The image above has next to nothing to do with this post, but I found it irresistible and had to share it.

Here’s a nice little item in the online edition of Nature magazine:

The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York.

I love it that this discovery emanates from Joseph Fourier University. I have always admired Fourier, and believe that his eponymous Transform is about the coolest thing going.

I used to be a member of the IEEE, and in those days, their publications were full of pretty good stuff — at least, the ones I read were. See what happens when you turn your back, just for a minute?

I would like to see PMLA purge itself of gibberish papers. Of course this would mean that the last forty years’ worth of the journal would be empty covers, with no pages inside. But think of the space saving on library shelves!

The depressing thing about PMLA is that very few of its gibberish papers were computer-generated, I feel sure. People actually wrote them.

Another dreary Color Revolution in the Ukraine — this time with genuine neo-Nazis to spice up the goulash, or rather, the borshcht — and Challah-Girl herself literally wheeled back on stage. Really, I thought we had heard the last of this one.

Greater Germany — sometimes referred to, euphemistically, as ‘Europe’ — is rejoicing, of course. Another paw amputated from the old Bear, and now to be thrown into the neo-liberal stew and boiled to the bone. Served with a side order of Brussels sprouts, of course.

Maybe this time it will really work; though one should never reckon without a live Bear, to paraphrase Professor Tolkien.

Presumably the officers on the bridge of Deathstar USA are also pleased, though you couldn’t tell it from John Kerry’s exceptionally wooden and tongue-tied performance. Still, Kerry remains an infallible touchstone: Anything the poor old ponderous tool says is a lie, so when he assures us that this is not a matter of East versus West, we can be absolutely certain that it is.

Not for the first time, I am struck by how little has changed since the days of Lord Palmerston and the Crimean War.

Naturally I wondered how the Left moral misotyrannists would react to this one. So I went to the gold standard, Comrade Louis Proyect, the Great Wet Hen himself, whose indignant cluckings I have rather missed since he exiled me from the disciplinary delights of his bondage-dungeon mailing list (quite rightly, too).

One was not disappointed:

If you read Global Research or the World Socialist Website, you’d tend to think that the troubles in the Ukraine are the result of a cabal by the Republican rightwing and the Ukrainian bourgeoisie to use the native fascists as a battering ram against Putin’s allies who are trying to preserve state-owned industry…. As I have pointed out in a previous post, the picture is a lot more complicated.

Louis has always ‘pointed something out’ in a preceding post — or some dozens of them — and of course one is always on safe ground to observe that life is complicated. In this case, though, it would be difficult to find an account less complicated than the straw man Louis constructs in this characteristic passage, and sets into brief lumbering life, like a flimsy third-rate Golem, only to incinerate it a sentence later.

(I can’t help marvelling at the fact that Louis himself apparently does read Global Research and the World Socialist website, and seems to think that the rest of us do so as well. A dirty job, but no doubt somebody has to do it; and Louis seems like just the guy.)

There is a professors’ club called the American Studies Association which recently decided to endorse an academic boycott of Israeli institutions. Now although I don’t usually have much use for guild organizations like this, I propose a toast to the ASA. This was certainly the right thing to do, and even now, a fairly ballsy thing to do, and I hope more such groups follow their example.

It should come as no surprise to hear that the Fort Zion defense team is chewing the carpet. (Of course they’re always chewing the carpet, but now the molars are involved.)

In my home state, one of the most loathsome, squalid, reptilian, stercoraceous, depraved, shameless and dogfaced politicians America has ever produced has leaped into the fray. And no, I don’t mean Bill Clinton: I mean someone even worse, if worse be possible, namely Sheldon Silver, the Democratic speaker of the New York state assembly — itself, of course, the filthiest, most vendible and abject deliberative body ever assembled since Satan called his council to order on the ever-burning sulfur unconsum’d.

(Though the New York state senate might be even worse. It’s a near-run thing.)

Here’s… Shelly!

