No Coup for You

Posted on January 9, 2015 by wellsdc

Did you know that it is a federal offense in the United States to attempt a coup d’etat in a foreign country?

Two U.S. citizens faced federal judges on Monday for their role in last week’s attempt to overthrow the government in the Gambia. One of the two men planned to become the country’s new leader.

According to the criminal complaint filed on Sunday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, the two men — Cherno Njie, 57, and Papa Faal, 46 — separately left the United States last month to travel to the Gambia. Once there, they allegedly joined with another 8 to 12 co-conspirators as part of an attempt to launch a coup against Gambia President Yayah Jammeh. Both Njie and Faal hold dual U.S. and Gambian citizenship.

Not only that, but it has been illegal for a very long time.

Both men are charged with violating the Neutrality Act, a 1794 law that makes it illegal for an American to prepare an attack on a country the U.S. is at peace with, as well as arming themselves in order to violate that law. The last time the law was invoked was in 2007, when 10 men were accused of attempting to overthrow the government of Laos. The charges in the Laos case were later dropped.

For those who don’t know, The Gambia is a small, sort-of-squirmy-shaped country in west Africa, which basically consists of the two banks of the Gambia River. Aside from a bit of Atlantic coastline, the country is completely surrounded¹ by Senegal, which is also named after a river. Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, December 16, 2014

Posted on December 16, 2014 by wellsdc

The Comic-Book Guys Quivering in Fear of Cosplay, Noah Berlatsky, The Atlantic, December 10, 2014

The backlash to cosplay is in part guys trying to keep girls out of the male clubhouse. But in this context it can also be seen as feminized guys panicking at yet another in a long line of demonstrations that the male clubhouse isn’t all that male to begin with. You could argue that cosplay’s associations with fashion actually make it more highbrow than comics—the New York fashion runway and the New York gallery scene are more kin than either is to low pulp superhero comics. Cosplay is appropriating superheroes for art, much as pop art has done—and some in comics fear the results.

But they shouldn’t. The truth is that cosplay is not a continuation of pop-art denigration by other means. Instead, it’s an antidote. Pop art’s self-conscious manipulation of comics is only possible, or painful, in a world where comics defines its legitimacy in narrow terms. Lichtenstein is only an outsider co-opting comics if you insist on seeing Lichtenstein as something other than a comics artist himself. Cosplay—like the Batman TV series before it—could be a way for fans to be the pop artists: to cast aside the wearisome performance of legitimacy for a more flamboyant, less agonized fandom. Once you stop neurotically policing boundaries, the question of whether comics or superheroes are masculine or feminine becomes irrelevant. If superheroes and comics are for everyone, that “everyone” automatically includes people of all genders, wearing whatever they wish.

The Real Story Of Apollo 17… And Why We Never Went Back To The Moon, Andrew Liptak, io9, December 12, 2014 Continue reading →

Today in History: The Day the Earth Didn’t Catch Fire

Posted on September 26, 2014 by wellsdc

The world might have descended into nuclear catastrophe thirty-one years ago today, September 26, 1983, had someone other than Stanislav Petrov been in charge of the Soviet early-warning system at a key moment. Via BillMoyers.com:

On this date in 1983, a Soviet lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer in the command center for the USSR’s early warning system when Russian satellites twice detected the launch of five ICBMs from the US. Had Petrov followed protocol and reported the “attack,” Moscow might have retaliated, bringing about a global nuclear war. But he didn’t trust the newly-installed system, and doubted a nuclear strike would begin with only handful of missiles. So, without any additional information, Petrov decided it was a false alarm and kept it to himself. The incident came to light after the fall of the USSR.

This was only three weeks after a Soviet plan shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, so there was already some tension.

Via Wikipedia:

Had Petrov reported incoming American missiles, his superiors might have launched an assault against the United States, precipitating a corresponding nuclear response from the United States. Petrov declared the system’s indication a false alarm. Later, it was apparent that he was right: no missiles were approaching and the computer detection system was malfunctioning. It was subsequently determined that the false alarm had been created by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds and the satellites’ Molniya orbits, an error later corrected by cross-referencing a geostationary satellite. Continue reading →

Fun with Numbers in Other Languages

Posted on September 24, 2014 by wellsdc

Multiples of ten in Russian, for the most part, have a common suffix, sort of like “-ty” in English (i.e. twenty, thirty, etc.) “Twenty” and “thirty” in Russian are “двадцать” and “тридцать” (pronounced “dvadtsat” and “treedtsat,” basically).

