[temporary post removed -- Combustible Boy now posts at The Sound and Fury]

Removal. Removal.

I have decided to join super-blogger Max Power as his superhero sidekick, part of a dynamic duo fighting idiotarianism at every turn as a contributor to Max's The Sound and Fury blog. The post that was here earlier this morn has been moved over there -- although I don't expect to abandon the Combustible Boy blog completely. I'm sure I'll figure out something to do with it!

Flickers of glamour

It's the national-news section that gets all the hype, but the Washington Post's Style section is where the real talent is, including not only the longtime Combustible Boy heroes Gene Weingarten and Howie Kurtz but also brilliant up-and-comer Hank Stuever, who brings in the pop-culture-savvy ironic fatalism that makes young gay guys such a national treasure. In today's paper Hank's got a great piece on the neon-accented liquor stores of upper Georgia Avenue, which along the way captures several decades of the hometown D.C. known to the capital's locals-for-life but only glimpsed through rolled-up taxicab windows by the tourists and transients. (Maybe it's the protectiveness of the locals that keeps this hometown under wraps and gives the rest of the world that there's-no-there-there view of D.C. that I like to call Exswampism, after the tendency of outsiders to repeat the old canard that "Washington" was built on nothing but swampland.) Along the way, Hank bestows an appropriate moniker on the local takeout cuisine that had henceforth been nameless: "subchickenchineseseafood".

See also the paper's front page this morning for a cycling look through the photos that accompany Hank's story in the dead-tree edition.

West Nile hitting home

I just found out that my mother, who lives in a suburb just east of Baltimore, has come down with a mild case of the West Nile fever. Turns out she got bit by a skeeter on the weekend when she was taking out the trash, and after a few days of low-grade fever and flu-esque symptoms she saw something on the news about how her neighborhood was about to be sprayed for mosquitoes, so she suggested to the doctor that maybe that was it. The blood tests say it is!

She should recover fine and thenceforth be immune, but she's going to be getting a lot of rest before that -- she's not supposed to go back to work until she's been fever-free for 24 hours.

Amazing how these things can hit home. I guess everyone out there should pay close attention to their symptoms, even if their area's not due to be sprayed, 'cause you never know whether you'll be the first person in your town to come down with the disease. Best help the epidemiologists track this thing as easily as they can.

A slogan for an age

As the oft-quotable Montykins puts it, "I mean, we live in the twenty-first century; maybe it's unreasonable to expect people to maintain a point all the way through a bumper sticker."

Feeling squishy in the middle

Politically centripetal types like myself should be crowing now that two of our least favorite members of Congress -- outspoken ideologue Bob Barr from the Dornanite Right, and outspoken ideologue Cynthia McKinney from the Rage Against The Machine Left -- have been shown the door by Georgia's primary voters. As most blogospherians know, McKinney's ouster was due in no small part to Georgia's open primary system, which enabled traditional Republican voters to cross party lines and cast votes in the Democratic primary. This will no doubt lead to a flurry of editorial predictions of an inevitable change to the state's primary election setup, and I expect that these will pan out about as well as the predictions of inevitable wide-ranging electoral reform following the 2000 presidential election (not to mention the predictions of inevitable adherence to centrism and bipartisanship on Dubya's part as a result of the statistical tie vote in that election)...

Reuters: Not real leftists

Sure, everybody in the blogosphere gives Reuters a hard time because of that "terrorist vs. freedom fighter" thing, but any real leftist would know better than to start out an article thuswise:

Want to be more attractive? -- then make sure those around you are having a drink.

Scientists have found even modest amounts of alcohol will make the opposite sex appear better-looking.

Because, you know, this'll just encourage certain religious groups to start touting beer as the quick-and-easy cure for homosexuality.

p.s. Somebody ought to let Debbie know.

