Airborne elephant watch

Google fetched this from someplace unsafe-looking called wn.com. Apologies for not crediting anybody. Forellenhof is the name of any number of hotels where Deutsch wird gesprochen and I suppose you can order trout—Forelle—from the Gasthof menu.

Yes, it's time to think once again about one of those news stories Thomas Friedman would not be able to imagine even in his most fevered vegetably-induced trance state: another prankish pachyderm sighted among the clouds, this time back in Tunisia, where they say elephant-gliding first got its start.

You can ignore the Times's Friedmanesque headline—"Tunisia Faces a Balancing Act of Democracy and Religion", like Religion, weighing in at 500 pounds, in this corner, and in the other, fresh from a championship bout in little Myanmar, you get the picture—and go straight to the story.

It turns out that the democracy and the religion are mostly struggling "ach! in einer Brust", in the same breast, and not really struggling, either, because they're actually fairly comfortable with it, that is a majority of Tunisians so far think of themselves as both little-d democrats and big-M Muslims at the same time and fail (of course they're not smoking whatever Tom is) to see any contradiction. Almost like Baptists, or somebody.

Not that everybody is entirely on board. There are your liberals, as usual, the ones who won the revolution but lost the election; and there are your Salafis, the ones who think that elections are not from God; and they tease each other a lot. The liberals are not listening to me, which is not that much of a surprise, and they're more worried about movie censorship than about breakfast for people who don't know where they're finding lunch, and if they want to start winning elections, they need to think about those priorities; and the Salafis are in my humble etc. kind of creepy. And somebody is really going to get hurt, I'm afraid. But most people won't, and things in general are going to keep chugging along. Try to enjoy it!

 

Abusive language

Wouldn't want these young Memphisites to get the wrong idea about George Washington, would you? From the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

 1. Tennessee Tea Partiers are concerned about the way slavery is presented in local history textbooks:

what's in your kid's textbook may be giving them [sic] a negative opinion about our nation's founding history....  "My biggest concern is that important information is being omitted, which creates a negative light on our Founding Fathers," said Tea Party activist Brian Rieck. (WYCB Television, Bristol, VA; h/t Great Lakes Liberal at Kos)

So they'd like the state legislature to do some editorial work on the texts, just [jump]

Ikhwan to be loved by you...

Ishak Md Nor, 40, (2nd L) and his two wives, Aishah Abdul Ghafar, 40, (C) and Afiratul Abidah Mohd Hanan 25 -- both members of the Obedient Wifes Club -- laugh with their children after the club's launch in Kuala Lumpur June 4, 2011/Photo by Samsul Said (Reuters) from Faith World. No, you will not see any titillating photos in this post. Any you see elsewhere are not authentic.

Morning Edition had a story this morning about an organization founded in Kuala Lumpur last year under the name of the Obedient Wives' Club, now claiming 800 members in Malaysia as well as branches in Singapore, Indonesia, and Jordan, promulgating what they claim to be the Qu'ranic way of relating to a husband. I have to tell you, they didn't report the half of it, much of which is accessible through a Wikipedia article, including the fact that the sex manual they published in October was entitled Islamic Sex: Fighting Against Jews To Return Islamic Sex To The World. However it is not the case, according to the members, that it recommended a man's having group sex with all of his wives; rather, it merely mentioned that "a man who has reached the highest spiritual capability can have sex with all his wives simultaneously, spiritually."

Mohammad Inaamulillah Bin Ashaari, son of the founder Mr Ashaari, with his four wives, Rohaiza Esa, Ummu Habibah Raihaw , Nurul Azwa Mohd Ani,and Ummu Ammarah Asmis at the “Ikhwan Polygamy Club Family Day” in Rawang, north of Kuala Lumpur. From Biyokulule Online, Somalia.

The book itself was banned in November, and the Malaysian government is keeping a close eye on the ladies, who were workers at the Ikhwan Coffee House in Bukit Bintang (Fine Dining, Spiritual Harmony), which is a property of the Global Ikhwan Group ("a company whose businesses include bread and noodle factories, a chicken-processing plant, pharmacies, cafes and supermarkets"), which was a property of the late Mr. Ashaari Mohamad (died May 2010), founder of the heterodox Al-Arqam sect, which is also banned. Also, I think they are probably suspected, with some justice, of being the same ladies who founded the Ikhwan Polygamy Club in 2009, a club which has apparently not been banned, but is less active than its sexier younger sister.

What they are being investigated for is revealed in today's Telegraph: they are suspected of having

violated [Malaysian] religious laws with a morality campaign that describes the Prophet Mohammed as a role model for "sacred sex".

