Month: May 2008

Answering A Rhetorical Question, Then A Prayer

by tristero

From the Times:

The culture says you’re free to sleep with as many people as you want to,” said Khrystian Wilson, 20, one of the Wilsons’ seven children, including five girls. “What does that get you but complete chaos?”

Well, for one thing, it gets you laid.

Dear God aka, The Unnameable,Allah,Zeus,Krishna,Flying Spaghetti Monster,You Know Who,You Know What, and Ineffable Oceanic Feeling Of Connectedness,

Please protect my daughter from the kind of sick mentalities which insist fucking between adults must be sanctioned by a priest or bureaucrat.

love,

tristero

McCain’s Lobbyist Problem Goes Mainstream

by dday

Ever since John McCain implemented new rules that should have forced him to fire his entire staff, and ended up in him actually firing his convention manager, one of his national finance co-chairs, a regional campaign manager, and a senior aide, there was no way for the press to ignore such a barrage without reporting on it. Not to mention the fact that BarackObama started talking about it as well.

“It appears that John McCain is very much a creature of Washington and one of the things that we’ve said from the outset of this campaign is that if we’re gonna change policies, if we’re gonna deliver on universal health care or have an energy policy that over the long term can bring down gas prices that we were gonna have to change how Washington works,” Obama told reporters Sunday at an ice cream shop in Milwaukie, Ore. “We can’t have special interests dictating what’s happening there and that’s why I said at the beginning I wouldn’t take PAC money and I wouldn’t take money from federal lobbyists. And it does appear that over the last several weeks John McCain keeps on having problems with his top advisers being lobbyists, in some cases for foreign governments or other big interests that are doing business in Washington that I don’t think represents the kind of change that the American people are looking for.”

It’s enough of a tie to “old Washington” and the failed policies of the past that McCain’s got the least popular President in the history of modern polling coming to raise money for him next week. That alone will dip his poll numbers. But the ubiquity of the lobbyists in his campaign finally breaking out into the open is deadly, because he’s carefully cultivated the image of being an independent maverick, and it’s being assaulted on all sides.

“It’s the biggest anti-Washington streak in the American electorate in decades, and McCain’s problem is that his campaign is full of Washington-lobbyist types,” said Chris Kofinis, a former John Edwards aide. “You can’t be the guy who is striving for reform when the people who run the campaign are fighting against reform.”

Democrats have hammered McCain on that very issue for months, noting that campaign manager Rick Davis and senior adviser Charlie Black have spent decades lobbying in Washington. Both have left their companies.

Yes, Davis left the company, but his name’s still on the lobbying firm’s letterhead, which means they’re making money based on his association to McCain. Bad job by the AP there.

McCain isn’t going to be able to run from these associations but we’re now down to people like Black and Davis who aren’t expendable. The information will continue to mount on sites like McCainpedia. And activist online video like this one from Brave New Films will continue to expose the deceptions and undercut the straight talk reform image. And the front-page stories almost write themselves.

McCain’s in big trouble.

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Market Stalinism

by tristero

Heebies, meet Jeebies.

Just in case you thought Digby’s post on Main Core was too, too outlandish to be true, some weird paranoid fantasy from a Pynchon novel… read Naomi Klein’s mind-boggling article in Rolling Stone on Chinese security tech. Hoo boy. To make a long story short, but you really MUST read the long story, China is perfecting what Klein calls Market Stalinism, wedding a turbo-charged capitalist culture with the psychotic obsession for total control of a totalitarian state. So you get chilling little scenes like this:

What is most disconcerting about China’s surveillance state is how familiar it all feels. When I check into the Sheraton in Shenzhen, for instance, it looks like any other high-end hotel chain — only the lobby is a little more modern and the cheerful clerk doesn’t just check my passport but takes a scan of it.

“Are you making a copy?” I ask.

“No, no,” he responds helpfully. “We’re just sending a copy to the police.”

And Klein goes on:

A few months earlier, in Davos, Switzerland, the CEO of China Mobile bragged to a crowd of communications executives that “we not only know who you are, we also know where you are.” Asked about customer privacy, he replied that his company only gives “this kind of data to government authorities”

And now you know why the liberal blogosphere will never let the issue of American telcoms immunity go. Ever.

