Honni soit qui Mali pense

Timbuktu. Photograph by Naftali Hilger, laif/Redux, from National Geographic.

Like everybody else, I've read my share of explanations over the past dozen years of why our Overseas Contingency Operations are taking place, but I don't think I ever learned as much as I did from a few paragraphs in this morning's Times about an ostensibly quite different adventure, the ongoing French invasion of Mali:

For years, the United States tried to stem the spread of Islamic militancy in the region by conducting its most ambitious counterterrorism program ever across these vast, turbulent stretches of the Sahara,

But as insurgents swept through the desert last year, commanders of this nation’s elite army units, the fruit of years of careful American training, defected when they were needed most — taking troops, guns, trucks and their newfound skills to the enemy in the heat of battle, according to senior Malian military officials.

“It was a disaster,” said one of several senior Malian officers to confirm the defections.

Then an American-trained officer overthrew Mali’s elected government, setting the stage for more than half of the country to fall into the hands of Islamic extremists. American spy planes and surveillance drones have tried to make sense of the mess, but American officials and their allies are still scrambling even to get a detailed picture of who they are up against.

Now, in the face of longstanding American warnings that a Western assault on the Islamist stronghold could rally jihadists around the world and prompt terrorist attacks as far away as Europe, the French have entered the war themselves.

1. The purpose of the OsCOps (as I propose they should be called; previously I tried OsCO) is to prevent terrorist attacks "as far away" (from, for example, Mali) "as Europe"—or North America (from, for example, Yemen). This does not include the crazed original invasion of Iraq, or if it did they were even crazier than we thought, but it evidently includes Iraq now, with whatver ongoing OsCOps are still being staged there, after Proconsul Bremer and General Franks had finished constructing a local Al Qa'eda within the country. President Obama may be regarded as telling the truth about this (or may not, I just want to note the possibility).

2. They are not a War (GWOT) because they are not a war, but rather counterterrorism, which seems to be a particular kind of counterinsurgency in which the insurgents are terrorists, or Terrorists. The Terrorists are, if they exist, Jihadists, that is a branch of Sunni Islam which is more or less Salafist in theology and terroristic in politics; we know they have existed in the past because we helped create them, in Afghanistan during the counter-counterinsurgency of the 1980s, but we don't know if those currently active are true Terrorists or merely terrorists. Keep in mind that some of this is really true: there have been real suicide attackers and real attacks, notably right here in New York City.

3. But OsCOps don't actually work very well, even if they did in Malaya and British East Africa 60 years ago (it certainly wasn't so great in Algeria, or Vietnam). Troops you train may be secret enemies, and the weapons you give them can be turned against you. Villagers can turn a blind eye when the bad guys murder hundreds of people at a shot, but if you mistakenly drop a bomb on a single funeral party they'll never forgive you. Why? Because they can visualize the funeral party. Because you obviously don't belong, and they're only hired friends; didn't your mother teach you that you can't buy friendship? Because killing somebody with a bomb launched from a computer console 10,000 miles away is cowardly (according to their exotic native culture). They don't respect you.

4. President Obama and his Gray Eminence Cardinal Brennan do not find this easy to understand. Although Aristotle and St. Thomas never laid out the rules for a Just Counterinsurgency, it seems obvious to them that it is juster than a just war. Far fewer people get hurt, and they get something back, like roads, and girls' schools, and village councils. Democracy! Actually Obama understands it better than any US president since Eisenhower, but he can only understand it one country at a time, so as we start packing up in Afghanistan—Yay!—things in Somalia and Yemen start getting worse. And Mali? Who knew!? But Obama didn't start it:

American officials defended their training, saying it was never intended to be nearly as comprehensive as what the United States has done in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We trained five units over five years but is that going to make a fully fledged, rock-solid military?” asked an American military official familiar with the region.

(They don't say it straight out, but luckily we're good at arithmetic, like 2013 minus 5.)

I'm sorry, emoprogs, but Obama is probably the very best we can do.

Or maybe just dangerous

Ship of Fools. Via afoolintheforest.

Politico:

“I think it is possible that we would shut down the government to make sure President Obama understands that we’re serious,” House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state told us.

That should work fine. If by "serious", you mean "irredeemably airheaded".