That faux-chateau in the background is the home of the New York state legislature. The picture doesn’t do it justice. Henry Hobson Richardson designed it, and never, I think, was good solid Victorian architecture more wasted on a stinkpot kennel of slinking soup-hounds.

Shelly has introduced a bill to defund any academic institution in the state of New York which ‘funds’ the ASA. The term ‘funds’ in this context includes things like paying a professor’s dues to the ASA, or defraying his travel costs to a farbrengen thereof.

Now what strikes me most about this measure is the tooth-gnashing impotence of it. Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. The worst thunderbolt that Shelly can fling at this atrocity, from his Olympus in Albany, is to trim the expense accounts of professors. A fleabite. We have come a long way.

If I were running the ASA I would offer a dues and registration waiver to anyone living under Zionist occupation, including the hapless citizens of New York. As for travel expenses — perhaps the Iranian government would be willing to establish a scholarship fund.

It seems to me that this ludicrously damp and inconsequential leven-stroke — a fulguration that signally fails to fulminate — ought to be matter for unbridled rejoicing among the friends of Palestine and foes of Israel (among whom I number myself, though the least).

It puts me in mind of a story told to me by an old friend of mine. My friend’s grandfather had very sensibly gotten himself out of Russia, as a young man, during the bad old days of the Black Hundreds. When the grandfather was a venerable patriarch the family, for his birthday, took him to see Fiddler On The Roof. In this show there is a pogrom scene; a number of Broadway dancers dressed as Cossacks come swirling onstage and behave in a very mean way toward the unfortunate inhabitants of the shtetl. The music, I’m told, gets very loud at this point.

During this scene the patriarch’s shoulders were observed to be shaking. The family were worried: Is this just too intense for the old boy?

At intermission, tender concern was, well, tendered. The grandfather, dissolved in mirth, managed to say, ‘You call that a pogrom?!’

This is sort of how I feel about Shelly’s bill. You call that a pogrom? If that is the best the Zionists can do, then difficult as it may be to accept, we’ve won.

Of course this hasn’t prevented all my academic friends from heating up the mailing lists. The humanity!

I guess it’s all a question of where the shoe pinches.

I’m sorry to say that the late Pete Seeger always left me rather cold. It’s a dismal thing to say about a man who lived through some very interesting times, and was always more or less on the side of the angels. His defiance of HUAC, if nothing else, deserves respect — indeed, something more than respect.

But I always saw him — alas — as a sort of living exhibit illustrating what went wrong with the old CP. And I don’t mean the Stalin thing. Indeed, one of the most depressing episodes in his later years was a grovelling apology, extorted by the unspeakable Ron Radosh, for Seeger’s Stalinism in the 30s. As it happens, I believe the only people who had it even halfway right in the 30s were the Stalinists, and they have nothing to apologize for. I mean, consider the alternatives. Hitler? Trotsky? Puh-leeze.

Admittedly, my fathers in God, the old Stalinists, were only halfway right. But to paraphrase Phyllis McGinley — now of course a forgotten name — halfway right is better than stupid(*).

Halfway, alas, was the best they did — the high-water mark. Subsequently many became Democrats, and then mere liberals, and ended up, like Pete, apologizing for the only heroic phase in their career.

Poor Seeger’s banjo — seen above — illustrates the degeneration. That po-faced inscription is an hommage to Woody Guthrie’s guitar, on which he wrote ‘This machine kills Fascists’.

Woody’s is better, don’t you think?

As I see it, Fascists are not an extinct species, and I would rather see a few of them killed than see an abstract noun surrounded. Oh, I’m not a bloodthirsty guy, and I’ve never killed anybody and probably never will; probably never could. But there’s something refreshingly concrete about Woody’s slogan that’s missing in Pete’s. I’ve never felt that abstract nouns are much of a problem, but I’m quite worried about Fascists.