There has been an explosion of security technologies – in some Chinese, cities there are three government surveillance cameras per block. Enter the U.S. While technically banned from providing the Chinese government with any help in spying, surveillance, and repression, companies like the little known L-1 Identity Solutions have, according to Klein, provided “sdks” (software developer kits) to at least one Chinese company at bargain basement rates. That company is participating in a contest to see which technology can identify a face from a photographic database of over 10 million people. In order to win the contract, the longest search time for a match must be on the order of 1 second or less.

With this much obsession with tech you can imagine how much money is involved. Actually, you probably can’t. The “homeland security” business is, Klein says, larger than the film and music industry combined, “an estimated $200 billion.” A business that large and lucrative is looking for ever larger and lucrative markets. Not only within China.

In Shenzhen one night, I have dinner with a U.S. business consultant named Stephen Herrington. Before he started lecturing at Chinese business schools, teaching students concepts like brand management, Herrington was a military-intelligence officer, ascending to the rank of lieutenant colonel. What he is seeing in the Pearl River Delta, he tells me, is scaring the hell out of him — and not for what it means to China.

“I can guarantee you that there are people in the Bush administration who are studying the use of surveillance technologies being developed here and have at least skeletal plans to implement them at home,” he says. “We can already see it in New York with CCTV cameras. Once you have the cameras in place, you have the infrastructure for a powerful tracking system. I’m worried about what this will mean if the U.S. government goes totalitarian and starts employing these technologies more than they are already. I’m worried about the threat this poses to American democracy.”

Herrington pauses. “George W. Bush,” he adds, “would do what they are doing here in a heartbeat if he could.”

Some of us might argue with the tense of Herrington’s characterization of the US goverment and of Bush’s activities. Nevertheless, welcome to globalization, Bush-style.

LIke I said, read Klein’s article, and note especially how the recent riots in Tibet have served as a perfect test case for the new technology of repression. Total Information Awareness has never sounded so close to reality. And you know something, people? That’s not a good thing.

Fitting In Faster

by digby

One of the enduring right wing shibboleths about immigration is that immigrants just don’t assimilate like they used to.

It’s not true:

Immigrants of the past quarter-century have been assimilating in the United States at a notably faster rate than did previous generations, according to a study released today. Modern-day immigrants arrive with substantially lower levels of English ability and earning power than those who entered during the last great immigration wave at the turn of the 20th century. The gap between today’s foreign-born and native populations remains far wider than it was in the early 1900s and is particularly large in the case of Mexican immigrants, the report said. The study, sponsored by the Manhattan Institute, a New York think tank, used census and other data to devise an assimilation index to measure the degree of similarity between the United States’ foreign-born and native-born populations. These included civic factors, such as rates of U.S. citizenship and service in the military; economic factors, such as earnings and rates of homeownership; and cultural factors, such as English ability and degree of intermarriage with U.S. citizens. The higher the number on a 100-point index, the more an immigrant resembled a U.S. citizen. In general, the longer an immigrant lives in the United States, the more characteristics of native citizens he or she tends to take on, said Jacob L. Vigdor, a professor at Duke University and author of the study. During periods of intense immigration, such as from 1870 to 1920, or during the immigration wave that began in the 1970s, new arrivals tend to drag down the average assimilation index of the foreign-born population as a whole. The report found, however, that the speed with which new arrivals take on native-born traits has increased since the 1990s. As a result, even though the foreign population doubled during that period, the newcomers did not drive down the overall assimilation index of the foreign-born population. Instead, it held relatively steady from 1990 to 2006. “This is something unprecedented in U.S. history,” Vigdor said. “It shows that the nation’s capacity to assimilate new immigrants is strong.”

Well, what do you know?

The report does note that some immigrants do better than others, with Mexicans coming closest to the bottom. however, this is likely due to the fact that they tend to be illegal immigrants and are forced to live in the shadows. Legal Mexican immigrants assimilate at the same levels as everyone else:

A major reason for these disparities in assimilation levels may be the high percentage of Mexican immigrants who are in the country illegally, Vigdor said. When only cultural factors are considered, Mexicans score almost as high as Vietnamese and higher than immigrants from countries such as India and China, which tend to have a high rate of immigration to the United States. “If you’re in the country illegally, a lot of the avenues of assimilation are cut off to you,” he said. “There are lot of jobs you can’t get, and you can’t become a citizen.”