 Move over, Salman Rushdie, you innocent! I hope this gives you all some idea of the stresses a "moderately Islamist" government can come under, and for once I don't even mean to be sarcastic. The idea that is necessary to "fight against Jews" to "return Islamic sex to the world" is not very comfortable, even though the Malay polygamists here do not look threatening and clearly have all the Islamic sex they need in any case.

Anyway, all I really wanted to say about the story, before I acquired all this excess information, was that when I was listening to the NPR version—not fully awake, to tell the truth—I heard two things that are not in their published transcript: one, which I fear was real, was a parental warning that the subject of the story might not be suitable for younger readers; the other, which I am pretty sure I must have dreamed, was that the membership of the club was suspected of having a satirical intention.

That's the second time this week I am imagining some kind of conservative gesture to be satire (the first was with the 10,000 leftists threatening to join the Likud party), and I woke up with an idea for a post suggesting that there was a general international phenomenon of living satire, growing out of Billionaires for Bush and Stephen Colbert, but I'm pretty sure now, awake, that this is not the case.

1929 recording of "Kashmiri Song" (Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar...)

Immaculate contraception (addendum)

Just in case it wasn't clear:

If anyone's religious freedom is affected by the rule requiring employers—except for a very narrowly defined class of religious organizations—to include coverage for family planning in their employees' health insurance, it is not America's Catholics, but a much smaller class of people, the CEOs of Catholic hospitals, colleges, and charitable foundations.

I think of them, rightly or wrongly, as America's Catholic bishops; that is, as a relatively small number of elderly and largely virginal men who have never had and will never have a reason to ask their doctors for birth control pills themselves and have extremely little experience of those who have (let alone of a girlfriend missing a period). It is their tender consciences that revolt at the thought of paying for insurance that pays for family planning for others, including Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, and nonbelieving employees, not to mention those Catholic employees who defy the papal edict, which is virtually all of those who are or ever have been sexually active women (yesterday I said 99%; today's Times says 98%).

A pompier Temptation of Saint Hilarion, by Dominique Louis Fléréol Papety (1815-1849) from Ze Last Chance Garage du 78.

In New York State since the effective date of the Women's Health and Wellness Act in 2003, every health care plan that covers any prescription drugs must also cover family planning, by law. Catholic Charities sued against the provision and lost every round of appeals, up to the US Supreme Court, which declined to hear it. Thus it is settled law that such provisions do not offend religious freedom.

Worrying about those tender consciences is 1% thinking; these people are not exactly martyring themselves for a cause. They haven't shut down Catholic Charities yet, or Fordham University, on account of the New York State Women's Health and Wellness Act. Do you know why? Because they don't really care that much. So forget about it.

Immaculate contraception

Speaking of Times columnists, the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, the Right Rev. Ross Douthat, is having a terrible time dealing with the horrors dealt out by the Obama administration; this time, the awful prospect of the rules announced last week by HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius for the Affordable Care Act, requiring employers to provide health insurance covering family planning services with no co-pays, including the dreaded "morning-after pill", which some of those Jesuits regard as an extra-sneaky way of getting an abortion. There's an exemption, but oh, my, [jump]

Really, Tom Friedman...

...whose blog, as you know, presents the Times columnist's electrifying insights in all their unspeakably raw grandeur, as they arrive to him before the Times copy editors bleach them out and turn them into something they are intellectually and emotionally equipped to deal with, is celebrating at the Davos conference and one of the aspects of his celebration is a brand new Twitter feed.

Also, don't miss his insider take on Davos, taken while he was "a guest of King Bhumibol’s at the week-long Davos para-party which one gets to by transporter beams."

I'm a non-Tweeter myself (he tweets not, neither does he spin; and yet Solomon in his glory...), and his website is distinctly unfriendly to comments (a clear sign, if you're a doubter, that this is the authentic Tom), so I have been unable to make any contact with him and engage in some of that feisty ferment of idea exchange on subjects such as the flatness vs. fatness of the world, the Airborne Elephant Watch, and so on. And I'm probably his biggest public fan—possibly the only one. And yet he still hasn't blogrolled me! Any of you Twitterholics care to take a stab at finding out why?

Mustache ring. From Paper Airplane Design.

Just a shande

Updated 7/13/2014

So they say whenever Netanyahu gets a divorce, he gets together with the wife and the lawyers and says, "Listen, let's talk without preconditions; I'm the most ethical man in Israel, I'm prepared to make incredible concessions if you negotiate in good faith."

"Okay," says the wife, "no preconditions. So what's your position?"

"Well, I get to keep all the money, and all the houses, and all the stuff."

"What? are you crazy?"

"In the first place, it's my money; and then I have to have all the houses, so I have somewhere to keep the stuff."

"And how come you have to have the stuff?"

"It's a principle of mine."

"And that's not a precondition?"

"Of course not, it's not the same thing at all. You know me, I'm a man of principle and I would never impose preconditions."

