Rush calls Obama "racist"

Rush Limbaugh today called Obama "the worst racist" of them all, a "reverse-racist" if we are going to be nice about it, and his new Supreme pick is also a "racist."

Rush is like the old man in the TV room growling at the rabbit-ears, fond of saying irresponsible and provocative things with nasty overtones, or the guy on his fourth slow beer at a small town bar, sitting back and crossing his arms with a stupid smirk.

The kind of guy who thinks that white people are suffering as a group in this country.

Let this be the hope of the GOP, so a new party representing conservatism and restraint and a more Libertarian attitude toward the law can bloom in the space behind it.

We're With You, Pakistan

Irony dies when a bomb in a car kills 23 Lahore shoppers and wounds over 300.  This constant war will not go on forever, and those who died were just trying to live like I do, in an urban milieu where men and women go outside and are not hidden away, go openly to a market, converse without fear.  We are with you, Pakistan, fighting for the rule of law and the attempt at intellectual mastery of our problems, the attempt to maintain equal rights for all citizens, the respect for religious pluralism, your court system, your people not ready to give in and permit the rule of the clerisy and the armed young men in their thrall.  You are on the front lines.  We are wounded with you.

New York Times lead story / internet headline: 11:57 am, 5/21/09

Obama's speech.

Let's see how fast this changes now that Cheney's stepped all over it saying choking prisoners by pouring water down their throats is not torturing them.  He insists on the euphemism, "enhanced interrogation," building on the already awful modality of putting prisoners in cold rooms, keeping them awake, dousing them in cold water, making them stand for hours, etc. etc. physical punishments that the CIA meted out.

I'll check back.

Still Obama.  Candy Crowley called it "enhanced torture techniques" just now.  Good for you, Candy.

12:20 pm and Cheney now pushes his head above the fold, under the headline, "Dueling speeches . . ."

Proposed Courses at the University of Maryland

In the interests of drumming up support for forthcoming courses, I propose the following.

Hist. 124: Africa through Wikipedia

Students read and critique Wiki pages devoted to some aspect of Africa — from Leo DiCaprio's eternal role in Blood Diamond, to Winnie Mandela's soccer club, to Ogoni oil lease demands in the Niger Delta, to Tanzanian drug transshipment.  Students then recheck Wiki to see if the truth has changed while they were writing their final composite amalgam papers.  The final submission is an e-mailed work in progress for which the entire class collaborates from their mobile devices.  As an electronic text, it is then thrown away or assimilated to another text, and the students collectively receive an A.

Hist. 3981: Transnational constants: Breathing, eating, drinking, walking, washing, unmentionabling

The class looks at wide continuities and contextualizes "change over time" as just one facet among many other more important ones, like getting a good night's rest.  Each professor selects a country or region, and offers a single fact differentiating/assimilating a "constant" (C) into the "Big Story" (BS).  Each student is responsible for a term project locating their own daily habits in a matrix of continuity.  We supply the conclusion of the class in advance, so those without the hours or know-how to follow the class in real time will not suffer.  It is: "People are different, people are the same."  Students receive an A.

Hist. 800: Gender in the History of History

This course pools the talents of the entire staff.  Each professor writes a thirty page summary of their field, drawing out the continuities and ruptures in the way sex-role-performance in society has been dealt with by previous scholars over time, and the way each him or herself is part of that history.  Using only the internet accessed in their free time, students merge the documents into one big document, and then edit them to fashion a master chronology of events (CE) roughly sixty to seventy pages long.  Random words and phrases are then chosen from the document and memorized for the test, which is a practice exam only.  All the students receive an A.

MSNBC on "The Family": the Sexualization of Christ

The Family as a cult, as a suicidal sinkhole, as a unification of God with f***ing (see below).

As i wrote last May:

Flight 3407 over Buffalo

The flight that went down in Buffalo with ice on its wings: the transcript of the final words in the cockpit predictably include presumably "SHIT" (alt. "FUCK") and "JESUS CHRIST." We are told that the co-pilot said, "I don't know anything about icy conditions or de-icing." And then the pilot said, "I've never been on the stick," meaning, I've never got this plane out of a stall with the stick, one assumes.

