A star Studed Cast turns out for "Prop 8 - The Musical!"

Ah the power of reason, comedy and celebrity all combining into one entertaining educational and admirable endeavor. I think this little Viral video from Funny or Die is something for America to be proud of!

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

New Enhancements

Thanks to Katya and Shams Mahmood we have a new threaded commenting system. This means that we can now reply directly to a comment and keep a discussion going in a more organized way. The one annoying part, is that in order to reply to a particular comment, you'll be instructed to include something along the lines of @jumco or @1234567890987654321 (which is provided for you, so simply copy and paste) as the first line of the comment. Unfortunately this bit of annoyance will persist until Blogger, the host of the blog, fully enables the code this system relies upon. When posted, there will be an indented, color-coded reply to a specific commenter or comment, respectively. Let me know what you think, or if there are any problems.

Akbar Ganji Asks: Who Rules Iran?

Image of Iran's Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei via WikiMedia

During numerous discussions about Iran, it has become apparent that a pervasive ignorance exists regarding the Islamic Republic. The complexity of its political arrangements, demographics, and strained history. I've recently completed Akbar Ganji's dense article on the political structure of Iran in Foreign Affairs. Ganji delicately parses this structure as a 'Sultanate' in the words of Weber as opposed to the 'fascist' or 'totalitarian' labels he argues are misrepresentative while bluntly discussing the terror the nation has employed. I sincerely recommend it to all those interested. A few highlights:

• But this analysis [Ahmadinejad has brought the country to ruin] is incorrect, if only because it exaggerates Ahmadinejad's importance and leaves out of the picture the country's single most powerful figure: Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader...Formally or not, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government all operate under the absolute sovereignty of the supreme leader; Khamenei is the head of state, the commander in chief, and the top ideologue.
  
  
• Judging by the freedom of Iran's elections, there has been little progress. Whether they are for the post of president, the unicameral parliament (known as the Majlis), or local councils, elections in Iran are rigged pseudoelections.
  
  
• If instances of political repression have decreased over the past three decades, it is largely because notions of democracy and human rights have taken root among the Iranian people and thus it has become much more difficult for the government to commit crimes.
  
  
• Ahmadinejad's populist rhetoric has also had the unexpected effect of allowing greater scrutiny of his policies. By using plain language to criticize his political opponents, Ahmadinejad has prompted them to speak in plainer and more forceful terms, too. Early this year, when Ahmadinejad dismissed reformist politicians as being "ill qualified" to run in the upcoming parliamentary elections, Mohsen Armin, a prominent reformist, shot back: "If ill-qualified people are being advised to desist from registering as candidates so that they don't inflict a cost on the country, Ahmadinejad is undoubtedly the first person who should be banned from standing in elections."
  
  
• Iran today is indeed a neosultanate, not a totalitarian state, nor even a fascist one. Such regimes create single-voiced societies, and many different voices can be heard in Iran today. Contemporary Iran is still officially an Islamic theocracy, but no single ideology dominates the country. In the totalitarian Soviet state, there was nothing but Marxism and the official Bolshevik version of it at that. In Iran, liberalism, socialism, and feminism have all been tagged as alternatives to the ruling ideology, and many Iranians openly identify with these currents. Iran has no single all-embracing party in charge of organizing society. It has dozens of parties -- such as the pro-reform Mosharekat (Participation) Party and the pragmatic conservative Kargozaran-e Sazandegi (Executives of Construction) Party -- and although they are not as free or autonomous as parties in democratic countries, they represent views that deviate from the government's. To some extent, too, Khamenei has to address their concerns.
  
  
• A major lever of power is the supreme leader's ability to appoint and dismiss senior government officials. President Rafsanjani allowed Khamenei to choose his culture minister, interior minister, intelligence minister, higher-education minister, and foreign minister.
  
  
• More broadly, Khamenei exercises control over all of Iran's elected institutions by virtue of a constitutional provision (Article 110) that empowers him to set the state's general policies. Khamenei draws up countless military, economic, judicial, social, cultural, and educational policies and conveys them to state bodies for implementation via the Expediency Council.
  
  
• [This one is for Pericles] Based on his [Khamenei's] interpretation of the Koran and the early history of Islam, he said at this meeting, "The majority of the people in the state are silent. A selfless group of individuals can make the state endure by using terror." This theory has served as the justification for assassinating dissidents in Iran and abroad and otherwise silencing anyone who has posed an ideological challenge to the regime.

Sexual Experimentation:

FAIL

1959 Hip

The world before the Beatles.  

Much more hip.

Too bad.

Moscow, Millionaires and Transvestites

Image from Reuters

Doing their best to disprove the Laffer curve, Moscow is home to more millionaires and billionaires than any other city. Meanwhile, Russia as a nation struggles financially and its currency is in jeopardy. Nonetheless, there is an annual 'Millionaires' Fair' to celebrate their poor taste and opulent wealth. Reuters brings us an image gallery of this year's event.

