 11, the Washington State Patrol said Wednesday. She was described as combative and held with soft restraints. No one was injured in the accidents.
"Someone who is an alcoholic will tolerate a higher blood-alcohol level," said Lynne Freeman, a doctor at Group Health's urgent-care clinic on Capitol Hill. "In someone who is not an alcoholic, they could die somewhere between 0.4 and 0.5."
For someone Jarrett's size -- 5 feet 5 inches and 130 to 140 pounds -- it would take about a fifth of liquor, 25.6 ounces, in a short period of time, to reach that blood-alcohol level, Freeman said.
"It would be many drinks," she said, and "probably straight alcohol rather than beer."
Of 356,000 breath tests administered since 1998 in Washington turned up only 35 above .40 - and none of those was higher than .45.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
http://blog.sportscolumn.com/
A couple of weeks ago, we told you about the fat guy who was running the Boston Marathon for charity. We had his chances of finishing the thing about the same as the Royals winning the World Series. Well, guess what? He did. In 9 hours and 40 minutes.
Boston Marathon... check.
I'm pretty sure that by the time I finished, the Kenyans were already back in Africa celebrating.
I'd also like to congratulate the 122-year old guy who passed me around mile 13. I have no idea if he finished but as he passed me -- he took with him any and all self-resecpt that I may have ha
Well done, Jacob. The guy lost 100 pounds and ran the Boston Marathon. Hell, it's quite a feat even if he walked for most of it. It doesn't look like anyone actually ponied up for his auction for charity on ebay. But he did something most of us wouldn't even attempt. And most of us didn't look like this.
Boston Marathon... check.
I'm pretty sure that by the time I finished, the Kenyans were already back in Africa celebrating.
I'd also like to congratulate the 122-year old guy who passed me around mile 13. I have no idea if he finished but as he passed me -- he took with him any and all self-resecpt that I may have ha
Well done, Jacob. The guy lost 100 pounds and ran the Boston Marathon. Hell, it's quite a feat even if he walked for most of it. It doesn't look like anyone actually ponied up for his auction for charity on ebay. But he did something most of us wouldn't even attempt. And most of us didn't look like this.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Roster of the 1976-77 NBA Champion Trail Blazers
4/17/2007, 2:52 p.m. PT
The Associated Press
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Roster of the Trail Blazers' 1976-77 NBA Championship team with number, name, position, birth date and college.
20, Maurice Lucas, F/C, 7/18/52, Marquette
32, Bill Walton, F/C, 11/5/52, UCLA
14, Lionel Hollins, G, 10/9/53, Arizona State
30, Bob Gross, F/G, 8/3/53, St. John's
15, Larry Steele, G/F, 5/4/49, Kentucky
13, Dave Twardzik, G, 9/20/50, Old Dominion
3, Herm Gilliam, C, 5/21/78, Purdue
16, Johnny Davis, G, 10/21/55, Dayton
36, Lloyd Neal, C/F, 12/10/50, Tennessee State
34, Robin Jones, F/C, 2/2/54, St. Louis
42, Wally Walker, F, 6/18/54, Virginia
10, Corky Calhoun, F, 11/1/50, Pennsylvania
4/17/2007, 2:52 p.m. PT
The Associated Press
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Roster of the Trail Blazers' 1976-77 NBA Championship team with number, name, position, birth date and college.
20, Maurice Lucas, F/C, 7/18/52, Marquette
32, Bill Walton, F/C, 11/5/52, UCLA
14, Lionel Hollins, G, 10/9/53, Arizona State
30, Bob Gross, F/G, 8/3/53, St. John's
15, Larry Steele, G/F, 5/4/49, Kentucky
13, Dave Twardzik, G, 9/20/50, Old Dominion
3, Herm Gilliam, C, 5/21/78, Purdue
16, Johnny Davis, G, 10/21/55, Dayton
36, Lloyd Neal, C/F, 12/10/50, Tennessee State
34, Robin Jones, F/C, 2/2/54, St. Louis
42, Wally Walker, F, 6/18/54, Virginia
10, Corky Calhoun, F, 11/1/50, Pennsylvania
So some of you might have seen the video of the infamous pizza-throwing incident at Fenway Park yesterday, but if you haven't -- and you haven't heard Jerry Remy and Co's hilarious commentary on NESN -- it's above. The NESN announcers didn't have the ability to talk to the fans, though, so The Boston Herald takes care of that. It's ultimately a tale of fans shit-talking each other and one beleaguered Boston girlfriend just trying to keep the peace while her drunken Red Sox boyfriend wants to fight. Boston ladies ... this is pretty much what every day is like, right?
Basically, the guy who missed the ball and received the pizza toss had, earlier in the game, been mocking the pizza tosser for eating a pizza in the stands. So when he missed the foul ball, all was fair game.
"They had been giving us shit about it," Madore said. "Next thing I know, there's a fly ball to left field and it goes foul and my buddy says, 'You want some pizza now?' And he hits him right in the face. Hey, the guy wasn't paying attention. When you're in the stands you've got to be ready for anything - a foul ball, a flying slice of pizza, everything."
Basically, the guy who missed the ball and received the pizza toss had, earlier in the game, been mocking the pizza tosser for eating a pizza in the stands. So when he missed the foul ball, all was fair game.
"They had been giving us shit about it," Madore said. "Next thing I know, there's a fly ball to left field and it goes foul and my buddy says, 'You want some pizza now?' And he hits him right in the face. Hey, the guy wasn't paying attention. When you're in the stands you've got to be ready for anything - a foul ball, a flying slice of pizza, everything."
Friday, April 13, 2007
I am that I am
I am that I am (Hebrew: אהיה אשר אהיה, pronounced Ehyeh asher ehyeh) is one English translation of the response God used in the Bible when Moses asked for his name (Exodus 3:14). It is one of the most famous verses in the Torah. Hayah means "existed" or "was" in Hebrew; "ehyeh" is the first person singular present/future form. Ehyeh asher ehyeh is generally interpreted to mean I am that I am (King James Bible and others), yet, as indicated, is most literally translated as "I-shall-be that I-shall-be."
Catholic Church interpretation
The Catholic Church's interpretation has been summarized in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a product of twenty centuries of theology and teaching since the establishment of the Church in the year 33 AD, and adapted from the Catechism of the 16th century Council of Trent. The interpretation is found in numbers 203-213.
Some of the salient points are the following:
206 In revealing his mysterious name, YHWH ("I AM HE WHO IS", "I AM WHO AM" or "I AM WHO I AM"), God says who he is and by what name he is to be called. This divine name is mysterious just as God is mystery. It is at once a name revealed and something like the refusal of a name, and hence it better expresses God as what he is - infinitely above everything that we can understand or say: he is the "hidden God", his name is ineffable, and he is the God who makes himself close to men.
207 God, who reveals his name as "I AM", reveals himself as the God who is always there, present to his people in order to save them.
Catholic Church interpretation
The Catholic Church's interpretation has been summarized in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a product of twenty centuries of theology and teaching since the establishment of the Church in the year 33 AD, and adapted from the Catechism of the 16th century Council of Trent. The interpretation is found in numbers 203-213.
Some of the salient points are the following:
206 In revealing his mysterious name, YHWH ("I AM HE WHO IS", "I AM WHO AM" or "I AM WHO I AM"), God says who he is and by what name he is to be called. This divine name is mysterious just as God is mystery. It is at once a name revealed and something like the refusal of a name, and hence it better expresses God as what he is - infinitely above everything that we can understand or say: he is the "hidden God", his name is ineffable, and he is the God who makes himself close to men.
207 God, who reveals his name as "I AM", reveals himself as the God who is always there, present to his people in order to save them.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
April 12, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut, Counterculture’s Novelist, Dies
By DINITIA SMITH
Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.
Mr. Vonnegut suffered irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, according to his wife, Jill Krementz.
Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.
Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?
He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,” “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.”
Not all Mr. Vonnegut’s themes were metaphysical. With a blend of vernacular writing, science fiction, jokes and philosophy, he also wrote about the banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the environment.
His novels — 14 in all — were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago “filled with bittersweet lies,” a narrator says).
The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. “The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”
His experience in Dresden was the basis of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, “so perfectly caught America’s transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age.”
To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” summed up his philosophy:
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”
Mr. Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were a mixture of fiction and autobiography, prone to one-sentence paragraphs, exclamation points and italics. Graham Greene called him “one of the most able of living American writers.” Some critics said he had invented a new literary type, infusing the science-fiction form with humor and moral relevance and elevating it to serious literature.
He was also accused of repeating himself, of recycling themes and characters. Some readers found his work incoherent. His harshest critics called him no more than a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty aphorisms.
With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor, typically chain smoking, his conversation punctuated with coughs and wheezes. But he also maintained a certain celebrity, as a regular on panels and at literary parties in Manhattan and on the East End of Long Island, where he lived near his friend and fellow war veteran Joseph Heller, another darkly comic literary hero of the age.
Mr. Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922, the youngest of three children. His father, Kurt Sr., was an architect. His mother, Edith, came from a wealthy brewery family. Mr. Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard, who died in 1997, was a physicist and an expert on thunderstorms.
During the Depression, the elder Vonnegut went for long stretches without work, and Mrs. Vonnegut suffered from episodes of mental illness. “When my mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote. She committed suicide, an act that haunted her son for the rest of his life.
He had, he said, a lifelong difficulty with women. He remembered an aunt once telling him, “All Vonnegut men are scared to death of women.”
“My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside,” he wrote.
Mr. Vonnegut went east to attend Cornell University, but he enlisted in the Army before he could get a degree. The Army initially sent him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.
In 1944 he was shipped to Europe with the 106th Infantry Division and shortly saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge. With his unit nearly destroyed, he wandered behind enemy lines for several days until he was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp near Dresden, the architectural jewel of Germany.
Assigned by his captors to make vitamin supplements, he was working with other prisoners in an underground meat locker when British and American warplanes started carpet bombing the city, creating a firestorm above him. The work detail saved his life.
Afterward, he and his fellow prisoners were assigned to remove the dead.
“The corpses, most of them in ordinary cellars, were so numerous and represented such a health hazard that they were cremated on huge funeral pyres, or by flamethrowers whose nozzles were thrust into the cellars, without being counted or identified,” he wrote in “Fates Worse Than Death.” When the war ended, Mr. Vonnegut returned to the United States and married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox. They settled in Chicago in 1945. The couple had three children, Mark, Edith and Nanette. In 1958, Mr. Vonnegut’s sister, Alice, and her husband died within a day of each other, she of cancer and he in a train crash. The Vonneguts took custody of their children, Tiger, Jim and Steven.
In Chicago, Mr. Vonnegut worked as a police reporter for the City News Bureau. He also studied for a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, writing a thesis on “The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales.” It was rejected unanimously by the faculty. (The university finally awarded him a degree almost a quarter of a century later, allowing him to use his novel “Cat’s Cradle” as his thesis.)
In 1947, he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and took a job in public relations for the General Electric Company. Three years later he sold his first short story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” to Collier’s magazine and decided to move his family to Cape Cod, Mass., where he wrote fiction for magazines like Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. To bolster his income, he taught emotionally disturbed children, worked at an advertising agency and at one point started a Saab auto dealership.
His first novel was “Player Piano,” published in 1952. A satire on corporate life — the meetings, the pep talks, the cultivation of bosses — it also carries echoes of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” It concerns an engineer, Paul Proteus, who is employed by the Ilium Works, a company similar to General Electric. Proteus becomes the leader of a band of revolutionaries who destroy machines that they think are taking over the world.