After these confessions, the plane stalled and wobbled twice and then made a bee-line for sea level on Elm Street.

But that is not so far in the released transcript I've seen. There is just normal sounding airline talk. What's on record however does however raise some questions, especially in light of the unprinted material released by NY1 above.

22:00:23.2

HOT-1

had a guy that worked in there. had an odd accent to begin with. and uh

College Station Airport is uh owned and operated by the university-- uh

the Texas A and M university.

22:00:37.8

later . . .

you know we had a a controller down in Houston. uh he was known as

Mister Happy.

21:58:37.7

HOT-2

oh yeah.

21:58:38.4

HOT-1

guy was just he was-- had a perfect personality for the being a controller.

he never let anything rattle him. and he just all just all bubbly type a type a

guy. he retired-- just to let you know how he-- how well respected he

was um he retired and he had they published where his retirement party

was. there was pilots from Continental Colgan pilots Chautauqua

Expressjet you know the main carriers there in Houston.

21:59:09.2

HOT-2

oh that's cool.

21:59:12.3

HOT-1

they all went to go see you know Mister Happy and everything but but

that's where I got the bent wing pencil jet.

21:59:19.6

HOT-2

it's where what?

21:59:20.6

HOT-1

that's where I got the bent wing pencil jet uh name from.

I was interested to find on line a commendation for Axe from Houston, who talked like that: "Bent-Wing Pencil Jets" for XRs. I wonder who left this note, who ERfly is?

HOT-1

it's-- it's like moms SUV or minivan. you know the soccer van uh you

don't have to fly with your hands and your feet. you just fly with your

hands.

21:44:59.2

HOT-2

yeah.

21:44:59.5

HOT-1

once you-- once you flip the auto-- uh the yaw damp on and autopilot on

it's solid as a rock.

and

21:45:05.2

HOT-2

works the rudders for you.

21:45:07.1

HOT-1

yeah it works rudders for you. it's all coordinated.

INTRA-AIRCRAFT COMMUNICATION AIR-GROUND COMMUNICATION

TIME and TIME . . .

and then earlier, also:

21:46:55.6

HOT-1

you know home with your husband to to take care of all that kind of stuff.

INTRA-AIRCRAFT COMMUNICATION AIR-GROUND COMMUNICATION

TIME and TIME and

SOURCE CONTENT SOURCE CONTENT

DCA09MA027

CVR Factual Report

Page 12-34

21:46:59.6

HOT-2

exactly yeah it's just gonna depend where we're at when that happens.

but I-- I mean I'm not-- I'm not in such a hurry to upgrade. I've got very

very very good connections at Alaska.

21:47:10.4

HOT-2

oh cool.

21:47:11.2

HOT-2

Alaska's the only major I'd want to go to.

21:47:13.2

HOT-1

yeah.

21:47:13.5

HOT-2

just because I don't want to commute my whole life...so um once I do

upgrade you know once once Alaska starts hiring I don't-- I mean I don't

necessarily have to have a thousand hours PIC. I need to have some PIC.

21:47:25.7

So: WHO wants to transfer to Alaska, a cold-weather region? And what led to the co-pilot being on the flight? What was all that talk about? Is it normal to screw up like this? Of course, one might say, what do I expect: "Executing proper maneuvers at the proper moment, but the technology appears to be failing." Best not to judge before getting all the facts. But aren't these the questions reporters should be asking?

OKAY, toward the end . . . we all know it got bad, but that's also on FOX NEWS. Sorry, I'm not a ghoul, there's no link.

Longtime readers (I think there are four of you) will know that I do not like to use the actual words and people in the news, but to write in a lax and undeniably annoying way using the wrong words so as not to be searched. Then I tried putting Ben Stein in a heading, and no one clicked up my counter (well, twenty people or so). Thus I learn I am writing a pebble stumbled upon once in a while like a wrong number. A private bulletin board . . .

Taylor and the Future of University Education

Re the Taylor essay in the New York Times, really, how odd it is that theology is still a subject in modern secular universities.  With only the most indirect application to the world as it is experienced by real people, the medieval subject has been caught in an identity crisis since Nietzsche remarked that its inclusion in the humanities is a conundrum beggaring any attempted explanation.

