Mark Bernstein on food always makes me hungry. And it looks good too.

Coonce-Ewing is also working on a new design and weblogware.

And let’s see how Sean does with Composition and weblogs. Sean could you send the url again?

And steve is working on not leaving critical words out his sentences.

Christopher Coonce-Ewing answers a question here

Japan did go from dynastic (the Tokugawa Shogunate) to Imperial, though the “empire” at the time of the Meiji restoration was only Japan. Japan, under Meiji was concerned with western powers encroaching upon them, as the British had done at the end of the Opium war with China. As such, Japan wanted to not only control their own territory but to establish their own imperial territories outside of Japan (Korea, parts of China) that would serve as a buffer zone to deter the west. After fighting the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, and winning, they were able to show the west that Japan was a force to be reckoned with.

So… yes. The Tokugawa rule was focused on Japan with an isolationist view. Meiji looked to the west to gain what they could from them and then strove to build their own empire.

Of course, there’s a lot more to this story of modern Japan. And I’m looking forward to probing for more especially given the “encroachment hypothesis” Chrstopher puts forth. But how did the daimyo’s lose their power and how did the consequences of this loss resurface before the Axis? Why was there a grasp for western social structures then a counter movement back to more conservative traditions? Cool stuff this.

I took this from the Washington Post

. . . on Thursday, a statement by the government of the reclusive North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, contained the most explicit wording yet. “In response to the Bush administration’s increasingly hostile policy toward North Korea, we . . . have manufactured nuclear weapons for self-defense,” said the statement, issued through the official Korean Central News Agency.

This sounds fishy to me. In ’02, KJI rushes to his chemistry set and whips up a batch of weapons, as if it were that easy. I read “the threat” and I’m no position to confirm, but it sounds all wrong.

I could be that North Korea has no weapons; it could be that they indeed have them. If yes, these are not recent manufactures. If no, then we “should know” this and to continue the “story” of the no/yes is a misrepresentation in the news much as the yes/no back and forth about Iraq proved most likely a con.

If we’re good we should know the resource capabilities of North Korea, as we know that the city streets and peoples’ stomachs are typically empty.

All this talk about history reminds me of a Rob Corddry piece on the Stewart Show where he reported in satirical fashion that to teenagers learning history ranks just above eating a plateful of one’s own shit.

Exaggeration, sure. Point made. An exciting area of human study needs a better rap.

Well it’s now 2005 and counting. Not much to say about the new year, except to wish those stricken by tsunami well in the recovery, survival, and rebuild. What horrors on the beaches.

Susan at Spinning is writing about narrative as she gears up for fiction writing. I’d suggest not to worry about short or long story, but rather about story and how it manifests. In fiction we’ll be dealing with shorter forms to start because we can manage a lot of them in a semester. Each story will demand what it demands. But I winder if as she writes them she sees the whole circle? Do I when I compose a story? Sure, a vague sense of what the story might look like at resolution.

What about the novel Suttree and Edson’s short Dinner Time as examples of story? One is long, the other short. Different shapes, but story nonetheless. But how they both drill into memory.

John Timmons announces the IF course for the Summer, too. Teaching at Tunxis is itself a lesson in timewarp.

A slice from a Kaplan and Mouthrope backandforth in Kairos

NK: Is it a problem to define the act of reading more or less exclusively as an encounter with a book?

SM: When the folks at the NEA say “books” they seem almost always to mean novels, short story collections, and volumes of poetry. This is a ludicrously narrow definition. Why don’t they include biographies, memoirs, or non-fiction books about history, science, economics, or even popular philosophy? I’ll agree that most Americans know very little about fiction and poetry, even recent work in their own language. But most of us are yet more profoundly in the dark about the natural and social sciences. Which is the more serious problem?

Via Bernstein.

Man, I’m beat.

What about you?

The arguments have been made and will continue to be made that the larger issue surrounding the offensive in Iraq is really about changing the culture of the Middle East so that the conditions that cause terrorism will be nipped, whatever this means. As Bill Kristol writes in The Weekly Standard:

In his October 18 speech on the war on terror, President Bush noted correctly that his opponent “has not made democracy a priority of his foreign policy.” Indeed, Kerry’s critique of Bush goes beyond competence in the execution of policy to first principles. Kerry does not see a need to fundamentally change the political culture of the Middle East. Bush posed the challenge well: “Is he content to watch and wait, as anger and resentment grow for more decades in the Middle East, feeding more terrorism until radicals without conscience gain the weapons to kill without limit?” Bush isn’t. Thus he embraces the task of helping to spread “democracy and hope” so that “governments that oppose terror multiply across the Middle East.”

This is, of course, where I see the heart of the illogic and apparent madness of the current administration and its boosters. Kristol highlights a connection between “democracy” and “governments that oppose terror.” What troubles me about this connection is its simplicity and its power. It could easily be argued that spreading democracy across the globe is a great policy position to take, just as messianism for some religions seems, on the surface, graceful. But in our case the circumstances are different but just as cynical and naive and tactless. “Democracy and hope” is a position, a rationalization, really, that sounds reasonable but really stems from emotional reactionism, superciliousness, and over-confidence, the kind of over-confidence that one relies on approaching a hornet’s nest with a broom and crazed grin.