This is another good reason to back a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. If they are allowed to join the larger community, they will end up just like any other American — watching too much TV, shopping, eating fast food, starting businesses, paying taxes. The horror.

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Main Core

by digby

I have heard some rumbling from readers lately that the blogosphere’s obsession with illegal spying and torture and the like is somehow an “elitist” concern that will be detrimental to winning elections. I don’t know if that’s true, but frankly, I don’t much care. Somebody has to care about civil liberties and the constitution or the whole house of cards falls in. If that makes me an elitist, so be it.

For instance, get a load of this article today, from Radar magazine. It recounts the dramatic testimony of James Comey where he revealed that Cheney’s cabal was so intent upon *something* so heinous that even strict law ‘n order types like him couldn’t stomach it. It posits that the program everyone was so concerned about was actually something different than what we may have assumed:

What was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey? Political blogs buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that the program was subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one can’t help wondering whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy constitutional experts, or even average citizens. Faced with push-back from his bosses at the White House, did he simply relent and accept a token concession? Two months after Comey’s testimony to Congress, the New York Times reported a tantalizing detail: The program that prompted him “to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases.” The larger mystery remained intact, however. “It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate,” the article conceded.

Another clue came from a rather unexpected source: President Bush himself. Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA’s warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed “every 45 days” as part of planning to assess threats to “the continuity of our government.”

Few Americans—professional journalists included—know anything about so-called Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it’s no surprise that the president’s passing reference received almost no attention. COG resides in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces—and effectively suspend the republic. In short, it’s a road map for martial law.

While Comey, who left the Department of Justice in 2005, has steadfastly refused to comment further on the matter, a number of former government employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance operations claim the program that caused the flap between Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say that the government’s data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, “There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

I could be wrong, but I would guess offhand that liberal bloggers and their readers might be among them:

Another well-informed source—a former military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence community—says this particular program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets’ behavior and tracks their circle of associations with “social network analysis” and artificial intelligence modeling tools.

“The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help,” he says. “Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets.” An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that “it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at the same time.”

[…]

“We’re at the edge of a cliff,” says Bruce Fein, a top justice official in the Reagan administration. “To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability”The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database.

Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that, in turn, cull from federal, state, and local “intelligence” reports; print and broadcast media; financial records; “commercial databases”; and unidentified “private sector entities.” Additional information comes from a database known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007 to include about 435,000 names. The FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center border crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000 names a year. A former NSA officer tells Radar that the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds transfer surveillance program, also contributes data to Main Core, as does a Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to monitor antiwar protesters and environmental activists such as Greenpeace.

Read the whole article. It goes into the long history of these kinds of abuses by the US Government right up to 9/11. We don’t know very much about what they did after that, but it’s completely reasonable to assume that it was far beyond anything done before.

I don’t know about you, but I sort of go with the assumption that there will be another terrorist attack on US soil at some point. I don’t know if it will be Islamic or homegrown. (After all we’ve had big attacks from both in the last 15 years.) The difference now is that we have a big new police apparatus built up during the Bush years and an entire propaganda machine organized around the idea that the boogeyman is trying to kill us all in our beds. It’s not a stretch to think that under pressure, any government could, (*ahem*) overreach just a tad and decide that certain political undesirables need to be dealt with. If they’ve built the capability, there is every chance they will use it. It’s how these things work.

Meanwhile, some dillweed federal bureaucrat can rifle through all of your personal information whenever he feels like it.

Feeling safer?

Update: Emptywheel weighs in on this. Like her, I don’t know if this is credible, but from what we know it certainly doesn’t sound beyond the realm of possibility.

A Majority Of Better Democrats

by digby

There has been a lot of chatter over the week-end about the apparently startling notion that Democrats winning in conservative districts might produce more conservative Democrats. I posted about it here. Matt Stoller wrote about it here, Jason Rosenbaum, here. It’s an interesting dilemma for progressives in the Democratic Party which is, as far as I can tell, encouraging all the candidates to run on a vague “change” agenda rather than explicit progressive policies. So, you get a bigger majority, but it’s less clear what it’s going to do. I guess we’ll see.

