Reading and rendering

A:

sympathy inescapably inflects understanding, and someone who withholds full sympathy (for whatever reasons, I’m not judging the reasons in question) holds back from the opportunity of fuller apprehension. AKMA

P:

I would suggest that what you are missing is the unique status of the biblical writings precisely as Scripture. . . . in fact, the Bible is simply a collection of occasional writings written over a period of a thousand years, pulled together as a collection by a religious community called the Christian Church. And this community insists that this collection of writings be regarded as one book authored by the Creator of the universe, i.e, as Scripture.

. . .

The answer is patent: the community that collected and canonized these writings must provide the rules for the book's proper interpretation. Hence my claim, which is an uncontroversial claim for catholic Christians, that the Bible can only be properly understood within the Church, by the Church. The Bible can be read in any number of different ways; but if one wants to read the book as Scripture, then one needs to learn from the Church how to do so.

I think I understand "A" - the clarification of AKMA's to an earlier post in which he at least in part addressed my questions here.

The comments under "P" (who goes by Pontificator - I think this was his site - they are found in full here) raise way more questions than they resolve. To proclaim that 1000 years of work by a people that carefully culled, meditated, commented, remembered and revised its tradition was in fact "pulled together" by an entirely other community, Christians, is to forget - to annul -- any other basis for the writing and reading of these works than the one which Pontificator happens to espouse.

The pretty total obliteration of the other was what I was trying to look into in my earlier comment -- to read the Bible as Scripture apparently means to arrive at a species of intelligibility less by dint of careful and critical attention than by removing any alien features that might complicate what for all we know could be a preordained meaning imposed ab extra.

• Marketing 101: Reinforce your target market's sense of its own identity by deep-sixing its awareness of any other markets.

I see AKMA's thought as pretty clearly opposed to Pontificator's. AKMA appears to say that absent total sympathy, openness, to what the text via all its myriad modes of signification points to, something will be missed, lost. There is no absolute either/or of intelligibility, yet some aspect of imaginative inspiration, some trace or inkling of what lies infinitely beyond the rarest overtones of the text, is in play.

Pontificator is saying a reader facing the Bible without the Pontificator's posse is consigned hopelessly to dealing with something "fundamentally unintelligible." This seems pretty either/or-ish.

The difference in tone and spirit between the two views seems huge: AKMA's mode of reading involves the intimacy of generous attention, combined with critical acumen. Pontificator, in line
with his Roman predecessors, will advise that anyone who ventures into the intimacy of that resonant chamber without the consensus fidelium is at risk of all manner of waylaying phantasmata of meaning.

Yet I wonder if somewhere along the hermeneutic moebius A and P don't converge, in answering what seems the next inevitable question:

Can the consensus fidelium be at odds with philology?

What is there about the sacred? What does it confer upon anything designated as such, and/or upon the designator of anything designated as such, that sets it apart from those who do not regard it as sacred?

Because the community agrees the text is sacred, it can, it is said, read it aright. But early on, before the canon was formed, the community doing the canonizing did not have a consensus telling it what were the possible significations among which it had to choose. What could their decisions vis a vis the canonical have been based on other than an attentive reading of the texts?

Does part of what "sacred" means have to do with putting something outside of rational intelligibility? Does it entail a kind of extraordinary rendition that binds, sacrifices, the sacred entity to inscrutable modes of capture, transport, protocol and control?

There seems little room for gradation when it comes to the sacred.

Revised Revised Standard

I am the Copyright your Copyright, thou shalt have no uncopyrighted slim shady copyrights before me.



The National Council of Churches for Christ apparently owns the USian rights to God.

IMproPeR Translationing

Top/Ahmadinejad

Bottom/USian media

in an ultimate mode of reading, interpretations that do not conclude in committed practice partake of rejection of the truth. Commitment, Ambiguity, and Reading Scripture

via

The word, ‘ilm that is most commonly used to denote ‘knowledge’ in Arabic, Hill reminds us, included a wide range of fields as astronomy, mechanics, theology, philosophy, logic and metaphysics.

