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Remora Prediction fiction The NYT reports official preliminary figures show fourth quarter growth at 0.7%. Further in the story we come to these two grafs : Most economists had predicted a weak figure for the fourth quarter, and none interviewed yesterday said they planned to change their forecasts. Though they expect growth to improve slightly this year, it might not be enough to create jobs until the spring or summer. Many companies hesitate even to bet on a midyear recovery, said Carl T. Camden, president and chief operating officer of Kelly Services, a leading provider of temporary workers. His clients "talk about things turning around in the third quarter," he said, "and then they realize that's the same speech they gave last year" So, is that what "most economists" had predicted? Wow, somehow we bet those predictions were revised about two weeks ago. Long range, that isn't what most economists were predicting at all. When Busine

Notes. We received a nice email from a friend in NY re the previous post. Here it is: "hi Roger - kind of a sweet post today, if I don't say so myself ....and, ah, evocative; in the sense that your introflashback brought me back to a memory of a moment in Austin in '91: I was sitting in the bar at the union (what the hell was it called?) drinking a beer and "protesting" the gulf war in the same way that all my "political" activity transpired (well, to be sure, very much as I did pretty much everything back then): sitting in a dark room on a sunny day, talking, drinking coffee, smoking, drinking beer, smoking, talking, drinking wine, talking, smoking..... when you happened in and we discussed having the same shameful, horrifying, stultifyingly humiliating realization the night before: that we agreed with Ross Perot - the war is not about oil. Well, were just about to go back to war and it still aint about oil. Trouble is, GW Dauphin and the

Dope In 1991, I received the call, and went down to U.T., where I found about a thousand people assembled. George Bush had just launched operation Desert Storm. We were assembled to protest the war. I remember running into my friend Emrys. We didn't talk about the war -- we talked about Emrys' dissertation, which at that time occupied his entire social life. Both of us were old enough to have been demonstrating, at this point, since the seventies. I was thirty two, which was a little above the average age of the demonstrators, but not much. The eighties had been full of demonstrations -- divestment, disarmament, Nicaragua -- and almost everyone there knew the drill. Neither Emerys nor I was happy to be there -- demonstrating had long lost its appeal over, say, having a beer in a burger joint. But duty called. We rallied in the dark -- as I recall, it was around eight o'clock -- and marched to the capital. I don't recall the next couple of weeks in crystal clear detai

Remora Conservatives like Mickey Kaus have been cannonading the NY Times for its leftwing bias since Howell Raines became editor in chief. Liberals like Eric Alterman have naturally retaliated by defending Raines. In LI's opinion, the NYT crusade to open the Augusta Masters to women is eminently defensable. However, we aren't golfers, we believe that gender biases in sports are much more pronounced in, say, football or basketball than in golf, and we don't really have any interest in the story. A more serious breach of journalistic integrity has emerged about the Time's reporting from Venezuala. We wonder if Kaus or his conservative cohorts are going to report on the right wing bias of the newspaper... No we don't. We dont' think for a moment that they will report on this story, which goes like this. Narco news is a site run by Al Giordano. In a news story about the Times' firing, or letting go, of its Venezualan stringer, Francisco Toro, Giordano r

Dope Hume, Huxley, and war The importance of distance should never be under-estimated. Heidegger, whose defense of Nazi-ism is well known, is continually being rediscovered (surprise) as the rotten bug under the rug of continental philosophy; that Derrida relies so much upon his work has been discussed in the terms one would usually reserve for talking about hiring Typhoid Mary to cook the cutlets in some local dinner . Yet who cares that David Hume, the surely one of the roots of English philosophy and its rather sterile offshoot, analytic philosophy, had, shall we say, rather dim views about blacks during a period in which the trade in black flesh (and the attendant destruction of African culture) was at its height? LI was pondering this while reading, yesterday, Thomas Huxley�s excellent Victorian study of Hume . Huxley himself is rather impatient with the �nonsense� that is usually ground out about race and national character. We like Huxley for that. We like Huxley for his

Remora Tomorrow, as the President gives his State of the Union address, LI will be out with (one hopes) thousands of Austinites protesting the war. Why? Why shouldn't the U.S, with or without a coalition of allies, invade a country that is ruled by a bloody dictator? A country that manifestly would do better without the dictator? As we have hammered home on this site, the problem with Saddam Hussein is not his expansionist policies. These have been little in evidence since the Kuwait war. The most striking instance of the change in S.H.'s view, or more likely, ability to incurse on his neighbors is the practical division of his own country. Those attempts that he has made to take back Northern Iraq have been feeble. They've been feeble even judged by his military strength. Though Iraqi forces are probably strong enough to defeat the Kurds in Northern Iraq, those forces, as Hussein knows, would be quickly reinforced by others. Or at least so he must calculate, give