He is nearly finished, bella. They want it
erected in the Piazza della Signoria. Already
some are calling him a masterwork.

	That’s nice, dear.
	Can you move your things?
	Lucia is stopping by. Full story »

We went to see Momix at the University of Colorado’s Mackey Auditorium last night. They’re currently doing a “Best of Momix” tour, and the show was wonderful. I’d never seen them before, and the inventive mix of dance, visual illusion and humor left me looking forward to their return.

Here’s one they didn’t do last night.

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Well, sadly, I couldn’t take my laptop into the auditorium, so it’s all written notes. You might as well head over to the Guardian Iraq Inquiry website for the live blog there. It’s the best one out there. So before I start watching the talking heads give their analysis, or, even worse, that of other Labour Party hacks (Margaret Beckett is droning on right now on Sky–anyone who lives in the UK will know what a dreaded prospect that is) here are some observations.

It was a bit surreal, in fact–the Alternative Viewing Facility turns out to be the large auditorium in the Queen Elizabeth II Center where the inquiry is being held. There must have been 800 people in there, not many of them likely to have been on Blair’s side. All very well behaved, I must say–and a really broad age range, Clearly a lot of people had taken time off from work, as I had. This was important. It’s like being in the Iraq marches in 2002 and 2003–there was a need to bear witness, and this was one of those occasions that required it. Chilcot, to his credit, understands this, I think. It goes without saying that neither Tony Blair nor the current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown (who testifies next month) wanted this inquiry. There were lots of demonstrators outside, of course, but there seemed to be even more police. Full story »

Many an activist and other members of the liberal left (sorry, conservatives, there’s nothing derogatory about that term you use for us) has torn out his or her hair over apathy on the part of the general public. Why do so few Americans care about inhumanity and injustice? Worse, why do they often vote against their own interests?

What compounds our frustration and bewilderment over our fellow Americans’ negligible participation in the political process is the overarching irony. We’re citizens of the nation that put participatory democracy on the map for God’s sake. How did we arrive at this sad state of affairs, which I call the enduring enigma of the American public? Full story »

OK, today is the big day. We’ve already had three hours of Tony Blair this morning, but they’re only letting the public in to either a morning or an afternoon session for Blair’s testimony, and I got the afternoon. I can’t believe I got one of these tickets—I never win anything. But here we are.

And I haven’t heard back on whether they have Wi-Fi in the room that I’ll be sitting in, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to post. If not, it will all come out in one large post later.

So what happened this morning? Blair was asked about what happened at Crawford (nothing special, no secret deal), the relation of Iraq to the mid-east peace process (none, apparently, although he said he was “frustrated” at the lack of progress), his relationship with Bush (fine, and did not set conditions). So far, Blair’s main point is that 9/11 changed everything—specifically, the perception of risk. So even though he more or less conceded that the actual risk posed by Saddam Hussein did not change, the perceived risk did. And he was very fudgy on one point—he saw no real difference between regime change and disarming Iraq, an interesting non-distinction for someone who trained as a lawyer to make. Blair also said that his comments in his now-notorious interview with Fern Britton of the BBC last year was a mistake. We’ve also learned that Blair seems to worry a lot about threats—he’s mentioned Iran several times today. Is he secretly lamenting that he didn’t get an attack on Iran in while he still could? Full story »

Scholars & Rogues honors JD Salinger as our 32^nd masthead scrogue.

J.D. Salinger is dead.

If you want to know about his lousy life or how he treated his kids or his ex-wives and girlfriends, or any of that other People Magazine crap, look somewhere else. I just don’t feel like going into it. Too many jerks spend all their time reading that shit anyway, and it’s just not worth recounting it when you could read it all at TMZ or some place like that and besides Salinger himself was pretty touchy about people talking about him and he’d probably sue from the grave. I mean, the guy sued every goddamn body who ever said boo to him for the last 50 years or so.

Some stuff just isn’t worth the trouble.

So I’ll just talk about driving to town last night…. Full story »

The Supreme Court has decreed that corporations are persons and money is speech, so it was only a matter of time before a company decided to exercise its Constitutional right to run for Congress.

Following the recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to allow unlimited corporate funding of federal campaigns, Murray Hill Inc. today announced it is filing to run for U.S. Congress. “Until now,” Murray Hill Inc. said in a statement, “corporate interests had to rely on campaign contributions and influence-peddling to achieve their goals in Washington. But thanks to an enlightened Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and run for office ourselves.” Murray Hill Inc. is believed to be the first “corporate person” to exercise its constitutional right to run for office. Full story »

“The guys who are shooting films now are technically brilliant, but there’s no content in their films. I marvel at what I see and wish I could have done a shot like that. But shots are secondary for my films, and with some of these films, it’s all about the shots. What’s the point? I’m not sure people know what points to make.” Who said it? Full story »

In honor of today, let’s get out of the house and go into the S&R archives.