This practice of not differentiating between seemingly separate fields is best
understood in the context of the Islamic view of the interconnectedness of all things that exist and wherein the quest for knowledge is a contemplation on and discovery of this essential unity of things. It is this essential unity and coherence of all things in the world, referred to in Islamic philosophy as
tawhid, which makes it almost impossible to articulate and maintain the distinctions between the sciences and other areas of inquiry and experience. According to Avicenna, a significant philosopher-scientist and an important Islamic proponent of this view, "(T)here is a natural hierarchy of knowledge from the physics of matter to the metaphysics of cosmological speculation,
yet all knowledge terminates in the Divine. All phenomena are creations of
Allah, His theophanies, and nature is a vast unity to be studied by believers
as the visible sign of the Godhead. Nature is like an oasis in the bleak
solitude of the desert; the tiny blades of grass as well as the most
magnificent flowers bespeak of the gardener's loving hand. All nature is
such a garden, the cosmic garden of God. Its study is a sacred act." Nadarajan, Gunalan




Let's analyze what Ahmadinejad said. His exact words in Farsi were as follows: "Emam goft een rezhim-e eshghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzegar mahv shavad."

The correct translation of the statement is as follows: "Imam said this occupying regime in Jerusalem must vanish from the page of times." Sam Sedaei

Gmail = Gonemail? Scrunchmail?

Jeneane is having a Google nightmare, specifically, a vanishment of her entire inbox. This has to be straightened out - people are moving to gmail and putting a lot of reliance on its staying put.

While on the subject, I will note that on my 3-year-old laptop, Gmail tends to scrunch and grind and lock up - like there are too many scripts running or something. Could it be all those "content sensitive" ads? It didn't always act this way. I use the latest Mozilla Firefox. I use the same stuff on a newer PC, and do not have Gmail scrunch.

I have been appreciating Gmail more and more - it's really quite brilliant. But what the

RAT on JSTOR

The Roman Army Talks of, but fails to conquer, JSTOR.

The 4th Estate, moribund since 1956

WASHINGTON, Oct 26 (Reuters) - The U.S. government's main disaster-response agency apologized on Friday for having its employees pose as reporters in a hastily called news conference on California's wildfires that no news organizations attended.

When we're all done harrumphing, please advise as to what would have been learned had "real" reporters been there.

massacre oversight

|| --- =\

WASHINGTON, Oct. 24 — The State Department official responsible for overseeing Blackwater USA and other private security contractors in Iraq resigned abruptly on Wednesday. John M. Broder.

action figures

When he was in a funk,






he would comment





: "Tell me if anything was ever done."

Some call it Scripture, but do they mean "the bunk"?

From a comment in a thread about this post via AKMA:

A proper and edifying reading of Scripture as Scripture requires that the reader be fully immersed in the faith and practice of the Church. Apart from this faith and practice, the Scripture is fundamentally unintelligible. Scripture must be read with the Church, in the Church. Only with and in the Church can the profoundly unity of the Bible be discerned. Why? Because it is only with and in the Church that the Bible is in fact and reality one book whose author is the creator of the universe. Divorced from the faith of the Church, Scripture necessarily breaks down into an anthology of texts--interesting and intelligible in themselves, generating infinite speculation and diversity of interpretation, but not the transforming Word of God unto salvation.

Last thing I wish to do is barrel into this circle of very bright folks speaking about matters of high import and deep relevance. Just wish to observe that the broad gesture that separates readers of the Bible into two groups -- believers to whom it is intelligible, and non-believers to whom it is "fundamentally unintelligible" -- is kind of striking, if nothing else, in its lack of nuance. Could I be the only reader of the Bible in existence who can simultaneously be a few kegs shy of faith and rather distinctly outside the Church, yet find the Bible to have a far more interesting and complex structure than a mere "anthology of texts"? Does that make me insane?

Why would this commenter (FrKimel) apply the proverbial barroom "two kinds of people" schtick to something as involved as to include (1) the full text of the Bible, (2) the complex relation of the interpretation of that text to faith, (3) the relation of both of these to religious practice, only to sweepingly, apocalyptically even, separate certain wheaties for whom it's a godshonest book from the chaffies for whom it's a godforsaken collection of texts?

In short, wtf?

Would someone say it is impossible to play Palestrina unless the musician happens to be a practicing Roman Catholic? Can't portray Moses unless one is a Hebrew hero? No Madonna unless the painter is Churchgoing devotee of the Virgin?