Note that they both end in “-цать.” “Forty” is different, though. (The words for “fifty” through “eighty” have a different suffix in common. “Ninety” is different, too, but that’s for another day.) I find this sort of thing interesting, and it’s my blog, so nyah.

The word for “forty” in Russian is “сорок” (pronounced “sorok.”) This threw us for a loop in Russian class back in college, and the professor’s explanation was interesting. I thought I’d share it today. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but Google helped me find the same basic linguistic theory.

A post by Joseph F. Foster, a University of Cincinnati anthropologist, at the website The Linguist List cites A.G. Preobrazhensky’s “Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language,” which suggests that the Russian word for forty “is related to this Russian form: sorochka = ‘shirt, blouse. shift (sack dress)’.” Foster explains: Continue reading →

Why “The Knick” Seems So Disappointing

Posted on September 7, 2014 by wellsdc

This review by Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker hits on why I have found Cinemax’s new show The Knick to be a disappointment:

In recent interviews, Soderbergh has seemed disenchanted by movies, financially and culturally: TV audiences, he has argued, are more open to character complexity, to ambiguity and risk-taking. It’s all the more disappointing, then, to report that Soderbergh’s first post-“Candelabra” TV venture, the period hospital drama “The Knick,” colors inside the lines. Rather than innovate, the series, on Cinemax, leans hard on cable drama’s hoariest (and whoriest) antiheroic formulas, diluting potentially powerful themes. Set in New York at the turn of the twentieth century, “The Knick,” which was written by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, is about the Knickerbocker, a hospital that treats the city’s poorest immigrants, with a board of directors made up of wealthy philanthropists. At the Knick, a brilliant, drug-addicted, brothel-frequenting doctor—John Thackery, played by a beetle-browed Clive Owen—is poised to push modern medicine forward, from C-sections to skin grafts. The surgical-history material is rich stuff, but the series itself is dour and hokey, full of stock characters and eye-rolling exposition. Designed to flatter rather than to challenge the viewer, it’s proof that even an ambitious director can’t overcome a blinkered script.

[Emphasis added.]

Via techtimes.com

The show started off with a truly amazing opening sequence—gory without quite seeming exploitative, and evocative of an unfamiliar time. It seemed clear that these doctors (Matt Frewer and Clive Owen) knew what they were doing, but only up to a point. In performing a C-section on a woman in severe distress (a placental abruption, as I recall), they were conducting an experiment, and the experiment failed. That failure, we soon learned, had a serious cost. Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, September 4, 2014

Posted on September 4, 2014 by wellsdc

Unreality TV: ‘Weekend Update’ and the landscape of fake news, Brian Phillips, Grantland, August 22, 2014

It would be a mistake, however, to write off “Update” as the less subversive precursor to a more radical age of news satire. In the early years in particular, it wasn’t that “Update” was soft; it was that the target was different. Saturday Night Live first aired a year after Nixon resigned, six months after the fall of Saigon. The old American public reality, I mean the Walter Cronkite, Fit to Print reality, was cracked down the middle but still more or less in place. TV channels were confined to a few stiff buttons on an oversize remote. Newspapers still published late editions. There was no Internet. The structure of American authority had been shown up as fatally flawed, but nothing emerged to replace it. The early “Weekend Update” sketches were less interested in using the power of the news to castigate corruption than in pointing out the fraudulence on which the power of the news was based. They showed Chevy Chase, a mock-up of the oracular newsman, murmuring dirty talk into a telephone, unaware that he was on the air.

Or they showed Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin, in a “Point/Counterpoint” debate, dropping the pretense of civility and saying what they really thought: “Jane, you ignorant slut.” “Dan, you pompous ass.”

Above all, they made the news, that somber institution, look innocuous and foolish, a province of irrelevant weirdos and harmless egomaniacs.

***

Is it strange that, of all the current-events products currently on television, it’s often Fox News that feels most like a “Weekend Update” bit? Critics are constantly asking why there’s no conservative Daily Show, but there is; it just won’t admit it’s a joke. The structure of Fox News is so deeply and basically comic that it’s impossible not to read it into the tradition of news satire. All those weeping paranoiacs! The fist-shaking curmudgeons! The gun-toting robo-blondes! Like “Weekend Update,” Fox succeeded by taking the elements of a normal news broadcast and exaggerating them to ludicrous proportions. Only instead of Opera Man, it has Angry Immigration Crusader; instead of Mr. Subliminal, it has Jowly Operative Insinuating Things About Hillary Clinton’s Health; instead of Gay Hitler, it has Outmatched Token Liberal; instead of “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead,” it has Benghazi.