Forget Robert Mueller, get Agent Mulder on the case

My knee-jerk prejudices about Guardian-quoting America-bashers were reasserting themselves yesterday when I stumbled upon another site maintained by such a person. The page includes a copy of that now-famous tourist photo of the sun between the Twin Towers, with the sun's rays appearing to form the horizontal bar of a cross. Most people who looked at the photo just noted that symbolism and moved on, but this guy has the real scoop -- there are chemtrails in the sky there!

For those who don't know: The "chemtrails" obsession appears to have gotten its start a few years ago when people started to worry that jet contrails were making them ill, but since then it's metastatized into a full-grown conspiracy theory involving shadowy organizations using airplanes -- KC-135 refueling tankers are sometimes cited -- to spray mysterious chemicals over populated areas. Although it's obvious to normal people that these are just plain old jet contrails, the paranoid have convinced themselves that real jet contrails are just ice crystals and water vapor that should evaporate quickly, while the contrails that remain hanging in the air long after the jet has passed are obviously chemtrails consisting of something more sinister. (Never mind that clouds consist of water vapor and ice crystals too, but clouds don't have much trouble hanging in the air for hours or days. Saner minds, however, are wondering whether persistent contrails might have some effect on climate, given their ability to generate additional cloud cover.)

Meanwhile, other chroniclers on the fringe are touting video and photographic evidence that UFOs were in the air over Manhattan on 9/11, as attested by these three pages -- the second of which seems to think that the two planes hit the Twin Towers something like 45 minutes apart. (Is that another of those things that the government doesn't want us to know?)

Next week: Shocking new evidence that Bigfoot was one of the passengers who fought back on Flight 93!

Why do us hate we? again

Speaking of small-time alternative papers, one paper that apparently once existed here in the D.C. area was something called Eastern Times, which published commentary critical of the U.S. by one Enver Masud of a sort of Muslim evangelistic group called The Wisdom Fund. It appears the Wisdom Fund's public efforts have centered around presenting a kinder, gentler face of Islam in a flier and posters put up in public places, including one campaign on the Metro subway system here in D.C. a few years ago.

I certainly am not opposed to people proselytizing a gentle form of Islam, but Masud's activities seem to include some other public stands that'll leave a bad taste in the mouths of many in the blogosphere. A couple of years ago, The Wisdom Fund's Madrasah Book Division published a collection of Masud's commentaries under the title The War on Islam (now available in its entirety online in PDF form), which chronicled some of the notorious events of alleged U.S. perfidy that critics of U.S. foreign policy always point to. A glowing review from Mumia Abu-Jamal mentions claims about whether Libyan terrorists were really planning to assassinate Americans in the early 1990s, as well as stuff about the ineffectual attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998. There is also, of course, something about those Christian Falangist soldiers' attacks on refugees in Lebanon in 1982 that everybody likes to blame directly on Ariel Sharon.

Masud has been busy more recently as well, publishing early last year a commentary arguing that people just pay too darned much attention to Hitler's Holocaust (and not enough to what Western colonialism allegedly has to answer for). After Sept. 11, Masud wrote a rather hideous article that hints at an endorsement of Thierry Meyssan's conspiracy book alleging that there wasn't really a suicide-plane attack on the Pentagon -- this from Masud, who lives close to the Pentagon in Arlington -- while also joining in the hoary old Oil Libel outlook that tries to attribute every U.S. effort overseas to some kind of fossil-fuels-related motivation.

The War on Islam was published a good while before the 9/11 attacks, but some local bookstores have been taking advantage of the revived interest in such matters to tout Masud's book -- in fact, the reason I noticed Masud in the first place is that one such bookstore is the Barnes & Noble here in downtown Bethesda, a short walk from my apartment. The Barnes & Noble is scheduled to host a book reading by Masud on August 29. Would any fellow D.C.-area anti-idiotarians like to read through the book and put together a few questions to try to put to Masud at the Barnes & Noble reading? Drop me an e-mail if so.

