"Werner Herzog meditates on the Google logo."

Roger Ebert is fooled by what is a very funny parody of Werner Herzog (which you should get if you've seen the movie "Grizzly Man"):



Looking (unsuccessfully) for the relevant clip from "Grizzly Man" — "I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder" — I found this video made by a guy who finds that when he reads Anton Chekov short stories, he hears the words in his head in Werner Herzog's voice:



(The words are from the Chekov story "Gusev.")

"Pakistan Tells U.S. to 'Vacate' Air Base as Border Strike Inflames Tensions."

"... Islamabad had already ordered the country's border crossings into Afghanistan closed, blocking off NATO supply lines, after the strike."

MEANWHILE: "Obama and family take in basketball game, chat with Bill Murray." He did comment on current events, noting that the tentative deal to end the NBA lockout seems to be "a good deal."

"Black Friday sales rose 6.6% from a year ago..."

"Online sales grew 24.3%..."

Graphic conception-to-birth depiction.

Should this video affect what we think about abortion?

Pro-life advocates are giving the video rave reviews. While the nation continues to be divided on the abortion issue, some believe that the growth and expansion of technology is beginning to impact how individuals view the issue. The ability to see graphic details about the development of a fetus, they believe, makes it more difficult to accept abortion without sincere questions about life’s beginnings.

Some Amazon shopping links.

May I recommend...

Visit Amazon's Home Kitchen and Lawn Gift Guide

Visit endless.com: Endless Holiday Gift Guide

Visit Amazon's Consumer Electronics Deals Page

Visit Amazon's Video Game Deals Page

Shop Amazon's Auto Deals - Countdown to Black Friday and Cyber Monday

By using any of these links and continuing on from there to buy whatever you want on Amazon, you'll be sending about 7% of the price to me, which I interpret as an expression from you that you appreciate the writing I'm doing here for you. You don't pay anything more for your purchases. Thanks in advance.

Climategate collusion.

"More than 5,000 documents have been leaked online purporting to be the correspondence of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia who were previously accused of ‘massaging’ evidence of man-made climate change."

Romney has got to be lying...

... when he says he doesn't use any "product" to hold his hair in place.

ADDED: Actually, it's only his hairstylist who says there's no product. Romney's not on record with this denial.

Occupy Wall Street is "overwhelmingly white."

Stacey Patton, in the Washington Post, deploys the same phrase that was used against the Tea Party. When journalists used "overwhelmingly white" against the Tea Party, they were showing a predictable aversion to conservative things. To say the same thing about OWS is, however, to deviate from the journalistic norm. You'd expect journalists to flatter and coddle the OWS folk.

But this column isn't about diminishing OWS for excluding/repelling black people. Patton is inquiring into why black people don't join up with a movement you're supposed to think they ought to want to join:

African Americans share white Americans’ anger about corporate greed and corruption, and blacks have a rich history of protesting injustice in United States. So why aren’t they Occupying?

The "rich history of protesting injustice" was about racial injustice, not left-wing class warfare. Some people like to mush those 2 things together, but where a movement begins with left-wing economic ideology, why should you expect black people to join up en masse?

From America’s birthing pains to the civil rights protests of the 1960s, blacks have never been afraid to fight for economic or social justice....

Afraid?  People declining to "occupy Wall Street" aren't afraid. It's demagoguery to insinuate that black people have opted out because they are afraid.

In 1969, James Forman, former executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a civil rights organization, called on blacks to not perpetuate capitalism or contribute to the exploitation of blacks in the United States and elsewhere. He urged black workers to take over America by sabotaging U.S. factories and ports “while the brothers fight guerrilla warfare in the street.” And Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party renounced the American Dream as defective and called for the destruction of the capitalist system.

This is exactly the kind of linking of racial injustice to left-wing ideology that most people reject.

GQ list of "25 least Influential People Alive" includes Barack Obama.

Ha ha. It all depends on what the meaning of "influential" is.

