This is the fight you’ve been waiting for.  The real deal rumble in the jungle.  Who will win?  And who would leave the world better off if they dropped dead?  Read here to find out.

This is a great article:

A variety of theories have emerged to explain why there has been such a divergence between the supposed public opposition to abortion and the actual outcome of recent votes. Some suggest that a “reverse Bradley effect” was the cause. Just as voters in the 1982 California governor’s race are believed to have lied about their intent to vote for a black candidate, South Dakota voters may have lied about their support for an abortion ban. “There’s a lot of public pressure to be anti-abortion,” explains Marvin Buehner, a Rapid City OB-GYN and South Dakota’s most outspoken physician against the abortion bans. Buehner had predicted voters would reject the 2008 ban, but narrowly. “People are more likely to answer the poll that they’ll support [a ban]. Then they get into the ballot booth and decide they just can’t vote for something like that.”

Her stuff on shock doctrine makes a lot of sense.  And it’s interesting to look at how much less, well leftist, our new new left is.  Read a great profile in the New Yorker:

The central thesis of the book is that capitalism and democracy, free markets and free people, do not, as we’ve been told, go hand in hand. On the contrary, capitalism—at least fundamentalist capitalism, of the type promoted by the late economist Milton Friedman and his “Chicago School” acolytes—is so unpopular, and so obviously harmful to everyone except the richest of the rich, that its establishment requires, at best, trickery and, at worst, terror and torture. Friedman believed that markets perform best when freed from government interference, so he advocated getting rid of tariffs, subsidies, minimum-wage laws, public housing, Social Security, financial regulation, and licensing requirements, including those for doctors—indeed, virtually every measure devised to protect people from the market’s harsh logic. Klein argues that the only circumstance in which a population would accept Friedman-style reforms is when it is in a state of shock, following a crisis of some sort—a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a war. A person in shock regresses to a childlike state in which he longs for a parental figure to take control; similarly, a population in a state of shock will hand exceptional powers to its leaders, permitting them to destroy the regulatory functions of government.

This is very exciting. All of Joseph Smith’s papers are being released. I’d like to hear what a non-Mormon who’s traditionally been critical of LDS has to say about the editing process, but still, this is a great day for history and for Mormons in general. Truth has nothing to hide. From the AP:

Painstakingly transcribed from hundreds of fragile, handwritten pages, the 500-page volume builds on decades of historical scholarship to provide a more accurate and complete look at the early church and Smith’s life, Turley said.

The inaugural work of The Church Historian’s Press covers Smith’s writings from 1832 to 1839 and includes his account of the “First Vision,” in which God and Jesus Christ tell Smith he must restore the original church on Earth.

The series is expected to run more than 30 volumes, Turley said.

Dozens of scholars collaborated on the project, looking for new sources of information, fact-checking historical records and crafting explanatory passages, maps and organizational charts to provide a fuller record, he said.

John Brown was executed today in 1859. (More on Brown here). I honestly knew the song about the man’s body a long time before I had any idea who John Brown was. I think it’s interesting to reflect on folks like John Brown now for a few reasons. First, it shows that our country has always been quite divided over social issues and, in fact, we were once much more divided than we are now. But also, it shows the willingness of radicals to be violent is often more appreciated later than it is at the time (and bear in mind, Brown is a radical I think most of us would now agree with, at least in goals if not in methods). It’s interesting right? I mean, people nowadays aren’t afraid to admit to kind of liking John Brown, but I wonder if other folks who not only advocated violence as a possible strategy but actually practiced it. (Malcolm X, for example, really never actually was violent–in some ways, if you think of boycotts as a form of violence, he was actually less violent than MLK–not to mention certainly a more consistently ethical human being). We don’t like Bill Ayers at least partially because most of America is not really sympathetic with the utopianism of the Weathermen, and we don’t like animal rights violence for similar reasons (most of us just don’t care that much about animals).

But what about anti-abortion violence? It’s certainly considered extreme, and it’s vilified by an overwhelming majority of the anti-abortion/pro-life bloc as not only morally wrong but also simply bad tactics. Yet I wonder if there can be that same kind of sympathy that some have for Brown (he should have been less violent, but man, he really fought for what he cared about) and abortion bombers? I mean, it’s kind of a logical question following all the abortion=slavery rhetoric, isn’t it? If Thoreau praised Brown, then either he was wrong to do so, or else pro-life folks have to praise those violent revolutionaries for their passion if nothing else?