Be sure to read the full article. It has some brilliant Fox News screen captures.

Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female, Stubby the Rocket, Tor.com, September 2, 2014 Continue reading →

Labor Day Movie Marathon

Posted on September 1, 2014 by wellsdc

At Hullabaloo, Dennis Hartley offers a list of ten films to watch on Labor Day (h/t ql). I’m a bit embarrassed to say I’ve only seen one of these:

Blue Collar
El Norte
The Grapes of Wrath
Harlan County, USA
Made in Dagenhan
Matewan
Modern Times
Norma Rae
On the Waterfront
Roger and Me

Of all these, I’ve only seen On the Waterfront. The whole list seems worth a look, though.

I might add season 2 of The Wire to the list, which (spoiler alert) portrays the difficulties of labor today. One of the season’s plots involves the head of a stevedores’ union getting involved in drug trafficking—not as a way of making money in and of itself, but to pay for lobbyists to improve the job prospects for workers on Baltimore ‘s docks.

Those Who Forget History…

Posted on August 19, 2014 by wellsdc

…might be condemned to embarrass themselves—and perhaps their whole country—in front of the world.

This past weekend the nation of Australia grimaced in sheer humiliation while their GWB-esque Prime Minister and clown car operator, Tony Abbott took a tour of Scotland. Forgetting his own nation, Australia, was once a British Protectorate, he vilified the cry for Scottish independence.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has swaggered up to the plate with the kind of spectacular gaffe that may well dominate the news cycle for days to come. In a recent interview with The Times, Abbott was drawn into a question about the upcoming Scottish Independence Referendum, and it didn’t go well.

Australia became an independent nation (i.e. mostly free of the United Kingdom/British Empire) in 1901, and you’d think a prime minister might remember that. As for Scotland’s independence, well, I heard Braveheart is very popular there. Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, August 6, 2014

Posted on August 6, 2014 by wellsdc

Ayn Rand’s libertarian “Groundhog Day”: Billionaire greed, deregulation and the myth that markets aren’t free enough, Thomas Frank, Salon, August 3, 2014

This summer will mark 13 years since the series of disclosures that led to the sudden bankruptcy of the Enron Corp. of Houston. The collapse of the gas-and-power leviathan, then one of the largest companies in the nation, was the starting gun for the modern age of neoliberal scandal, the corporate crime that set the pattern. It was not the first episode to feature grotesque bonuses for insiders, or a fawning press, or bought politicians, or average people being fleeced by scheming predators. But it was the first in recent memory to bring together all those elements in one glorious fireball of fraud.

This is the next Hobby Lobby, Irin Carmon, MSNBC, July 30, 2014

Continue reading →

Today in History: The Assassination of President Sam

Posted on July 27, 2014 by wellsdc

Ninety-nine years ago today, July 27, 1915, the president of Haiti, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, was assassinated by an angry mob. He was Haiti’s fifth president in five years, and had been in office for just over five months when he fled to the French embassy to seek asylum.

Let me back up a bit (this is mostly coming from the Wikipedia page, by the way). After several months of repressive rule targeting his political opponents, Sam upped the ante by ordering the execution of 167 political prisoners. Among those to be executed was former Haitian president Oreste Zamor, who had served as president for about eight months in 1914. The executions were carried out on July 27, 1915, and the populace, to put it mildly, got pissed off when they found out. I’ll let Wikipedia take it from here:

Sam fled to the French embassy, where he received asylum. The rebels’ mulatto leaders broke into the embassy and found Sam. They dragged him out and beat him senseless then threw his limp body over the embassy’s iron fence to the waiting populace, who then ripped his body to pieces and paraded the parts through the capital’s neighborhoods. For the next two weeks, the country was in chaos.

The next day, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson ordered American troops to seize Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. This was at least in part because he feared that instability in the country could lead to a German invasion—this was during World War I and the Mexican Revolution, remember, and the U.S. Navy had recently caught a German ship trying to smuggle arms to the Mexican government. The United States continued to occupy Haiti until August 1934.

I don’t remember this from history class….

Photo credit: By A. R. Harrison, United States Marine Corps [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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