Then of course, besides Fascists, there are Zionists. As with many other old CP types, poor Pete had a soft spot for Fort Zion, and actually broke with his old collaborator the Rev Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick over the latter’s support for the Palestinians.

(Full disclosure: I knew Kirkpatrick slightly, in his last years, and liked him very much. There’s a little doorway to a basement apartment in my neighborhood, which I pass a couple of times a week, where Rev Kirkpatrick lived in those days. Sunt lachrimae rerum. Too many places in my nabe are now associated with those who have gone before. Time to move, perhaps.)

Another old pal of mine has a different and more fond connection with Pete, and we spent some time talking about Pete purely as songwriter. It was borne in upon me — depressingly enough — that I never much liked his songs either.

‘Where have all the flowers gone’ is so associated in my mind with early — and mostly unsuccessful — attempts to get laid that I can’t begin to say whether it’s any good or not. Usually I relish the elegiac mode but there’s something a little too weepy about this one. Even for me.

Always loathed ‘If I had a hammer’. Too many abstract nouns. Somebody please explain to me how you’re supposed to ‘hammer out love’.

‘Little boxes’ seems smug, and the lip-smacking way Seeger pronounced ‘ticky-tacky’ always made my skin crawl.

‘Waist deep in the Big Muddy’ might actually be my favorite, but even that has some strangely inartistic touches — like the painstaking explanation of the fatal creek’s hydrography; as if the Big Fool’s error was that he didn’t do his geography homework.

But Seeger was an energetic and convincing performer, whose presentation could make you overlook the weaknesses in the material. And undoubtedly he did more good than harm.

Let’s hope we can all say as much, should we live to be 94. Sit levis terra.

————

(*) Oh, all right:

Martin of Tours, when he earned his shilling
Trooping the flags of the Roman Guard,
Came on a poor, aching and chilling,
Beggar in rags by the barrack yard.

Blind to his lack, the guard went riding.
But Martin a moment paused, and drew
The coat from his back, his sword from hiding,
And sabered his raiment into two.

Now some who muse on the allegory
Affect to find it a pious joke;
To the beggar what use, for Martin what glory
In a deed half-kind and part of a cloak?

Still, it has charm, and a point worth seizing.
For all who move in the mortal sun
Know halfway warm is better than freezing,
As half a love is better than none.

I’ve always liked the pun on ‘half a love’ — worthy
of Dorothy Parker.

I may have mentioned before that I subscribe to a few email lists dedicated to somewhat out-of-the-way topics. One of these is a list for people interested in the ancient Greek and Latin languages and literatures. Of course, in the nature of the case, many of my fellow listers are paid schoolmasters (though a surprising number are not). As a result, questions of interest only to the schoolmaster guild take up a fair amount of time on the list.

Several topics recur. Two of the most perennial are 1) How do you keep kids from cheating and plagiarizing in these here Interwebb days, and 2) How can we keep our jobs when nobody wants to learn Latin and Greek?

The two questions collided interestingly in a recent post:

I have a distinct memory of busting a college student back in about 2006 who had cheated from the online Wheelock(*) answer key, and I put so much immortal terror in him he actually dropped the class a week later. I call that a success.

Dear reader, I did not make this up, or change, or omit, a word of it. This is a schoolmaster who is happy about having caused so much ‘terror’ in a student that the student dropped the course, and will probably hate the whole idea of Classical studies for the rest of his life. The lipsmacking tone of the narrative, and the police phraseology — ‘busting’ — depressingly ice the dismal cake.

Really, I think the point may have arrived where we must destroy education in order to save it.

———-
(*) A fine old students’ Latin grammar. I learned Latin out of it, which tells you just how old it is, if not how fine.

Credit where it’s due: The Israelis are great sloganeers, though they do have a weakness for melodramatic word-choice. The latest catch-phrase, it seems, is ‘keeping the castle‘(*):

Netanyahu and other leaders continue to see Shiite Iran and its nuclear program as the primary threat to Israel, and Hezbollah as the most likely to draw it into direct battle. Still, the mounting strength of extremist Sunni cells in Syria, Iraq and beyond that are pledging to bring jihad to Jerusalem can hardly be ignored.