“Player Piano” was followed in 1959 by “The Sirens of Titan,” a science-fiction novel featuring the Church of God of the Utterly Indifferent. In 1961 he published “Mother Night,” involving an American writer awaiting trial in Israel on charges of war crimes in Nazi Germany. Like Mr. Vonnegut’s other early novels, they were published as paperback originals. And like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” in 1972, and a number of other Vonnegut novels, “Mother Night” was adapted for film, in 1996, starring Nick Nolte.
In 1963, Mr. Vonnegut published “Cat’s Cradle.” Though it initially sold only about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English classes. The novel, which takes its title from an Eskimo game in which children try to snare the sun with string, is an autobiographical work about a family named Hoenikker. The narrator, an adherent of the religion Bokononism, is writing a book about the bombing of Hiroshima and comes to witness the destruction of the world by something called Ice-Nine, which, on contact, causes all water to freeze at room temperature.
Mr. Vonnegut shed the label of science-fiction writer with “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout (as Mr. Vonnegut was), who discovers the horror of war. “You know — we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves,” an English colonel says in the book. “We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. My God, my God — I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’ ”
As Mr. Vonnegut was, Billy is captured and assigned to manufacture vitamin supplements in an underground meat locker, where the prisoners take refuge from Allied bombing.
In “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Mr. Vonnegut introduced the recurring character of Kilgore Trout, his fictional alter ego. The novel also featured a signature Vonnegut phrase.
“Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote at the end of the book, “was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
“Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.”
One of many Zenlike words and phrases that run through Mr. Vonnegut’s books, “so it goes” became a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam war.
“Slaughterhouse-Five” reached No.1 on best-seller lists, making Mr. Vonnegut a cult hero. Some schools and libraries have banned it because of its sexual content, rough language and scenes of violence.
After the book was published, Mr. Vonnegut went into a severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation, he wrote. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol.
“The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem,” he wrote. His son Mark also suffered a breakdown, in the 1970s, from which he recovered, writing about it in a book, “The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity.”
Forsaking novels, Mr. Vonnegut decided to become a playwright. His first effort, “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” opened Off Broadway in 1970 to mixed reviews. Around this time he separated from his wife and moved to New York. (She remarried and died in 1986.)
In 1970, Mr. Vonnegut moved in with the author and photographer Jill Krementz, whom he married in 1979. They had a daughter, Lily. They survive him, as do all his other children.
Mr. Vonnegut returned to novels with “Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday” (1973), calling it a “tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.” This time his alter ego is Philboyd Sludge, who is writing a book about Dwayne Hoover, a wealthy auto dealer. Hoover has a breakdown after reading a novel written by Kilgore Trout, who reappears in this book, and begins to believe that everyone around him is a robot.
In 1997, Mr. Vonnegut published “Timequake,” a tale of the millennium in which a wrinkle in space-time compels the world to relive the 1990s. The book, based on an earlier failed novel of his, was, in his own words, “a stew” of plot summaries and autobiographical writings. Once again, Kilgore Trout is a character. “If I’d wasted my time creating characters,” Mr. Vonnegut said in defense of his “recycling,” “I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter.”
Though it was a best seller, it also met with mixed reviews. “Having a novelist’s free hand to write what you will does not mean you are entitled to a free ride,” R. Z. Sheppard wrote in Time. But the novelist Valerie Sayers, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote: “The real pleasure lies in Vonnegut’s transforming his continuing interest in the highly suspicious relationship between fact and fiction into the neatest trick yet played on a publishing world consumed with the furor over novel versus memoir.”
Mr. Vonnegut said in the prologue to “Timequake” that it would be his last novel. And so it was.
His last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, “A Man Without a Country.” It, too, was a best seller.
In concludes with a poem written by Mr. Vonnegut called “Requiem,” which has these closing lines:
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
Kurt Vonnegut, Counterculture’s Novelist, Dies
By DINITIA SMITH
Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.
Mr. Vonnegut suffered irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, according to his wife, Jill Krementz.
Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.
Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?
He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,” “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.”
Not all Mr. Vonnegut’s themes were metaphysical. With a blend of vernacular writing, science fiction, jokes and philosophy, he also wrote about the banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the environment.
His novels — 14 in all — were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago “filled with bittersweet lies,” a narrator says).
The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. “The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”
His experience in Dresden was the basis of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, “so perfectly caught America’s transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age.”
To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” summed up his philosophy:
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”
Mr. Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were a mixture of fiction and autobiography, prone to one-sentence paragraphs, exclamation points and italics. Graham Greene called him “one of the most able of living American writers.” Some critics said he had invented a new literary type, infusing the science-fiction form with humor and moral relevance and elevating it to serious literature.
He was also accused of repeating himself, of recycling themes and characters. Some readers found his work incoherent. His harshest critics called him no more than a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty aphorisms.
With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor, typically chain smoking, his conversation punctuated with coughs and wheezes. But he also maintained a certain celebrity, as a regular on panels and at literary parties in Manhattan and on the East End of Long Island, where he lived near his friend and fellow war veteran Joseph Heller, another darkly comic literary hero of the age.
Mr. Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922, the youngest of three children. His father, Kurt Sr., was an architect. His mother, Edith, came from a wealthy brewery family. Mr. Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard, who died in 1997, was a physicist and an expert on thunderstorms.
During the Depression, the elder Vonnegut went for long stretches without work, and Mrs. Vonnegut suffered from episodes of mental illness. “When my mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote. She committed suicide, an act that haunted her son for the rest of his life.
He had, he said, a lifelong difficulty with women. He remembered an aunt once telling him, “All Vonnegut men are scared to death of women.”
“My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside,” he wrote.
Mr. Vonnegut went east to attend Cornell University, but he enlisted in the Army before he could get a degree. The Army initially sent him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.
In 1944 he was shipped to Europe with the 106th Infantry Division and shortly saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge. With his unit nearly destroyed, he wandered behind enemy lines for several days until he was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp near Dresden, the architectural jewel of Germany.
Assigned by his captors to make vitamin supplements, he was working with other prisoners in an underground meat locker when British and American warplanes started carpet bombing the city, creating a firestorm above him. The work detail saved his life.
Afterward, he and his fellow prisoners were assigned to remove the dead.
“The corpses, most of them in ordinary cellars, were so numerous and represented such a health hazard that they were cremated on huge funeral pyres, or by flamethrowers whose nozzles were thrust into the cellars, without being counted or identified,” he wrote in “Fates Worse Than Death.” When the war ended, Mr. Vonnegut returned to the United States and married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox. They settled in Chicago in 1945. The couple had three children, Mark, Edith and Nanette. In 1958, Mr. Vonnegut’s sister, Alice, and her husband died within a day of each other, she of cancer and he in a train crash. The Vonneguts took custody of their children, Tiger, Jim and Steven.
In Chicago, Mr. Vonnegut worked as a police reporter for the City News Bureau. He also studied for a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, writing a thesis on “The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales.” It was rejected unanimously by the faculty. (The university finally awarded him a degree almost a quarter of a century later, allowing him to use his novel “Cat’s Cradle” as his thesis.)
In 1947, he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and took a job in public relations for the General Electric Company. Three years later he sold his first short story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” to Collier’s magazine and decided to move his family to Cape Cod, Mass., where he wrote fiction for magazines like Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. To bolster his income, he taught emotionally disturbed children, worked at an advertising agency and at one point started a Saab auto dealership.
His first novel was “Player Piano,” published in 1952. A satire on corporate life — the meetings, the pep talks, the cultivation of bosses — it also carries echoes of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” It concerns an engineer, Paul Proteus, who is employed by the Ilium Works, a company similar to General Electric. Proteus becomes the leader of a band of revolutionaries who destroy machines that they think are taking over the world.
“Player Piano” was followed in 1959 by “The Sirens of Titan,” a science-fiction novel featuring the Church of God of the Utterly Indifferent. In 1961 he published “Mother Night,” involving an American writer awaiting trial in Israel on charges of war crimes in Nazi Germany. Like Mr. Vonnegut’s other early novels, they were published as paperback originals. And like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” in 1972, and a number of other Vonnegut novels, “Mother Night” was adapted for film, in 1996, starring Nick Nolte.
In 1963, Mr. Vonnegut published “Cat’s Cradle.” Though it initially sold only about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English classes. The novel, which takes its title from an Eskimo game in which children try to snare the sun with string, is an autobiographical work about a family named Hoenikker. The narrator, an adherent of the religion Bokononism, is writing a book about the bombing of Hiroshima and comes to witness the destruction of the world by something called Ice-Nine, which, on contact, causes all water to freeze at room temperature.
Mr. Vonnegut shed the label of science-fiction writer with “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout (as Mr. Vonnegut was), who discovers the horror of war. “You know — we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves,” an English colonel says in the book. “We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. My God, my God — I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’ ”
As Mr. Vonnegut was, Billy is captured and assigned to manufacture vitamin supplements in an underground meat locker, where the prisoners take refuge from Allied bombing.
In “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Mr. Vonnegut introduced the recurring character of Kilgore Trout, his fictional alter ego. The novel also featured a signature Vonnegut phrase.
“Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote at the end of the book, “was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
“Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.”
One of many Zenlike words and phrases that run through Mr. Vonnegut’s books, “so it goes” became a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam war.
“Slaughterhouse-Five” reached No.1 on best-seller lists, making Mr. Vonnegut a cult hero. Some schools and libraries have banned it because of its sexual content, rough language and scenes of violence.
After the book was published, Mr. Vonnegut went into a severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation, he wrote. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol.
“The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem,” he wrote. His son Mark also suffered a breakdown, in the 1970s, from which he recovered, writing about it in a book, “The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity.”
Forsaking novels, Mr. Vonnegut decided to become a playwright. His first effort, “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” opened Off Broadway in 1970 to mixed reviews. Around this time he separated from his wife and moved to New York. (She remarried and died in 1986.)
In 1970, Mr. Vonnegut moved in with the author and photographer Jill Krementz, whom he married in 1979. They had a daughter, Lily. They survive him, as do all his other children.
Mr. Vonnegut returned to novels with “Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday” (1973), calling it a “tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.” This time his alter ego is Philboyd Sludge, who is writing a book about Dwayne Hoover, a wealthy auto dealer. Hoover has a breakdown after reading a novel written by Kilgore Trout, who reappears in this book, and begins to believe that everyone around him is a robot.
In 1997, Mr. Vonnegut published “Timequake,” a tale of the millennium in which a wrinkle in space-time compels the world to relive the 1990s. The book, based on an earlier failed novel of his, was, in his own words, “a stew” of plot summaries and autobiographical writings. Once again, Kilgore Trout is a character. “If I’d wasted my time creating characters,” Mr. Vonnegut said in defense of his “recycling,” “I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter.”
Though it was a best seller, it also met with mixed reviews. “Having a novelist’s free hand to write what you will does not mean you are entitled to a free ride,” R. Z. Sheppard wrote in Time. But the novelist Valerie Sayers, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote: “The real pleasure lies in Vonnegut’s transforming his continuing interest in the highly suspicious relationship between fact and fiction into the neatest trick yet played on a publishing world consumed with the furor over novel versus memoir.”
Mr. Vonnegut said in the prologue to “Timequake” that it would be his last novel. And so it was.
His last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, “A Man Without a Country.” It, too, was a best seller.