Or is there something else here - something that says that the proper reading of the text involves a construction of its legibility that could not exist (but why?) without first bringing to it a faith that Scripture is supposed to be the basis of, and without first having membership in a community built on that faith?

If this is so, doesn't this short-circuit the act of reading itself? You there, you do not believe, you are not a card carrying member of _________ . . . therefore the text (name any text) is unintelligible to you.

This would seem to abandon the very question of reading and interpretation that gave rise to the original discussion. And if so, then what possible common ground for conversation and community could there be between innies and outies?

What am I missing here?

When agon was king

In his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari describes how the sculptor Donatello, awash in success and adulation in Padua, abruptly returned home to Florence, "saying that if he stayed where he was any longer he would forget all he knew because of their flattery, and that he was only too anxious to return to his own land, where he would be constantly criticized and so would have an incentive for studying and winning even greater glory."

~ Sprezzatura, 50 Ways Italian Genius Shaped the World.

Sic et non

sic:

At any moment there are 40,000 stories out there claiming to be the gospel truth. Many of them are good as gold, presented by people with the best intentions; many are lies and distortions sponsored by people with the worst. Most are muddle and nonsense. It takes years of experience or constant immersion in the news cycles, or both, just to begin to sort them out.

non:

"If you can't explain a stock or an investment principle in under a sentence to me, chances are you're not serving the audience. So clarity counts. Getting to the point counts. None of the on-the-one-hand, and on-the-other-hand stuff."

Lessig on Reich and Supercapitalism

Lessig on Supercapitalism

" . . . we need to understand the nature of the corporation -- to make money -- and come to love it, and yet, to keep it in its proper place, just as you can love a tiger, but know that it's not the sort of thing that should play with your kid. . . . Corporations are not more efficient governments. They are instead increasingly efficient money making machines. And while there's nothing at all wrong with money making machines -- indeed, wealth and growth depends upon them -- there is something fundamentally wrong with trusting these machines to restrain the drive for profits in the name of doing the right thing.. . .

Recognizing this point forces you to recognize how important it is that we make government work. It is government's job to set the appropriate limits on corporations (and individuals) so that when corporations and individuals pursue their self-interest, they will not harm a public interest.

No question corporations have devised methods of reliably producing surplus capital that are more efficient than, say, certain Viking methods of old. When figuring out what to do with them -- to keep that money flowing at the same time that one reduces the collateral damage that they inflict -- it is important to weigh one's metaphors carefully. They are, in part, machines, and, in part, enormous aggregations of workers, not tigers, often reduced to savage ignorance by the myths required to perpetuate the operations.

Corporations have tremendous gravitational force -- so much so that they can bend the mediated representation of value, of time, of history, of understanding and of what life is -- to suit their objectives.

As such, they are not quite as mindless or as docile as machines. A machine can be beyond persuasion -- it's a tool designed for something else. But it does sit passive while someone modifies, manipulates, tweaks to suit.

Corporations are not primarily machines -- and the whole matter of what it is that is required to bring them to heel might need a fresh approach -- not (merely) regulation, nor merely tweaking, nor bullying.

Perhaps some civilizing -- educative, pragmatic mix of honey and wormwood -- as the Tutor has been offering to the philanthropists and their retinue in the marketplace.

We are beginning to know the impact of corporate ideology upon humanistic education. Until we try, we don't know whether and to what extent corporate entities can be educated humanistically.

fARTstor

Apopos of JSTORiana, Juke puts us in mind of another mode of expropriating our intellect in order to sell it back to us: The AMICA library, which, despite its name, may not be the friendliest purveyor of cherished cultural flotsam. Apparently this fine "library" purports to own images - some of which at least are freely available to the public at no charge from the superb Library of Congress online archive -- and sells them back to us for the mere pittance of $150 a year subscriptions (individual rate).

Can we just stipulate that so long as USia maintains its commanding lead in the world decathalon of universal stupidity, scams like this will not starve for lack of suckerage?

AMICA is not alone. On the model of JSTOR, behold ARTstor, a digital library with half a million images in art, architecture, humanities and social sciences. #.



ARTstor, another Andrew W. Mellon intelprop gatekeeper, bills itself as "Images for Education and Scholarship." It is avowedly emulative of JSTOR, but currently refuses participation to individuals on any terms. Its blog is free and open to the public. There we learn that:

ARTstor recently announced a collaboration with Art Resource and Scala Archives (Florence, Italy). Through this collaboration, ARTstor will ultimately make available approximately 12,000 high quality images of European art and architecture, with a special focus on the archaeology, art and architecture of Italy and on the collections of the major museums in Italy and other European countries.