As the chaos escalates, Israeli officials insist they have no inclination to intervene. Instead, they have embraced a castle mentality, hoping the moat they have dug — in the form of high-tech border fences, intensified military deployments and sophisticated intelligence — is broad enough at least to buy time.

Translation: They prodded Obie into trying a Syria intervention, as part of the strategy to encircle Iran; the American public and even the English House Of Commons didn’t buy it; the ‘realists’ now have the upper hand in the White House, at least for the moment, and the Empire is talking to Iran as any reasonable, realistic empire would talk to a smaller, though not negligible independent state, too considerable to conquer outright. Meanwhile Israel still owns Congress — and hasn’t given up on getting back in the driver’s seat as regards the US’ Middle East policy.

But of course, even within the castle, counsel seems to be divided. The real hard-line Likudniks will never give up their own variety of anti-Iran jihad, but the less ideological local experts — who no doubt have a few US ‘realist’ phone numbers on speed-dial — are inclined to back off, at least for the moment. Hence the ludicrous battle of the frogs and mice over who was responsible for this appalling atrocity:

Was it Hezbollah, as the True Believers say, or the semi-mythical Al Qaeda, as the experts say?

Whoever did it, I’m with ’em, and only wish it had done a good deal more damage.

————-
(*) Prior to this one, my favorite swords-and-sorcerers slogan from the Promised Land was ‘securing the realm‘.

A recent car trip to Maine and back refreshed my acquaintance with NPR. I was shocked. It’s become amazingly jingoistic. There used to be a pretense, at least, of ‘balance’; but that’s all gone.

I was gobsmacked, in particular, by a program called America Abroad — just the title seems to call for some unpacking, doesn’t it?

The particular segment I listened to was one long propagandistic infomercial for intervention in Syria, complete with alarming booms and bangs in the background — bad, dictatorial, tyrannical booms and bangs, not at all like the humanitarian booms and bangs our friendly bombs(*) produce. And of course there was the obligatory Israel stooge presented as an ‘expert’. In this case, that role was played con brio by one Michael Abramowitz, the ‘Director of the Committee on Conscience, which conducts the genocide prevention efforts of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’.

This Holy Joe may perhaps be another reputation.com customer, since there’s nothing interesting about him on the Web, except that he has gone into the family business; his father was the once-notorious Morton Abramowitz, a real permanent-government type, who did the Foreign Office dirty work of presidents from Carter through Bush I, and then retired, like a dim-sighted but sharp-toothed old moray eel, into the crevices of the foundation sector, and from thence contributed his own fangs to the dismemberment of Yugoslavia.

‘America Abroad’ has quite a list of sponsors, which pretty much tells the tale. Personally, I don’t know whether I’m happier about the Qatar Foundation or the National Endowment for Democracy.

Somebody — not me — needs to do a job on the show’s guiding spirit, one Madeleine Brand. I don’t think I have the right cultural background. I’ve spent time in Southern California, but I don’t really quite get it.

————-
(*) A tip of the Father Smith biretta to Sir John Betjeman for one of the good Father’s favorite poems.

The gruesome image shown above is not the real, much more gruesome Ariel Sharon; rather, it is a life-size wax effigy, part of an art installation. What the artist was thinking of I do not know, though I suspect an intention, not badly realized, of biting, transgressive drollery.

There is something about the mouth that reminds me of Saul Bellow.

I’m superstitious about saying that I’m glad people are dead, though if there’s anybody I might be tempted to say it of, it’s this monster. Not that it matters; the Golem-state he helped create, and juice-up, remains, whether or not his bloated carcass is sucking in life support that might be better used. Apart from that niggling economy, his final corporeal dissolution benefits no one and harms no one.