The weaving of doctrinal fantasies must, sure, be leavened with lace, bells and whistles, images and video-projects. Who otherwise would wish to write about purely ideological disagreements, the kind Marx said cannot actually have a discernible history?

Who would not rather make a multi-media presentation about Hans Kung or Zoroaster or the famous three-Jesus-fingers or two-Jesus-fingers controversy?

"In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text."

"Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure."

"Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs."

"Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological . . ."

I know about water.

Did you learn about the history of water management and other resources?

No, about the water of history management, and the watering of other resources, with a strong theological slant. You know there is no more history department.

Have you noticed time getting away from you?

It's four o'clock, again, four in the afternoon, time for a cup of coffee.  The coffee again.  I am always making coffee, it is always this time, four, then it will be head on the pillow time again.  It is always all the times.  It is always the coffee, the driving the same routes, the progress by inches in making the redundancies go away and the chronology as solid as possible.  No balance or sanity is possible until it is done.  What gets sacrificed for a big attempt, a large effort, made out of the darkness, not in the middle of a seminar, one consisting of watching words on a screen for thousands of hours, if not balance

Rozi ness

To continue a conversation with myself about evidence and argument and ethnicity:

Conveying relief.  Whew.  Not that I am provided with cover, but that my obvious sins have been corrected before the graver ones are revealed.  I mean, the obvious sins in my argument in my second chapter corresponding to the flood inward of an idea of heightened interest in place and defense and wider alliances/bigger chiefdoms, called rozi.  I had to decide whether to go against JV and say, "I believe it is based on Shirazi," and so dates back to Great Zimbabwe, which is then ipso facto apparently suggested as having hosted a "Shirazi" dynasty, etc.   You get the picture: it looks from a distance like walking into the Hamitic Hypothesis volume two.  Even so, I can't get out of my mind the odd coincidence of relatively rare r --- names.  Even so.  Even so, I gave up.

Gone is everything that can't be shown without a thorough survey of Shona and Setswana and Sesotho usages a la the Schoenbrun and Ehret and JV approach.  Yet it turns out that the disagreement between Ehret and JV is bigger in JV's view than their agreement, and they are the masters of the lexicostatistics etc. approach.  Let me put this delicately: I have some . . .  problems with establishing proto-meanings for conceptual words etc. with their approach.  But I grant it is great for sheep and goats and types of sorghum.

So I've just saluted them all from afar now, so to speak, in my revision.  Now, all I say is something that JV has no objection to in principle: the argument that rozvi - rozi - rotse is a continuum of phenomena, that the continuum bridges Shona-"highveld" i.e. Tswana - Sotho - Pedi languages, that Shona v. S.A.'n highveld has been overemphasized to create a false image of tribal organization on the highveld.  And the twin-court reading of oral tradition.  So it is much shorter now . . .

To return now to this commentary.  The historian always has to ask him or herself, "What do I believe actually happened."  This is very important.  If that cannot be answered honestly, you cannot go forward.  I believe that ethnicity has blinded scholars to wider shared phenomena and that rozvi - rozi - rotse are related, but developed differently in different places.  I accept that Shona ZCP sites are more complicated than highveld settlements as lines written in mud and stone.  But I do not accept the binary: Shona developed civilization of ZCP in Mapungubwe and Zimbabwe, while plus sa change highveld settlements were and remained tribes.

The same kinds of associative devices productive of a torwa could make alliances into brotherhoods in the language of the highveld, and even alter genealogies.  That much I learned in Lerala years ago.  When one considers that writing freezes memory, we have to assume there is a palimpsest and that the usual rules of less clarity and richness in the middle period is followed i.e. the "hourglass."  There is a trans-ethnic kind of phenomenon, where blood descent has blinded historians of the SA and Zim elevated agrarian towns' relationships and mutual intercourse, showing the complexities of the development of forms of self-rule.

Most of all that there was a real politics operating that reached back before extant tribes, and that real ancestors were recollected all the time by highveld chiefs and their minions, and that genuine wisdom about the past and so the future was contained in their oral traditions.  This leads to the argument re motebele.