June 2011 Archives

Or should I say, welcome back to the BananaRepublic -- land of the red, white & blue, and home of the brave. Al Capp must be smiling.

And by the way, don't take the subhead on that article at face value. That's the WSJ putting an editorial slant on the news story. Here, in the third paragraph, is what the story really says:

While broad majorities of the court have voted to affirm protections for such long-recognized forms of expression as picketing, movies and now videogames, conservatives have outvoted liberals to confer First Amendment rights on business and void campaign-finance regulations that advocates say promote fairer elections.

Had the subhead accurately reflected the whole story and not just some of it, it would have said:

Rulings Cap Term That Broadened Free Speech, Killed Fair Election Financing

Postscript: July 1 -- The NY Times chimes in: Ethics, Politics and the Law.

Supervert has just redesigned his Fleursdumal.org Web site, which was first launched in 2004 and is "the definitive online edition" of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil).

The elegant new design is simple, and it works quickly. The site also has lots of levels, so you can dive deep. Its scholarship and devotion, whatever you choose to call it, is a literary service. Here's part of what the front page says:

Fleursdumal.org contains every poem of each edition of Les Fleurs du mal, together with multiple English translations -- most of which are exclusive to this site and are now available in digital form for the first time ever.

QuickStart. If you're new to Baudelaire, or if you're not interested in the nuances of the various editions of the Flowers of Evil, you should browse poems using the 1861 Table of Contents. This is the definitive edition of Les Fleurs du mal and contains most everything the casual browser would want to read, except perhaps the "condemned poems" which you can find in Les Épaves (scraps).

The advanced reader of Baudelaire will want to take advantage of the different ways to view the poems that make up Les Fleurs du mal.

English translations on the bi-lingual site "have mostly appeared previously in book form," Supervert writes. He notes that "they are not necessarily the best or the worst" but those he "felt comfortable reproducing" in terms of usage rights. As a Baudelaire hound, he himself is "partial to Edna St. Vincent Millay's renderings."

Supervert, take a bow please.

In case you're wondering, he is not a poet. But he has written several books, including Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, Necrophilia Variations, and Perversity Think Tank, which are a combination of philosophy and science fiction, as well as Horror Panegyric, an appreciation of the three dystopian Lord Horror novels by David Britton and Michael Butterworth.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

"The attempt to criminalize WikiLeaks is clearly a leading prong in the Obama administration's truly odious and dangerous war on whistleblowers."
-- Glenn Greenwald
(See: WikiLeaks Grand Jury investigation widens.)

Postscript: Don't forget to watch Greenwald's 30-minute speech on media propaganda. It's in three parts on YouTube. Here's the beginning (you can skip the introductory speaker's niceties and jump straight to the 4-minute mark), the middle, and the end. Incidental intelligence: He never once refers to his notes. He doesn't have to. What he has to say, which is typically incisive and characteristically brilliant, is all there in his head.

June 11 -- As to the Thomas Drake "Leak" Case: "[I]t seems clear that the Obama Administration misjudged the merits of its case against Drake, pursuing minor infractions with disproportionate zeal."

That's not Greenwald. That's Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News, a blog of the Federation of American Scientists, "which reports on new developments in secrecy policy and provides direct public access to official records of policy value that have been suppressed, withdrawn or that are simply hard to find."

June 18 -- Two excellent NYT frontpagers today: One reports that the Obama administration is pressing its "unprecedented crackdown on leaks," despite "the crumbling" of the Drake case. The other reports that, in the administration's internal policy debate about the war in Libya, Obama rejected the views of top lawyers from the Pentagon and the Justice Department, and claimed that the U.S. is not engaged in hostilities there. Ludicrous, eh? What's next? Pointing to an imperial scar?

This video was recorded on April 29, 2011 at the Society of Illustrators in New York City, where the exhibition ran from March 23 to April 30. Curated by Monte Beauchamp, editor of "The Life and Times of R. Crumb," the show was a retrospective that presented key pieces culled from the underground art collection of Eric Sack, with contributions from Paul Morris and John Lautemann. The laid-on soundtrack for part one is "Pennies From Heaven," from "Ben Webster: King of the Tenors"; a selection from Satie's "Nocturnes," played by Aldo Ciccolini, for part two; and "Honeysuckle Rose," played by Count Basie & HIs Orchestra, for part three.

We've focused for so long on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that we tend to forget that the worst U.S. war crimes of our time -- of mine anyway -- were committed in Vietnam. Here's a well-told reminder from several years ago:

Read the comment, below, and click the link it gives.