In concludes with a poem written by Mr. Vonnegut called “Requiem,” which has these closing lines:
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Rocker's Soap Tests Positive for GHB
By Associated Press
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. - A soap manufacturer is coming to the defense of a punk rocker who was jailed after his bottle of liquid peppermint cleanser tested positive for gamma-hydroxybutyrate, or GHB, often called the "date-rape drug" because it leaves people groggy and powerless.
Germs drummer Don Bolles was arrested last week after police pulled over the 50-year-old musician on a traffic stop. Police said a toiletry kit containing denture glue, razors and a bottle of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap was found inside the vehicle.
A field test of the soap indicated it was GHB, said Sgt. Evan Sailor of the Newport Beach Police Department. Bolles, whose real name is Jimmy Michael Giorsetti, was arrested on suspicion of felony narcotics possession.
Bolles, who lives in Huntington Beach, was released from jail Sunday on $2,500 bond.
He told the Los Angeles Times he has been using Dr. Bronner's for 35 years, adding that the organic ingredients help give him the complexion of a 15-year-old girl.
"A date-rape drug is the last thing I need," he said. "If anything, I need a way to keep the girls off me. They make my girlfriend mad."
Executives at Escondido-based Dr. Bronner's hired an attorney, Bruce Margolin, to represent the rocker.
David Bronner, the company's president, said police field tests of Magic Soap have occasionally indicated THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, because the soap includes hemp oil. But he said finding GHB in the product is "beyond belief. ... The field test must have been flawed or tampered with."
The Orange County Crime Lab was conducting more tests.
The Germs, a punk band formed in Los Angeles in the 1970s, are credited with influencing generations of musicians and popularizing mohawks. Bolles took his name from Arizona Republic journalist Don Bolles, who was killed in 1976 by a car bomb while investigating corruption.
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. - A soap manufacturer is coming to the defense of a punk rocker who was jailed after his bottle of liquid peppermint cleanser tested positive for gamma-hydroxybutyrate, or GHB, often called the "date-rape drug" because it leaves people groggy and powerless.
Germs drummer Don Bolles was arrested last week after police pulled over the 50-year-old musician on a traffic stop. Police said a toiletry kit containing denture glue, razors and a bottle of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap was found inside the vehicle.
A field test of the soap indicated it was GHB, said Sgt. Evan Sailor of the Newport Beach Police Department. Bolles, whose real name is Jimmy Michael Giorsetti, was arrested on suspicion of felony narcotics possession.
Bolles, who lives in Huntington Beach, was released from jail Sunday on $2,500 bond.
He told the Los Angeles Times he has been using Dr. Bronner's for 35 years, adding that the organic ingredients help give him the complexion of a 15-year-old girl.
"A date-rape drug is the last thing I need," he said. "If anything, I need a way to keep the girls off me. They make my girlfriend mad."
Executives at Escondido-based Dr. Bronner's hired an attorney, Bruce Margolin, to represent the rocker.
David Bronner, the company's president, said police field tests of Magic Soap have occasionally indicated THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, because the soap includes hemp oil. But he said finding GHB in the product is "beyond belief. ... The field test must have been flawed or tampered with."
The Orange County Crime Lab was conducting more tests.
The Germs, a punk band formed in Los Angeles in the 1970s, are credited with influencing generations of musicians and popularizing mohawks. Bolles took his name from Arizona Republic journalist Don Bolles, who was killed in 1976 by a car bomb while investigating corruption.
America Alone
612 of 651 people found the following review helpful: "Some light reading for the new Dark Ages", September 25, 2006
Reviewer:
David McCune "self-deprecating and proud of it" (Tacoma, WA) - See all my reviews At least, that's how he signed my copy. I'd call Mark Steyn's essay the single best distillation of the challenge posed to the West by radical Islam that I have ever read. Regular readers of Mr. Steyn will not be unfamiliar with his central points: 1) In the ongoing conflict between the West and Islam, both the demographics and the will to power favor the Islamists. That a country like Spain, with a birth rate of 1.15 children per adult women, will extinguish itself in a few generations, while immigrants from countries such as Pakistan (birth rate 4.53) will move in to fill the vacuum. 2) That as an aggressive, unassimilated minority edges closer to a majority (as in France, with an estimated 30% Muslim population in the under 20 age group), the character of the democratic institutions will become more closely aligned with Islamic law and culture. 3) That the post-Christian welfare state is largely to blame for the pessimism and failures of will demonstrated by Europe. 4) That America represents the primary exception to this trend, if only by degree, and that only a concerted effort to save our society stands a chance of reversing these trends. That's a reasonable précis of Steyn's book, and he is certainly not unique in either his diagnosis or his prescription for the West. What sets this apart is his writing. The argument is made in a way that is the most engrossing and entertaining presentation of these ideas I've ever read. Steyn, as part of his superhuman writing regimen, is the obituarist for The Atlantic Monthly, and he puts that talent on display. This is not just a description of a set of demographic realities, but a loving, if premature (he hopes), obituary to a dying great culture. It's Steyn's ability to blend humor with the terminal diagnosis that sets him apart. Take the following, from letting the book fall open at random (pages 60-61), where Steyn weaves together these seemingly disparate ideas: a photo of Lincoln with his future assassin in near proximity, the globalization at the root of a bird flu scare ("Any minute now there would be toxic cockatoos over the white cliffs of Dover, and the East End would be reeling under a blitzkrieg of sneezing parakeets"), the Black Death in Europe in the 1340s, the exportation of radical Islam from the Bedouin to the West, and finally a quote for Dean Martin's old nightclub act. I can't even describe it adequately; Steyn actually pulls it off, brilliantly.
Reviewer:
David McCune "self-deprecating and proud of it" (Tacoma, WA) - See all my reviews At least, that's how he signed my copy. I'd call Mark Steyn's essay the single best distillation of the challenge posed to the West by radical Islam that I have ever read. Regular readers of Mr. Steyn will not be unfamiliar with his central points: 1) In the ongoing conflict between the West and Islam, both the demographics and the will to power favor the Islamists. That a country like Spain, with a birth rate of 1.15 children per adult women, will extinguish itself in a few generations, while immigrants from countries such as Pakistan (birth rate 4.53) will move in to fill the vacuum. 2) That as an aggressive, unassimilated minority edges closer to a majority (as in France, with an estimated 30% Muslim population in the under 20 age group), the character of the democratic institutions will become more closely aligned with Islamic law and culture. 3) That the post-Christian welfare state is largely to blame for the pessimism and failures of will demonstrated by Europe. 4) That America represents the primary exception to this trend, if only by degree, and that only a concerted effort to save our society stands a chance of reversing these trends. That's a reasonable précis of Steyn's book, and he is certainly not unique in either his diagnosis or his prescription for the West. What sets this apart is his writing. The argument is made in a way that is the most engrossing and entertaining presentation of these ideas I've ever read. Steyn, as part of his superhuman writing regimen, is the obituarist for The Atlantic Monthly, and he puts that talent on display. This is not just a description of a set of demographic realities, but a loving, if premature (he hopes), obituary to a dying great culture. It's Steyn's ability to blend humor with the terminal diagnosis that sets him apart. Take the following, from letting the book fall open at random (pages 60-61), where Steyn weaves together these seemingly disparate ideas: a photo of Lincoln with his future assassin in near proximity, the globalization at the root of a bird flu scare ("Any minute now there would be toxic cockatoos over the white cliffs of Dover, and the East End would be reeling under a blitzkrieg of sneezing parakeets"), the Black Death in Europe in the 1340s, the exportation of radical Islam from the Bedouin to the West, and finally a quote for Dean Martin's old nightclub act. I can't even describe it adequately; Steyn actually pulls it off, brilliantly.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Monday, April 09, 2007
No Such Thing As a 'Perfect' Temperature
By Richard S. Lindzen
Newsweek International
April 16, 2007 issue - Judging from the media in recent months, the debate over global warming is now over. There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true. What of it? Recently many people have said that the earth is facing a crisis requiring urgent action. This statement has nothing to do with science. There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators—and many scientists—seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes. The earth is always warming or cooling by as much as a few tenths of a degree a year; periods of constant average temperatures are rare. Looking back on the earth's climate history, it's apparent that there's no such thing as an optimal temperature—a climate at which everything is just right. The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman's forecast for next week.
A warmer climate could prove to be more beneficial than the one we have now. Much of the alarm over climate change is based on ignorance of what is normal for weather and climate. There is no evidence, for instance, that extreme weather events are increasing in any systematic way, according to scientists at the U.S. National Hurricane Center, the World Meteorological Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which released the second part of this year's report earlier this month). Indeed, meteorological theory holds that, outside the tropics, weather in a warming world should be less variable, which might be a good thing.
In many other respects, the ill effects of warming are overblown. Sea levels, for example, have been increasing since the end of the last ice age. When you look at recent centuries in perspective, ignoring short-term fluctuations, the rate of sea-level rise has been relatively uniform (less than a couple of millimeters a year). There's even some evidence that the rate was higher in the first half of the twentieth century than in the second half. Overall, the risk of sea-level rise from global warming is less at almost any given location than that from other causes, such as tectonic motions of the earth's surface.
Many of the most alarming studies rely on long-range predictions using inherently untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately forecast the weather a week from now. Interpretations of these studies rarely consider that the impact of carbon on temperature goes down—not up—the more carbon accumulates in the atmosphere. Even if emissions were the sole cause of the recent temperature rise—a dubious proposition—future increases wouldn't be as steep as the climb in emissions.
Indeed, one overlooked mystery is why temperatures are not already higher. Various models predict that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere will raise the world's average temperature by as little as 1.5 degrees Celsius or as much as 4.5 degrees. The important thing about doubled CO2 (or any other greenhouse gas) is its "forcing"—its contribution to warming. At present, the greenhouse forcing is already about three-quarters of what one would get from a doubling of CO2. But average temperatures rose only about 0.6 degrees since the beginning of the industrial era, and the change hasn't been uniform—warming has largely occurred during the periods from 1919 to 1940 and from 1976 to 1998, with cooling in between. Researchers have been unable to explain this discrepancy.
Modelers claim to have simulated the warming and cooling that occurred before 1976 by choosing among various guesses as to what effect poorly observed volcanoes and unmeasured output from the sun have had. These factors, they claim, don't explain the warming of about 0.4 degrees C between 1976 and 1998. Climate modelers assume the cause must be greenhouse-gas emissions because they have no other explanation. This is a poor substitute for evidence, and simulation hardly constitutes explanation. Ten years ago climate modelers also couldn't account for the warming that occurred from about 1050 to 1300. They tried to expunge the medieval warm period from the observational record—an effort that is now generally discredited. The models have also severely underestimated short-term variability El Niño and the Intraseasonal Oscillation. Such phenomena illustrate the ability of the complex and turbulent climate system to vary significantly with no external cause whatever, and to do so over many years, even centuries.
Is there any point in pretending that CO2 increases will be catastrophic? Or could they be modest and on balance beneficial? India has warmed during the second half of the 20th century, and agricultural output has increased greatly. Infectious diseases like malaria are a matter not so much of temperature as poverty and public-health policies (like eliminating DDT). Exposure to cold is generally found to be both more dangerous and less comfortable.
Moreover, actions taken thus far to reduce emissions have already had negative consequences without improving our ability to adapt to climate change. An emphasis on ethanol, for instance, has led to angry protests against corn-price increases in Mexico, and forest clearing and habitat destruction in Southeast Asia. Carbon caps are likely to lead to increased prices, as well as corruption associated with permit trading. (Enron was a leading lobbyist for Kyoto because it had hoped to capitalize on emissions trading.) The alleged solutions have more potential for catastrophe than the putative problem. The conclusion of the late climate scientist Roger Revelle—Al Gore's supposed mentor—is worth pondering: the evidence for global warming thus far doesn't warrant any action unless it is justifiable on grounds that have nothing to do with climate.
Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies.
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17997788/site/newsweek/
By Richard S. Lindzen
Newsweek International
April 16, 2007 issue - Judging from the media in recent months, the debate over global warming is now over. There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true. What of it? Recently many people have said that the earth is facing a crisis requiring urgent action. This statement has nothing to do with science. There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators—and many scientists—seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes. The earth is always warming or cooling by as much as a few tenths of a degree a year; periods of constant average temperatures are rare. Looking back on the earth's climate history, it's apparent that there's no such thing as an optimal temperature—a climate at which everything is just right. The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman's forecast for next week.
A warmer climate could prove to be more beneficial than the one we have now. Much of the alarm over climate change is based on ignorance of what is normal for weather and climate. There is no evidence, for instance, that extreme weather events are increasing in any systematic way, according to scientists at the U.S. National Hurricane Center, the World Meteorological Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which released the second part of this year's report earlier this month). Indeed, meteorological theory holds that, outside the tropics, weather in a warming world should be less variable, which might be a good thing.
In many other respects, the ill effects of warming are overblown. Sea levels, for example, have been increasing since the end of the last ice age. When you look at recent centuries in perspective, ignoring short-term fluctuations, the rate of sea-level rise has been relatively uniform (less than a couple of millimeters a year). There's even some evidence that the rate was higher in the first half of the twentieth century than in the second half. Overall, the risk of sea-level rise from global warming is less at almost any given location than that from other causes, such as tectonic motions of the earth's surface.
Many of the most alarming studies rely on long-range predictions using inherently untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately forecast the weather a week from now. Interpretations of these studies rarely consider that the impact of carbon on temperature goes down—not up—the more carbon accumulates in the atmosphere. Even if emissions were the sole cause of the recent temperature rise—a dubious proposition—future increases wouldn't be as steep as the climb in emissions.
Indeed, one overlooked mystery is why temperatures are not already higher. Various models predict that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere will raise the world's average temperature by as little as 1.5 degrees Celsius or as much as 4.5 degrees. The important thing about doubled CO2 (or any other greenhouse gas) is its "forcing"—its contribution to warming. At present, the greenhouse forcing is already about three-quarters of what one would get from a doubling of CO2. But average temperatures rose only about 0.6 degrees since the beginning of the industrial era, and the change hasn't been uniform—warming has largely occurred during the periods from 1919 to 1940 and from 1976 to 1998, with cooling in between. Researchers have been unable to explain this discrepancy.
Modelers claim to have simulated the warming and cooling that occurred before 1976 by choosing among various guesses as to what effect poorly observed volcanoes and unmeasured output from the sun have had. These factors, they claim, don't explain the warming of about 0.4 degrees C between 1976 and 1998. Climate modelers assume the cause must be greenhouse-gas emissions because they have no other explanation. This is a poor substitute for evidence, and simulation hardly constitutes explanation. Ten years ago climate modelers also couldn't account for the warming that occurred from about 1050 to 1300. They tried to expunge the medieval warm period from the observational record—an effort that is now generally discredited. The models have also severely underestimated short-term variability El Niño and the Intraseasonal Oscillation. Such phenomena illustrate the ability of the complex and turbulent climate system to vary significantly with no external cause whatever, and to do so over many years, even centuries.
Is there any point in pretending that CO2 increases will be catastrophic? Or could they be modest and on balance beneficial? India has warmed during the second half of the 20th century, and agricultural output has increased greatly. Infectious diseases like malaria are a matter not so much of temperature as poverty and public-health policies (like eliminating DDT). Exposure to cold is generally found to be both more dangerous and less comfortable.
Moreover, actions taken thus far to reduce emissions have already had negative consequences without improving our ability to adapt to climate change. An emphasis on ethanol, for instance, has led to angry protests against corn-price increases in Mexico, and forest clearing and habitat destruction in Southeast Asia. Carbon caps are likely to lead to increased prices, as well as corruption associated with permit trading. (Enron was a leading lobbyist for Kyoto because it had hoped to capitalize on emissions trading.) The alleged solutions have more potential for catastrophe than the putative problem. The conclusion of the late climate scientist Roger Revelle—Al Gore's supposed mentor—is worth pondering: the evidence for global warming thus far doesn't warrant any action unless it is justifiable on grounds that have nothing to do with climate.
Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies.
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17997788/site/newsweek/
Today in History
was on this day in 1865 that General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the American Civil War. At that point, Lee's army consisted of about 25,000 soldiers, compared to Grant's army of more than 100,000. In the year leading up to the surrender, the Northern blockade of the South had made it almost impossible for the Confederate army to get proper supplies. Confederate soldiers were fighting without decent food, without proper clothing, in some cases without even shoes. Confederate numbers were also dwindling as many soldiers began to desert.
So Lee and Grant met at the Appomattox Court House on this day in 1865, Palm Sunday, just after noon. After it was over, Grant said, "[I felt] sad and depressed at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, the worst for which people ever fought." When the Union soldiers began to cheer and celebrate, Grant ordered them to be silent out of respect.
Lee rode back to his camp, and crowds of Confederate soldiers along the road began to weep as he passed. When he reached his tent, Lee said to the crowd, "Go home now, and if you make as good citizens as you have soldiers, you will do well, and I shall always be proud of you. Goodbye, and God bless you all."
So Lee and Grant met at the Appomattox Court House on this day in 1865, Palm Sunday, just after noon. After it was over, Grant said, "[I felt] sad and depressed at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, the worst for which people ever fought." When the Union soldiers began to cheer and celebrate, Grant ordered them to be silent out of respect.
Lee rode back to his camp, and crowds of Confederate soldiers along the road began to weep as he passed. When he reached his tent, Lee said to the crowd, "Go home now, and if you make as good citizens as you have soldiers, you will do well, and I shall always be proud of you. Goodbye, and God bless you all."
BlackSportsOnline.com spent a week with Oscar and documented his training habits.
I followed De La Hoya and Roach for three days and it went generally like this:
5 am – Oscar drinks a liter of water and runs 5 miles every morning. Freddie Roach does not allow De La Hoya to stop running even to urinate the water he has consumed earlier. According to Freddie Roach, this helps for endurance. On days when the tropical heat of Puerto Rico has been unbearable, De La Hoya has been known to strip down, doing his morning run clad only in a Mets baseball cap, Speedo underwear and Nike running shoes without socks. The scene is unreal as hordes of Puerto Rican females wait on different corners of Oscar’s route just to catch a glimpse of him even at five in the morning.
7:00 to 8:30 am - Calisthetics (push ups, sit ups, etc.) Chases chickens for a half hour.
9:00 am - Breakfast (egg whites, oatmeal, and mango.)
10:00am to 2:00pm- Rest3:00 to 4:00 pm - Family time with wife Millie Corretjer. According to one of Oscar’s entourage, Oscar enjoys non-ejaculatory sex with wife (rejuvenates the spirit). Freddie Roach does not discourage sexual contact during training as long as the fighter does not climax or reach orgasm. Roach declined to comment on exactly what Oscar does from
3:00pm to 4:00pm but he did share this: “Let’s just say, when a fighter is pent up from having sex with no release, this increases his aggression and ferocity in the ring. This is why Manny is champ right now and this is why Floyd Mayweather’s getting knocked out on Cinco de Mayo..” He was referring to his other charge, Manny Pacquiao, a ferocious fighter from the Phillipines and current lightweight champ.
6:00-8:00 pm - Boxing. Oscar works the pads with Freddie Roach and also engages in intense sparring sessions with local Puerto Rican talent including the world strawweight champion, Ivan “Iron Boy” Calderon.
8:00-9:00 pm – Freddie Roach performs the full nude body greasedown massage technique on Oscar de la Hoya while fight strategy is discussed. The full nude body greasedown is a well documented boxing training tool used mostly before the 1970’s by fighters like Joe Louis and Willie Pep. It has been hailed by fighters like Demarcus Corley, Lennox Lewis, and Archie Moore. It is making resurgence among today’s trainers and currently trainer Joe Goossen is considered the most adept at it. In my opinion, Freddie Roach is the least adept as his Parkinson’s affected hands don’t seem to allow him to perform the gentlest massage. For those not familiar with the deeper fundamentals of boxing training, the full nude body greasedown consists of the trainer rubbing a combination of oil, vinegar, and sometimes salt over the completely nude body of a boxer. This seems to increase concentration and cause a bond between the fighter and the trainer.
9:00-10:00 pm – Freddie Roach has Oscar de la Hoya and the sparring partners go for a swim in a special thermal pool designed to relax the muscles and allow them to recuperate faster from the day’s training. Only fighters and trainers are allowed in the pool and no clothing or any type of swimwear is allowed while swimming. Freddie Roach supervises the swimming and I am informed that he also serves as a lifeguard during this. The environment is completely professional and not paramount to “skinny dipping” as some in Floyd Mayweather’s camp have alluded to.After the swim, Oscar goes to bed and the cycle continues the next day. Oscar appears to be in tremendous shape and appears to be already on weight for the fight with over a month to go. Oscar looked better than I have ever seen him during sparring and is training diligently to pull off the upset.
I followed De La Hoya and Roach for three days and it went generally like this:
5 am – Oscar drinks a liter of water and runs 5 miles every morning. Freddie Roach does not allow De La Hoya to stop running even to urinate the water he has consumed earlier. According to Freddie Roach, this helps for endurance. On days when the tropical heat of Puerto Rico has been unbearable, De La Hoya has been known to strip down, doing his morning run clad only in a Mets baseball cap, Speedo underwear and Nike running shoes without socks. The scene is unreal as hordes of Puerto Rican females wait on different corners of Oscar’s route just to catch a glimpse of him even at five in the morning.
7:00 to 8:30 am - Calisthetics (push ups, sit ups, etc.) Chases chickens for a half hour.
9:00 am - Breakfast (egg whites, oatmeal, and mango.)
10:00am to 2:00pm- Rest3:00 to 4:00 pm - Family time with wife Millie Corretjer. According to one of Oscar’s entourage, Oscar enjoys non-ejaculatory sex with wife (rejuvenates the spirit). Freddie Roach does not discourage sexual contact during training as long as the fighter does not climax or reach orgasm. Roach declined to comment on exactly what Oscar does from
3:00pm to 4:00pm but he did share this: “Let’s just say, when a fighter is pent up from having sex with no release, this increases his aggression and ferocity in the ring. This is why Manny is champ right now and this is why Floyd Mayweather’s getting knocked out on Cinco de Mayo..” He was referring to his other charge, Manny Pacquiao, a ferocious fighter from the Phillipines and current lightweight champ.
6:00-8:00 pm - Boxing. Oscar works the pads with Freddie Roach and also engages in intense sparring sessions with local Puerto Rican talent including the world strawweight champion, Ivan “Iron Boy” Calderon.
8:00-9:00 pm – Freddie Roach performs the full nude body greasedown massage technique on Oscar de la Hoya while fight strategy is discussed. The full nude body greasedown is a well documented boxing training tool used mostly before the 1970’s by fighters like Joe Louis and Willie Pep. It has been hailed by fighters like Demarcus Corley, Lennox Lewis, and Archie Moore. It is making resurgence among today’s trainers and currently trainer Joe Goossen is considered the most adept at it. In my opinion, Freddie Roach is the least adept as his Parkinson’s affected hands don’t seem to allow him to perform the gentlest massage. For those not familiar with the deeper fundamentals of boxing training, the full nude body greasedown consists of the trainer rubbing a combination of oil, vinegar, and sometimes salt over the completely nude body of a boxer. This seems to increase concentration and cause a bond between the fighter and the trainer.