This sends me not to GQ, but to the Online Etymology Dictionary:

influence (n.)
late 14c., an astrological term, "streaming ethereal power from the stars acting upon character or destiny of men," from O.Fr. influence "emanation from the stars that acts upon one's character and destiny" (13c.), also "a flow of water," from M.L. influentia "a flowing in" (also used in the astrological sense), from L. influentem (nom. influens), prp. of influere "to flow into," from in- "into, in, on, upon" (see in- (2)) + fluere "to flow" (see fluent). Meaning "exercise of personal power by human beings" is from mid-15c.; meaning "exertion of unseen influence by persons" is from 1580s (a sense already in M.L., e.g. Aquinas). Under the influence "drunk" first attested 1866.

Streaming ethereal power, eh? That sounds like something he's tried to do, oh, maybe years ago. Thank God — thank the stars — he couldn't.

fluent
1580s, "flowing freely" (of water, also of speech), from L. fluentem (nom. fluens) "lax, relaxed," figuratively "flowing, fluent," prp. of fluere "to flow, stream, run, melt," from PIE *bhleugw-, extended form of *bhleu- "to swell, well up, overflow" (cf. L. flumen "river;" Gk. phluein "to boil over, bubble up," phlein "to abound"), an extension of base *bhel- (2); see bole. Used interchangeably with fluid in Elizabethan times. Related: Fluently.

Flowing, streaming, melting, welling up, swelling, boiling over, bubbling up... but when we say "fluent" these days, we're usually speaking about speaking: fluent speech. But this idea of fluency began with a word about bubbling up, not streaming down from the stars, and that ground-up flowing concept takes us to the fascinating word "bole":

bole
early 14c., from O.N. bolr "tree trunk," from P.Gmc. *bulas (cf. M.Du. bolle "trunk of a tree"), from PIE *bhel- (2) "to blow, swell" (cf. Gk. phyllon "leaf," phallos "swollen penis;" L. flos "flower," florere "to blossom, flourish," folium "leaf;" O.Prus. balsinis "cushion;" O.N. belgr "bag, bellows;" O.E. bolla "pot, cup, bowl;" O.Ir. bolgaim "I swell," blath "blossom, flower," bolach "pimple," bolg "bag;" Bret. bolc'h "flax pod;" Serb. buljiti "to stare, be bug-eyed;" Serbo-Cr. blazina "pillow").

Swollen penis! Blossom! Pillow! Pimple! We've come to an odd spot on this etymological path. We begin with influence, which came from the stars, and we found our way to flowing water and then to a swelling tree trunk or phallus.  Keep in mind that we are talking about politics.

But this is a blog post, so I've got to stop now. Your turn to speak. Flow on, burst forth, see if you can influence anybody.

The NYT editorializes against traditional classroom teaching in law schools.

Here.

Instead of a curriculum taught largely through professors’ grilling of students about appellate cases, some schools are offering more apprentice-style learning in legal clinics and more courses that train students for their multiple future roles as advocates and counselors, negotiators and deal-shapers, and problem-solvers.

Of course, law school clinics have been around for decades, but they don't overwhelm the coursework. If they did, law school would become much more expensive for students. And yet it's apprentice-style learning! If learning law doesn't involve deep study of difficult materials, why should you have to go to law school at all? If apprentice work is best, why not have apprenticeships?

The case method has been the foundation of legal education for 140 years. Its premise was that students would learn legal reasoning by studying appellate rulings. That approach treated law as a form of science and as a source of truth.

That vision was dated by the 1920s. It was a relic by the 1960s. Law is now regarded as a means rather than an end, a tool for solving problems. In reforming themselves, law schools have the chance to help reinvigorate the legal profession and rebuild public confidence in what lawyers can provide.

So... forget science and truth. Law is a means to an end. Got that? Can you understand why the NYT thinks that you, the public, would have more confidence in lawyers if you would only see them as deal-shapers and problem solvers who only use law because it's a means to an end? Would you look upon the law with newfound admiration if you thought that only unsophisticated people imagine that law has something to do with reasoning from principle and the accurate interpretation of texts?

By the way, if classroom teaching is suspect these days, and apprentice-style learning is better, why are we trapping all our youngsters in buildings with desks and books and blackboards and teachers? Why not devote half the school day to letting the students work cleaning the buildings and cooking and serving the meals? Newt Gingrich said it last week:

Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they'd begin the process of rising.