Errata, small press, community conspiracies, etc.

The weird thing about Lileks' decision to name-check my moniker for wackiness effect in today's Bleat is that I'm probably one of the few people he doesn't owe an e-mail to. Now, I've been a Bleat reader for years, having been a Lileks fan from afar since even before he started his Web site, and I used to e-mail him now and then under my real name (which shall remain unmentioned) back in the pre-9/11 days, when the amount of e-mail he received each day was merely staggering, and not fundamentally obscene like it probably is nowadays. But I don't think I've ever sent him mail under my Combustible Boy alias.

However, as a native of Baltimore (who now lives elsewhere in Maryland), I have to note that he was mistaken to imply that this idiotarian screed was published in a major daily newspaper. There's only one paper in Baltimore that anyone would call a major daily, and that's The Sun. I'm not sure exactly what the "Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel" is, but a quick glance around its Web site indicates that it's just a leftist alternative publication -- even though the news briefs are filed under "local news", the only local bits in there are what look like summarized press releases about some grocery store's expansion, two "permaculture" lectures and a new substance-abuse treatment facility, while the rest is about people and/or things that only leftists and/or conspiracy mavens care about, such as Julia Butterfly Hill and Gulf War Syndrome. And the links page touts such sinistral sites as Talk Left, BushWatch and IndyMedia.

Over on Steven Chapman's site, I speculated that maybe the Baltimore Chronicle and/or Sentinel was that cheaply printed newsletter-style thing that I used to see on the take-one-free rack at the convenience store when I was still living in Baltimore a few years ago. I recall at least noting that that publication seemed to have a lefty bent, which differs from the crypto-rightist orientation of suburban Baltimore shoppers like the Rooster, which started showing up on my mother's front lawn around 1990. The Rooster was mostly one of those ordinary community shoppers, with lots of articles featuring the names of local residents, pictures of smiling local shopkeepers, and haphazardly edited movie reviews. As the months went by, though, the Rooster got weirder and weirder, regularly running long front-page rants about bizarre Clintonian conspiracy theories; I recall that one time, the Rooster darkly hinted that Clinton's proposal for federally backed mandatory inoculation programs in schools was really a scheme on Clinton's part to pump kids full of mind-control drugs.

Too bad I don't get the same kind of high-weirdness-by-mail in the area where I live now; I kind of miss the Rooster and its trademark blend of cheerful community news and paranoid conspiracy ravings. Apparently, the Rooster now has something to do with another small paper called the Independent nowadays.

Democracy != pro-Westernism

Steven Chapman is fretting again about some warbloggers' underlying assumption that once we go and regime-change Middle Eastern countries, we'll be able to foster democracies there that will reflect a generally pro-Western body politic:

In fact, I would say that Saudi Arabia's shortfall in cooperating with the US on the WOT is an indication of a leadership desperately trying to appear less pro-Western in an attempt to appease its own people. One of the curious things about this kind of activity is that autocratic governments which try to appease their own people (in order to stay in power) start to look remarkably similar to the kind of governments that said people would have voted for, if they could vote.

What Steven points up is a serious problem that I've had trouble dealing with, as he seem to have had as well, since there don't really seem to be any solutions we can offer as long as we don't really know what it's like on the ground among the ordinary civilians in those countries. I can't help but be of the knee-jerk opinion that liberal democracy is the best thing for all concerned, but of course it's also important -- if only in interest of self-defense -- for us in the West to be concerned about widespread anti-Western sentiment.

I suspect that part of what's going on is that the regime-changers tend to suspect that once the people in these autocratic states get open access to information, they will naturally see the greater justness that inheres in countries like ours. (To them, my saying that might make me seem far more pro-American than I really am; even though I am concerned about creeping flaws in my country and other Western nations, I believe that Western-style liberal democracy is a superior way of running a society compared to the ones in the sorts of countries we're thinking of.)