"But seriously, if you get everything, what are these incredible concessions you're prepared to make?"

"Are you kidding? We get a divorce, I was going to let you move out and fuck other men!"

I really meant to try to drop the thugs of Likud as a subject for a while, but then I caught this from yesterday's Times: [jump]

It's the principal of the thing

The New York education world is buzzing with the news of a study ostensibly showing that small high schools are better than big ones, carried out by Gordon Berlin and Howard Bloom of a nonprofit firm called MDRC, funded by the Gates Foundation, and "proving" the correctness of the path followed by the Bloomberg administration over the past ten years, of shutting down those awful old failure mills and then filling the buildings with these little boutique schools, the School of Armenian Studies, the Renaissance School for Future Hipsters, the Cupcake Academy, where all the math and science classes are keyed to understanding the life cycle of the cupcake,  and so on.

And does it, actually? There's no telling in any proper sense, [jump]

A shande far de goyim (continued)

I ran across something kind of beautiful that gave me an idea how to conclude this post on my Likud Derangement Syndrome and the general Israel dilemma of the leftish JOJIA (Jew Or Jewish-Identified American). It's from a commentary on Exodus 21:1 to 24:14 as a weekly Torah portion by David Marcus of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and it goes like this: [jump]

Holy heretics

How many Americans...? (addendum)

I didn't really finish the previous, because of the risk of belaboring the obvious, but then the belaborer is worthy of his hire, so:

Q: Why did TransCanada and the US Chamber of Congress and so forth lie to the US Congress, and the American people, and their shareholders about how many jobs the Keystone XL pipeline project would create?

A: Because the project is a stinker which actually advantages no one except those who can extract some profit out of it; but if it created jobs, then it would have created jobs, and practically everybody likes that.

Q: So how come they told the truth to the Canadians?

A: Because Canada is ruled by Tories, also known as Conservatives, the only exception to the "everybody likes jobs" rule. They do not give a frack, as we say, about jobs. Give them a chance to extract profits and they're fine--and the opportunity to destroy Alberta is just icing on the cake.

Beach wedding sand cake; stolen from Flickr.

How many Americans does it take to lay some pipeline?

From a patent application by Ezra Cornell, 1844, for a machine to cut trenches and lay pipes for telegraph cables. Cornell University's Chronicle Online.

It seems the proportion is about 67 US citizens to one Canadian. That's at any rate, according to a Greenpeace Report (via ThinkProgress), what the TransCanada company (aka TRP) told its investors when it was selling that Keystone XL pipeline from the Alberta tar sands out through the Ogallala Aquifer to Texas; that is, the figures they gave the Canadian National Energy Board suggested the total amount of employment they were going to create with the Canadian part of the project would be about 442 person-years, while for the US portion, four times as long, the US Congress was given a number amounting to 118,000.

Of course when people asked Dr. Johnson how he expected to finish his Dictionary in three years when it had taken 40 years for the 40 Immortals of the Académie Française to complete theirs, he replied,

This is the proportion. Let me see: forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.

I guess those Canadians must be really patriotic.  Or maybe they're just making the numbers up because they know what the Congresspersons like to hear. How did they come up with the 20,000 construction jobs that will build the pipeline to start with? On the basis of a $7-billion budget; but

Simple arithmetic shows that this figure is grossly overstated, possibly by more than 350 percent, because Perryman included three major budget items that have little or nothing to do with investment or job creation in the U.S.:

• The $1.6 billion Canadian portion of KXL;   

• The $683 million section of Keystone Phase II in Kansas that is already built; and

• The $3.1 billion already spent or committed, most of it on pipes and pumping component from companies outside the U.S.

  This means the total spending in the U.S. may be $2 billion or even lower. That translates into significantly fewer jobs simply because the true budget for KXL in the U.S. is less than a third of Perryman’s budget. Dividing TRP’s claim of 20,000 jobs by three equals 6,667 – a number that may still be overstated but is much closer to reality for a project such as KXL.

According to the US Chamber of Commerce,

We can put 20,000 Americans to work right away and up to 250,000 over the life of the project

and the American Petroleum Institute's Keystone XL Pipeline website still says

Projects like this, along with additional investment in oil sands development in Canada and expansion of pipelines and refineries in the U.S., make it possible to realize an additional 500,000 U.S. jobs in 2035.

So who knows? Maybe the Keystone XL Pipeline will end up employing everybody in the world. Or maybe (since they not only lied to the US Congress, but far worse, to their shareholders, just maybe, something bad will happen to them for once. I mean, no doubt jail is too much to hope for, but if we could hurt their feelings a little bit?

I fear if you are at all hip this may not be funny—it's four years old, for one thing—but I think it's a gas, as it were.

Another first: Flamed!