Cheap shots special Sunday edition

#ImAnExtremist b/c I remember Jesus said to turn the other cheeck.Even during an event as horrible as rape.
— Bill Donohue (@HolyBillDonohue) August 21, 2012

 I realize rape is never funny. But what if it happened to a fat old bullying Knight of Columbus? Can we at least tell him he was asking for it?

Image from Current.com.

And from the real Donohue, this:

[MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell] says the practice of presidents putting their hand on the Bible is “one of our most absurdist [sic] traditions.” Furthermore, he says that because Obama embraces the gay agenda, he should not swear on the Bible. The point is not without merit. Given Obama’s ideology, perhaps it would make more sense for him to swear on Das Kapital.

1. HuffingtonPost says O'Donnell said "more absurdist". Donohue thinks he spelled "absurdest" wrong.

2.  Don't think it's at all correct to suggest that Das Kapital embraces the gay agenda, whatever that might be. (Banning pink shirts in Donohue's size?). In fact Engels was a total bigot. I think Donohue must mean a copy of Caritas in Veritate, by old Benedict XVI, a nice little encyclical according to which

capitalism as such is now effectively "obsolete" and must be replaced by a new form of market economy whose driving force is not the maximization of profits.

Maybe Donohue was too busy panty-sniffing to hear about it.

Praxis makes perfect

Paul Rosenberg in Al Jazeera:

Everyone has an ideology, whether they know it or not. But when your ideology has you - that's when you're an ideologue. It's not a matter of "extremism" but of rigidity and blindness - detachment from reality. Which is why Barack Obama is one of the most ideological presidents we've ever had. And being imprisoned in his "pragmatist" ideology is key to his numerous pragmatic train wrecks, as well his less-noted failures to even take on several really big, really significant problems....[C]ommon sense is no match for cultural hegemony, what political theorist Antonio Gramsci essentially described as ideology in drag as common sense. Obama's root problem is his deep unwillingness to engage in hegemonic struggle, to face his adversaries' failures, call them out by name, and show how we can do better.

I've noticed that too. If you're looking around for a little hegemonic struggle, don't even bother looking at the White House. It turns out that Barack Obama is totally different from Angela Davis, can you beat that? It's like he's not even a Marxist, for Pete's sake! Oh, wait...

Then again imagine, if you will, that you're the Marxist president of the United States and that David Gregory, say, asks you on camera one Sunday morning what you're up to. Do you come out and tell him you're all about hegemonic struggle? "Gosh, Dave, I guess I'm pretty much focused on that hegemonic struggle, or I guess I should say counter-hegemonic, since I aim less at taking hegemony over than at dissolving it, so the working class can start producing its own organic individuals and culture, know what I'm saying?" Or do you waffle into that world of undifferentiated change and problems don't have an R or a D next to them, etc., etc.?

Thought so.

Mutual appreciation

Larry Ward on Friday told CNN that he created the first annual Gun Appreciation Day just days before President Barack Obama’s inauguration and the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to “honor the legacy of Dr. King”.... 
He added: “The truth is, I think Martin Luther King would agree with me if he were alive today that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country’s founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history. And I believe wholeheartedly that’s essential to liberty.”
Raw Story (http://s.tt/1yiNR)

You know, I'll bet that's true. All those African Americans were practically begging to be enslaved there, sitting around unarmed. Oh, wait, they were actually slaves already. Even before day one.

So if they had been given the right to keep and bear arms on day one, there, slavery still would have been a chapter, wouldn't it? First they'd have had to get hold of the guns, after whoever was in charge gave them the Second Amendment. And what with being enslaved, they were often a little short of cash. Being enslaved, you know, kind of means you never get a payday—or a welfare check either, smartass—and it's hard saving up for the big expenses. Or impossible. There'd have to be some means of getting them the guns. Your liberty-loving white folks and free people of color would have to be carting those guns down to the plantation and passing them out, and explaining to the plantation owners that African Americans have a right to keep and bear arms just like anybody else, and your plantation owners would have to say, "Oh, I see what you mean, carry on." Which takes the story at least a few weeks beyond day one, even in the best of circumstances, so there's your chapter after all.

The capture of Nat Turner. Engraving by William Henry Shelton (1840-1932), color added. From Kasama Project.