We are pleased to announce that we have released additional images of major Italian and other European work from Scala Archives, bringing the total number of Scala images now available to ARTstor users to approximately 7,800.

"Available," "have released," -- code reminiscent of the language of country clubs, whose amenities are "free" to every single child of the earth whose membership obligations are current and paid in full.

In the course of their education, some children will see these images and read this scholarship, and some will not.

AMICA mia, amigo mio, mon amis, ARTstor my hypocrite, mon frere, what will you sell us next? MUZAKstor, LIFEstor, DNAstor, AIRstor, VISIONstor, H2Ostor, JOCKITCHstor, BOOGERstor -- the possibilities stagger.

Destination blogs vs. en route twits

I'm not making much headway with the thought about the web and temporality. This might be relevant, or emulate bupkis:

Blogs will become something else. People are putting down roots that will require further software extravaganzas. One day you'll come to a blog and it will be like Second Life, except that blogger's life. The blog will be their home. You, avatar-neighbor, will go and visit Frank Paynter, or Brian Moffatt, and certain rooms will be open -- the library, the kitchen, in Frank's case perhaps a tractor ride -- avatar citizens will expatiate in the agora, and this will be very Web Arabicnumber.0.

It will be even more emphatically spatial than what we have now.

For the temporal (an aspect of it, anyway), for now it's Twitter that suffers the pressure of the moving arrow of time. The form -- 140 keystrokes that allow for verbal blats longer than mere acronymic ejaculation but too brief for anything like a discursive paragraph -- seems at first to deny all expectation of sense, certainly to deny anything like conversation. Until one realizes that it's not much interested in conversation. Other media are for that; Twitter is for non-sequiturial pinging, phaticking, sidewalk saluting, rendezvousing, emo-ing, screamo-ing, some nano-slice of your moment, then moving on, as your 140-character noodle dwindles down the timestream, getting lost amid the thicket of updates from others that continuously crowd in.

A blog might offer a flaneur's attending stroll through a land-, citi-, or idea-scape; twitter, more temporal, emits the dopplered odd yawp from a passing bus or subway.

JSTORiana

The Technology Editor, ZDNet UK, finds something lacking in JSTOR's closed world formula:

ask any independent researcher. There are a lot of them out there, writing books, building businesses, experimenting with ideas, inventing the future, educating themselves, trying hard to participate in the great human endeavour of standing on the shoulders of giants. They will all have had the experience of finding exactly what they want, only to be told "NO".

It is extraordinarily frustrating, and the exact opposite of JSTOR's laudable aims. Furthermore, it is unthinkable that the situation will continue like this indefinitely. I cannot envision a future where this huge library of public knowledge is forever denied to those who need it. Every sign, every pointer, every tiny eddy in the tide, says otherwise.

The wall is pernicious. Break it down.

That guy up there is not the Technology editor, ZDNet, UK. He's Surinder Kumar Mandal of Bihar, India, featured in Jan Banning's extraordinary series of photos of Bureaucrats of the World. I have had that page of images open ever since finding it (I wish I could remember how) more than a week ago.

Why build a digitized scholarly archive, searchable via the public internet, if access to it is controlled like some kind of top-secret database?

That's Christopher Barden, a longtime reader of The Stingy Scholar, which seems to be some sort of educator's blog with, disturbingly, a very large standing image of Michelle Malkin in the right hand column, where indeed she belongs - not that she's standing, actually, one can't be sure, we only see a blow-up of the front of her head, i.e., her face, but the image is standing, sort of like a foetid pool of cess, right there on the right every time you flick or click to a story.

No, no, that's not Christopher Barden, up there behind the desk. That's Sergey Mikhailovich Osipchuk, policeman of Oktjabrskij, Tomsk province, Siberia. I wouldn't want anyone to confuse scholar/editor critics of JSTOR with deskwarming bureaucrats who seem to man their posts with a certain gatekeeperly determination.

There must be some connection with the whole JSTOR thing, I just can't put my finger on it. . .