Chris Hayes at The Nation reported back from a Grover Norquist lecture at the New America Foundation,where Grover claimed that topics such as fiscal responsibility and deficit reduction may poll well but they are not “vote movers:”

Same with the growth of government under Bush. Since each constituency in the Republican coalition has gotten what it wants on its “vote-moving issues” (judges, assault weapons, tax cuts), they tolerate increased spending even if they don’t like it. “Thank you very much for my vote-moving issue and grumble, gumble, you spend too much,” they say according to Norquist. But “‘spend too much’ doesn’t make people walk out of the room, it doesn’t make people throw heavy objects.” […]
The worst example of mistaking preference for intensity is on the issue of “fiscal responsibility.” Tune into CSPAN at random and you’re likely to hear a Democrat railing against fiscal irresponsibility and the budget deficit. The worst offenders are the Blue Dog caucus of Democrats from conservative districts who are positively obsessed, with a kind of monomaniacal zeal, on balancing the budget and matching revenue to expenditures. So much so, in fact, that they’re now threatening to block Jim Webb’s excellent G.I. Bill because its expenses aren’t adequately off-set. This is asinine. The notion that it will somehow be politically beneficial to go back to a conservative district and crow about killing a bill to give educational benefits to veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan is loony. And the notion that voters will base their vote on fiscal rectitude is ungrounded both empirically and experientially. Can someone name the last time a member of congress was voted out of office because the deficit was too large? I understand that Democrats in conservative districts will vote differently than those from, say, Manhattan or Oakland. But the Blue Dog caucus has chosen an inexplicably stupid issue to plant their flag on. And their obstinacy is going to cause massive headaches should there be a Democrat in the White House come January.

The Wisdom Of The Ancients

by digby

Some of you may remember me writing about my conservative Dad — retired military, very right wing, very political. He’s the type of guy who thinks General Curtis Lemay had the right idea about bombing Hanoi back into the stone age.

He and I were just talking about the presidential race and he astonished me by saying that he won’t vote for McCain because he’s just too old. This, from a man who is nearly 15 years older than him! In his case, this translates into just not voting rather than a vote for Obama or Clinton (completely out of the question, of course) but for those elderly who aren’t so rigid in their politics, this really could be a big deal. McCain should be my Dad’s dream candidate — naval war hero POW, military obsessive, “go-to-hell” macho attitude. That his age overrules all of that good stuff says something.

I don’t know if McCain really is too old for the job. But it probably does pay to listen to those who are themselves in their golden years. There have been a number of articles and polls pointing out that older voters are the most skeptical of McCain’s age, but I had expected my feisty father not to be among them. I assumed the macho military thing would trump all. If they’ve lost my Dad, they really are in trouble.

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Practically Lactating

by digby

I looks like they’re going to go back to this well one more time:

“It was remarkable to see Barack Obama’s hysterical diatribe in response to a speech in which his name wasn’t even mentioned.” McCain campaign

“If he is this prickly, he is way too much of a girly man to be president of the United States.” Monica Crowley on the McLaughlin Report

“Well, at least they didn’t kiss. I was bracing myself for the lip lock Wednesday when John Edwards endorsed Barack Obama….Obama and Edwards make an attractive picture — Ultra Brite cover boys of youth and glamour united against old men (and women) who worship the status quo. Obama — the man who makes Chris Matthews feel a thrill up his leg — wants to “do the Lord’s work,” lately pictured in front of a cross illuminated with vanity lights on a flier aimed at Kentucky voters, while Edwards wants to roll out the catapults and nuke the Coliseum. Kathleen Parker, Washington Post

Maureen Dowd has already blessed the meme with her oh-so-clever depictions of Senator Obama as an “anorexic starlet” and “desperate debutante.”

I knew they would do it, but I didn’t think they could get away with doing it so blatantly. Sometime back, I wrote:

I think that one of the reasons the conservatives are mostly hanging tough with Coulter is at least partially due to what she specifically said. She used the word “faggot” to describe a Democrat. This is the premise that forms the entire basis of the Republican claim to leadership and lies at the bottom of the media’s continuing ridiculous assumption that the Republicans are more natural leaders than Democrats. For forty years the Republicans have been winning elections by calling liberals “faggots” (and “dykes”) in one way or another. It’s what they do. To look too closely at what she said is to allow light on their very successful reliance on gender stereotypes to get elected.

