Tall-poppy syndrome

If you're a US state and want to impose more stringent emissions regulations than Washington can muster, you're shit out of luck. Getting the policy framework precisely right is more important than updating the regulatory regime, which is the Administration's view. But if it's true, as Jonathan Adler asserts, that "nothing California does to control greenhouse gas emissions from new
motor vehicles will mitigate the threat of climate change to the state
in any meaningful way", it won't make much of a difference anyway.

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Unsung 100th

The reverse angle, the eyeline match, and editing on action: 1917 marked the birth of classical cinema... «MORE»

Slovenian takedown

"These words simply demonstrate that today’s liberal-democratic state and the dream of an ‘infinitely demanding’ anarchic politics exist in a relationship of mutual parasitism: anarchic agents do the ethical thinking, and the state does the work of running and regulating society." Slavoj Žižek pisses on Simon Critchley (2003 interview, recent smackdown by Brian Leiter) from a lofty perch indeed, and it sparkles in the sunlight.

Wolfgang Schneider lends us a little extra background on the literary context from which Žižek sprang, a Slovenian canon "taken up with the hard rural life" and "infused with a whiff of bondage and dunghills"... «MORE»

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Holiday of the spectacle

The Smithsonian's William L. Bird remembers the department-store holiday displays of his childhood: "Of course it can never be as wonderful as you remember. That's its power." «MORE»

BC indigo

The mountain pine beetle is eating British Columbia from west to east, and in five years will have consumed 80% of the province's lodgepole pines. Beyond the jarring spectacle of huge dead stretches of pine forest gone russet from death and disease, the trees hold up that dwindling portion of the provincial economy that is dedicated neither to growing pot for Americans nor building condominiums for nouveau riche from China. The tiny black insect comes with a fungus that infects the outer layer of wood and kills the tree, turning its wood an eerie blue. Forestry towns are witnessing one last boom as mills ramp up to collect and process the dead trees before they rot, and for the moment there's so much wood that they're turning it into everything from furniture to concrete.

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Bhutto falls

"An odd coexistence of military despotism and anarchy" holds sway over Pakistan and facilitated the assassination, says Tariq Ali now in the Guardian, two weeks after a long excerpt from his upcoming work reviewed the sordid details of the Bhutto family's political machinations in the LRB. Ali went on to give some excellent summation and analysis along with Manan Ahmed on Democracy Now (transcript here, audio/video here).

Sepia Mutiny rounds up some bangers but is rather facile in the bulleted outline (a PowerPoint already?) presented in lieu of an analysis. Note the images from the Getty photographer at the scene, who gives a shaky audio interview to the New York Times. The Times of London reports riots and train stations in flames across the country but only 30 dead. The Hindu provides consistent detail from its own reporters and the wires on at least what the Pakistani government is advancing as its theory of the case, while interviewing Indian security experts who describe Bhutto's security as "dismal, almost as bad as if it was designed to facilitate her assassination"... «MORE»