Government boobs? Yay! From Europe: An interdisciplinary approach, an educational website created by students at the Universiteit Utrecht

In a giant step forward for the Rectification of Names, I have just received my first angry wingnut comment, from someone offended by my rudeness back in December on the subject of Dr. Ron Paul:

A, rather, mediocre smear attempt at honorable Dr.Paul. I guess, you would prefer to live in a police state, as long as you can suck on a big government tit.

As you can see by that flurry of commas, like a sudden flight of grouse (he also signs himself "Daniel.", with a period), [jump]

Other people's money

I hate to spoil a good punch line by tacking on a commentary, but there was something I wanted say in the discussion of Rick Santorum (the magic link is back up to number 2!) and his views on the special needs of risk takers that the punch line didn't quite convey.

It's that Santorum wasn't just misspeaking in an amusing way, [jump]

Who says money doesn't equal speech?

Just when I became convinced that Willard Mitt Romney doesn't really believe that corporations are people, it turns out that he really does:

"Well, the banks aren't bad people. They're just overwhelmed right now.... scared to death, of course," he said. "They're feeling the same thing that you're feeling. And so they just want to pretend that all this is just going to get paid some day."

(from AP; h/t to Jed Lewison at Daily Kos)

You want to know how he got so in touch with the feelings of banks? Well, it probably has something to do with this:

Employees at the five largest U.S. banks by assets, including Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co., had given Romney about $600,000 through the first three quarters of 2011, according to the most recent filings available from the Federal Election Commission.

The second-largest recipient of bank employee contributions, President Barack Obama, had far less, about $200,000, the analysis showed....

Romney received more from employees of those top five banks than all the other candidates combined.

(from McClatchy; h/t to Pat Garofalo at ThinkProgress)

Looks like money really is speech, eh? Those banks have been whispering sweet nothings in Willard's ears all year!

Cross-posted at Daily Kos.

Kristol Ball

Hahaha.
William Kristol, the comic you loved so much in When Harry met Sally, no, of course not, I mean the man who discovered Sarah Palin on his cruise to the Bridge to Nowhere, has come up with yet another savior for the party, union-busting Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. The selling point is, he rides a motorcycle. Can your president do that?

Photo Credit: Ap. From Billy's blog.

There is an online petition drive to recruit him. Gosh, using the Internets!

Risky business

This quotation from Rick Santorum, pulled out from a Kos diary by Joe Ascanio with his highlighting, really made me think about something:

“The reason you see some sympathy among the American public for them is the grave concern,” he said, according to the Des Moines Register, “and it’s a legitimate one.” 

“They talk about income inequality. I’m for income inequality. I think some people should make more than other people, because some people work harder and have better ideas and take more risk, and they should be rewarded for it. I have no problem with income inequality.”

Wait a minute! Rewarding people for hard work? Sure. Rewarding people for better ideas? Why not? But rewarding people for taking risks? I beg your pardon? You get the reward if the risk pans out, you lose if it doesn't. That's what risk means! If you're not running an actual risk, then you're just playing Risk down in your well-renovated rumpus room, Mr. Master of the Universe.

Mossad uncovers a secret

Updated 1/24

This is in the why isn't it breaking category: a story published by Haaretz on January 18 and picked up by Juan Cole a day or two later: it seems that Israeli intelligence services have come up with an estimate, to be published some time this week, that Iran has not yet decided whether to build a nuclear weapon.

That is, it's not news to everybody that Iran has not—so far—decided to build a nuclear weapon. National Intelligence Estimates [jump]

恭喜发财！ Happy New Year!

Spring Festival for concert band, 2002, by Chen Yi

A singularity of purpose

Thigh, by Francis Picabia. From Disasturbation

I'm haunted by that vision of the corporation as superorganic Creature, slouching towards—whatever goal you might imagine them to have, feeding and reproducing, I guess, like everything else. I think I know how it could really happen, too (at least in a science fiction sense), as a kind of socioeconomic Singularity, analogous to the technological Singularity when all the artificial intelligence devices are supposed to achieve their own independent intelligence and declare independence from their human masters...

Think of all those folks in their cubicles [jump]

What John Cole said.

This is important, folks.

Romney meets his Waterzooi?

In a glorious day for irredentist Belgian imperialism, holy terror Dr. Newt Gingrich was acclaimed victor in the South Carolina Republican primary at about 7:01 this evening, with zero percent of the vote counted. According to the Times exit poll, voters felt the Newtster was the most conservative, had the most relevant experience, and had the best chance of beating Obama. I guess those Nullificationists* must have seen him in the debates wiping up the floor with—umm—it wasn't one of the candidates—remember that nice black guy with the mustache that used to do horse race color commentary on NPR? I mean, it wasn't the mustache that did the commentary, that's Friedman, but the guy—Juan Williams, that's it. The one to whom "work is a very strange concept", according to a later Newt comment. "Many pundits," according to ThinkProgress,

have seen racial undertones in Gingrich’s belittling of Williams during the debate. “That’s the way I like to spend my Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: watching Newt Gingrich sneer at Juan Williams, a black man, for having the temerity to ask him” a tough question, New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote.