9:00-10:00 pm – Freddie Roach has Oscar de la Hoya and the sparring partners go for a swim in a special thermal pool designed to relax the muscles and allow them to recuperate faster from the day’s training. Only fighters and trainers are allowed in the pool and no clothing or any type of swimwear is allowed while swimming. Freddie Roach supervises the swimming and I am informed that he also serves as a lifeguard during this. The environment is completely professional and not paramount to “skinny dipping” as some in Floyd Mayweather’s camp have alluded to.After the swim, Oscar goes to bed and the cycle continues the next day. Oscar appears to be in tremendous shape and appears to be already on weight for the fight with over a month to go. Oscar looked better than I have ever seen him during sparring and is training diligently to pull off the upset.
At Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly, an account of a meeting with Muslim Brotherhood, Hizballah, Hamas, and Western Marxist idiots; I’ve used that headline before, but this is a truly mind-boggling example of Total Moronic Convergence™:
"Ali Fayyad of Hizbullah backed up Mazraani, though he complained that, “many socialists in Europe still refuse to work with us, calling us ‘terrorist’”. He admitted that Islamists are conservative and often don’t want to work with the left, especially extremists like Al-Qaeda, which “will not work with anyone and will fail”. Then there are the liberal Muslims who don’t care about the war and occupation, lack a clear position on imperialism, and as a result, actually ally with it. “The differences of Hamas and Hizbullah with the left are minor — family and social priorities — and at the same time, the Islamic movement must apply democracy, which is really the same as shura. Democracy is a bridge to cross to a better world. We should avoid intolerance in governance, whether it’s Islamic or not, and forcing religion upon people.” He referred to Gramsci’s argument about creating a common front at important historical junctures to induce historical change, after which the different groups can go their separate ways. What a lovely irony to have an Islamist quoting a Western communist theorist.
“By working with Islamic groups in an open way, the left can have a positive impact on Islamic movements, and vice versa.”
The international left, as represented at the conference, emphasised practical ways to reach out to the broader Muslim community, as reflected in conference forums on such projects as twinning UK and Palestinian cities, countering the boycott of the Hamas government in Palestine with a boycott of Israel and Western firms that provide military equipment to Israel, countering Islamophobia — in a word, citizens’ diplomacy.
James Clark of the Canadian Peace Alliance described how the anti-war coalitions are now supportive of Muslims who find themselves targets of racial and religious profiling and no-fly lists, and that there is active work in the peace movement to counter Islamophobia, “which the governments use to fan the flames to generate support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are committed to defend all civil liberties. ”On the wall of the prayer room at Ryerson University in Toronto, someone’s spray painted ‘Die Muslim’. The administration refused to condemn this as hate crime, so we organised a petition and a campaign to counter Islamophobia, and as a result, the head of the Islamic students’ organisation was elected president of the students’ council. So you can use such incidents to educate and mobilise people.“ Clark vowed that the Canadian peace movement, inspired by the Arab resistance in Lebanon and Iraq, would work with Muslims to defeat imperialism.
Johannes Anderson of Denmark criticised the Danish left for not standing behind Muslims during the cartoon controversy, allowing a weak prime minister to emerge unscathed. ”I’ve changed through the past years and grown through criticism. We should not be afraid of it. We fight for democracy in the Middle East and Europe against neo-liberalism which is taking away our rights everywhere."
.
Ali Fayyad of Hizbullah backed up Mazraani, though he complained that, “many socialists in Europe still refuse to work with us, calling us ‘terrorist’”. He admitted that Islamists are conservative and often don’t want to work with the left, especially extremists like Al-Qaeda, which “will not work with anyone and will fail”. Then there are the liberal Muslims who don’t care about the war and occupation, lack a clear position on imperialism, and as a result, actually ally with it. “The differences of Hamas and Hizbullah with the left are minor — family and social priorities — and at the same time, the Islamic movement must apply democracy, which is really the same as shura. Democracy is a bridge to cross to a better world. We should avoid intolerance in governance, whether it’s Islamic or not, and forcing religion upon people.” He referred to Gramsci’s argument about creating a common front at important historical junctures to induce historical change, after which the different groups can go their separate ways. What a lovely irony to have an Islamist quoting a Western communist theorist.
“By working with Islamic groups in an open way, the left can have a positive impact on Islamic movements, and vice versa.”
The international left, as represented at the conference, emphasised practical ways to reach out to the broader Muslim community, as reflected in conference forums on such projects as twinning UK and Palestinian cities, countering the boycott of the Hamas government in Palestine with a boycott of Israel and Western firms that provide military equipment to Israel, countering Islamophobia — in a word, citizens’ diplomacy.
James Clark of the Canadian Peace Alliance described how the anti-war coalitions are now supportive of Muslims who find themselves targets of racial and religious profiling and no-fly lists, and that there is active work in the peace movement to counter Islamophobia, “which the governments use to fan the flames to generate support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are committed to defend all civil liberties. ”On the wall of the prayer room at Ryerson University in Toronto, someone’s spray painted ‘Die Muslim’. The administration refused to condemn this as hate crime, so we organised a petition and a campaign to counter Islamophobia, and as a result, the head of the Islamic students’ organisation was elected president of the students’ council. So you can use such incidents to educate and mobilise people.“ Clark vowed that the Canadian peace movement, inspired by the Arab resistance in Lebanon and Iraq, would work with Muslims to defeat imperialism.
Johannes Anderson of Denmark criticised the Danish left for not standing behind Muslims during the cartoon controversy, allowing a weak prime minister to emerge unscathed. ”I’ve changed through the past years and grown through criticism. We should not be afraid of it. We fight for democracy in the Middle East and Europe against neo-liberalism which is taking away our rights everywhere."
Friday, April 06, 2007
Answers To the Atheists
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, April 6, 2007; Page A21
This weekend, many of the world's estimated 2 billion Christians will remember and celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
While some Christians harbor doubts about Christ's actual physical resurrection, hundreds of millions believe devoutly that Jesus died and rose, thus redeeming a fallen world from sin.
Are these people a threat to reason and even freedom?
It's a question that arises from a new vogue for what you might call neo-atheism. The new atheists -- the best known are writers Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins -- insist, as Harris puts it, that "certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one." That's why they think a belief in salvation through faith in God, no matter the religious tradition, is dangerous to an open society.
The neo-atheists, like their predecessors from a century ago, are given to a sometimes-charming ferociousness in their polemics against those they see as too weak-minded to give up faith in God.
What makes them new is the moment in history in which they are rejoining the old arguments: an era of religiously motivated Islamic suicide bombers. They also protest the apparent power of traditionalist and fundamentalist versions of Christianity.
As a general proposition, I welcome the neo-atheists' challenge. The most serious believers, understanding that they need to ask themselves searching questions, have always engaged in dialogue with atheists. The Catholic writer Michael Novak's book "Belief and Unbelief" is a classic in self-interrogation. "How does one know that one's belief is truly in God," he asks at one point, "not merely in some habitual emotion or pattern of response?"
The problem with the neo-atheists is that they seem as dogmatic as the dogmatists they condemn. They are especially frustrated with religious "moderates" who don't fit their stereotypes.
In his bracing polemic " The End of Faith," Harris is candid in asserting that "religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each one of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others."
Harris goes on: "I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance -- born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God -- is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss. We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man's inhumanity to man."
Argument about faith should not hang on whether religion is socially "useful" or instead promotes "inhumanity." But since the idea that religion is primarily destructive lies at the heart of the neo-atheist argument, its critics have rightly insisted on detailing the sublime acts of humanity and generosity that religion has promoted through the centuries.
It's true that religious Christians were among those who persecuted Jews. It is also true that religious Christians were among those who rescued Jews from these most un-Christian acts. And it is a sad fact that secular forms of dogmatism have been at least as murderous as the religious kind.
What's really bothersome is the suggestion that believers rarely question themselves while atheists ask all the hard questions. But as Novak argued -- in one of the best critiques of neo-atheism -- in the March 19 issue of National Review, "Questions have been the heart and soul of Judaism and Christianity for millennia." (These questions get a fair reading in another powerful commentary on neo-atheism by James Wood, himself an atheist, in the Dec. 18 issue of the New Republic.) "Christianity is not about moral arrogance," Novak insists. "It is about moral realism, and moral humility." Of course Christians in practice often fail to live up to this elevated definition of their creed. But atheists are capable of their own forms of arrogance. Indeed, if arrogance were the only criterion, the contest could well come out a tie.
As for me, Christianity is more a call to rebellion than an insistence on narrow conformity, more a challenge than a set of certainties.
In " The Last Week," their book about Christ's final days on Earth, Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, distinguished liberal scriptural scholars, write: "He attracted a following and took his movement to Jerusalem at the season of Passover. There he challenged the authorities with public acts and public debates. All this was his passion, what he was passionate about: God and the Kingdom of God, God and God's passion for justice. Jesus' passion got him killed."
That's why I celebrate Easter and why, despite many questions of my own, I can't join the neo-atheists.
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, April 6, 2007; Page A21
This weekend, many of the world's estimated 2 billion Christians will remember and celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
While some Christians harbor doubts about Christ's actual physical resurrection, hundreds of millions believe devoutly that Jesus died and rose, thus redeeming a fallen world from sin.
Are these people a threat to reason and even freedom?
It's a question that arises from a new vogue for what you might call neo-atheism. The new atheists -- the best known are writers Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins -- insist, as Harris puts it, that "certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one." That's why they think a belief in salvation through faith in God, no matter the religious tradition, is dangerous to an open society.
The neo-atheists, like their predecessors from a century ago, are given to a sometimes-charming ferociousness in their polemics against those they see as too weak-minded to give up faith in God.
What makes them new is the moment in history in which they are rejoining the old arguments: an era of religiously motivated Islamic suicide bombers. They also protest the apparent power of traditionalist and fundamentalist versions of Christianity.
As a general proposition, I welcome the neo-atheists' challenge. The most serious believers, understanding that they need to ask themselves searching questions, have always engaged in dialogue with atheists. The Catholic writer Michael Novak's book "Belief and Unbelief" is a classic in self-interrogation. "How does one know that one's belief is truly in God," he asks at one point, "not merely in some habitual emotion or pattern of response?"
The problem with the neo-atheists is that they seem as dogmatic as the dogmatists they condemn. They are especially frustrated with religious "moderates" who don't fit their stereotypes.
In his bracing polemic " The End of Faith," Harris is candid in asserting that "religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each one of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others."
Harris goes on: "I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance -- born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God -- is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss. We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man's inhumanity to man."
Argument about faith should not hang on whether religion is socially "useful" or instead promotes "inhumanity." But since the idea that religion is primarily destructive lies at the heart of the neo-atheist argument, its critics have rightly insisted on detailing the sublime acts of humanity and generosity that religion has promoted through the centuries.
It's true that religious Christians were among those who persecuted Jews. It is also true that religious Christians were among those who rescued Jews from these most un-Christian acts. And it is a sad fact that secular forms of dogmatism have been at least as murderous as the religious kind.