And then what if the plantation owners objected? You can easily imagine how they might feel put upon. "Hey," they'd say, "that's my property you're arming there! Next time I need to beat him up, or sell his kids down the river, or what have you, he might pull that firearm on me!" That would be a bit of a quandary, you see. If you wanted to avoid just endless arguments, the liberty-loving white folks and free people of color would have to be sneaking the guns in, which might be pretty dangerous. I need not mention that your plantation owners already had as many guns as they liked, and didn't mind using them. Also it was more or less legal to shoot slaves. Whereas shooting plantation owners could get a person into real trouble.

In this way your African American would be at a serious disadvantage from the get-go. He could go up to the big house, gun in hand, and tell the master, "Excuse me, but I've decided I love liberty and prefer not to be enslaved," but the master could just laugh at him. Or kill him, although that would of course represent a financial loss, and I'll remind you here that they couldn't take deductions for equipment replacement in those days. Then again, if the African American ceased to be a slave, the master would be in the same fix, so it didn't much matter.

Not only that, but if this was done in, say, 1790 (pretty close to day one), it would have to be done 654,121 times. That's a long chapter indeed.

Gabriel (sometimes called Gabriel Prosser after his owner), a trained blacksmith, and literate, in Henrico County, Virginia, got hold of some guns in 1800 or so. He was a slave himself, but Mr. Prosser didn't have enough work for all his slaves on the tobacco plantation, so he sent Gabriel to Richmond to work in an iron foundry, and pocketed his wages.

Drawing by Cardow.

In Richmond, Gabriel came to know some of those liberty-loving white folks and free people of color and even, perhaps, some Frenchmen, and learned about the French Revolution, and how there were no longer slaves in France or the French West Indies. It may have seemed particularly odd to him that slavery should exist in Virginia, the home of Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison and Governor Monroe, whose love for liberty and the French Revolution was so very deep. He came up with a plan for capturing the governor and holding him hostage until such time as the end of slavery in the state should have been negotiated.

Before the weather was right for the job, however, two of his comrades warned their owner and Governor Monroe called out the state's well-regulated militia, which was necessary to the security of a free state, and Gabriel escaped downriver but was fingered by another slave, for a $300 reward, and caught, and hanged by the neck until dead with his two brothers and 23 others. The traitor only got $50.

Gabriel's liberty-loving white confederates were never charged—perhaps, it's thought, because they were Republicans and Mr. Jefferson, then running for President, didn't want publicity for the notion that Republicans loved liberty all that much, since it might disincline many of the state's most distinguished Republicans to vote for him. He felt that the tree didn't need watering just at the moment; or the kind of rebellion he had in mind when he made his famous statement was to be led by somebody more like Mr. Shays, veteran, farmer, and all-round white guy.

Would it have made a difference if Gabriel's country had recognized his constitutional right to keep and bear arms? Would it have brought him closer to his goal? Sitting with him in the darkened room as the militia prowled outside, would Governor Monroe have come to appreciate Gabriel's intelligence and fervor, the nobility of his character, and said, "Well, since you've got the one right already, might as well have the rest," and signed an emancipation proclamation? Uh, no.

And Dr. King? His right to keep and bear arms was not recognized by the Alabama police when they turned down his application for a concealed carry permit in 1956, after his house had been bombed; so we know it was one of the rights of which he had been partially deprived.  But then again the next year was when he wrote his essay on "The Power of Nonviolence". Something tells me he would not be celebrating Gun Appreciation Day by Mr. Ward's side this January if he were alive. As far as that goes, something tells me Mr. Ward wouldn't be inviting him to, either, but it's just one of those inexplicable little intuitions.

Larry Ward addresses the demonstrators outside his Washington office.  The sign in the window says "Repeal it now org". (Yes, he works on health care too.) Photo by Bonnie Jo Mount for The Washington Post.

Cheap shots 1/11

When Dick Armey confessed to Media Matters how corrupt his old employers at FreedomWorks were, with their advertising-for-editorial swaps with Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and all, what on earth did he have in mind? Was it repentance for a wicked life? Did Jesus tell him to do it, or the ghost of George Washington? Is David Brock guiding him on the leftward lurch? ("I used to think I was born conservative, Dick, like I had no choice, but I've learned that it can be cured.")

Uh, no. Turns out (via Steve Benen) he thought he was talking to L. Brent Bozell III of the Media Research Center. Apparently in the wingnut welfare world you can say anything you want and then (as mistermix says) there are editors to fix it up for you if you say anything incautious. Poor old chap!