But those South Carolina Republicans were just salivating at the thought of the president (who is also black, though he does not wear a mustache) getting pummeled in the same way by that savage Newt oratory.

Me too, in a way. On to Florida!

*South Carolinians used to be concerned with the Tariff of Abominations; now they worry more about the Abominations of Leviticus. Hope they don't find out too soon about their man's predilection for what the Village Voice once referred to as "lip service" and was long regarded in many states as felonious sodomy, even though Leviticus itself seems to be "down" with it, so to speak.

Airborne elephant watch

Alas, the Times and the BBC both headline their Egypt election stories with the announcement that "Islamists" have won.  Once again, that's just not exactly what happened, which is what you read in Al Jazeera or Voice of America: The Muslim Brotherhood–linked Freedom and Justice Party is the winner, with 47% of the seats in the People's Assembly, a "sweeping victory" but not a majority; their Islamist rivals Al-Nur finished second, with 29% of the seats, and the liberal Al-Wafd third, with about 7%—enough to enable them to form a majority coalition with the MB, if that's how things work out, which is no less likely than some kind of "Islamic front".

Reconstruction from the late 16th century of an automaton by Heron of Alexandria (10-70 C.E.), a mathematician of uncertain ethnicity who invented the steam engine. From here. When Hercules whacks the dragon on the head, the dragon shoots water in the hero's face.

Primates!

Photo: AP

 

The Telegraph reports that Miller's grizzled langur, a species of northeastern Borneo/Kalimantan so extinct that there were not even any extant photographs of it, only museum sketches, turns out to exist in a small population. Details at the link. Via Kos.

Citizens far from United

I've been absorbed in a discussion chez Kos to a diary by Adam B to a remark made (somewhere else) by Eugene Volokh, in reference to the infamous Citizens United decision, and asking what if Congress were to ban corporate speech (i.e., money) on issues of legislation instead of elections—so that Google, say, would not have been able to mount its protest this week against the loathsome SOPA bill. How would we feel about corporate speech then? It was one of those Talmudic questions to which "Not going to happen" is not an acceptable answer—meant to elicit the underlying principles on which that discorporate entity "the Left" bases its objections.

So the conversation turned quickly to the question of whether corporations are persons [jump]

Where is abortion worst? Where it's illegal

and in more ways than one, according to a new report from the Guttmacher Institute (via ThinkProgress):

• Highly restrictive abortion laws are not associated with lower abortion rates. For example, the abortion rate is high, at 29 and 32 abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age in Africa and Latin America, respectively—regions where abortion is illegal under most circumstances in the majority of countries. In Western Europe, where abortion is generally permitted on broad grounds, the abortion rate is 12 per 1,000.
• Where abortion is legal on broad grounds, it is generally safe, and where it is illegal in most circumstances, it is generally unsafe. For example, in the United States, where abortion is legal on broad grounds, induced abortion results in 0.6 deaths per 100,000 procedures. In Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, abortion results in 30 and 460 deaths per 100,000 procedures, respectively.

Prohibitions on abortion mean more abortions, not fewer. File it under facts for your brother-in-law.

Big government is for little people

I'm sure if Dickens were composing us he'd love to come up with the idea of a Senator Grassley from the Land of Pork (a gross and greasy grass-fed grouch), but it's hard to imagine him going all the way to imagine a Senator Grassley like ours, who blames child labor laws for childhood obesity. (Little nippers don't sweat the way we did in my day back in the 1880s.)

And then there is well-known Belgian imperialist terror candidate Dr. Newt Gingrich, who only wants them doing "light janitorial work" and even then only if their parents qualify for food stamps, or did I get that wrong?

Hell, I say put 'em in the army. Don't we need drummer boys?

The unconscious of a conservative (addendum)

Central Plains prairie. From ecolandscaping.org

That inability of conservatives to imagine themselves in the other guy's position may help explain the habit they have of regarding everything as a game, but not "only" a game.

Republican reaction to the president's cancellation of the Keystone pipeline project made me think about this--like Rep. Lee Terry of Nebraska, quoted on NPR this morning as saying,

I'm deeply, deeply disappointed that our president decided to put his politics above the nation.... To me it's pretty obvious, it's all about election-year politics.

