from: Benjamin Kellogg (bkellogg@groupsjr.com)
to: gau@cnavk.pbz*
date: Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 3:19 PM
subject: Top "Rogue" movies to watch while waiting in line to hear Sarah Palin speak

Teresa-

Thought this could be a fun list for your readers...

In honor of Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" book tour, mobile movie site zFcbg.pbz has put together a list of eight rogue-centric movies to watch while waiting in line to hear her speak.

8 Rogue Movies to Watch While Waiting in Line to Hear Sarah Palin Speak:

Patriot Games
Braveheart
Mission: Impossible
The Hunt for Red October
American Gangster
The Sum of All Fears
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
Van Helsing

Benjamin Kellogg | Group SJR | 646 495 9722

You put out a list of "Rogue" movies that doesn't include the first X-Men movie? Epic fail.

Those joys were so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but sand; but there were good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but gold.
Anna Karenina, book 3, chapter 7

I could use some help with the telling. Mention Velma in your prayers, too.

If there's more news, I'll add it here.

7:52: They're at New York Methodist Hospital.

Velma reports that Scraps is compos mentis and furious (no details on that), and that his blood pressure is somewhat low. For all of which we are grateful.

9:36: Velma texts to say CAT scan soon; also, Howard is there, and he says "Due diligence to figure out what's the matter." I add, Howard knows this stuff.

I further add, IMO, things are sounding better than they might, but Scraps clearly needs to be in the hospital.

11:11: Velma says not to sit up all night. She'll call if there's news, and I'll keep updating.

1:19: Helen, who's also been at the hospital, says:

Howard and I just got back from the hospital. Soren did not have a stroke. At 7pm Soren had a seizure which lasted about 2 minutes, Velma called 911 and he was taken to the hospital. At 9:50 pm Soren had a second seizure while in the hospital which lasted for 2 and a half minutes.

He was given medication to relax him and to stop the seizures. His blood pressure was on the high side while we were there. A CAT scan showed some abnormalities but those could be contributed to residual artifact from the stroke. He is probably going to be held 24-48 hours for observation, given anti-seizure medications, and then referred to his primary doctor for followup.

2:08: Velma posts:

It's a bit after 2am, and I'm home. Soren's in a room at Methodist, and the plan is to saturate his system with anti-seizure meds, have a neurosurgeon take a look at the CAT scans, and see what happens. He'll be in the hospital at least until Monday or Tuesday.

He has speech, though he's somewhat disoriented by the hospital setting, and he's unhappy and drugged-drowsy.

Thank you all for prayers, good thoughts, and spreading the word. I'm going to follow his mother's directions and go to bed. I'll try to be more coherent in the morning.

3:09 PM: Velma texted: "Keeping Scraps till Tuesday @ earliest. EKG will be tomorrow." Patrick had a conversation with her about whether that's an EKG or EEG. Velma said NYMH staff had initially been saying EEG, but now were saying EKG. She couldn't tell whether they'd changed their plans or were simply misspeaking.]]> tag:nielsenhayden.com,2009:/makinglight//3.11876 2009-11-14T20:16:32Z 2009-11-14T21:53:44Z

November 14, 2009
McCain Campaign Adviser pushes back on Palin book
Posted: November 14th, 2009 02:22 PM ET

	As you know, Bob, Sarah Palin's book is called Going Rogue. The title is on the cover and everything.
But observe on CNN just now:

The full page is here as a graphic, or read the original; maybe they haven't corrected it yet. ]]> tag:nielsenhayden.com,2009:/makinglight//3.11861 2009-11-09T19:08:24Z 2009-11-09T19:35:09Z

It's evening now, here in Europe, so we're really two decades from that night. I can't watch even the...

Abi Sutherland http://www.sunpig.com/abi/ It's evening now, here in Europe, so we're really two decades from that night. I can't watch even the announcement without crying. I never have, not since the first time I saw it live, and I don't know if I ever will. I'm not sure I want to; when I can watch sundered families be reunited with dry eyes I think I've lost some part of my humanity.

The nuances of the fall of the Berlin Wall are being debated all over. Anniversaries are good times for awkward questions and complex analyses. Were the East Germans fairly treated in reunification? Has the victory of free-market capitalism been everything it promised, all things considered? How many half-truths and simplifications have buried the ambiguous complexity of that time?

I have nothing useful to add to the discussion, except that I live in a Europe that could not have existed with the Wall intact, and I think it's a good place. I call it a night's work well done.

I think I'll have a drink. It's a suitable matter for a toast. Anyone with me?