To be utterly clear on my own take: as conservative and naive as this sounds, I like violence to be the exclusive province of the state. So I think Thoreau was wrong. I used to say that I support armed insurrections, but, now that we have the kinds of weapons we have now (and based on empirical evidence of previous modern revolutions), I don’t think that this could possibly be a helpful strategy to marginalized peoples. Instead, I’m a big advocate of media freedom and social movements, which I really do think can change the world. Which is all to say, I’m not at all a fan of John Brown, and neither am I a fan of ever using violence to achieve one’s politics aims.

From Joan Didion:

Yet. The expectations got fueled. The spirit of a cargo cult was loose in the land. I heard it said breathlessly on one channel that the United States, on the basis of having carried off this presidential election, now had “the congratulations of all the nations.” “They want to be with us,” another commentator said. Imagining in 2008 that all the world’s people wanted to be with us did not seem entirely different in kind from imagining in 2003 that we would be greeted with flowers when we invaded Iraq, but in the irony-free zone that the nation had chosen to become, this was not the preferred way of looking at it.

There was a recent Times article about this quote.  There is actually a lot here, so I don’t want to try to talk about all of it, but this will have to suffice for now: Didion is right that some people are way too excited about Obama as a transformational figure.  But I’m not sure that a. this is anything new (see Weber’s stuff on charisma) and that b. anyone (including Obama) who’s in a position of power is as taken by this as were folks who were taken by Bush’s democracy.  One is blind belief in a person who is not blindly confident in himself; the other (Bush) was a very, very different (and much more frightening) matter.

This review is a bit harsh.  First off, Tina Fey is certainly a better writer than actress, but geez she’s a good writer, and she’s not at all a bad comic actress either. Additionally, I love Tracy Jordan on this show.  He’s one of the best parts, though I agree that Alec Baldwin’s performance borders on the sublime.  The two together, however, make the greatest moment in television history.

The show’s true claim to fame, and a reason never to miss an episode, is Alec Baldwin, whose comic magnetism is so strong I’m surprised it hasn’t caused weather disturbances. He doesn’t steal scenes; he makes them rise and shine. Baldwin has to know how good he is, but he wears it lightly, and you actually take pleasure from how much pleasure you’re taking from his performance—just as you do, say, when Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby sing that put-’er-there-pal number “Well, Did You Evah?,” in “High Society.”

But he didn’t mean to imply that if you voted for Obama you need to go to confession.  Not exactly anyways.  I guess the idea–as I understand it–is it’s only a mortal sin if you willfully voted for Obama, intending for, or not caring if, the amount of abortions increases, and then as well this weighed against other issues (which the Churches teaches are individually less significant but which some claim, in the aggregate, are more important than abortion).  This has now been clarified by the USCCB that they want not just a decrease in number of abortions but concrete laws against them.  Still, the question of multiple issues (eg, seamless garment, consistent ethic of life, etc.) is still important.  I guess–and please correct me if I’m wrong–the one case where a vote for Obama is a clear sin is when you don’t seen a pro-choice candidate as the lesser of two evils but you actually want to keep abortion happening and perhaps happening even more.  Is that accurate?

Yes, I know. His personal life is a bit complicated. But the guy’s body of work is phenomenal. Here’s his website and his wikipedia.

And this, from Annie Hall, the best opening to a comedy ever:

There's an old joke.  Uh, two elderly
women are at a Catskills mountain
resort, and one of 'em says: "Boy, the
food at this place is really terrible."
The other one says, "Yeah, I know, and
such ... small portions." Well, that's
essentially how I feel about life.  Full
of loneliness and misery and suffering
and unhappiness, and it's all over much
too quickly.  The-the other important
joke for me is one that's, uh, usually
attributed to Groucho Marx, but I think
it appears originally in Freud's wit and
its relation to the unconscious.  And it
goes like this-I'm paraphrasing: Uh ...
"I would never wanna belong to any club
that would have someone like me for a
member." That's the key joke of my adult
life in terms of my relationships with
women.

This is an interesting article on comedians blurring the line between policy and humor.  I like the idea of Stewart and Colbert as court jesters especially:

Comics like Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert are also returning the comedian to the role once played by the court jester, who was allowed to speak truth to power with impunity. Professional fools are spies in the house of power; they can go places few other people can. Recall the Fool confronting King Lear: “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.” Of course, unlike the nonpartisan Fool, Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert have their (mostly) liberal politics, and if you don’t share their attitudes, these serious, polemical comedians can seem unbearably knowing and clubby. That is both the annoying limitation and the refreshing gamble of confrontational, interactive comedy. It shows its cards.