The Brunch Table

It starts off gently, but stick with this Dora the Explorer parody for about a minute. Things get weird fast after she starts speaking in garbled German.

( direct link)

I think this interview with military historian Chalmers Johnson is exceptional. He basically argues that, at the end of World War II, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were left in superior but “unstable” positions relative to the traditional imperial powers of Europe and Asia. We both then proceeded to squander this temporary advantage through a series of unwise foreign and domestic policy decisions that, collectively, produced the resource-sapping Cold War:

“It’s not at all clear that we’ve won the Cold War. Probably, we and the U.S.S.R. lost it, but they lost it first and harder because they were always poorer than we were.”

This inspired me to go looking for other stuff on Johnson, which led me to a second, equally good article of his. Here, he elaborates on the same idea, arguing that we face a stark choice similar to that of the postwar British Empire. Heavily damaged by the Nazi invasion, Britain no longer had the resources to maintain military control over its colonies. It could either impose tyranny at home and extract the missing wealth from its own citizens–or it could voluntarily give up the empire, accept a reduction in its global influence, and use the dividends of peace to rebuild itself.

He quotes Hannah Arendt:

“On the whole [the British Empire] was a failure because of the dichotomy between the nation-state’s legal principles and the methods needed to oppress other people permanently. This failure was neither necessary nor due to ignorance or incompetence. British imperialists knew very well that ‘administrative massacres’ could keep India in bondage, but they also knew that public opinion at home would not stand for such measures. Imperialism could have been a success if the nation-state had been willing to pay the price, to commit suicide and transform itself into a tyranny. It is one of the glories of Europe, and especially of Great Britain, that she preferred to liquidate the empire.”

…remains Cosmic Star’s “Honest and Hard.”

Desktop Tower Defense: Design a maze and fill it with cannons to shoot down hordes of cheerful little creatures trying to get through. Simple graphics, brilliant game mechanics, and–if you’re successful–lots of high-pitched squeaking. (If you’ve given it a good try and it’s still driving you nuts, here’s a solution that can conquer even the crazy final levels.)

Red: Sleek, very topical physics-based game where you try and nudge incoming asteroids off course. Great music.

Eleminer: Speaking of asteroids, here’s a version of Snake set in space, adding lots of deadly flying rocks and a few other cleverly-designed twists.

MotherLoad: Dig a shaft, collect minerals, and get back to the surface before you run out of fuel. Actually has a plot, sort of.

Spikey’s Bounce Around: Bounce off walls and hit all your targets in a set number of moves. Difficult to get right.

Virus 2: No-frills matching-colored-tiles puzzle game, where the object is to, I guess, “infect” neighboring tiles with your color.

Sprout: You’re a little seed or bean thing with the power to change into different kinds of plants. Weird.

Looks like Bush’s crony Lord Black is now accused of stealing $84 million from one of his own newspaper companies, looking at a life sentence if he’s convicted. Yes, his name is really Lord Black. He’s probably best known in his native Canada for demanding legal recognition of his aristocratic title–and then, in 2001, loudly renouncing his citizenship and moving to the UK when he didn’t get it. But in the States, if you’re not Jewish, or more specifically if you don’t have Jewish Republicans in the family, you probably haven’t heard of Conrad Black, Baron of Crossharbour. (You don’t have to be Jewish, of course, to appreciate the awesomeness of that name. I can only imagine that he turned to publishing after failing to get into Hogwarts.)

Basically, he’s a baby Rupert Murdoch, a foreign friend of the Republican Party who ferrets out new constituencies and tries to trick them into voting against their own interests with a seductive, custom-made news spiel. In 1989, Black bought the venerable conservative Jewish paper The Jerusalem Post (published in Israel, but written mainly by Americans for American readers). He turned it into a Republican organ, part of a broader Reagan-era effort to woo conservative Jews away from federalism, which from the early 20th century up to the present day has meant the Democratic Party. (Since 1868, when the 14th Amendment made institutionalized religious discrimination illegal, voters belonging to minority religions have tended to back the federalist party for their own protection. Stephen Feldman’s book Please Don’t Wish Me a Merry Christmas has more on that history.)

Throughout the ’90s, the revamped Post was made to serve as a “gateway drug,” gently priming its mostly-elderly niche readership for entry into the far larger, Christian-oriented world of Fox and Clear Channel. To use a classic example, a Post article on a Nationalist terrorist attack in Israel might make a casual reference to the subversive anti-war activity of “leftist college professors.” That’s a weird non sequitur in an Israeli context–in a country where military service is compulsory and the most notorious draft-dodgers in public life tend to come from the religious right. But anti-intellectualism is a familiar ideological tack in the U.S., dating right back to our Puritan beginnings (and becoming even more entrenched after universities proved crucial in organizing opposition to the Vietnam War). Growing accustomed to this new vocabulary, I’d bet that after a while the hapless Post reader no longer finds a speech by major Republican mouthpieces like Limbaugh or O’Reilly quite so alien.

If only the upcoming trial could occupy enough of Lord Black’s time to keep him from preying on my relatives in the near future. (To be fair, he sold off the Post in 2004, but its new outlook and function haven’t changed.)