Image from DiveBuddy.

Après nous le déluge, and tornados too, not to mention dust bowls, starvation, and of course radiation sickness:

WAMU reports (via ThinkProgress):

State Sen. Dick Saslaw does not mince words about his support for uranium mining. A Northern Virginia Democrat who is also the Senate minority leader, Saslaw says burying the radioactive byproduct known as tailings underground should be a solution to environmental concerns. And he says he can’t be concerned about what might happen 100 [years] from now.

“What about 10,000 years from now? I’m not going to be here,” Saslaw says. “I can’t ban something because of something that might happen 500 or 1,000 years from now.“

These are the guys who are always telling us how we mustn't burden our grandchildren with debt. Now you know how much they really care about the little tykes.

Eric Bolling doesn't end it all. From Mediaite.

And then there's Eric Bolling, not the least daunted after last week's colorful New Year's suicide attempt:

Fox News host Eric Bolling on Wednesday accused some schools of “pushing the liberal agenda” for teaching an algebra lesson about the distributive property.

During a segment about “indoctrination in schools,” Bolling reminded viewers of a 2009 video of children chanting, “Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Barack Hussein Obama,” which outraged conservatives at the time.

“But even worse is the way some textbooks are pushing the liberal agenda,” the Fox News host explained, pointing to an algebra worksheet that Scholastic says gives students “[i]nsight into the distributive property as it applies to multiplication.”

Raw Story (http://s.tt/1yfvF)

Just wait till the kids learn about the associative property, that's where unions come from, and the commutative property that lets all the criminals out of jail! (And hey Eric, this link's for you!)

Oye Cuomo va! The Times reported,

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who spent his first two years in office establishing himself as a fiscal conservative, turned left in his third annual address to the Legislature, and sought to reclaim the state’s progressive mantle.

No kidding! His voice on the radio this morning wandered into Magical Mario territory, as he questioned how many bullets anybody needs to shoot a deer, and he was calling for a rise in the minimum wage, and a billion dollars for affordable housing, and money to expand the use of solar power, and all kinds of things that I can actually approve of. And the Andrew of the past two years, who sounded like a hedge-fund manager, nowhere to be seen. I hope this lasts.

Just heard about the lasagna. (Rembrandt, ca. 1633,  Städel Museum Frankfurt; from The Schwartzlist.)

Food writer Patricia Wells:

I don't know anyone who doesn't fall on his knees at the thought of a luscious golden roast chicken paired with a crusty potato gratin and a sip of a fragrant red Volnay, from Burgundy. (Simply French: Patricia Wells Presents the Cuisine of Joël Robuchon, 1991)

She didn't know all that many people in those days, but it was a lively crowd, as they contemplated the menu, even the cynics among them whipping off their hats, while the true believers, prostrating themselves, covered the floor.

Libenter enim suffertis insipientes

Image by C.E. Brock, 1898. From Golden Bridge Inmate.

Preliminaries

Sometime last week David Brooks was reading, or at any rate looking at, last March's issue of Foreign Policy; to be exact, it was the first page of Tina Rosenberg's profile of an American human rights statistician who documents mass murder and genocide all over the world, Patrick Ball. Was he really planning an article on mass murder and genocide, or for that matter on statistics, subjects he would surely regard as indecorous, ungrateful, and outside his usual beat? We will probably never know. But we do know what the article was, because he describes it unmistakably:

Recently I was reading a magazine profile of a brilliant statistician. The article mentioned, in passing, that this guy doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

I mean, how many magazine profiles of statisticians are there in a given year? And how many of those note their statistician's attitude to suffering fools at the bottom of the first page?

As to what happened next, it's a bit of a mystery. Before we proceed to that, though, I need to introduce a few suspicious characters. [jump]

Cheap shots and caviar!

No Caspian sturgeon were harmed in the making of this post.

Farmed Italian caviar, from Saveur.

Hey, confetti guns don't kill people, you know. No, really, they don't. (Via Raw Story.)

Caviar from Kibbutz Dan. NPR.

It takes a good person with a credit card, via ThinkProgress:

Republicans attacked the new ban [in New Hampshire] as an encroachment of their Second Amendment rights, but according to the Concord-Monitor also sought to derail the bill by warning of a slippery slope:

“A holstered gun is not a deadly weapon. . . . But anything can be used as a deadly weapon. A credit card can be used to cut somebody’s throat,” said Rep. Dan Dumaine, an Auburn Republican.