The party line is that Obama has [jump]

That's why they call it capitalism

I'm really kind of shocked to hear how shocked-shocked the world has been by the news that Willard Mitt Romney pays an effective tax rate of 15% on his vast income. What on earth did they expect? It's been taken as a fundamental and unarguable principle for decades now that investment income--essentially, rent--is in some way better than working income; that rent money creates jobs, while all we ever do with our working money is to throw it away maintaining our pathetic little worker lives--it really eats jobs. So rent is taxed at a lower rate than work. And as far as I know a Warren Buffet rule is not going to change this; it will just demand that executives admit that they are sort of workers too, and take more of their compensation in the working money form.

That's why they call it Capitalism, sunshine--it's a religion. Pay no attention to all that talk about Jesus and the Ten Commandments and the Sacredness of Life. The real conservative religion is the worship of capital, as the burnt-offering smoke that feeds the Invisible Hand, and I don't know what we're going to do about it, but we should start by getting over the surprise.

Cross-posted at Daily Kos.

...and his bysshopryk another take!

(with update 1/20/12)

Duccio di Buoninsegna on an unidentified subject, early 14th century, at the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena

The thing about Psalm 109 came up again the other day: where you see a bumper sticker or a T-shirt that says "Pray for Obama. Psalm 109:8" and you go home and look it up and the text reads, "May his days be few; and may another take his office." Republicans of a certain cast of mind found this very funny for a while around the time of the 2009 inauguration; hahaha, it says it in the Bible.

So Speaker Mike O'Neal of the Kansas House of Representatives, evidently dimmer than most—[jump]

Airborne elephant watch

Among those unpanicked by the Friedman Fear of Egypt's being overrun by Islamic fanatics, count the Google person turned revolutionary Wael Ghonim, currently on a well-deserved book tour; asked by NPR's Steve Inskeep if it didn't upset him that the Muslim Brotherhood had won the elections by working door to door while he and his fellow liberals were online, he replied something like, "Yes, perfect--we should learn from them."

Holy Alliances, Batman!

I love the developing story of the conservative Christians having a summit at a ranch outside Houston to agree on a Republican candidate as their Anointed One, getting snookered by the Catholic contingent, by a little sharp electoral practice, into naming Rick Santorum (don't forget to click, it's still down in fourth place).

The Sufi saint Ibrahim ibn Adham (c. 718–c. 789) in an 18th-century Indian miniature. This version found here. He is the subect, under a garbled name, of Leigh Hunt's poem "Abu ben Adhem".

It seems that after two indecisive ballots a number of the delegates had to leave to catch planes, so a rump cast a third ballot without them, or with (possibly kind of forged) proxies, and [jump]

Random notes

I was just a little curious about that Ayn Rand–Rachmaninov connection. Did she think the piano solo in the second concerto sounded sublimely selfish? Did it make her feel a little Galty? (Wouldn't "Gal't" be "halt" in Russian, by the way? Гальт! Гальт!*) Anyway I rand across (typo, but I'm leaving it) something incredibly precious, a website devoted to "music with an Ayn Rand connection".  You can just imagine the faithful zoning out to "a type of turn of the century popular music that she called 'Tiddlywink Music.'" Or learn that

Rand's love of Rachmaninoff's music is well known. Rachmaninoff was also a talented pianist and his solo recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company sold well.

Not only did Rand love his music, but he also managed to make some money. Undoubtedly because of the very entrepreneurialism that attracted her to him in the first place. What a lot of blessings!


Anyway, something that is not at all tiddlywink...
 
 *No, it is not. Гальт is apparently Ukrainian for Galt, or Halt if it's somebody's name, or with a stretch the sound Germans make when they are telling somebody to stop, but in Russian it's just Галт. I have learned, though, about the Scottish novelist John Galt (1779-1839), in whose Ayrshire Chronicles the word "utilitarian" appeared for the first time, a casual acquaintance of Byron's during their European travels. I'm pretty sure Ayn Rand had no knowledge of this person when she named her reclusive hero.

The unconscious of a conservative

The 1967 Poor People's Campaign, from Ecumenical Women at the United Nations

I've already amused myself more than could be considered strictly necessary, or even entirely sane, with Arizona's attorney general, Tom Horne, who believes that the Tucson high schools' Mexican-American Studies Program was teaching students that they were "oppressed by white people" and therefore "just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it." But I'm not really over it. Anyway, it's Dr. King's birthday...

So what I want to know is: What exactly is it about rightishness [jump]

Young Horne with the Man

Horne warming up for the Rachmaninov second piano concerto, from America's Own Espresso Pundit, who notes that "Rach II was Ayn Rand's favorite piece.  So it's a cult favorite among Conservatives..."