Rick Perlstein recently noted that Saint Ronnie went for it early on:

…he got the tribal stuff right, the us-versus-them stuff–as when he confronted young people harassing him with make love, not war signs. He said it looked like they were incapable of doing either.

Reagan also used to say the hippies “look like Tarzan, walk like Jane and smell like Cheetah.” That’s not so different than Coulter saying, “my pretty-girl allies stick out like a sore thumb amongst the corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagons they call ‘women’ at the Democratic National Convention.”

A lot of the shrieking aversion to the dirty hippie came from all that “feminine” hair on men’s heads and “masculine” hair on women’s bodies, if you’ll recall. My brother was constantly harrassed about “looking like a girl” in 1966 Mississippi for having hair below his collar. In those days, hair was a political statement and even though forty years have passed and most of those people can only dream about all that hair they no longer have, the right successfully parlayed that gender role anxiety into a political narrative that continues to powerfully effect politics today.

Coulter is somewhat desperate so she’s articulating this stuff in a crude and obvious fashion in order to keep her stale schtick going. But this concept is so ingrained in the political culture by now that the only thing that really stands out about it is the fact that she used an obvious epithet that is out of public fashion, even at a rightwing event. Suppose she had used the silly word “girlyman”? Nobody would be calling for the smelling salts. In fact, I would imagine the press corps would have told us all to “get over it.”

As Somerby pointed out earlier today, Maureen Dowd does exactly the same thing Coulter does without the vulgarity. He also recalls that Coulter recently called Al Gore a “big fag” on Chris Matthews show and nobody said a peep. This is because it’s so internalized that unless people are paying close attention, it just slips through. After all, she even said Bill Clinton is gay and it barely made a ripple:

DEUTSCH: Before we’re off the air, you were talking about Bill Clinton. Is there anything you want to say about Clinton? No?

Ms. ANN COULTER: No.

DEUTSCH: OK. All right. Did you find him attractive? Was that what it was?

Ms. COULTER: No!

DEUTSCH: You don’t find him attractive?

Ms. COULTER: No. OK, fine, I’ll say it on air.

DEUTSCH: Most women find him attractive.

Ms. COULTER: No.

DEUTSCH: OK, say it on air.

Ms. COULTER: I think that sort of rampant promiscuity does show some level of latent homosexuality.

DEUTSCH: OK, I think you need to say that again. That Bill Clinton, you think on some level, has — is a latent homosexual, is that what you’re saying?

Ms. COULTER: Yeah. I mean, not sort of just completely anonymous — I don’t know if you read the Starr report, the rest of us were glued to it, I have many passages memorized. No, there was more plot and dialogue in a porno movie.

Hillary too. Here’s Coulter again:

Q: Does Hillary Clinton have a good chance in 2008? What are her strengths and weaknesses? What did her reaction to your “Jersey girls” comments tell you about her as a potential candidate?

A: Good chance of what? Coming out of the closet? I’d say that’s about even money.

It may seem odd to you that she would call the most notorious womanizing president since JFK and his wife gay, but there you have it. Coulter is so coarse that she has to make the claim literal in order to keep her career going, but it’s actually a mainstream view.

Here’s just a small sampling of how this has played out in just the last six years:

Al Gore needed to be taught how to be an “alpha male.” He doesn’t “know who he is.”
John Kerry “flip-flops” like a flaccid penis.
John Edwards is “the Breck girl.”
Howard Dean was “hysterical.”
Barack Obama is “Obambi.”
Bill Clinton was “a pervert.”
Hillary Clinton is a lesbian.

The underlying premise of the modern conservative movement is that the entire Democratic party consists of a bunch of fags and dykes who are both too effeminate and too masculine to properly lead the nation. Coulter says it out loud. Dowd hints at it broadly. And the entire press corps giggles and swoons at this shallow, sophomoric concept like a bunch of junior high pom pom girls.

Here it is, happening again.