That's why I always carry my American Express card with me at all times, just in case I'm in a tight situation with some thug slaughtering people left and right with a semi-automatic Discover. All you have to do is charge the guy!

Secrets of the House

Ppl shouldn't be so cynical to assume all Cliff actors are abt pure politics. Several of the key players are worried about nation/economy
— Mark Halperin (@MarkHalperin) January 2, 2013

But Mark's not going to out the key players in question. There's still such a thing as shame on the Hill, you know, they don't want their colleagues to find out.

Texas caviar. From Simply Recipes.

Don't forget the Simpsons of compassion:

An example of the phenomenon illustrated in the screenshot below was in a right-winger comment in the Times—I wasn't sure whether it was snark or a typo, so I Googled to get an idea.

It isn't even a typo, but an error, by people who think they're spelling it right, like this Average Guy, many of them supporting the Bowles-Simpson plan. Indeed there may be a significant correlation here: people who do not know the word "bowels" are more likely to suffer from Debt Terror than those who do. Suggestive?

By New York artist Chrissy Conant, from Gastronomica.

This goes out to you, Dr. Franklin

Apparently there are thought to be some problems with our religious feelings about the U.S. Constitution, according to Thers and Georgetown professor Louis Michael Seidman:

Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?

I would like to say that no constitution is foolproof, and when the fools constitute the majority, whether in the Supreme Court or the House of Representatives or both, the problem is as it were metaconstitutional. Nevertheless our Living Constitution certainly is, if not downright dead, at least pretty frail, and there's no reason we shouldn't consider shopping around for a fresher one. Herewith, a proposed

Praeambulum

• We the uninvited representatives (let's get that out of the way first thing, and if you don't like it you can litigate it, or hold a plebiscite, or something)
• of the people of the United States (and by "the people" I do not mean "the states" or "the white men" or "the imaginary universal militia" or "the people and their foetuses", but just citizens of the country by birth or naturalization, meaning that all of them have been born)
• in humble recognition that our Union is far from perfect (whatever making it "more perfect" may have meant in 1788, it sounds totally fatuous now, in addition to being, as your fourth-grade teacher may have told you, less than standard English),
• that justice is hardly available to all (especially to those who can't afford high-class lawyers), 
• that domestic tranquility is provided only to some (especially those who can pay privately for their own security), 
• that our common defenses are far too commonly turned to the offense of others (we'll try the specific language again here, but don't get your hopes too high for it working), 
• that the general welfare is nowhere near as general as it needs to be, 
• and that the blessings of liberty (which, as they say, ends where the other person's nose begins)
• are fast slipping away to forces that our old Constitution doesn't deal very well with, to be lost if not in our time then certainly in that of our posterity if we don't do something about it soon, 
• do ordain and establish and institute and otherwise kick off (because a little redundancy is a tradition here)
• this here Constitution for doing these things better in the United States of America.

N.B. Nothing in this document is to be regarded as inspired by, emulating, or otherwise under the influence of any deity, demiurge, totem ancestor, muse, Norn or Valkyrie, prophet, sybil, or angel, or other wholly or partly supernatural entity. This particularly applies to the Hebrew Ten Commandments, which have played no role in the composition of the work, even though we are coincidentally much opposed to oath breaking, theft, and murder. Disrespecting our parents and coveting our neighbor's ox or his or her ass are problems too, but we don't think the Constitution should go there. Besides, be honest, haven't you ever coveted somebody's ox? As for Sabbath observance, you can just forget about it. If you think parent-honoring, non-covetousness, and Sabbath observance are in our old Constitution, go right ahead, it's a free country, but they are not in this one.

Any other suggestions?

Image from the 92nd Street Y, which is actually doing a re-constitutional convention thingy this summer.

Roundup Time

Lillian Gish in Orphans of the Storm (D.W. Griffith, 1921). From Film Fanatic.

Following on the Vixen, but pushing it a little too hard as usual (she only listed five!), I've assembled a list of favorite posts of my own for the year, focusing on those that didn't attract as many readers as I thought they deserved. Poor little things! All they want is a little affection, and maybe a comment or two wouldn't hurt?