I suspect it’s not democracy that we’re after in Iraq, however, since that term is so muddied these days. I’d say it has to do more with “control.” When someone says that we should be spreading democracy around the world, I wonder, why not spread swiss cheese around, too, just to give it some taste. The only reason that one can say that they are spreading democracy to another is if the carrier carries a big club and bank account or the 21st century paradigm of economic markets. American democracy can’t be separated from federalism and competition for limited resources, such as coffee, sugar, broadband, or oil. But we have plenty of control issues today: nuclear proliferation, new arms deals, and terorism is far from being fisted around the throat.

The problem is practice vs guesswork, fact vs inference. The Bush administration took us to aggression for WMD, knowing full well that WMD were an improbability. “Democracy and hope” is rationalization. Does this mean that those soldiers who died in the “thrust” to Baghdad died under suspicious circumstance, false entitlement? Logic says yes. This is worse than a shame.

The argument goes, “Better to fight them overseas than on US soil.” This, again, is faulty logic, given the place we’re fighting was irrelevant to the fight to begin with and the “rationalization” comes with loads of unintended consequences, such as inspiring a new generation of America haters (not democracy or freedom haters: abstractions don’t bleed). It would seem to me that this is a clumsy way to go about spreading the good news.

Both the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Hartford Courant have endorsed George W. Bush. One reason is economic. But the record is still up for grabs on the economic policy of the administration, as Kash points out in this post. Both Bush and Kerry have incredibly naive education approaches, yet the Enquirer’s reason for disagreeing with Kerry’s approach is false. Kerry keeps NCLB but actually funds it. I disagree with both positions. NCLB for me is a solution to the wrong problem, a huge money waster.

Finally, consider this contradiction from Richard Cheney, speaking in my old territory of New Mexico yesterday.

“One way the world might look if he [Kerry] had been in charge is, he would have ceded our right to defend ourselves to the United Nations. . . . If John Kerry had been in charge, maybe the Soviet Union would still be in business. . . . If John Kerry had been in charge, Saddam might well control the Persian Gulf today. . . . He might well have nuclear weapons,” Cheney said. “It’s a good thing he wasn’t in charge.”

Campaign talk aside, the suggestion here is the same as before: that aggression against Iraq was based on false evidence then, false now. “. . . Saddam might well control the Persian Gulf today,” he claims. The implications here are audacious (even for a speech to the typical hand-picked crowd and the reference to Kerry’s vote on Gulf War I). Now and “in reality”, the infrastructural state of Iraq (remember sanctions) prior to and after the “war” has been shown to be woeful; it was a country in ruins, disrepair, and decline, the only signs of gold hammered on the walls of the dictator’s palaces.

Such a speech, and the “democracy and hope” rationalizations by the boosters, aren’t worthy of respect, except perhaps by those who buy the metaphors and the ties. But belief is one thing, logic another.

By the way, the natural gas is flowing from Libya.

How complicated is Iraq? Let’s ask Juan Cole:

Brig. Gen. Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, the head of the Iraqi secret police, has charged 27 employees in the Iranian embassy in Baghdad with espionage and sabotage. He blames them for the assassination of over a dozen members of the Iraqi secret police in the past month. He claims to have seized from “safehouses” Persian documents that show that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its militia, the Badr Corps, served as Iranian agents in helping with the assassinations.

SCIRI is represented in the caretaker government by Adil Abdul Mahdi, the Defense Minister, and the party has been an ally of convenience of the US against the Sadr Movement. The party was formed in Tehran by Iraqi exiles in 1982 and was close to Iranian hardliners. SCIRI officials vigorously denied Shahwani’s charges on Thursday. They said that the neo-Baath network in the Allawi government is seeking to discredit Iraqis who fought against Saddam from Iran in the 1980s.

and

Shahwani’s allegations are disturbing, coming when they do, because they may be an attempt to damage SCIRI’s prospects in the January elections. If the secret police are manipulating documents to tie a major Iraqi party to foreign intrigue and domestic assassination, this move would bode badly for Iraq’s development as a democracy.

Personally, I find Shahwani’s allegations fantastic.

It was clear as soon as Allawi and the neo-Baath faction was put in power by the US in late June that they wanted to target Iran. Defense Minister Hazim Shaalan decried Iran publicly as Iraq’s number one enemy this summer.

Shahwani is an old-time Baath officer. In 1990 he broke with Saddam, who is said to have killed three of Shahwani’s children in revenge. Shahwani came out of Iraq and to join US efforts to overthrow the dictator. This summer, he was appointed head of the Mukhabarat or Iraqi secret police, which the US Central Intelligence Agency is rebuilding with $3 billion. Shahwani is alleged to be a long-time CIA asset who is being groomed as a replacement for caretaker Prime Minister Iyad Allawi should the latter be assassinated.

William Saletan makes good sense in this Slate article. It isn’t rocket science, but we do need evidence as a standard for certain actions. The yakyak over “global test” as one based on evidence has been pretty clearly stated, and it goes beyond the politics of “issuing on television for votes and image.” It goes to open standards of conduct.