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Color Blindness

by tristero

Forgive a totally personal rant here, but dammit, I can’t be the only one who finds this rather annoying and, in some circumstances, potentially hazardous. This is a post about being color blind,. That’s not in the political/cultural sense of color as a synonym for race but color as in perception. So hardcore political junkies or those easily bored, just skip this post; you won’t miss anything. For the rest of you:

Like 8% of all males, I have color blindness. Color blindness is a misnomer. I see colors. I just don’t perceive color differences as well as most people. And I don’t have it as severely as my (maternal) grandfather, who literally couldn’t distinguish between red and green traffic lights (I see the green light as whitish and the red light as, well, red), so it’s usually just an amusing party chit-chat kind of a problem.

Except when it comes to reading technical drawings, charts and graphs, such as the ones in science journals. Here’s a fresh example. In order to illustrate a fascinating post on the differences between human and squid eyes, PZ reproduced this disastrous illustration from Nature Magazine. Well, at least it’s disastrous to me:

The caption reads:

Structural comparisons between squid rhodopsin and bovine rhodopsin. Squid rhodopsin is denoted by brown and magenta; bovine rhodopsin by cyan and blue.

Well I’m sure it’s really pretty, but I can’t *&#($^@#$ see the fershlugginah colors!

I deduced that the brown was the dark color; in fact, it kind of looks greenish to me, but nothing else remotely looks like brown, so brown it must be. I can’t see the magenta but I think it’s gotta be the grey color, except it seems to me there are two different grey colors, I’m think, and I have no idea whether they are both shades of magenta or one of them is supposed to be cyan. In isolation cyan, looks bluish to me, but in the drawing, there’s only one blue hue that I can find and since it doesn’t look like the cyan in Wikipedia, I assume it must in fact be blue. Maybe the cyan is what Wikipedia labels “dark cyan” (scroll down in the cyan entry). But that actually looks like grey to me which… looks just like what I think is the magenta.

As you can tell, this drawing hopelessly confused me. Dont get me wrong: I followed PZ’s lucid explanation of the squid/human differences perfectly, and grokked his later explanation of the drawing which seemed not to depend too much on the colors. But if the drawing had subtleties to offer that were not in PZ’s text, I completely missed them.

:You would think that using bold, distinctive colors in scientific visual material would be some kind of no-brainer. And you would be wrong. I have three of Edward Tufte’s beautiful books on the visual design of information and, while he does discuss color, he never mentions, as far as I can recall, choosing color schemes to minimize confusion related to color-blindness. Maybe he takes it into consideration in his new book. But frankly, I doubt it.

This is no aberrant incident, a single over-caffeinated graphic artist digging into the latest iteration of Photoshop. About 12 or 13 years ago, the color schemes at Scientific American got so confusing, I wrote a somewhat humorous letter to complain that I literally couldn’t make head or tail out of some of the charts. I received a very nice reply, with an apology and a promise to take color blindness into account in future graphics. And, miracle of miracles, for several years, the color coding dramatically improved before reverting back to an occasional head scratcher.

Now really, I’m simply a low level science fan; it’s not that big a deal if an amateur can’t tell magenta from cyan. But I know what sheer havoc is caused in my own field – music – before they changed the color coding for stereo wires and cables from red and green to red and white. Anyone who’s hooked up stereo components out of phase has some inkling of the problem – and sometimes, in my studio, I’ve had to make literally hundreds of connections. It was no fun at all trying to puzzle out which wire is red and which is green times 200 plus, especially in less than ideal light.

Given how many male scientists, doctors, engineers, etc, etc, there are (the disproportionate number of males in these professions is another post) and given that a significant fraction of those males must be color blind (8% is not a trivial percentage), I would guess that some very, very serious mistakes could be avoided simply by using less ambiguous color codings. I’m not trying to stifle creativity in the visual design of information. Go ahead, use magenta for all I care. But for heaven’s sakes, please contrast it not with brown and cyan but with eye-melting yellows, bright oranges, and the bluest blues this side of paradise.

Saturday Night At The Movies

Chicken chucker, arms dealer, Brit killer: Voila!

By Dennis Hartley

“I was woken by a guy screaming on a tower. I couldn’t sleep. I had to shut him up.”

(Shocked tone) “A muezzin? You ‘shut up’ a muezzin?! He was calling for prayer!!”

(Bemusedly) “Yours is a strange religion. You’ll grow tired of it…it won’t last long.”