January: It struck me that the idea of Obama as our first Jewish president is more than just an easy laugh. I.e., it's an uneasy laugh. Not so much because there is something Jewish about him, though there is, as because of the way right-wingers hate him, which is modeled on classic anti-Semitism, as Clinton hatred was modeled on anti-black racism. A philosophical-semiotic followup bringing in the First Ladies is here.

Mayor Bloomberg and schools chancellor Klein commissioned a study to prove that the Small High Schools of Choice they favor are better than big high schools; just as always, when scholars know in advance what conclusions they are expected to come to, the study was full of shit, but nobody at the Times noticed. And nobody reads me, of course, but I tore the thing apart. Also I got to quote David Mamet.

February: I can't stand the way right-wingers use the term "federalist" to mean "anti-federalist", thereby associating themselves in retroactionary fashion with our progressive Constitution, which they in fact oppose (they'd be more comfortable with the Articles of Confederation). Washington and Hamilton and Adams liked them some Big Government (not fat, but tall and strong) and so did Madison and Jefferson, for that matter, except whenever they were in opposition. Here's my tirade.

This was the month I started posting "Cheap Shots" on Fridays (my New Year's blog-resolution is to get back to doing it regularly). Eventually they achieved considerable popularity, by my pathetic standards, but the early ones were not much noticed, including this one, featuring an extremely unkind Dana Loesch joke.

March: One of my biggest preoccupations since I started blogging has been the fear of a U.S.-Iran war, along with the hope that Obama really means to prevent it, which I am always trying to influence not directly, I realize these grand persons are not attending to me, but by some kind of observer's paradox effect. These posts often get a lot of attention (nobody ever leaves a comment, so I don't know why), but two of them in March that I thought were a little more coherent than usual got almost none, one on Obama's diplomatic language, and one on correcting the Israeli sense of tragedy with a Jewish sense of comedy.

April: Easter post: Our crack political team reporting from Jerusalem on the trial and execution of a certain dissident rabbi...

May and June: We lost my mom, and I lost most of my larynx and spent an unconscionable amount of time in the hospital. One of the things (beside the helpmeet and kids, and siblings, and their helpmeets and kids, who were all amazing) that brought some cheer in this desolate time was somehow the politics in France, of all places, which I found myself taking quite personally, and halfway believing in, as if socialiste really meant "socialist", and which led me to some philosophical reflections of uncharacteristic earnestness. (Mom would have been pleased about the French elections, but seeing Obama reelected would have been much better; of course she was confident he'd win.)

Jan De Bray, ca. 1627-1697, The Care of Orphans.

July: I guess I was in the hospital when I started getting obsessed with David Brooks, perhaps the most deeply dishonest of our famous political commentators. One of my favorite early efforts was this Shorter on the moviehouse massacre in Colorado, which has some renewed relevance in light of the school shooting in Connecticut.

August: Then senatorial candidate, now ex-congressman Todd Akin brought me all the way back to high Swiftian rage with his comments on the physiology of rape. Of course everybody had to write something about Akin's peculiar beliefs, but only Yastreblyansky was able to tie it in with the beliefs expressed in the Roman Catholic Catechism, to say nothing of recycling that Dana Loesch joke in a greatly improved version.

September: The big Republican pseudo-scandal of the 9/11 anniversary season was the news that Obama sometimes didn't go to his Presidential Daily Briefing. ZOMG we're doomed! Something told me it might not be that serious, and indeed, it turned out to be even less serious than that. And for the High Holy Days, a take on a hilarious Christianist approach to interpreting the Bible on poverty and government.

Also, an extended discussion of what I believe is David Brooks's most ethically reprehensible column since I've been studying him, where, as I wrote,

I don't know that David Brooks should be busted for plagiarism here, even though he fails to credit [Paul] Tough for three quarters of his material. But I don't think you can properly call what he's done "fair use" either; to use an author's words to point toward a conclusion that the author would not dream of drawing....

October and November: As Brooks grew more and more crazed with the approach of the election, I finally began trying to channel his voice directly, as in this discussion of Burkean moderation; another example from after Romney's defeat is chosen to illustrate how his broadest anthropological musings, on changing family structures for instance, can be grounded entirely in a single unreviewed self-publication by an academic grifter writing "out of a Christian worldview".

December: And finally, why do we keep denying our War on Christmas? I'm bringing mine out of the closet, and putting Baby Jesus back in his! Yule be sorry you missed it!