What's really bothersome is the suggestion that believers rarely question themselves while atheists ask all the hard questions. But as Novak argued -- in one of the best critiques of neo-atheism -- in the March 19 issue of National Review, "Questions have been the heart and soul of Judaism and Christianity for millennia." (These questions get a fair reading in another powerful commentary on neo-atheism by James Wood, himself an atheist, in the Dec. 18 issue of the New Republic.) "Christianity is not about moral arrogance," Novak insists. "It is about moral realism, and moral humility." Of course Christians in practice often fail to live up to this elevated definition of their creed. But atheists are capable of their own forms of arrogance. Indeed, if arrogance were the only criterion, the contest could well come out a tie.
As for me, Christianity is more a call to rebellion than an insistence on narrow conformity, more a challenge than a set of certainties.
In " The Last Week," their book about Christ's final days on Earth, Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, distinguished liberal scriptural scholars, write: "He attracted a following and took his movement to Jerusalem at the season of Passover. There he challenged the authorities with public acts and public debates. All this was his passion, what he was passionate about: God and the Kingdom of God, God and God's passion for justice. Jesus' passion got him killed."
That's why I celebrate Easter and why, despite many questions of my own, I can't join the neo-atheists.
Veteran of WWII's 'Great Escape' dies
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Ian Tapson, one of the last survivors of a team of World War II soldiers who planned and executed a breakout from a German POW camp later immortalized in the film "The Great Escape," has died. He was 84.
Tapson died at Settler's Park, a retirement complex in the coastal town of Port Alfred on March 31, said Wally Vandermeulen, chairman of the Port Alfred branch of the South Africa Air Force Association.
The escape was immortalized in Paul Brickhill's book "The Great Escape" and in the movie of the same title, starring Steve McQueen, James Garner and Richard Attenborough.
Tapson was a lieutenant in the South African Air Force flying Kittyhawk fighter-bombers when his plane was crippled by anti-aircraft fire over Tunisia and he was forced to crash-land. He was captured and was sent to Stalag III prisoner of war camp at Sagan, Silesia, near the Polish border.
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Ian Tapson, one of the last survivors of a team of World War II soldiers who planned and executed a breakout from a German POW camp later immortalized in the film "The Great Escape," has died. He was 84.
Tapson died at Settler's Park, a retirement complex in the coastal town of Port Alfred on March 31, said Wally Vandermeulen, chairman of the Port Alfred branch of the South Africa Air Force Association.
The escape was immortalized in Paul Brickhill's book "The Great Escape" and in the movie of the same title, starring Steve McQueen, James Garner and Richard Attenborough.
Tapson was a lieutenant in the South African Air Force flying Kittyhawk fighter-bombers when his plane was crippled by anti-aircraft fire over Tunisia and he was forced to crash-land. He was captured and was sent to Stalag III prisoner of war camp at Sagan, Silesia, near the Polish border.
A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
Geography
by George Konrád
A guest in my own country
February 1945. We are sitting on a bench in a motionless cattle car. I can't pull myself away from the open door and the wind whipping off the snowy plains. I didn't want to be a constant guest in Budapest; I wanted to go home — a weeklong trip — to Berettyóújfalu, the town our parents had been abducted from, the town we had managed to leave a day before the deportations. Had we stayed one more day we would have ended up in Auschwitz. My sister, who was 14, might have survived, but I was 11, and Dr. Mengele sent all my classmates, every last one, to the gas chambers.
Of our parents we knew nothing. I had given up on the idea of going from the staircase to the vestibule to the light-blue living room and finding everything as it had been. I had a feeling I would find nothing there at all. But if I closed my eyes, I could go through the old motions: walk downstairs, step through the iron gate, painted yellow, and see my father next to the tile oven, rubbing his hands, smiling, chatting, turning his blue eyes to everyone with a trusting but impish gaze, as if to ask, "We understand each other, don't we?" In a postprandial mood he would have gone onto the balcony and stretched out on his deck chair, lighting up a long Memphis cigarette in its gold mouthpiece, looking over the papers, then nodding off.
Excerpted from A Guest in My Own Country by George Konrád, translated from the Hungarian by Jim Tucker. Copyright © 2002 by György Konrád, used courtesy Other Press.
by George Konrád
A guest in my own country
February 1945. We are sitting on a bench in a motionless cattle car. I can't pull myself away from the open door and the wind whipping off the snowy plains. I didn't want to be a constant guest in Budapest; I wanted to go home — a weeklong trip — to Berettyóújfalu, the town our parents had been abducted from, the town we had managed to leave a day before the deportations. Had we stayed one more day we would have ended up in Auschwitz. My sister, who was 14, might have survived, but I was 11, and Dr. Mengele sent all my classmates, every last one, to the gas chambers.
Of our parents we knew nothing. I had given up on the idea of going from the staircase to the vestibule to the light-blue living room and finding everything as it had been. I had a feeling I would find nothing there at all. But if I closed my eyes, I could go through the old motions: walk downstairs, step through the iron gate, painted yellow, and see my father next to the tile oven, rubbing his hands, smiling, chatting, turning his blue eyes to everyone with a trusting but impish gaze, as if to ask, "We understand each other, don't we?" In a postprandial mood he would have gone onto the balcony and stretched out on his deck chair, lighting up a long Memphis cigarette in its gold mouthpiece, looking over the papers, then nodding off.
Excerpted from A Guest in My Own Country by George Konrád, translated from the Hungarian by Jim Tucker. Copyright © 2002 by György Konrád, used courtesy Other Press.
Schemes and Fifis
Letter From Prison
An inmate dispels misconceptions about America's brutal incarceration system
J. Incandenza
July 2, 2003
There are more than two million people behind bars in the United States. One of every four black men between the ages of 20 and 30 is incarcerated. Millions are on probation or parole. In fact, one of every 32 Americans is currently caught up in the criminal justice system. In the District of Columbia, one in every three adult men is under some kind of penal supervision. [Editor’s note: As of June 16, 2003, the state of Hawai‘i has 3,063 inmates here and on the Mainland. Of Hawai‘i’s prisoners, 21 percent are locked up for serious drug offenses and 29 percent are in jail for misdemeanor or felony drug-related crimes.] Despite our vast numbers, we are, except for an occasional cartoon in The New Yorker, largely ignored and completely voiceless. We exist for the popular culture mostly as the punch line of a joke. I am one of the incarcerated millions, a prisoner in what has become this country’s endless War on Drugs. Despite having spent many years in prison, I am not really representative of the average convict: I am white, middle-aged, educated and a federal prisoner. Many or most convicts are black or brown, have never finished high school and are states’ inmates. But, I have at one time or another, been held in nine federal facilities ranging from Pennsylvania’s Lewisburg Penitentiary to the camp where I am now and every sort of place in between. I also have personal knowledge of a handful of county jails thanks entirely to the Feds’ miserly attitude toward bail. (County jails are the worst; no other lockup even compares to their capacities to inflict misery. Guys celebrate the day they get transferred to a pen.) And from what I’ve seen in all of these stops, prison is prison and convicts are convicts. I’d like to say I’m innocent, a victim of circumstance, unjustly held by a vengeful and misguided system. I’d like to, but I can’t, because I’m guilty as charged. Everybody used to think it was cool when I got all those A’s in Chemistry, but instead, I’ll just say that not many people in jail claim to be innocent anymore. The standard line is more like, “Sure, I did it, but this sentence isn't fair.” Maybe you didn’t know that. Maybe you think you know what it's like in here, but you’re just plain wrong. Allow me to help separate you from some widely held misconceptions.
Misconception 1: Courts are manned by soft-as-a-grape judges who dole out slaps on the wrist Some shrewd PR guy in some prosecutor’s office somewhere must have come up with this one. It really doesn’t work that way. Fifteen of my last 30 years have been spent in prison, the last 10 in a row. This is the result of two arrests, one in the late ‘70s and another on Groundhog Day, Feb. 2, 1993. I am the norm, not the exception. Don’t believe all that stuff about second chances. Today it’s one strike and you’re out. This is especially true of drug guys. All the places I’ve been are full of kids doing decades or more for a few hundred dollars’ worth of dope. The kid who bunks next to me — he’s not a kid anymore, is halfway through a 15-year sentence he caught from a D.C. judge for $600 worth. The judge even apologized when he handed out the sentence. It was the federal sentencing guidelines. He said there was nothing he could do.
Misconception 2: Prison is some sort of sodomite bacchanalia This one is getting old. Mention prison and the next thing you are likely to hear is some wisecrack about anal penetration. Both Letterman and Leno seem to be contractually obligated to mention it at least once a month. I’ve come to accept that, like fart jokes and bathroom humor in general, there must be something funny about anal penetration. I also understand that we have brought a large part of this upon ourselves. But enough already. Sexual orientation is not a matter of convenience, and sodomy inside is not more likely than you would find in a big city nightclub. As far as rape is concerned, in 15 years behind bars, I’ve yet to see one. As in any sizable population, there is a sufficiently large gay segment. There are plenty of volunteers and prison administrators usually accommodate their needs. In one prison where I was a resident, the psychology department made women’s underwear available to those who were so inclined. I’m talking about federal prisons, men’s federal prisons. I have no idea what happens in women’s prisons, though I like to imagine it sometimes. Which brings us to what sex in prison is really all about. To quote Woody Allen, “Sex is like bridge: If you don't have a good partner, you need a good hand.” The medical department even recommends a good hand as a prophylactic against prostate problems. Most prisons today are built with individual shower stalls as opposed to the type of shower rooms you may remember from gym class. (Lewisburg still has shower rooms, but it is considered bad form there to shower nude. The custom is to shower wearing boxer shorts.) These shower stalls are virtual masturbatoria, and you would be well advised to scrub one out before using it, especially if you find a page from the Victoria’s Secret catalog stuck to the wall inside. There is even, among certain strangely twisted (and usually younger) convicts, a market for prosthetic devices known as fifis. I will say no more. Please, lighten up on the sodomy jokes.
Misconception 3: Federal prisons are country clubs This one really ticks me off. There is no such thing as a country-club prison. I can only assume that whoever coined this phrase has either never been to a country club, or has never been to a prison. I have spent time in both. There is no similarity. Can you imagine a country club where 130 snoring, stinking, farting guys sleep stacked on bunk beds arranged not even two feet apart in a tiny little dormitory, and then stand in line in the morning to use one of six toilets, which are only rarely in working order at the same time. American prisons are, for the most part, overcrowded, dirty and dangerous places. Having always been a federal prisoner, I cannot speak with authority about conditions in state prisons, though people tell me that they are, in the main, abysmal. I’ve spent more than a little time in county lockups. I would have spent none if that stuff the Eighth Amendment says about bond was more than just words on paper. Speaking of the Third World, I once asked an erudite Nigerian convict, who supported himself in prison by writing habeas corpus appeals and habeas corpus petitions — he averaged two to three a month at about $1,000 a pop, what prison conditions are like in his native land. “Absolutely horrific,” he assured me. He didn’t believe that the average American could survive even a short stay. But, for the kind of money a convict spends to get by in an American prison, someone could probably bribe his way out of a Nigerian prison, or at the very least hire someone to do his time for him. You tell me where you’d rather be.