Did Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne really attend the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, as a fresh graduate of Mamaroneck High School, on August 28, 1963? He certainly enjoys saying he did:

I grew up in the civil rights era. In the summer of 1963, having just graduated from high school, I participated in the march on Washington, in which Martin Luther King gave his famous speech, that his son should be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin. I have held onto this ideal in the face of subsequent fads: political correctness, identity politics, racial preferences, and "ethnic studies." (Letter to the editor, Arizona Republic, 2/3/2007)

Or then,

A shande far de goyim

Updated 4/8/2012

The four sons: "the wise, the wicked, the simple, and the one who doesn't know how to ask... the question" From Point of No Return.

When a Jewish or Jewish-identifying American says something harsh about the Likud party and its coalition, as happens fairly often to me,* she or he runs a risk of being attacked as anti-Semitic or a self-hating Jew, as if Binyamin Netanyahu somehow represented all of suffering Jewry and to criticize him were equivalent to accepting the Blood Libel.

To the contrary, the reason so many leftish JOJIAs get so upset about Bad Israelis like Netanyahu that they appear instead to be identifying with Palestinians is that Bad Israelis misrepresent Jewry in a way that brings shame on the race; they are a shande far de goyim, a scandal seen by the gentiles.** I think of Netanyahu as a gangster cousin whose parents should have [jump]

*I'm only patrilineally Jewish--Jewish enough, as you might say, for Hitler, not for Chabad.
 **That's far corresponding to German vor meaning "in front of", not fur corresponding to für.

Truth terrorism in action

Also from Think Progress, Governor Nikki Haley in defense of Governor Willard Mitt Romney:

HANNITY: Newt’s saying, though, that the governor’s record, whether or not he created 100,000 jobs net net net is fair game. Do you agree with that?

HALEY: You know, with all due respect to Mr. Gingrich, no. I mean –

HANNITY: It’s not fair to ask? That’s not fair?

HALEY: Well, I think what you have to understand is what does the private sector do? I come from a business background. I know that when times are tough, we have to make hard decisions — we never want to... have to let people go. And when times are good, you love to expand.

Well, of course it's not fair!  If the man wanted to create a hundred thousand jobs, he ought to be able to say he did it. I mean, it's the thought that counts, right? Giving the man a hard time just because it didn't actually happen is nothing but truth terrorism.

From the Indian Muslim Observer (New Delhi)

Mississippi gosh darn

Per Think Progress, the Tucson Unified School District must close down its Mexican-American Studies Program in keeping with the new state prohibition on ethnic studies in public schools:

 Insisting that the Mexican-American program taught Latino students “that they are oppressed by white people,” [state Attorney General Tom] Horne equated the program to the Jim Crow era. “It’s just like the old South, and it’s long past time that we prohibited it,” he said.

Hey, that explains the whole civil rights movement! It was all the fault of the teachers in those segregated schools--they told the black kids they were being oppressed! I mean, how else would they have been able to find out?

Oh, wait...

Truth terrorists

You will have heard that the Times's Public Editor, Arthur Brisbane, asked a little plaintively if the newspaper ought to go beyond reporting the lies told by politicians and actually correct them. "Should the Times be a truth vigilante?" All the commenters (including yours truly, under my passport name) were properly outraged by such a stupid question, but an anonymous "J-School Grad" added something relevant to us here, and the project of the Rectification of Names:

I also think "Truth Vigilante" is a great sort of Orwellian phrase - ah, so now someone who bases their thinking on facts and confronts people knowingly spreading falsehoods with factual information to the contrary isn't just an "honest person", they're a Truth Vigilante. Next stop - Truth Terrorist.

Watching elephants write op-ed pieces (addendum)

If you're interested in Thomas Friedman, you need to check out this unexpected discovery, his own personal blog. Unfiltered by those prissy Times editors, it's far richer and wilder than what we know; on the subject of elephants flying, for instance:

I came back to the exurbs of Cairo preparing to write a syllabus for the only journalism course of the future, because seriously, there’s not going to be a big demand for this sort of nonsense once our cloned children get their RSS feeds routed into their earbuds. The first lesson: When elephants fly, watch out for their feces.

 Or this, my favorite so far [jump]:

You give us 32 minutes, we'll give you the end of the world

The Climate Progress subdivision of Think Progress reported the other day that evening news broadcasts of the three major TV networks devoted a total of 32 minutes--14 separate stories--to climate change in the year 2011. This morning, I figure NPR gave me close to 32 minutes on yesterday's movements of the Republican presidential candidates in and around South Carolina. Not anything about what the candidates "believe", mind you--something that might help a South Carolina voter decide what to do about the situation--but about "how they're doing": even sound bites from the candidates themselves only discussed their views on the horse race.*

Then again, anybody who's been paying a modicum (or a small emoticon) of attention knows as much as she or he can stand about the candidates' views already, and I imagine that that applies to the journalists as well, not to mention that they're typically not very interested in economic policy and such. And likewise, I guess, for climate change--if what's happening to the Arctic sea ice is news to you, you're pretty far behind.