]]>

Mary Shelley wasn't worried about reanimated corpses stalking Europe, but by casting a technological innovation in the starring role of Frankenstein, she was able to tap into present-day fears about technology overpowering its masters and the hubris of the inventor. Orwell didn't worry about a future dominated by the view-screens from 1984, he worried about a present in which technology was changing the balance of power, creating opportunities for the state to enforce its power over individuals at ever-more-granular levels. [...]

Some of my favorite contemporary speculative fiction is instead nakedly allegorical in its approach to the future--or the past, as the case may be.

Consider Bruce Sterling's The Caryatids (Bantam, 2009), an environmental techno-thriller--Sterling once defined a techno-thriller as "a science fiction novel with the president in it"--set in a mid-twenty-first century in which global warming has done its catastrophic best to end humanity. Finally forced to confront the reality of anthropogenic climate change, humanity fizzles and factions off into three warring camps: the Dispensation, an Al-Gorean green-capitalist technocracy; the Acquis, libertarian technocrats who'll beta-test anything (preferably on themselves); and China, a technocracy based on the idea that technology can make command-and-control systems actually work, in contrast to the gigantic market failure that destroyed the planet. The play of these three ideologies serves as a brilliant and insightful critique of the contemporary approach to environmental remediation. Sterling especially gets the way that technology is a disruptor, that it unmakes the status quo over and over again, and that a battle of technologies is a battle in which the sands never stop shifting. Casting his tale into the future allows him to illustrate just how uneven our footing is in the present day--and the fact that the book consists of humans getting by, even getting ahead, despite all the chaos and devastation, makes The Caryatids one of the most optimistic books I've read in recent days.

Exhibit A: Marathon's Headline Win Is Empty by Darren Rovell, a CNBC Sports Business Reporter.

The meat of the article is that the Men's New York City Marathon winner may be the first American to take the prize since 1982, but it's "not as good as it sounds." Take it away¹, Darren.

Meb Keflezighi, who won yesterday in New York, is technically American by virtue of him becoming a citizen in 1998, but the fact that he's not American-born takes away from the magnitude of the achievement the headline implies.

The article goes on to explain how Keflizighi was born in Eritrea, and African runners are so poor that the measly money that one can make as a runner is "a lifetime full of riches". But how is that relevant to Keflizighi?

He is an American citizen thanks to taking a test and living in our country.

That's the usual way, yes. There's an oath, too; some people do care about that. I'm guessing that Rovell isn't Native American, so I bet he's descended from similarly technical Americans.

Let's do a trivial bit of research on the web and clear up a few facts. According to both Wikipedia and Sports Illustrated, Keflezighi came to the United States at the age of 12, and started running in seventh grade (about a year later, I guess). He was naturalized as a US citizen in 1998, when he will have been about 23. So he's not a product of the African distance-running culture, and as a college graduate (UCLA, 1998), he's not dependent on his running to fund his third-world life of poverty. Implying otherwise is—to put it mildly—completely incorrect.

Furthermore, the 1982 finisher whom Rovell cites as the previous American winner was Alberto Salazar, who was born in...Cuba.

(We won't even go into whether Keflezighi got his citizenship as easily as "a ringer who (sic) you hire to work a couple hours at your office so that you can win the executive softball league" gets work. That level of ignorance about the difficulties of the American immigration process is a whole different field of fail.)

Exhibit B: What I got Wrong About Keflezighi, also by Darren Rovell, CNBC Sports Business Reporter.

The non-apology apology.

I said that Keflezighi's win, the first by an American since 1982, wasn't as big as it was being made out to be because there was a difference between being an American-born product and being an American citizen. Frankly I didn't account for the fact that virtually all of Keflezighi's running experience came as a US citizen. I never said he didn't deserve to be called American.

Oh. That phrase "technically American" really doesn't mean "doesn't deserve to be called American." I see.

And I'm a Dutchman.

Rovell is on a bit of a cleft stick. He can either say that the use of "technically American" in his original article was correct, and that American citizenship by adoption is second-class citizenship, or he can say that he did no research whatsoever on Meb Keflezighi, and conflated two unrelated English terms to boot.

He declined the racist² option and went for incompetence:

It turns out, Keflezighi moved to the United States in time to develop at every level in America. So Meb is in fact an American trained athlete and an American citizen and he should be celebrated as the American winner of the NYC Marathon.

<Jon Stewart voice>It turns out? What, was it just revealed, just today, November 3, 2009? Then that Sports Illustrated article that tells the whole story of his childhood was, like, backdated to October of 2005?</Jon Stewart voice>

And then there's the fact that, to make sense of Rovell's argument, you have to read "American-trained" for "American-born", the phrase he uses to differentiate Keflezighi from runners for whom he would "break out [his] red, white and blue." For a professional writer, conflating two such terms is like a carpenter picking up a screwdriver to pound nails.

