Fill in the Blank

_________'s next leader will be an openly gay former flight attendant who parlayed her experience as a union organizer into a decades-long political career.

The answer? Iceland!

Ugly Betty [More Chat]

[21:14] A: OMFG
[21:15] A: UGLY BETTY IS NOT UGLY
[21:15] A: SHE'S FUCKING HOT
[21:15] A: just had to say that
[21:16] M: no shit sherlock
[21:17] A: but even in the "ugly" makeup
[21:17] A: like, even hotter in the ugly makeup
[21:17] M: wat

IMHO:

Song of the Day

Electric Version by the The New Pornographers:

I Like Obama?

This is gonna be published somewhere; I'll let you know where when it is. In the meantime, read it; it's good.

Count me among the cynics. ‘Tis always better to doubt than to believe, and there is no shortage of reasons to doubt. We seem to be stuck in a timeless universe, living in a moment that knows no past and no future. The boundless enthusiasm for Barack Obama is simply not proportionate to what he has done or plans to do, nor can the nation hope itself out of the mess it is in. Only when we understand this can we confront the very real nature of policy, and what Obama has promised does not look promising. Can the President bail the country out by resuscitating hopelessly failed industries, by spending on projects that cannot hope to commence until the “crisis” has passed, by hoping to use our money better than we ourselves can? Can he hope to outlaw partisanship and “unify” government, an idea that I hope sounds as scary to me as it does to thee? Can he hope to surmount the vitally imperfect nature of our government, to avoid redundancy and waste when only a few hundred people have a say in where billions of dollars are spent? The answer is no, of course, and this is a reality that few of us wish to confront. Blinded by the magical brilliance of the inauguration, we seem to have forgotten that what goes on in Washington is very real and very serious. We should not expect salvation from lofty platitudes, nor that hopeful change is some unalloyed good.

Given the nature of my convictions, you would not expect me to have been moved by Obama’s speech. Yet you would be wrong, and I hold out hope yet. I was touched, indeed surprised, by the rising line in which he proclaims to the terrorists, for all the world to hear, that “our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken,” that “you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.” I was glad to hear my president submit a declaration of strength, not weakness, proud in the knowledge that my country would not succumb to the trendily radical sapping of the human spirit, a sapping that surrenders any claim to the right, that preemptively declares the scum of humanity the victor. A vigorous defense of liberty, a defense that fiercely recoils from the disgustingly pusillanimous equivocation that grips the souls of cowards, is the only way to halt the moral advance of terrorism. Any friend of liberty is a friend of mine. So I say: Mr. President, with trust in God, defend freedom; fight for good!

What Is Essential And What Is Not?

The lede of another tepid article from Yahoo! HotJobs:

In just 60 minutes, you could earn enough to pay for a tank of gas, the cable bill, gym membership, or dinner out. Thirty dollars still covers some of life's essential costs. Earn that much in just one hour on the job, and you have enough to build a comfortable life.

Why are we awash in foreclosures? Because we don't know how to live. Not one of the items above is one of life's "essential costs." Tank of gas? The bus is too low for you, I guess. The cable bill? Why do you have a fucking TV? What is so compelling about the television that you must have one at the cost of $50/month, especially when you can see most of the shows on the internet? Gym membership? I can't believe this. It's called a sidewalk.

Sidewalk: use it.

Dinner out? Jesus Christ, I want to gouge out my eyes; make your own food! Invite people over to your house! Unless someone else is paying, don't go to a restaurant for food at ten times the cost of what you could make or purchase yourself!

My philosophy is this: If you don't need to do something costly, don't do it. "But Ari," you protest, "these are just life's luxuries! Treat yourself once in a while! These are indulgences; some people just can't live without them!" Honestly? That's your reply? Your willpower isn't strong enough not to eat ice cream, get a gym membership, or watch TV? Set this as your desktop background, and maybe you'll change your mind:

Another starving child in Africa. I'm sure the cable bill is a real priority.

I Was Right: Biden Is President

You heard it here first, folks [SFGate]:

Several constitutional lawyers said President Obama should, just to be safe, retake the oath of office that was flubbed by Chief Justice John Roberts.

The 35-word oath is explicitly prescribed in the Constitution, Article II, Section 1, which begins by saying the president "shall" take the oath "before he enter on the execution of his office."

The oath reads: "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

In giving the oath, Roberts misplaced the word "faithfully," at which point Obama paused quizzically. Roberts then corrected himself, but Obama repeated the words as Roberts initially said them.