Maybe news itself is a problem--maybe we really need more opinion, just the way they feel on Fox News. Not so much what I'm doing, which is merely stammering--teaching myself the news about what I'm thinking, and sharing it with a presumably similarly half-assed audience--but mobilizing? Just a thought.

Made the news when it was cold in Florida...

*Think Progress itself didn't bother to promote the 32-minutes story to its main site, for that matter--I got it from Steven D at Daily Kos.

Watching elephants write op-ed pieces

Don't look now, but Thomas Friedman has locked on a new idiotic metaphor. None of us can predict the title of his next book, but I'll bet a good bookie can give you decent odds on Watching Elephants Fly. Tell 'em I sent you.

Flying elephants--if he wore a mustache, wouldn't he look a little like--OMG!

Watching elephants fly is a trope for coming across a totally unexpected story (like, "Amazingly, it took more than six months!"). Friedman uses it in particular as a description of how he felt [jump]

The attention he desperately needs, continued

That last post was about to go somewhere interesting, I think, but kind of missed its bus. It's surely true that we shouldn't be judging politicians harshly for needing attention ("And after all, isn't it something we all need?"), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be judging them on the subject at all ("And aren't they trying to get it by being good?" Not all of them, Sunshine!).

"Tony Bennett, attention whore" from the somewhat eccentric, not to say appropriately named, Diary of a Mad Person

The naked neediness on Chuck Schumer's face as I saw it in 1998 is a part of who he is and how he's as effective as he is, [jump]

The attention he desperately needs

The phrase was used by Mara Liasson on NPR this morning, and to be understood as horse race language--for the attention that will come to a candidate if he gets more votes relative to some other candidate than she was expecting him to, which will apparently contribute to his getting still more votes somewhere else; the desperation would be at the thought of not getting those votes, of being no longer "in the running", and it doesn't sound like the right word, at least as long as you don't think about the money at stake, and I don't think these very high rollers habitually do.

But it made me think of a humbler context,[jump]

A Republican friend writes:

I see all you latte-sniffing Volvonauts are trying to make a federal case of how none of the candidates ever seems to mention George W. Bush, as if to suggest there's something we're ashamed of. I find the irony delicious, given that you're the ones who never stop shoving it in our faces that he wasn't elected in the first place. Now you expect us to go around apologizing to all and sundry for all the ghastly things he supposedly did when he wasn't president?

I'm not normally one to play the blame game, [jump]

Correction

Because of an editing error, a review in some editions last Sunday about Polpettina, a restaurant in Eastchester, N.Y., described a chicken entree incorrectly. It is half of a roasted chicken, not a “half-roasted” chicken. (New York Times, January 8, 2012)

A first: Insider poop!

Steve Benen is among those wondering what's ailing the non-Romney Republican candidates in their failure to gang up on the front-runner:

I’m at a loss in trying to explain this. It’s not as if there’s nothing to criticize Romney over. The guy used to support abortion rights, gay rights, gun control, “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants, and combating climate change. He distanced himself from Reagan, attended Planned Parenthood fundraisers, and helped create the blueprint for the Affordable Care Act. He supported taxpayer-funded abortions and taxpayer-financed medical care for undocumented immigrants.

Do these non-Romney candidates not realize they’re losing? Are they reluctant to go after him because they want to be his running mate?

I heard from somebody who heard from somebody who's been in New Hampshire (also, somebody's mother-in-law is in the chain) (also, I think I made some of it up): they know the Republicans are going to lose in November and they're all trying to detach themselves--they'd rather see themselves losing right now and getting it over with. Willard is on his own here, because nobody likes him.

By Alfred Pearse (1856-1933)

Update 1/9/2012

All, that is, except naturally for crypto-Belgian imperialist terrorist Dr. Newton Leroy Gingrich, who never was any good at holding it back, and who has a backer whose remarkable vindictiveness almost matches his own.

When Osama bin Laden was murdered

Glenn Greenwald righteously denounced a certain ugly-American response to the news--

one of those events which, especially in the immediate aftermath, is not susceptible to reasoned discussion. It’s already a Litmus Test event: all Decent People — by definition — express unadulterated ecstacy [sic] at his death, and all Good Americans chant “USA! USA!” in a celebration of this proof of our national greatness and Goodness (and that of our President)

 --although he may have been mistaken as to how far such vulgar behavior extended among the population (lots of us found reason to stay sober, and for that matter I don't recall Mitch McConnell dancing out by the White House, say,  or any self-described Republicans, though their reasons were certainly different from mine), or how long it was going to last.

Human sacrifice as represented in a label from the reign of Djer, second king of the First Dynasty (ca. 3100 B.C.E.), after which the Egyptians are said to have abandoned the practice

He also added, primly, [jump]