Misconception 4: All prisoners are stupid This is the converse of a belief widely held in prison: That everyone out there is gutless. This is not to suggest that prison is some kind of graduate seminar, except maybe of crime. Nor am I referring to “street smarts,” which I have found to be nothing more than a high level of paranoia combined with incredible baseness and selfishness and a willingness to do things that most people would consider beneath them. All of this aside, it has been my experience that IQ distribution mirrors the usual bell curve, even if we get more than our fair share of guys who have been failed by the big-city school system. My guess is that the idea that everyone in prison is stupid is based on the line of thinking that goes: They got caught. Ergo they must be stupid because there are some things that one just cannot do. I suggest, however, that the way the world is really set up is with few exceptions, you can literally do any damn thing you want to do, anything that you can think of. Of course, you may have to deal with the consequences. I say “may” because TV cop shows aside, people do get away with things once in a while. Machiavelli observed it is not the severity of the punishment that deters one from pursuing a particular course of action, but the certainty of being caught. Machiavelli was no dolt.
Misconception 5: All prison guards are misanthropic sadists like the ones portrayed in the movies This is true. Not all of the guards. Maybe there are 2 or 3 percent who aren’t. The question I have never been able to answer to my satisfaction is whether working in prison turns people into officious petty dictators, or people with those traits are the ones attracted to prison work in the first place. Many of the guards we see here are former (or failed) military who arrive with bad haircuts and affected, tortured syntax and a love of acronyms while they double-dip their government pensions and strut around like Patton clones, shouting orders in what is known as “command voice.” I’d be willing to wager that given the choice between tossing a few back at the corner pub with a group of convicts or a group of prison guards, most of you who looked into it would opt for the convicts.
Misconception 6: Everything someone needs to survive in prison is supplied by the prison If bare survival is the goal, that might possibly be true. But over the course of a 10-year sentence — about average for a small to mid-level dope dealer, anyone who hoped to treat himself to a few luxury items like dental floss, or coffee, or a phone call home, or postage stamps, or even aspirin or cold pills, which are mainly available through the prison commissary, that person would have a problem. It’s a problem that will soon be getting worse, because the Bureau of Prisons has recently announced its intention to begin charging convicts a nominal fee for sick-call visits. If a $4 fee for someone who makes $5 a month can truly be called nominal. (We all have jobs in prison, but it’s like the old Soviet system under Communism: We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.) For the fortunate in the prison population for whom crime did pay, the $200 to $400 a month required in order to comfortably do his time does not represent a serious burden. However, for the person who is more accustomed to scores than to paychecks, who typically is not the sort of person who had put a little something away for a rainy day, comfort is something one strives for.
Misconception 7: Prison has a rehabilitative effect By removing us from the pressures and temptations of the money economy, prison supposedly affords convicts the opportunity and inclination to reflect on our evil ways and do penance. Hence the name “penitentiary.” Given that most convicts hit the door under pressure to earn, about 80 percent of the prison population is on a 24/7 hustle. Some hustles are even tacitly encouraged. Sanitation, for instance, is a high-priority item with all prison administrators. New arrivals are commonly told that their areas have to be cleaned every day, regardless of how that is accomplished. In a higher-security joint, enterprising types take this as authorization to seize all the mops, buckets and other cleaning supplies and establish a monopoly on cleaning that hardly anyone is inclined to break. After all, the crowd who needs to hustle and the crowd who needs, for reasons largely associated with perceived status, to have their cells professionally cleaned, are symbiotic, and two bucks a week is a cheap way to feel like a Mafia don. Laundry service is similarly tolerated by staff, who have come to accept that maximum usage of the limited laundry facilities in woefully overcrowded prisons is best achieved by people who are motivated by profit. Along these lines, a convict who is willing and able to pay can hire another convict to perform his assigned job. The cost of this is, naturally, many times what the prison pays. No one would really work for that. All of this contributes to what is known as “the orderly running of the institution,” and there isn’t anyone on either side of the bars who would argue that turning a blind eye to certain indiscretions is anything but sound management policy. Most hustles, however, are not so benignly regarded. Stealing, for instance, is frowned upon by everyone, though the sanctions imposed by the convict population are so much worse than anything the administration is allowed to employ that this is not as much of a problem as you might expect. Such is not the case with gambling, which is ubiquitous. Many a bookmaker has arrived in prison already feeling unfairly persecuted while the society he has just been exiled from is rife with church’s bingo games, volunteer fire departments’ Monte Carlo night and the NCAA Tournament pool that was hanging on the wall of the police station where he was taken after he was arrested. He finds himself in prison, immediately solicited to place bets or buy squares in pools for football games, basketball games, NASCAR races and the Daily Number. The first advice a newly arrived convict usually receives is to mind his own business, always pay his bills on time, and never get involved with gambling, dope or punks. The first piece of advice he usually ignores is the part about gambling. In the higher-security institutions, more convicts PC (check into protective custody) over gambling debts than for any other reason. There is plenty of dope in prison, which begs the question: If they can’t keep drugs out of a penitentiary with 30-foot walls, eight gun towers and a full-time security staff of 500, how do they expect to keep them from crossing the Mexican border? In most prisons, one can obtain the full array of intoxicants available on the street corner. In maximum-security joints, tastes run toward heroin, exorbitantly priced reefer (about $40/gram), and jailhouse wine made from either orange or tomato juice or, for the connoisseur, a very fine grape juice vintage aged 21 days in a plastic trash bag that most convicts say tastes almost as good as anything that can be had in a bottle with a twist-off cap. At a medium security facility, you’ll find less heroin and wine but more reefer. A minimum-security facility is about the same. Coke and hallucinogens are rare everywhere — there’s no sense getting too wound up with nowhere to go. At a camp where it is easiest to get things from the street there is, paradoxically, practically nothing to be had except for some occasional vodka, the drink of choice because of its mild smell. Convicts get transferred to camps, after all, for good behavior. Besides the dope biz, other hustles you find everywhere include extortion, prostitution, selling chow-hall food (your own and others’), making and selling greeting cards and other hobby-craft items (including fifis), selling loosies (single cigarettes), operating a 2-for-1 store with commissary items (take 1 now, pay for 2 later), doing legal work, really anything you can think of. In here it is still all about the money, and we don't have much time for rehabilitating or reflecting.
Misconception 8: Politicians are sending a message to potential criminals with harsh sentencing laws There is a consistent refrain among the John Ashcrofts and Donald Rumsfelds of the world that that person, or group of people, needs to be sent a message, usually in the form of some draconian punishment. Every week on the evening news you are likely to see some politician advocating the bastinado or drawing and quartering to send a message to jaywalkers or mopes. Hello out there. No one in here is listening. Do you really think that with the time and effort one must devote to a career in crime, not to mention staying out half the night carousing and sleeping ’til mid-afternoon, that any of us actually has time to watch the news or read the paper, let alone the Congressional Record or the Federal Register? These messages are spam, or junk mail, and ignored. Few of us will ever learn the penalty for anything until we get caught, at which point the message is useless unless, of course, the message really is a wink and a nod in the direction of you, the voter, to let you know that the government is going to continue to do its best to punish the people who do things that you don’t want them to do; so please continue to vote for me and, by all means, don’t think that this pat on the back is only a diversion to disguise a grab for your wallet. But that is too cynical for even a criminal like me to believe. Implicit in these messages is a misunderstanding of exactly what goes on in here. A criminal-defense lawyer who has defended hundreds of clients once told me that no one who goes to prison is ever the same again. I didn’t believe him. Convicts never believe anything anybody tells them. We are archetypal show-me guys. But it turns out that he was right, and I’m not talking about an increased tendency to dress in dark colors, wear sunglasses at inappropriate times, or believe that Vegas and Sinatra and Wayne Newton are really, really cool. Prison leaves an indelible mark on the soul. The results, however, are not what I believe the people who advocate it most are hoping for. So if we’re not rehabilitating, whatever that means, what are we doing? Everybody’s main activity, even more than hustling, is scheming. It makes perfect sense if you think about it. Take a large group of people largely motivated by money and remove them from the economy during their prime earning years. The longer you do this, the more it increases their anxiety. Then, stigmatize them with a label that makes the possibility of a secure future via traditional means unlikely. Finally, when you set them free, place them under the thumb of a supervisory system designed to hassle them. What do you expect to happen? It is so obvious to me that I can’t see how anyone could believe that we are doing anything else in here but hatching schemes. The message we get by the time we’re paying attention is: You’re really screwed, so you’d better figure out what you’re going to do about it. Soon a lot more people will be getting that message. The feds are so happy about how the drug thing is working out that they are in the process of upping the ante for everyone. Just this year they doubled, and in some cases quadrupled, the sentencing guidelines for a bunch of white-collar offenses. I’ll leave a light on for you.
J. Incandenza is the pen name of an inmate currently serving 14 years in U.S. federal prison for drug-trafficking.
An inmate dispels misconceptions about America's brutal incarceration system
J. Incandenza
July 2, 2003
There are more than two million people behind bars in the United States. One of every four black men between the ages of 20 and 30 is incarcerated. Millions are on probation or parole. In fact, one of every 32 Americans is currently caught up in the criminal justice system. In the District of Columbia, one in every three adult men is under some kind of penal supervision. [Editor’s note: As of June 16, 2003, the state of Hawai‘i has 3,063 inmates here and on the Mainland. Of Hawai‘i’s prisoners, 21 percent are locked up for serious drug offenses and 29 percent are in jail for misdemeanor or felony drug-related crimes.] Despite our vast numbers, we are, except for an occasional cartoon in The New Yorker, largely ignored and completely voiceless. We exist for the popular culture mostly as the punch line of a joke. I am one of the incarcerated millions, a prisoner in what has become this country’s endless War on Drugs. Despite having spent many years in prison, I am not really representative of the average convict: I am white, middle-aged, educated and a federal prisoner. Many or most convicts are black or brown, have never finished high school and are states’ inmates. But, I have at one time or another, been held in nine federal facilities ranging from Pennsylvania’s Lewisburg Penitentiary to the camp where I am now and every sort of place in between. I also have personal knowledge of a handful of county jails thanks entirely to the Feds’ miserly attitude toward bail. (County jails are the worst; no other lockup even compares to their capacities to inflict misery. Guys celebrate the day they get transferred to a pen.) And from what I’ve seen in all of these stops, prison is prison and convicts are convicts. I’d like to say I’m innocent, a victim of circumstance, unjustly held by a vengeful and misguided system. I’d like to, but I can’t, because I’m guilty as charged. Everybody used to think it was cool when I got all those A’s in Chemistry, but instead, I’ll just say that not many people in jail claim to be innocent anymore. The standard line is more like, “Sure, I did it, but this sentence isn't fair.” Maybe you didn’t know that. Maybe you think you know what it's like in here, but you’re just plain wrong. Allow me to help separate you from some widely held misconceptions.
Misconception 1: Courts are manned by soft-as-a-grape judges who dole out slaps on the wrist Some shrewd PR guy in some prosecutor’s office somewhere must have come up with this one. It really doesn’t work that way. Fifteen of my last 30 years have been spent in prison, the last 10 in a row. This is the result of two arrests, one in the late ‘70s and another on Groundhog Day, Feb. 2, 1993. I am the norm, not the exception. Don’t believe all that stuff about second chances. Today it’s one strike and you’re out. This is especially true of drug guys. All the places I’ve been are full of kids doing decades or more for a few hundred dollars’ worth of dope. The kid who bunks next to me — he’s not a kid anymore, is halfway through a 15-year sentence he caught from a D.C. judge for $600 worth. The judge even apologized when he handed out the sentence. It was the federal sentencing guidelines. He said there was nothing he could do.