P.S.: "Chris," a commenter at The Stingy Scholar, asks who to sue at JSTOR and PROJECTilevomit MUSE, calling them jointly "the great firewall of America."

Fragment from the dark wood

A small fragment of what Christopher Locke pinpoints as the precise source of what he calls his madness:

miscellaneous thought

Something to remember to think about:

What David Weinberger calls "miscellaneous" -- which is conceived with an emphasis on spatiality, upon tag-able features of items, things, thingliness, contains something else that the web is unconcealing: temporality - which is never more completely hidden than in broadcast stagings of "history."

Correction

WSJ interview with GWB:

We have lost sight of what it means to be a nation willing to be aggressive in the world and spread freedom or deal with disease.

Given the Presidential penchant for malapropism, we helpfully unscramble:

We have lost sight of how to be a mean nation willing to be aggressive in the world and spread disease or deal with freedom.

J-Store too rich for some learning environments

The Daily Texan:

"Unfortunately we do not subscribe to JSTOR because we cannot afford to get it online," [reference librarian at Concordia University Adrian] Erb said. "Library budgets tend to stay stagnate, and because of that we are kind of stuck."

Erb said that the prices are what stopped Concordia from subscribing to JSTOR because of the $10,000 down payment and the annual $2,000 fee to keep the database.

Playhouses

LOC

JSTOR Watch

The longer I homeschool and the more I interact with online technology, the more firm my conviction grows that formal teaching is part of the problem, not part of the answer. AKMA

For years, we've watched academia acclimate to the Internet, version 1.0, with JStor articles, podcasts and course Web sites. Mostly, these are conveniences that improve education for those already inside the academic cloister. But Web 2.0 is all about universality, about content that reaches groups well beyond its intended audience, about the unpredictable ways that items online link people together. Maha Atal 08

Barnacle of Higher Education

Librarians Protest Science's Departure From JSTOR, Fearing a Trend

By PETER MONAGHAN

When the American Association for the Advancement of Science announced in late July that it would pull its flagship journal, Science, from JSTOR, the popular, nonprofit digital archive of scholarly publications, the association cast its decision as a natural evolution.

According to the announcement, the AAAS, as the association is known, was merely joining "an increasing number" of large scientific-society journals that were "digitizing and controlling their own content."

Why, then, are so many librarians kicking up a ruckus about it?

Why infuckingdeed.com:

To continue reading this premium article, you must have a Chronicle account AND a subscription or an online pass.

Subscriptions start at $40; Web passes for under $10.

WHEN WE CONSIDER the responsibility of intellectuals, our basic concern must be their role in the creation and analysis of ideology. Chomsky via Golby.

flitting

Barbellion: one of the best bloggers ever:

Death

What a delightful thing the state of Death would be if the dead passed their time haunting the places they loved in life and living over again the dear delightful past — if death were one long indulgence in the pleasures of memory! if the disembodied spirit forgot all the pains of its previous existence and remembered only the happiness! Think of me flitting about the orchards and farmyards in —— birdsnesting, walking along the coast among the seabirds, climbing Exmoor, bathing in streams and in the sea, haunting all my old loves and passions, cutting open with devouring curiosity Rabbits, Pigeons, Frogs, Dogfish, Amphioxus; think of me, too, at length unwillingly deflected from these cherished pursuits in the raptures of first love, cutting her initials on trees and fences instead of watching birds, day-dreaming over Parker and Haswell and then bitterly reproaching myself later for much loss of precious time. How happy I shall be if Death is like this: to be living over again and again all my ecstasies, over first times — the first time I found a Bottle Tit’s nest, the first time I succeeded in penetrating into the fastnesses of my El Dorado — Exmoor, the first time I gazed upon the internal anatomy of a Snail, the first time I read Berkeley’s Principles of Human Understanding (what a soul-shaking epoch that was!), and the first time I kissed her! My hope is that I may haunt these times again, that I may haunt the places, the books, the bathes, the walks, the desires, the hopes, the first (and last) loves of my life all transfigured and beatified by sovereign Memory.

In writing this, he seems already half on his way.

Not from Barbellion:

wood

s lot understatedly turns 7.

High time

Alexandre Linhares, A modest (billion-dollar) proposal:

The other day I tried to download my own paper published in the journal "Artificial Intelligence", and I was asked to pay USD30.00 for it. That´s the price of a book, and I was the author of the thing in the first place!