It's a clinic. Students learn the ways of real-life practical work. Of course, Newt's idea is different from the law school clinic, because law students pay tuition for the benefit of learning through practice, while Newt's teenage janitors would get paid.

"No matter what I do... the kissing, the hugging... I'm more interested in what's going on on Mars...

Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to think the point of a DVD commentary track is to tell us what we can already obviously see happening in the movie... as displayed — hilariously — in this collection of clips from "Total Recall":



Is he an idiot? Does he think we're idiots? Or is this Arnold's amazingly sly way of saying commentary tracks are worthless?

(Via Metafilter.)

Where am I? What am I doing here?

Presmittdent.

I just wanted to be the first person on the internet to write that word.

"[Herman] Cain avoided some of the most heated moments of the 1960s, and he said his recollections of that era are hazy."

"He said he doesn't recall being aware of Dr. King, a 1948 graduate of Morehouse, ever visiting the campus, including a convocation during Mr. Cain's senior year at which Dr. King was the featured speaker and the glee club performed. Mr. Cain sang baritone for the glee club all four years at Morehouse."

Excerpt from "Herman Cain's Political Education," in the Wall Street Journal.

Some Morehouse graduates have criticized Mr. Cain for being disengaged from the civil-rights movement. Horace Bohannon Jr., who sometimes shared lecture notes with Mr. Cain as an underclassman and later became a follower of Stokely Carmichael and his "black power" movement, said he perceived in Mr. Cain a disdain for students who became more deeply involved in the turmoil of those days. "We were hellbent on changing this society and the structure of the South," he said. "There was sort of a resentment toward us by Herman."

But others from that era say that many students at the school focused on preparing for careers, and that some faculty members discouraged open participation in marches and similar activity.

"Most of the Morehouse fellows did not participate," said Wesley D. Clement, a classmate of Mr. Cain who is now an eye surgeon in Charlotte, N.C. "Your main target and goal was to prepare yourself for business and life. Not that we were ignorant of what was going on or didn't favor what was going on. But we were not involved in the things that some people would have called more radical at that time."

"Frank Miller and the rise of cryptofascist Hollywood."

Rick Moody attacks "Batman" writer/artist Frank Miller who attacked Occupy Wall Street. Miller said:

Everybody’s been too damn polite about this nonsense:

The “Occupy” movement, whether displaying itself on Wall Street or in the streets of Oakland (which has, with unspeakable cowardice, embraced it) is anything but an exercise of our blessed First Amendment. “Occupy” is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.

“Occupy” is nothing short of a clumsy, poorly-expressed attempt at anarchy, to the extent that the “movement” – HAH! Some “movement”, except if the word “bowel” is attached - is anything more than an ugly fashion statement by a bunch of iPhone, iPad wielding spoiled brats who should stop getting in the way of working people and find jobs for themselves.

That's about half of it. It goes on in that vein, then ends with a single-word paragraph: "Schmucks."

Rick Moody — who's a writer best known for "The Ice Storm" — uses Miller's diatribe to launch his own diatribe about how Hollywood action movies are fascist propaganda. (Moody doesn't entertain the notion that OWS might be fascist. He blithely links Miller and fascism to the conservative side of the political spectrum.) Moody sorts through the evidence: "True Lies, the abominable 1994 James Cameron film (featuring Republican governor-to-be Arnold Schwarzenegger)...  the expensive and aesthetically pretentious Gladiator (2000), which I still contend is an allegory about George W Bush's candidacy for president..."

The types of men (almost always men) who have historically favoured the action film genre, it's safe to say, are often, if not always, politically conservative: Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Mel Gibson, even Clint Eastwood (former Republican mayor of Carmel, California), all proud defenders of a conservative agenda, and/or justifiers of vigilantism....