There is some evidence to back up the expectation that people will be pro-Western if they throw off their homegrown oppressors; we certainly saw post-Soviet people expressing their gratitude for the support they got from people in the West, and today the Iranian dissidents show some gratitude for our support as well. But I think it's too much of a leap from this evidence to the conclusion that the country will be sufficiently pro-Western if democracy does take hold. This is partly because I recognize the problems with the "if they just got to know us, they'd love us" thinking, but also partly because of widespread misapprehensions about what life is like in Third World countries as opposed to Western ones.

As an example of this wild gap in perceptions, take this bit of misinformation posted by some do-gooder to a Web site that is supposed to be for real people around the world to describe what their hometowns are like. It's full of the usual Westerner's perception of Kabul as a place under seige by callous and evil soldiers, with explosive ordnance everywhere, the ever-present danger of sudden death, populated by dreadfully poor people who have never been outside Kabul (never mind all the news stories indicating how much Afghans seem to get around to neighboring regions and other countries) and utterly lacking in cultural opportunities. After Andrea Harris pointed this out and the owner of the Web site popped up in her comments space to endorse the phony Kabul entry as a bit of humor based largely on reality, I reacted in the comments with a bit too much anger, though pointing out the care the U.S. has taken to avoid civilian casualties, and more importantly pointing to the article I linked in the entry below, about Kabul's most popular TV show being back on the air.

The reason I pointed to that article in particular is that it paints a vastly different picture of what life in Kabul is like -- they're lacking in some resources and have got problems, to be sure, but there's also entertainment, happy popular culture, traffic problems, noisy neighbors, and other bits of everyday life that you wouldn't pick up from the one-sided TV news reporting depicting all of Afghanistan as a wasteland of buildings reduced to rubble and people living under the bayonet point of the U.S. Army.

Of course, though I have my complaints about this ridiculously off-center TV news coverage, I also betray an underly assumption that people in Afghanistan and other such countries will be favorable to us in the West if they get a more accurate picture of what life in the West is like compared to life in their countries -- and this assumption is once again a reflection of the "if they got to know us they'd like us" fallacy. When even the generally pro-American bloggers have plenty to complain about regarding our country -- its diplomatic need to be friendly to regimes like Saudi Arabia's and Egypt's, its Homeland Security overreach and incompetence, its growing neglect for civil liberties in an effort to crack down on victimless crimes, the vast effect on it from the forces of political correctness -- you can be sure that the people living in the countries that we'd like to see become liberal democracies will be hesitant to embrace us with all those flaws. And other Western countries have the aforementioned problems too, in some cases somtimes seeming even more pernicious in Europe than here. So while I think the U.S. is among the best countries in the world for people to live in, I also can see plenty of warts that will be unpleasant news to people in putative Third World democracies.

And I'm barely touching on the perceived foreign-policy faults of the U.S. above, because I was looking for things that broadly apply to the U.S. and Europe, which both have drastic foreign-policy problems in my opinion, but they are very different foreign-policy problems. At any rate, though most of us in the West would agree that the benefits of liberal democracy far outweigh the flaws that have cropped up in our countries, the fact is that the news will always concentrate on the downsides, giving an off-kilter negative impression of what it's like to be in these countries -- just like the off-kilter negative impressions people in the West have about life in Kabul.

In the end, that's probably what upset me the most about the existence of that Kabul entry on the Wisdomsprings Web site, upsetting me so much that my responses were in danger of going off the rails a couple of times there. Basically, I think it would be broadly valuable for people to get a true impression of the real life in places that are different from where they live, with the nice things reported in addition to the bad sides, but the "Kabul" poster's little joke has already ruined that by once again allowing the news-media negative picture to win out.

And of course, even if accurate information does get out there, it's still not necessarily a solution to global tensions, as the fallaciousness of the "if they got to know us they'd like us" outlook illustrates. So once again we are caught in that bind, and I'm still no closer to discovering a solution.