Now, if you ask me, technology has forever changed the economics of the scientific publishing business, and it´s high time for someone like Jobs to step forward. via Open Access News

Talk too clear for Media to hear

I wouldn't spend one ounce of American blood for any amount of oil coming out of Iraq. We're using our treasure to get control of the Titanic. We should be getting off of oil. link via

Altruism will be televised in Black and White

In total, the aim of this investigation was to assess altruistic actions on American television from a social cognitive perspective. Although the findings for rate per hour are encouraging, the context surrounding character portrayals is lacking. Most of the altruistic actions on television are still initiated and received by White men. Altruism on American Television

In fact, on Broadcast networks, 85.2% of the altruistic behaviors were initiated by Whites, and only 10.2% by Blacks. Cable was nearly identical. Public broadcast had 67.4% Whites, 9.2% Blacks. Must be going after some demographic this study didn't see fit to include.

A pragmatic suggestion for the Philanthropically inclined

Phil Cubeta at Gifthub offers many in the philanthropic community the opportunity to encounter -- in the marketplace of ideas, if not in an actual agora -- a wide spectrum of viewpoints, analyses, beggaring tutors, situationists, scabrous satirists, righteous indignationists, dedicated world-changers, jesters, philosophes, mastiffs of spite, poodles of privilege, noble gooddooers, motley lost-in-the-blogsphere waifs, carnivalesque bacchantes, bollocks detection agents, opinionasters, lecturers, pansophists, barrel-inhabiting flea gatherers, tick collectors and other pungent calibrators of the Zeitcloud.

I was checking on a charity that happened to send a solicitation, and found this site, which seems rich in the sort of info one is looking for when evaluating any particular philanthropic endeavor. It seems a useful tool. I then noted that its president, Trent Stamp, has a blog, which indeed is linked at Gifthub.

I do have a suggestion. I don't know how most online banking sites operate, but for online checking, the bank I use (it's a very big one) has a finite list of payees that one can pull up to save time when adding a payee. If you find the payee on the list, you simply click and the address or routing info is entered automatically. Very useful. Only, the payees are almost all the usual corporate shite: you can find the Ohio Gas Company, but not Oxfam; Dominion Virginia Power, but not Doctors Without Borders; Apria Healthcare Inc. but not CARE.

Whatever one might infer about what this says about how banks -- no, corporate entities in general (some owned by USia's wealthiest philanthopists) -- prioritize the world, this seems like a worthy project for someone -- perhaps some of the denizens of Gifthub or in Wealth Bondage -- to undertake. Just round up all the contact info for the philanthropic organizations that can and wish to be vetted and included and make that info available to every online banking entity, thereby easing the process of giving, saving the cost of a stamp and dalliance with procrastination.

If some of Phil's scabrous dumpster-dwellers were to earn a few sheckels, or find a few less lice around their neighborhood, would that be a bad thing?

Representational mode trumps knowledge

http://flickrvision.com/

or

http://flickrvision.com/maps/show_3d

For some reason, I prefer the "classic view" - the earth is flat, like it's supposed to be. And one has a horizontal, rather than top-down, relation to the events/photos leaping up. And the photos can be made bigger. And one is not in some god-like/forsaken space above, all alone, in the dark.

Because it matters, even though this is strictly a contrivance of representation, to think these representations are gregariously in your company, rather than little blips being emitted by a planet far below.

Crimson opts to Obviate Anachronism

All for Open Access
Let’s welcome the end of for-profit academic publishing
Published On Tuesday, October 02, 2007 12:22 AM
By THE CRIMSON STAFF


It seems that the for-profit academic publishing industry’s days are numbered...

more at JOHO.

Google is not Google if it blocks Open Access

I'm also irked by all those libraries jumping into bed with Google to digitize their books without imposing hard rules about public access to this material. The Open Content Alliance offers a sensible alternative. Why would you undo in less than a decade what it took a century or more for your library to build--a great collection accessible to the world? (The tax-paying world that actually owns your collection.) Karen G. Schneider, formerly of the ALA TechSource blog, via Joho.



The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny are] to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large. . . T. Jefferson via A Tiny Revolution

Closing the sale

This is just a new plan that has one great advantage: it’s something that could be sold. . . Sy Hersh on DN. New Yorker article.