The irony is, there is actually a core discussion to be had about American runner training. But it's covered in the muck of so many assumptions and errors that it's not worth addressing. That would dignify said muck with too much legitimacy, and its the kind of stuff that damages actual human beings.

The point of all this

It's useful and necessary to discuss these things, if only to discourage that level of stupidity. But there's a deeper point than just the question of why this particular man, who has epitomized the American narrative, is being accorded second-class citizen status. Seriously. A man goes from being a refugee from a war-torn country to a college-educated world-class athlete. He demonstrates pride in his American citizenship; most other runners did not wear shirts with USA emblazoned on them. And yet he can't shake the perception that he's only "technically American."

What does that make my children, who are natural born American citizens, but have never lived in the US? What about my cousin, born in El Salvador and adopted at 12 by my uncle when he married her mother? What will it make my niece, when my brother and his wife bring her back from China in three weeks? What does that make the members of our community who have chosen their citizenships, taken tests and oaths?

I get it all the time, as an expat; people want to lessen and belittle my Americanness when they disagree with my opinions. Leaving the US is apparently very unpatriotic; learning about other cultures is suspect, and moving abroad all but treason³. (And taking a second citizenship? Dear Lord, the reactions.) I recall one conversation where I only salvaged my right to an opinion on matters American by mentioning that I am required to file tax returns.

There are similar discussions in pretty much every nation on earth, of course. This deep question of identity is not specific to the United States. Europeans have been wrestling with it since the Moorish Conquest. The rise of the British National Party in the UK is symptomatic of England's ongoing struggle to see even the Scots as fellow countrymen.

But the matter at hand is the American identity, and I'm relieved to report that the majority of the comments on both of those posts agree that Rovell failed this impromptu civics test. That, at least, restores some of my faith in my fellow Americans, technical and otherwise.

Keegan has now published his own history of the American Civil War, and McPherson has reviewed it in the New York Times. And by "reviewed," I mean "discredited it for the ages," if even only a portion of the factual errors McPherson cites are in fact present in Keegan's book.

The analytical value of Keegan's geostrategic framework is marred by numerous errors that will leave readers confused and misinformed. I note this with regret, for I have learned a great deal from Keegan's writings. But he is not at top form in this book. Rivers are one of the most important geostrategic features he discusses. "The Ohio and its big tributaries, the Cumberland and the Tennessee," he writes, "form a line of moats protecting the central Upper South, while the Mississippi, with which they connect, denies the Union any hope of penetration." The reality was exactly the contrary. These navigable rivers were highways for Union naval and army task forces that pierced the Confederate heartland, capturing Nashville, New Orleans, Memphis and other important cities along with large parts of Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas. Keegan acknowledges this reality later in the book when he notes that these rivers "offered points of penetration to the Union into Confederate territory." Precisely.

But Keegan's grasp of river geography and other terrain features is shaky. He confuses the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers, seems to place the Confederate forts Henry and Donelson on the wrong rivers, has the Kanawha River join the Monongahela River at Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River (it is the Allegheny River that joins the Monongahela, while the Kanawha empties into the Ohio 150 miles southwest of Pittsburgh) and shifts the state of Tennessee northward, where he says it "gives on to" Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. The Confederates did not abandon their strong point on Island No. 10 on the Mississippi River; Union forces surrounded and captured it with its 5,000 defenders. Tunnel Hill at Chattanooga is not a feature of Lookout Mountain, and the battle of Cedar Mountain did not take place in the Blue Ridge.

All books contain errors; book publishers, even long-established book publishers with large nonfiction lists, don't have staffs devoted to "fact-checking," nor is it clear that the world would be better off if they did. Moreover, as a book editor myself (albeit primarily of fiction) I usually hesitate to point fingers; I've made enough mistakes of my own that my more usual reaction is a sympathetic wince. But it's boggling that no reader at US publisher Alfred A. Knopf noticed that this distinguished historian, at the beginning of Chapter Nine, asserts that Tennessee shares borders with Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. It's equally amazing that nobody at UK publisher Hutchinson remembered that Disraeli wasn't actually Prime Minister yet in the years 1861-1865. As for the Gettysburg Address, it was entirely about the sacrifice of Union soldiers, the ones being buried in a Union cemetery, the dedication of which occasioned the speech. The address is ten sentences long. It's not exactly little-known or hard to find. Against my better judgement and all sense of professional discretion, I find myself compelled to emit that cry of the outraged reader: Didn't anyone at either publisher actually read this book?]]> tag:nielsenhayden.com,2009:/makinglight//3.11825 2009-11-01T11:34:18Z 2009-11-01T15:08:32Z