A do-over "would take him 30 seconds, he can do it in private, it's not a big deal, and he ought to do it just to be safe," said Boston University constitutional scholar and Supreme Court watcher Jack Beermann. "It's an open question whether he's president until he takes the proper oath."

The courts would probably never hear a challenge, and some might argue that Obama automatically took office at noon because that's when President Bush left the office. But because the procedure is so explicitly prescribed in the Constitution, Beermann said if he were Obama's lawyer, he would recommend retaking it, just as two previous presidents, Calvin Coolidge and Chester Arthur, did under similar circumstances.

"The Constitution says what he's supposed to say," Beermann said. "... It's kind of surprising the chief justice couldn't get it right."

The only reason not to retake the oath would be to prevent further embarrassment of the chief justice, he said. "It would seem appropriate for the president of the United States to take the oath specified in the Constitution," he said. "It's the same oath all 43 of his predecessors took. He ought to take it."

Charles Cooper, head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel under President Ronald Reagan, said that the oath is mandatory, that an incorrect recitation should be fixed and that he would be surprised if the oath hadn't already been re-administered.

Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University, was hosting an inauguration party at his home in McLean, Va., Tuesday and did a mock swearing-in of 35 children. When Roberts erred, one child shouted: "That's not right!"

"He should probably go ahead and take the oath again," Turley said. "If he doesn't, there are going to be people who for the next four years are going to argue that he didn't meet the constitutional standard. I don't think it's necessary, and it's not a constitutional crisis. This is the chief justice's version of a wardrobe malfunction."

They laughed at Galileo and Copernicus, and now at me! Hate to say I told you so, but, well, i don't: I told you so!

UPDATE: Obama's taken the oath a second time!

Chief Justice John Roberts has administered the presidential oath of office to Barack Obama for a second time just to be on the safe side.

The unusual step came after Roberts flubbed the oath a bit on Tuesday, causing Obama to repeat the wording differently than as prescribed in the Constitution.

White House counsel Greg Craig said Obama took the oath from Roberts again out of an "abundance of caution."

The chief justice and the president handled the matter privately in the Map Room on Wednesday night.

Obama's probably an avid reader of this blog; Obama or the Supreme Court, that is. Okay, so Obama's definitely president now, but I still hold that Biden was acting president there for a while! What's more important is that Obama didn't have the power to create a National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation. I therefore refuse to celebrate it on the grounds that it's an unconstitutionally created holiday.

Sufism and Zen

This is a short paper I wrote for a history class. I think it is of general interest, so I post it here.

Schimmel very briefly discusses the possible influence of East Asian thought on Sufism. I think that the parallels between Sufism and Zen are so numerous as to warrant more than a short mention. The parallelism is more than superficial; while most religions have mystical elements, Islam has a mystical strain that is profoundly Zen-like. Whether this is indicative of Islam’s borrowing from Buddhism is another question; I am merely pointing out the similarities.

Sufism is that which cannot be named. “A Sufi does not ask who a Sufi is”; Sufism is an indefinable philosophy of contemplation of the timelessly infinite. The Kashf al-Mahjub describes Sufism as purity. And what is purity? Purity is the seeing of the sun and moon, the seeing of and absorption into the ethereal, the endless sky of God. Men are exhorted to escape the confines of “stations,” stations that bind us to the world and to the finite chain of causality. Causality figures very importantly in Sufism; it marks the line between this world and the next. The concept of a “next” world is misleading here; Sufism focuses on the escape from this world into a state of purity that finds bliss in brutal hunger. Hunger and asceticism cause joy because they remove the veil.

The essence of Zen is namelessness. Kōans about Zen are designed to “shock” the listener into contemplation with the sheer force of their discord; Sufi tales are likewise described as being not literal (yet importantly not figurative), as being designed to propel the reader beyond that which is known. The Chinese character 無 is used as a reply to riddles that are not riddles; it represents the state of ultimate negation, the “off” state. There is no question; the question is not designed to question, but to induce contemplation. The concept of Zazen, or the clearing of the mind to become oneness with everything, is startlingly similar, in both practice and metaphor, to Abu Amr Dimashqi’s instruction to “shut the eye to the phenomenal world” – as Daito says to sweep away thoughts that are like clouds, so do the Sufis say that the “eye cannot see the light of the sun and moon with complete demonstration”; the heart sees only the empyrean.

The goal of the Sufis is to have an existence that is without cause and without end, an existence unaffected by time or the thoughts and actions of man. I argue that the practitioners of Zen have precisely the same goal.