No, that transcript is not excerpted from secret Oval Office tapes; it’s an exchange between the cheerfully sexist, jingoistic, folkway-challenged and generally clueless French secret agent Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath (alias OSS 117) and his Egyptian liaison, the lovely Larmina El Akmar Betouche. The scene is from OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, a gallingly amusing Gallic spy romp from director Michel Hazanavicius.

The director and his screenwriter Jean-Francois Halin adapted the script based on characters from the original “OSS 117” novels by Jean Bruce, which concerned the misadventures of an Ian Fleming-esque French government agent. The books inspired a series of films, produced in France between 1956 and 1970. This latest installment played the festival circuit two years ago (I wasn’t able to get into the sold-out screening at the 2006 Seattle International Film Festival, much to my chagrin) but is only just now receiving American distribution in May of 2008 via limited engagements in select cities.

After a brief prologue depicting agent OSS 117 (Jean Dujardin) handily dispatching a Nazi adversary from a plane (sans parachute) in a wartime escapade, the film flash-forwards to the year 1955. Hubert (as we will refer to him going forward) is sent to Cairo to investigate the mysterious death of a fellow agent. He is assisted by the aforementioned Larmina (Bernice Bejo) and just like an undercover 007, he is given a business front. In this case, our intrepid agent poses as a chicken exporter; and yes, all of the inherent comic possibilities involving this most ubiquitous species of barnyard fowl are gleefully explored (and the credits assure us that none were harmed during filming).

As the intrigue thickens, Hubert encounters some sexy royalty in the person of La princesse Al Taouk (Aure Atika) as well as the usual Whitman’s assortment of shady informers, sneaky assassins and dirty double dealers that populate exotic spy capers. In the interim, thanks to his deGaullist stance and blissful cultural ignorance of the Muslim world, Hubert manages to deeply offend nearly every local he comes in contact with. As one Egyptian associate muses to himself: “He is very stupid…or very smart.”

Hazanavicius has concocted a tremendously well-crafted and entertaining spy spoof here that actually gets funnier upon repeat viewings. Unlike the Austin Powers films, which utilizes the spy spoof motif primarily as an excuse for Mike Meyers to string together an assortment of glorified SNL sketches and (over) indulge in certain scatological obsessions, this film manages to stay true and even respectful to the genre and era that it aspires to parody. The acting tics, production design, costuming, music, use of rear-screen projection, even the choreography of the action scenes are so pitch-perfect that if you were to screen the film side by side with one of the early Bond entries (e.g. From Russia With Love) you would swear the films were produced the very same year.

I also have to credit the director’s secret weapon, which is leading man DuJardin. He has a marvelous way of underplaying his comedic chops that borders on genius. He portrays his well-tailored agent with the same blend of arrogance and elegance that defined Sean Connery’s 007, but tempers it with an undercurrent of obliviously graceless social bumbling that matches Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau. One of the film’s running gags has Hubert uttering “deep thought” epiphanies that belabor the obvious. While getting a massage, he announces: “I love being rubbed with oil.” While at breakfast, he realizes: “I love buttering my toast.” Stopping to gaze at a public fountain, he wistfully offers: “I love the white noise water makes.” DuJardin delivers these lines with the knowing wisdom of a high lama, imparting a Zen proverb. I tell you, the man is a bloody genius.

It’s too bad that this film is in limited release; it deserves a wider audience here in the states (there is a PAL DVD out now; no street date yet for a Region 1 version). I find the timing of its domestic distribution interesting, with this summer’s Steve Carell vehicle Get Smart looming on the horizon. If that film is one-half as clever and entertaining as OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, it will be a miracle. Would you believe…one quarter?

Trailer for Get Smart:

Agents of spoof: My Favorite Spy, Carry On Spying, In Like Flint, The President’s Analyst, What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, Austin Powers Collection, Matt Helm Lounge collection, Modesty Blaise, Fathom, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, Spy Hard, Get Smart the Complete Series — Seasons 1-5, The Nude Bomb That Man From Rio Top Secret!, Our Man In Havana , The Avengers – The Complete Emma Peel Megaset , The Wild Wild West, Undercover Brother, Spies Like Us, Johnny English , Charlie’s Angels , The Accidental Spy, I Spy

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