I don’t understand my country. None of its political labels make a damn bit of sense. Too many of them are outright falsehoods. And at least a couple have been maligned by so much propaganda that they may not be salvageable. “Liberal” is one. The word itself has become weaponized to the point where even liberals often eschew it in favor of “progressive”. I’m still not sure what that even means. Progress is cool, i suppose, but requires direction and a destination. And then there’s that pesky Zeno and his paradox: is progress even possible for a monkey with fancy thumbs? “Libertarian” is pretty bad these days too. Far too often the word is invoked as a dog whistle for social Darwinism and neo-liberalism. Liberty being best wholly described by “free” markets and possibly gun ownership. “Conservative” is the biggest laugh. Aside from conserving fetuses and the holy sanctity of heterosexuality (airport bathrooms and male prostitutes being the acceptable exceptions), i’m still at a loss for how these people got or retain the label.

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I don’t want to be a whiner and complainer, but I’m going to whine and complain for a while. I’m losing my teeth! It’s 2010, for crying out loud, and not only do we not have flying cars and floating cities, we don’t have a way to re-grow bone below the gum line. My teeth are shifting and sliding like dancers in a slippery ballroom, or worse: two of the front ones on the bottom are gone. They just fell out, and the timing couldn‘t have been worse. I lost one while eating a banana. You read that right. I was enjoying a banana, a ripe banana, when one of my bottom teeth just wasn’t there anymore. And how lucky was I that I was on my way to a job interview in Myrtle Beach when that happened. I kept my right hand over my lower lip and mumbled through it. Full story »

Today we celebrate one of the greatest, and most improbable, moments in the history of rock.

Let’s begin with the Mnozil Brass:

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The original photo was shot in the my studio but the processing was done in my phone.

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — In December, what for all intents and purposes looks like the mother of all reports on nuclear weapons was issued. The entity responsible is called the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND). A joint initiative of the Australian and Japanese Governments, it was launched to reinvigorate global nuclear disarmament in time for the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. Full story »

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Anthony Watts of WattsUpWithThat.com and SurfaceStations.org published a 30 page white paper in 2009 with the help of the Heartland Institute titled “Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?” His conclusion was that the temperature record was not reliable due to problems with where thermometers are located.

If Watts were correct, this would be a major problem. If the entire US temperature record was unreliable, then conclusions drawn from the temperature record could also be similarly flawed. At a minimum, the scientific papers using the temperature record would have to be revisited. So a thorough investigation of Watts’ conclusion by scientists was warranted. And now a new peer-reviewed paper by scientists at the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) have analyzed the temperature record and found that Watts’ conclusion of a flawed temperature record runs contrary to the actual data. Full story »

We learned a lot this past week in the Iraq Inquiry. Jack Straw, for example, told us that he almost thought the war was a bad idea, and was, well, awfully close to being illegal. But then he changed his mind, apparently, maybe. That’s the way it went pretty much the whole week. Geoff Hoon agreeably admitted that he did what he was told to do. I suppose reading between the lines, we learned that everything that was done under Tony Blair was against the will and judgment of those who worked for him–and yet, somehow, they managed to do what he told them to do anyway.

And we have an exciting week coming up. First, we have a bunch of people from the Foreign Office, who will be telling us that in all likelihood the invasion of Iraq was illegal without a second UN resolution, which of course Tony was happy to ignore. Full story »

Today is the birthday of our original scholar rogue, George Gordon Byron, sixth earl of Newstead Abbey.

I have been thinking a lot about Byron in the last week, partly because it used to be a ritual of my misspent youth to celebrate his birthday each year by engaging in as much debauchery as my financial and physical health could stand, partly because I wasted four hours of my life last week watching the mini series Byron on Ovation Television even after I’d realized that the narrative construct focused almost entirely on Byron’s scandalous love life. (There were passing references to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, and I think The Corsair was mentioned, too, in relation to Edward Trelawny who makes a cameo near the end of the program, but perhaps I mis-remember).

This Byron – Byron the scandalous celebrity – is the Byron the media believes the public wants. Full story »

Bad attitude and strange bedfellows at the dawn of the Reich, and What Would Hunter Do, anyway?

Ever since five members of the Supreme Court declared the Constitution unconstitutional yesterday morning I’ve been in something of a snit. Along the way, I’ve said a variety of things that struck me as insightful, pithy, even witty. Others, however – bitter, lonely misanthropic types simmering in their own humorless bile – seem to be finding me mostly snarky and cynical.

So here are a few samples. You be the judge. Assuming you’re a corporation with enough spare cash that your opinion matters, that is.

• Early on, my S&R colleague Brian Angliss lamented that this is how democracy dies, or something to that effect. My reply: “From where I sit democracy has been dead for some time. This is more like vandals pulling over the headstone.” See? Wasn’t that clever? Full story »