Misconception 2: Prison is some sort of sodomite bacchanalia This one is getting old. Mention prison and the next thing you are likely to hear is some wisecrack about anal penetration. Both Letterman and Leno seem to be contractually obligated to mention it at least once a month. I’ve come to accept that, like fart jokes and bathroom humor in general, there must be something funny about anal penetration. I also understand that we have brought a large part of this upon ourselves. But enough already. Sexual orientation is not a matter of convenience, and sodomy inside is not more likely than you would find in a big city nightclub. As far as rape is concerned, in 15 years behind bars, I’ve yet to see one. As in any sizable population, there is a sufficiently large gay segment. There are plenty of volunteers and prison administrators usually accommodate their needs. In one prison where I was a resident, the psychology department made women’s underwear available to those who were so inclined. I’m talking about federal prisons, men’s federal prisons. I have no idea what happens in women’s prisons, though I like to imagine it sometimes. Which brings us to what sex in prison is really all about. To quote Woody Allen, “Sex is like bridge: If you don't have a good partner, you need a good hand.” The medical department even recommends a good hand as a prophylactic against prostate problems. Most prisons today are built with individual shower stalls as opposed to the type of shower rooms you may remember from gym class. (Lewisburg still has shower rooms, but it is considered bad form there to shower nude. The custom is to shower wearing boxer shorts.) These shower stalls are virtual masturbatoria, and you would be well advised to scrub one out before using it, especially if you find a page from the Victoria’s Secret catalog stuck to the wall inside. There is even, among certain strangely twisted (and usually younger) convicts, a market for prosthetic devices known as fifis. I will say no more. Please, lighten up on the sodomy jokes.
Misconception 3: Federal prisons are country clubs This one really ticks me off. There is no such thing as a country-club prison. I can only assume that whoever coined this phrase has either never been to a country club, or has never been to a prison. I have spent time in both. There is no similarity. Can you imagine a country club where 130 snoring, stinking, farting guys sleep stacked on bunk beds arranged not even two feet apart in a tiny little dormitory, and then stand in line in the morning to use one of six toilets, which are only rarely in working order at the same time. American prisons are, for the most part, overcrowded, dirty and dangerous places. Having always been a federal prisoner, I cannot speak with authority about conditions in state prisons, though people tell me that they are, in the main, abysmal. I’ve spent more than a little time in county lockups. I would have spent none if that stuff the Eighth Amendment says about bond was more than just words on paper. Speaking of the Third World, I once asked an erudite Nigerian convict, who supported himself in prison by writing habeas corpus appeals and habeas corpus petitions — he averaged two to three a month at about $1,000 a pop, what prison conditions are like in his native land. “Absolutely horrific,” he assured me. He didn’t believe that the average American could survive even a short stay. But, for the kind of money a convict spends to get by in an American prison, someone could probably bribe his way out of a Nigerian prison, or at the very least hire someone to do his time for him. You tell me where you’d rather be.
Misconception 4: All prisoners are stupid This is the converse of a belief widely held in prison: That everyone out there is gutless. This is not to suggest that prison is some kind of graduate seminar, except maybe of crime. Nor am I referring to “street smarts,” which I have found to be nothing more than a high level of paranoia combined with incredible baseness and selfishness and a willingness to do things that most people would consider beneath them. All of this aside, it has been my experience that IQ distribution mirrors the usual bell curve, even if we get more than our fair share of guys who have been failed by the big-city school system. My guess is that the idea that everyone in prison is stupid is based on the line of thinking that goes: They got caught. Ergo they must be stupid because there are some things that one just cannot do. I suggest, however, that the way the world is really set up is with few exceptions, you can literally do any damn thing you want to do, anything that you can think of. Of course, you may have to deal with the consequences. I say “may” because TV cop shows aside, people do get away with things once in a while. Machiavelli observed it is not the severity of the punishment that deters one from pursuing a particular course of action, but the certainty of being caught. Machiavelli was no dolt.
Misconception 5: All prison guards are misanthropic sadists like the ones portrayed in the movies This is true. Not all of the guards. Maybe there are 2 or 3 percent who aren’t. The question I have never been able to answer to my satisfaction is whether working in prison turns people into officious petty dictators, or people with those traits are the ones attracted to prison work in the first place. Many of the guards we see here are former (or failed) military who arrive with bad haircuts and affected, tortured syntax and a love of acronyms while they double-dip their government pensions and strut around like Patton clones, shouting orders in what is known as “command voice.” I’d be willing to wager that given the choice between tossing a few back at the corner pub with a group of convicts or a group of prison guards, most of you who looked into it would opt for the convicts.
Misconception 6: Everything someone needs to survive in prison is supplied by the prison If bare survival is the goal, that might possibly be true. But over the course of a 10-year sentence — about average for a small to mid-level dope dealer, anyone who hoped to treat himself to a few luxury items like dental floss, or coffee, or a phone call home, or postage stamps, or even aspirin or cold pills, which are mainly available through the prison commissary, that person would have a problem. It’s a problem that will soon be getting worse, because the Bureau of Prisons has recently announced its intention to begin charging convicts a nominal fee for sick-call visits. If a $4 fee for someone who makes $5 a month can truly be called nominal. (We all have jobs in prison, but it’s like the old Soviet system under Communism: We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.) For the fortunate in the prison population for whom crime did pay, the $200 to $400 a month required in order to comfortably do his time does not represent a serious burden. However, for the person who is more accustomed to scores than to paychecks, who typically is not the sort of person who had put a little something away for a rainy day, comfort is something one strives for.
Misconception 7: Prison has a rehabilitative effect By removing us from the pressures and temptations of the money economy, prison supposedly affords convicts the opportunity and inclination to reflect on our evil ways and do penance. Hence the name “penitentiary.” Given that most convicts hit the door under pressure to earn, about 80 percent of the prison population is on a 24/7 hustle. Some hustles are even tacitly encouraged. Sanitation, for instance, is a high-priority item with all prison administrators. New arrivals are commonly told that their areas have to be cleaned every day, regardless of how that is accomplished. In a higher-security joint, enterprising types take this as authorization to seize all the mops, buckets and other cleaning supplies and establish a monopoly on cleaning that hardly anyone is inclined to break. After all, the crowd who needs to hustle and the crowd who needs, for reasons largely associated with perceived status, to have their cells professionally cleaned, are symbiotic, and two bucks a week is a cheap way to feel like a Mafia don. Laundry service is similarly tolerated by staff, who have come to accept that maximum usage of the limited laundry facilities in woefully overcrowded prisons is best achieved by people who are motivated by profit. Along these lines, a convict who is willing and able to pay can hire another convict to perform his assigned job. The cost of this is, naturally, many times what the prison pays. No one would really work for that. All of this contributes to what is known as “the orderly running of the institution,” and there isn’t anyone on either side of the bars who would argue that turning a blind eye to certain indiscretions is anything but sound management policy. Most hustles, however, are not so benignly regarded. Stealing, for instance, is frowned upon by everyone, though the sanctions imposed by the convict population are so much worse than anything the administration is allowed to employ that this is not as much of a problem as you might expect. Such is not the case with gambling, which is ubiquitous. Many a bookmaker has arrived in prison already feeling unfairly persecuted while the society he has just been exiled from is rife with church’s bingo games, volunteer fire departments’ Monte Carlo night and the NCAA Tournament pool that was hanging on the wall of the police station where he was taken after he was arrested. He finds himself in prison, immediately solicited to place bets or buy squares in pools for football games, basketball games, NASCAR races and the Daily Number. The first advice a newly arrived convict usually receives is to mind his own business, always pay his bills on time, and never get involved with gambling, dope or punks. The first piece of advice he usually ignores is the part about gambling. In the higher-security institutions, more convicts PC (check into protective custody) over gambling debts than for any other reason. There is plenty of dope in prison, which begs the question: If they can’t keep drugs out of a penitentiary with 30-foot walls, eight gun towers and a full-time security staff of 500, how do they expect to keep them from crossing the Mexican border? In most prisons, one can obtain the full array of intoxicants available on the street corner. In maximum-security joints, tastes run toward heroin, exorbitantly priced reefer (about $40/gram), and jailhouse wine made from either orange or tomato juice or, for the connoisseur, a very fine grape juice vintage aged 21 days in a plastic trash bag that most convicts say tastes almost as good as anything that can be had in a bottle with a twist-off cap. At a medium security facility, you’ll find less heroin and wine but more reefer. A minimum-security facility is about the same. Coke and hallucinogens are rare everywhere — there’s no sense getting too wound up with nowhere to go. At a camp where it is easiest to get things from the street there is, paradoxically, practically nothing to be had except for some occasional vodka, the drink of choice because of its mild smell. Convicts get transferred to camps, after all, for good behavior. Besides the dope biz, other hustles you find everywhere include extortion, prostitution, selling chow-hall food (your own and others’), making and selling greeting cards and other hobby-craft items (including fifis), selling loosies (single cigarettes), operating a 2-for-1 store with commissary items (take 1 now, pay for 2 later), doing legal work, really anything you can think of. In here it is still all about the money, and we don't have much time for rehabilitating or reflecting.
Misconception 8: Politicians are sending a message to potential criminals with harsh sentencing laws There is a consistent refrain among the John Ashcrofts and Donald Rumsfelds of the world that that person, or group of people, needs to be sent a message, usually in the form of some draconian punishment. Every week on the evening news you are likely to see some politician advocating the bastinado or drawing and quartering to send a message to jaywalkers or mopes. Hello out there. No one in here is listening. Do you really think that with the time and effort one must devote to a career in crime, not to mention staying out half the night carousing and sleeping ’til mid-afternoon, that any of us actually has time to watch the news or read the paper, let alone the Congressional Record or the Federal Register? These messages are spam, or junk mail, and ignored. Few of us will ever learn the penalty for anything until we get caught, at which point the message is useless unless, of course, the message really is a wink and a nod in the direction of you, the voter, to let you know that the government is going to continue to do its best to punish the people who do things that you don’t want them to do; so please continue to vote for me and, by all means, don’t think that this pat on the back is only a diversion to disguise a grab for your wallet. But that is too cynical for even a criminal like me to believe. Implicit in these messages is a misunderstanding of exactly what goes on in here. A criminal-defense lawyer who has defended hundreds of clients once told me that no one who goes to prison is ever the same again. I didn’t believe him. Convicts never believe anything anybody tells them. We are archetypal show-me guys. But it turns out that he was right, and I’m not talking about an increased tendency to dress in dark colors, wear sunglasses at inappropriate times, or believe that Vegas and Sinatra and Wayne Newton are really, really cool. Prison leaves an indelible mark on the soul. The results, however, are not what I believe the people who advocate it most are hoping for. So if we’re not rehabilitating, whatever that means, what are we doing? Everybody’s main activity, even more than hustling, is scheming. It makes perfect sense if you think about it. Take a large group of people largely motivated by money and remove them from the economy during their prime earning years. The longer you do this, the more it increases their anxiety. Then, stigmatize them with a label that makes the possibility of a secure future via traditional means unlikely. Finally, when you set them free, place them under the thumb of a supervisory system designed to hassle them. What do you expect to happen? It is so obvious to me that I can’t see how anyone could believe that we are doing anything else in here but hatching schemes. The message we get by the time we’re paying attention is: You’re really screwed, so you’d better figure out what you’re going to do about it. Soon a lot more people will be getting that message. The feds are so happy about how the drug thing is working out that they are in the process of upping the ante for everyone. Just this year they doubled, and in some cases quadrupled, the sentencing guidelines for a bunch of white-collar offenses. I’ll leave a light on for you.
J. Incandenza is the pen name of an inmate currently serving 14 years in U.S. federal prison for drug-trafficking.
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