There are so many action films. I'm sure plenty of them involve liberals. That wouldn't undermine Moody's point that action films are fascist and Hollywood is fascist. It would help it. But he can't go all Jonah Goldberg and talk about liberal fascism, because then how will you get your abominable, aesthetically pretentious novels about boring people in the suburbs made into glossy Oscar-bait movies? Moody says:

American movies, in the main, often agree with Frank Miller, that endless war against a ruthless enemy is good, and military service is good, that killing makes you a man, that capitalism must prevail, that if you would just get a job (preferably a corporate job, for all honest work is corporate) you would quit complaining. American movies say these things, but they are more polite about it, lest they should offend. The kind of comic-book-oriented cinema that has afflicted Hollywood for 10 years now, since Spider-Man, has degraded the cinematic art, and has varnished over what was once a humanist form, so Hollywood can do little but repeat the platitudes of the 1%. And yet Hollywood tries still not to offend.

I agree with him that "comic-book-oriented cinema... has degraded the cinematic art," but imagine a 10-year-long craze for "Ice Storm"-type stuff. I mean, if you want to talk about degradation! America would need to be insane in the first place to go crazy for that deadly genre, but imagine. Action is preferable to a suicidal funk.

Moody ends his mood piece with a call for a boycott of Frank Miller's films. Actually, he says: "And we might repay the favor [of Frank Miller's 'reminding us that our allegedly democratic political system, which increases inequality and decreases class mobility, which is mostly interested in keeping the disenfranchised where they are, requires a mindless, propagandistic (or "cryptofascist") storytelling medium to distract its citizenry'] by avoiding purchase of tickets to Miller's films."

Which is so much less pithy than "Schmucks."

Pepper-sprayed protesters had "encircled" the police and told them "if they wanted to clear the path they would have to go through us."

That's the description coming from one of the sprayed protesters. According to Elli Pearson, the protesters had linked arms in a way that sounds as though the police were stuck in the center and the protesters refused to allow them out of the encirclement.

What sort of place should you want to live in as you get old? A place with "non-Western ideas about healing"?

From a discussion with an architect (Wid Chapman) and a gerontologist (Jeffrey P. Rosenfeld):

Along with grab bars (which are frequently mentioned in your book, though none is visible in the pictures), what makes a house suitable for aging?...

Mr. Rosenfeld: When you mentioned grab bars, it reminded me that most of the homes in the book speak to a Western medical aesthetic, but a few support non-Western ideas about healing. There’s one in particular, Bioscleave, in East Hampton, N.Y., that builds on the idea of reversible destiny: that the home can challenge and stimulate inhabitants to keep them youthful. Everything about that home is colorful. It’s angular. It’s full of intentional surprises and quirks.

I’m glad you mentioned Bioscleave. I wanted to ask about the sloping, textured floors the architects designed to make walking more of an “adventure.” Isn’t that the kind of adventure that can lead to a broken hip?

Mr. Rosenfeld: The house is occupied by a person who lives there part time. A mature person. I haven’t dared ask her age, but I can say that neither of her hips is broken.

Colorful, angular... stimulate and challenge... this made me think of crib toys. They're thinking of old people like babies. I found that repulsive. We've thought a lot about moving to a simpler house, which would also be the house where we'd grow old — hopefully, extremely old. (I see that in the discussion, the gerontologist says he's "beginning to think about how [he and his wife are] going to deal with our inevitable aging." But getting old is not inevitable. It's preferable!)

What Meade and I have talked about wanting is a completely uncluttered, cleanly modern place. I don't look to the walls and floors for stimulation. I want a place that doesn't distract and bother me while I'm doing what I want to do, like read or talk to somebody.

Bioscleave sounds utterly insulting, like old people are babies. Then I looked it up. My lord! It's like old people are hamsters!



Ridiculous! Hilarious! And who cleans that place? Especially of all the blood.

I'm looking at that word "Bioscleave." "Bios" is the Greek word for life in the sense of one's life, course or way of living, lifetime. "Cleave" is a word that famously has 2 meanings. It's an auto-antonym. It can refer to clinging — let's say, to life — or to separation — which, in the case of life, would refer to death.

Take a look at that Bioscleave again. If they try to take you there... get out. I don't want your Hamster Habitat of Death. And I'm not charmed by your burbling about "non-Western" ideas. I don't want your Bioscleave just like I don't want your acupuncture. I want an ultra-Western ultra-modern house to go with my ultra-Western modern medicine.