Sunday Roundup

Arts & Culture

• Harrey Eyres deplores The Curse of Literalism in this weekend's Financial Times:
  

  You would think all this had thoroughly informed our way of thinking; we take great care not to impose unthinkingly one-dimensional interpretations on other cultures – not to be chauvinists. But the one area where we seem to have become unthinkingly literal is our own culture and its key texts. Few nowadays, apart from zealots and academics, read the Bible or Shelley at all, and if they do they struggle to see beyond the literal meaning.

• Over at Vanity Fair, Lisa Robinson celebrates Motown with an oral history in It Happened in Hitsville:
  

  After half a century, and several shelves of books about the revolutionary music label, Motown’s story is still obscured by rumors and misconceptions. Founder Berry Gordy Jr. joins a groundbreaking chorus—Smokey Robinson, Martha Reeves, Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder, Suzanne de Passe, and other legends—to give an oral history of the Detroit hitmaking machine, the cultural and racial breakthroughs it inspired, and life at “Hitsville,” as well as a true account of Gordy’s relationship with Diana Ross and the rise of the Supremes.

• Vanity Fair making this weeks list twice, with a well written and hilarious retrospective, England Made Them, looking at what makes the British so very strange:
  

  Meet Garech Browne, the Guinness heir whose father raised pigs in their drawing room. And Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society. And the Marquis of Bath, with 64 mistresses he calls “wifelets.” Tim Walker captures a cross section of proud standard-bearers in Britain’s long tradition of eccentricity as Christopher Hitchens explains why his native land often seems like one big Monty Python skit.

Politics

• In The Nation, Barbara Crossette untangles a fair amount of the unsettling and complicated chaos taking hold in Thailand:
  

  The sides in this battle are not what might be expected. The urban educated elite, the professionals with cell phones, the democrats who have stood bravely against military rule in the past are now the ones determined to provoke an army coup to overthrow a populist government they have been unable to defeat at the ballot box.

• Anne Applebaum raises some of the questions I asked about the attacks in Mumbai. Mainly, after 7 years of the 'war on terror' and at least hundreds of billions of dollars spent, how is it possible that authorities were ignorant of the pending attacks or the groups involved? Drawing parallels to some of the lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan she states:
  

  It took some time before we understood that our opponents in Iraq were not merely disgruntled Baathists but encompassed a range of both Sunni and Shiite groups with different agendas. Only now, for that matter, do we fully understand the degree to which the very word Taliban is misleading: Though the term implies a definite group with clear goals, American commanders in Afghanistan now understand very well that what they call Taliban is also an amalgamation of insurgents, some of whom fight for tribal interests, others for money, and only some for a clear-cut ideological cause.

• Matt Taibbi in, Requiem for a Maverick, mixes comedy with analysis as he explores the inner depths of destruction that the McCain / Palin ticket brought to the Republican Party:
  

  The ironic thing is that the destruction of the Republican Party was a two-part process. Their president, George W. Bush, did most of the work by making virtually every mistake possible in his two terms, reducing the mightiest economy on Earth to the status of a beggar-debtor nation like Pakistan or Zambia. This was fucking up on a scale known only to a select few groups in history, your Romanovs, your Habsburgs, maybe the Han Dynasty, which pissed away a golden age of Chinese history by letting eunuchs take over the state. But John McCain and Sarah Palin made their own unique contribution to the disaster by running perhaps the most incompetent presidential campaign in modern times. They compounded a millionfold Bush's legacy of incompetence by soiling both possible Republican ideological strategies going forward: They killed off Bush-style neoconservatism as well as the more traditional fiscal conservatism McCain himself was once known for by trying to fuse both approaches into one gorgeously incoherent ticket. It was like trying to follow the recipes for Texas 10-alarm chili and a three-layer Black Forest chocolate cake in the same pan at the same time. The result — well, just take a bite!

Food & Wine

• Porfolio Magazine's Amy Cortese examines the second labels of the world's winemakers of greatest renown:
  

  A bottle of Lafite for a fifth of the price? Makers of the world's most coveted wines make more versions that are younger, softer, and vastly more affordable.

• In Dueling Spanish Chefs, Gourmet Magazine interestingly, yet clumsily, wades into socio-political critique via the culture wars Spain has experienced post-Franco:
  

  In this sense, Adrià is like that other genius to come out of Spain’s transition to democracy, Pedro Almodóvar. Their media are of course different—spherified olives and parmesan-infused air for one; sex, drugs, and neurotic women in stilettos for the other. But the reckless joy of their exquisite creations, the provocative art disguised as humor and sensuality, are the same. So too is the drive, relentless but unstrained, to create anew. If in today’s Spain you can hardly recognize the grim, authoritarian place that subsisted largely on fried eggs and sexual repression 30 years ago, you can thank, in part, Adrià and Almodóvar. Like the peaceful transition to democracy itself, they embody Spain’s unexpected liberalization.

Money & Business

• Economist's Market View column examines dividends and the yawning gap between those of equities and bonds:
  

  Ten years ago, investors regarded companies that paid dividends as old-fashioned—they believed companies ought to use profits to expand their businesses). Today they seem grateful for any payouts they can get.

• BusinessWeek explores the diminishing luster of China's appeal to U.S. manufacturers:
  

  A new survey finds rising worries about product quality and intellectual-property theft. More U.S. companies are looking to Mexico and their own backyard