Have you no sense of decency, sir? Unbelievable:

US Vice-President Dick Cheney has said that insurgents in Iraq have increased their attacks in order to influence the upcoming US mid-term elections.

He blamed a recent rise in violence on al-Qaeda and others trying to "break the will of the American people".

"They're very sensitive to the fact that we've got an election scheduled," he said, claiming the militants monitor US public opinion via the internet.

Full story here.  ¶ 5:59 AM

  Blogger is totally sucking Their servers have been down for days, and not for the first time. My posts show up long after I've published them or occasionally not at all, or they show up but then disappear. If this keeps up, Team V-L might just have to pack our bags and move somewhere else...'cause, man, this is totally lame.  ¶ 5:50 AM

  Correction: Fidel not so dead Man. Just when I was starting to feel really quite sure, it seems I'm wrong again.  ¶ 8:46 AM

  Fidel: lookin' pretty dead More details to follow, but I'm thinking we've got some serious coma action going on, here.  ¶ 10:33 AM

  bits and pieces 1. The stats TA who I thought totally hated me not only sent me a semi-encouraging note after I submitted my less-than-half-baked problem set, but also sent my hall-and-classmate home with a half-gallon of organic OJ for me after I stayed home from section. What a stud.

2. The wind is literally howling outside and through the cracks in my window. It looks and sounds kind of cool right now, but, man. It is going to be a long, long winter.

3. While I was in Seattle I got a much-needed haircut, which, in addition to being awesomely easier to deal with now, is short enough that with enough shampoo lather I can totally mold my hair into little horns like I did when I was a kid. I find this endlessly pleasing.

4. I have realized that a major source of stealth stress in my life is, well, there are two, actually. One is just the quiet, cumulative stress of living on a hall and sharing a bathroom and kitchen with a bunch of other people who do things like leave chunks of mystery meat clinging to the kitchen sponge and hog the shower at peak hours and try to, like, talk to me all the time. This dorm thing was a pretty dumb idea, especially since it's not really turning out to be that much cheaper (or, actually, any cheaper at all). Won't be making that mistake again. The second factor is the level to which I'm unfortunately buying into all the salvation-anxiety around here. (Ha, Weber-joke! Get it? Anyone? Oh well.) BSL and I had a long, memorable conversation in Australia last spring about this, so it really kind of pisses me off that it's gotten the better of me anyway and is thus exerting its stealth-stress mojo. I'm going to think some more about it and maybe write more soon about what the hell I'm going to do about it.

5. I feel considerably better, but I'm sneezing a whole lot for some reason.  ¶ 2:19 PM

  various 1. The stats TA who I thought totally hated me not only sent me a semi-encouraging note after I submitted my less-than-half-baked problem set yesterday, but also sent my hall-and-classmate home with a half-gallon of organic OJ for me after I stayed home from section. What a stud.

2. The wind is literally howling outside and through the cracks in my window. It looks and sounds kind of cool right now, but, man. It is going to be a long, long winter.

3. While I was in Seattle I got a much-needed haircut, which, in addition to being awesomely easier to deal with now, is short enough that with enough shampoo lather I can totally mold my hair into little horns like I did when I was a kid. I find this endlessly pleasing.

4. I have realized that a major source of stealth stress in my life is, well, there are two, actually. One is just the quiet, cumulative stress of living on a hall and sharing a bathroom and kitchen with a bunch of other people who do things like leave chunks of mystery meat clinging to the kitchen sponge and hog the shower at peak hours and try to, like, talk to me all the time. This dorm thing was a pretty dumb idea, especially since it's not really turning out to be that much cheaper (or, actually, any cheaper at all). Won't be making that mistake again. The second factor is the level to which I'm unfortunately buying into all the salvation-anxiety around here. (Ha, Weber-joke! Get it? Anyone? Oh well.) BSL and I had a long, memorable conversation in Australia last spring about this, so it really kind of pisses me off that it's gotten the better of me anyway and is thus exerting its stealth-stress mojo. I'm going to think some more about it and maybe write more soon about what the hell I'm going to do about it.

5. I feel considerably better, but I'm sneezing a whole lot for some reason.  ¶ 8:35 AM

  etc. Life still sucks massive-amounts-of-work-wise, but, hey, I just got some very nice professional validation! I don't want to get into too much detail since this is still a public blog, but let's just say that a Major Conference Panel Proposal is in the collaborative works with a Very Important and Awesome Person in the Field. Which is pretty goddamn great.

Before that happens, though, I've got about two hundred more pages on Kenyan party-state development to read (damn you, Daniel arap Moi, for betraying Jomo Kenyatta's legacy!), and then somehow have to crank out a paper in the next 24 hours about regime change and democratization in the FSU. Which will be just in time to get a new problem set in stats. Thank god for the awesomest corporate coffee in all of Cambridge (which the relatively decent corporate citizens at Peet's assure me is fair-trade, or at least as fair-trade as one can hope for in East Africa). I just polished off another bag o' beans, which means the timing is great to pick up some even awesomer bean juice in Seattle later this week. Also, have I mentioned the pumpkin beer? Some people call Christmas the most wonderful time of year, but they clearly haven't had the Elysian's pumpkin stout.  ¶ 12:25 PM