Not being God, I am also hesitant about consigning him, or anybody else, to eternal torment, even in imagination. One — the merely human one — does rather feel that eternity is a long time, no matter how bad a person has been. Which of us, in Sharon’s circumstances, can be sure that he or she would not have become Sharon? It’s a serious question, and well worth pondering.

At the same time one also feels that a nice long stretch at the Mount Purgatory Correctional Facility would do the guy good. Say a millennium or two. In the white phosphorus spa. But this is as far as my own merely human sense of justice extends.

As Richard Stallman said of Steve Jobs: I won’t say I’m glad he’s dead; but I’m glad he’s gone.

I note with pleasure that there is to be an Ariel Sharon Park, outside of Tel Aviv. It’s a-building, even now, on top of an old garbage dump, which was in turn placed on top of a Palestinian village, whose inhabitants were either killed or chased out during the ’48 atrocities.

Really, it would be difficult to find a better metaphor for modern Israel.

Facebook has its uses. A pure Facebook friend — a fella I haven’t actually met in the 3D world, but would like to — passed along a link to a very nice essay at Gawker, of all places. I recommend the essay, but it’s not the burden of my song tonight. Rather, it’s a particularly smarmy bit of Oblather the writer cites:

I believe that the free enterprise system is the greatest engine of prosperity the world’s ever known. I believe in self-reliance and individual initiative and risk-takers being rewarded. But I also believe that everybody should have a fair shot and everybody should do their fair share and everybody should play by the same rules, because that’s how our economy is grown. That’s how we built the world’s greatest middle class.

The platitude density is high enough here to create a black hole, an all-devouring intellectual singularity from which no stray thought can escape, so let’s heave to, well away from the event horizon, and just consider the last sentence at a safe telescopic distance.

I like the idea of the ‘middle class’ as something which has been ‘built’ — like a brick shithouse, presumably — and built, moreover, by ‘us’.

Who is this ‘us’, exactly? The Great Smarmer’s intent, no doubt, is to suggest that he and you, dear reader, and I, even, in spite of myself, have all collaborated in this world-historical construction project, an achievement that makes the Pyramids blush and hang their pointy heads, so thoroughly are they cast into the shade by the great American middle class. He and you and I have done this together, along with Marse Tom Jefferson and that dear little bear Teddy Roosevelt and Duke Nukem Truman and, for all I know, Ronald Reagan, a person whom he says he admires very much.

But regardless what giants of old ‘built’ this mighty edifice, what does it consist of? The answer is simple: a negation. The ‘middle class’ is a doughnut hole. It’s the people who aren’t obviously rich or obviously poor. It’s like erecting a category of people who are neither red-headed nor left-handed and calling them the Freds.

(We do this a lot, by the way; ‘white people’ is a similar categorical non-category.)

The myth has a certain grip on people, though. To that extent its implicit mystification has succeeded. I remember being told by an older relative of my own, when I was a kid, that we were ‘middle class’. I knew exactly what she meant, though it puzzled me a bit even then. We obviously weren’t rich — nobody needed to say that; the street address told that story. What needed to be stressed, it seemed, was that we weren’t poor either.

But I was a literal-minded, metrically-inclined kid, and it seemed to me that our condition, while certainly not poor, was a good deal closer to that of the poor than it was to that of the rich. That is to say, we weren’t in the middle in any arithmetically intelligible sense; and characterizing us that way was, in effect, a lie. It overstated our distance from the poor and understated our distance from the rich.

No doubt that’s precisely the great usefulness of it, as a national myth. If Joe the Plumber is in the middle, presumably he has an equal chance of rising or falling in the great Brownian churn. This false sense of situation is perhaps one of the things that keeps us so docile — and is, no doubt, the very reason the brick shithouse was ‘built’ in the first place.

I’m getting a maddening number of spam registrations — hundreds of bogus users per day — and it’s begun to annoy me. I’ve disabled registration of new users for the moment, until I can figure out a way to stop this. Any newcomers who want to register, get in touch with me through the contact form.