  sweet merciful crap There is so much really important stuff to write about right now--Turkey and the EU and France's genocide vote, Russia's ever-metastasizing fucked-up-ness, elections in Venezuela, the toxic sludge dump in Côte D'Ivoire, goddamn North Korea and the "China question"...it just goes on and on. But, as it turns out, I have something close to less than zero time to read or write about anything that isn't directly class-related. We've figured out in the cohort that the problem sets for the stats class, which we typically receive on Thursday (although we're supposed to have a full week to do them) take about 15 hours on average to complete. I, of course, am on the higher end of that average since I don't know a goddamn thing about Arrr, the command-line statistics language that they are forcing us to use. Most academic programs that require any kind of stats prefer software packages like Stata or SPSS, which do the same things that Arrr does but are kind enough to hide the raw code from you and let you interact with your data more visually and intuitively (the analogy here would be producing a website in Dreamweaver as opposed to writing it up in raw html code). Arrr, on the other hand, forces you to justify everything with perfectly structured arguments and will spit out an error and dig in its heels if you, say, leave off a closing quotation mark or misuse a capital letter. Or even better, since you're manipulating the data at the level of the data, and not just importing it and making pretty pictures with it, Arrr makes it exceptionally easy to do horrible, irrecoverable things--like last week, when I was trying to isolate the "Southern" cases in my dataset and wound up coding EVERY PIECE OF DATA as "Southern" because I wrote "South=TRUE" instead of "South==TRUE."

Right. Anyway.

Today is Friday, which means I can actually take a breath and, like, read the newspaper for once before launching into my piles of reading for the week ahead. Fortunately the theme in the comparative seminar this week is "regime change and democratization," which we all know is right up my alley. There's even a good amount of post-Soviet stuff in the reading, so hopefully that paper will write itself. Africa should be good, too--post-colonial state formation and specifically party development--all fascinating stuff, as far as I'm concerned. Now if I can just get through it all. I've always considered myself to be a pretty fast reader, but apparently I'm not nearly fast enough.

Kristin, a good and wise Older Student in the Program Who has Actually Passed the Mysterious Threshold of General Exams, assured me during the first week that this semester of taking both the field seminar and the horrible stats class will be by far the longest, hardest slog of the entire program (with the possible exception of that little dissertation thing), and that at least the rest of my Master's program will seem very easy after this semester. That seems about right; after this, the classes that I'll take will look more like the Africa class than the other two--that is, they will be final-project based, not weekly-output based. So there will be an ugly week or two after the semester ends while final papers are written, but not this weekly cycle of intense stress and evil. And that ugly week or two won't actually coincide with any other obligations, because it will either be in January during the "reading period" or after classes end in the summer.

The worst part? I'm totally developing an immunity to caffeine. My morning cup still wakes me up, but the afternoon pick-me-up does nothing. Nothing! However, there is hope: Shauna introduced me to this place, which, oh my god. They serve up a cup of dark hot chocolate that costs something like $3 for 6 ounces or something, but is PURE MOLTEN LOVE. I can't even explain. I guess gaining approximately 200 pounds is a small price to pay for a hot dark chocolate survival mechanism.  ¶ 6:14 AM

  holy fucking shit, second installment Sorry for the lack of good news today, but Dave just sent me this shit about old-skool Alaskan airline MarkAir and it's making me question all the order in the universe:

When the senior Bush was vice president in 1986 and his aides were deeply involved in supplying the Contras in Nicaragua, Bergt's airline, renamed MarkAir, did at least a half-dozen runs to a dirt strip in Honduras hauling aid, some of it in sealed containers, for the rebels. "If it's guns and ammunition, I could care less," Bergt told reporters at the time. Again, Soghanalian and the CIA were also deeply involved in the Contra traffic. The Anchorage Daily News reported that at least two of the flights were not registered with customs, avoiding the requirement of "an export declaration of everything" aboard.  ¶ 6:00 PM

  holy fucking shit Things in Russia just got much, much worse.

Nina Zubareva, an official from school No. 1289 in northern Moscow, told the AP that on Thursday, the local police station telephoned and demanded a list of pupils with Georgian surnames.

"There are very few pupils with Georgian surnames in our school and we have honored the police request. I must say that our pupils are Russian citizens and have Moscow registration. Their families have been living in Moscow for years," she said.

The international community needs to do something about this now, now, now.  ¶ 7:27 AM

  Rufus Last night I had another Rufus dream, my first in quite a while, but it was just the same. Worse than usual, even. There was some kind of gathering at the Was1lla house, and I left the noise and lights and went out to go talk to him as I often did, and he was all, "dude, where have you been?" And I hugged him and kissed his nose and apologized and I was just so relieved that he was okay, since in the dream (this is always the case) we've forgotten about him for some unconscionably long period of time, and I promised him I wouldn't ever leave him again like that. The sensations in these dreams, and this one in particular, are always so immediate and powerful--I really feel like I just kissed his head and his nose and scratched his ears and pushed down on the tops of his paws to annoy him and make him lift his legs up.

What is the point of this dream? It comes again and again and again; the only ones I have more often are the low-flying dream and the airplane that can't get off the ground (also frequently a low flying) dream. Those are obviously related, in some weird way, but why the messages from Rufus? It totally fucks me up for the rest of the day. Sigh.  ¶ 6:08 PM