Happy New Year to all, from Gene Autry.

One or two Lumps?

As the defeated Tea Party legions begin their long trek west from Moscow, out come the traditional-minded Republican senators and their cocktail friends—haven't Susan Collins and Max Baucus, for instance, been in the headlines an awful lot lately?—to see what damage they can do in the intervening chaos. Yesterday's report was of Senators Corker and Alexander (formerly known as Lamar! with the exclamation point included, anybody remember that?) to demand that the retirement age be raised, or they'll blow up the debt ceiling, trapping us all inside the building.

Now old Lindsey-Woolsey* Graham is on board with the same extortion plan.

Sorry, I don't negotiate with terrorists.

*I have long felt that "Huckleberry", with its cornpone crackle, makes a lousy nickname for this starchy, perpetually indignant fussbudget.

First edition of Tasha Tudor's book (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).

Why is it, do you suppose, that they're so fixated on that particular item? I mean, I can really understand the thing about cutting Medicare and Medicaid benefits: it may be a bad solution, but it is to a problem that actually exists. But surely Corker and Alexander have heard by now that Social Security does not contribute to the deficit, will not be in trouble for a good many years, and will be easy to fix when it happens.

Are they just envious of retired friends and neighbors Facebooking their endless vacations, while they themselves must spend literally days every month in tedious Washington haranguing tongue-tied committee witnesses? Is it a moral issue—is our social substance being consumed by shiftless 69-year-old bucks blowing their checks on T-bone steaks, Cadillacs, and smartphones? A-and listening to that filthy bebop music?

Or are they merely representing the old Markets hungry, boss. Must feed markets, plenty fresh cash, or P-E rate go down rent-seeking institutions in their eternal quest for the money nobody else seems to be using at the moment? Because the bond market gets to play with your Social Security as long as you're not collecting it?

Be that as it may, what I was thinking about was something completely different: whether there's a relationship between delayed retirement and unemployment, such that making all us dotards keep slaving away until we're 70 will have the effect of making it harder than ever for others to find jobs—youngsters, and middle-aged layoff victims.

Because, as it happens, there's a good deal of delayed retirement going on already:

In 2009, 31 percent of eligible people signed up for Social Security, up from 27 percent in 2007. But the take-up rate has since declined to 28.3 percent in 2010 and 26.9 percent in 2011. The Urban Institute found that a smaller proportion of eligible people signed up for Social Security in 2011 than in any other year since 1976.

The rise in retirements from 2007 to 2009 was a response to the housing-and-finance crisis which put so many out of reach of ever getting a job again; the later decline reflects the changes in Social Security that have already taken place, the general crappiness of the new-style pension plans (just ask Richard Armey!), and a higher educational attainment that puts more of us in jobs that we are physically able to do until we have to be carted away into the R&R we can't afford.

Uncredited image from the apparently now defunct blog Upper Italy, in a post that reminds us that linsey-woolsey, a "garment mingled of linen and woolen", is shatnez, an abomination unto the Lord (Leviticus 19:19).

Well, Dr. Google informs me that the received wisdom among economists is that I am guilty of the Lump of Labor fallacy in expecting delayed retirements to interfere with employment growth. Or rather, that early retirements don't increase employment, as they used to believe in Europe in the 1980s and still do in France. The fact that they still believe it in France is a sign that it's a little more complicated than that.

The Lump of Labor fallacy is when** you believe that any community has a fixed amount of work that has to be done, so that for example if you hire immigrants you are taking work away from the natives. It was first used to mock the English Luddites who believed that the spinning jenny would eliminate their jobs, which of course it didn't.*** Obviously the amount of work in a given community constantly changes, the work itself being one of the factors (the more suits you make the more dry cleaners you require). When you add immigrants, you add economic activity, so the number of jobs may increase. Thus, anybody who really believes in the Lump of Labor is an idiot.

I'm no economist, but I must warn you, I have studied logic, and this putdown is a transparent, elementary straw man. You don't need to believe in the Lump of Labor to worry about the retirement system affecting the jobs market; all you need is to walk into your local Barnes & Noble and look at the grumpy 70-year-old manning a cash register, doing a job that is a godsend for a student or aspiring actor sharing an apartment and groceries with five other people, but is of very little use to this guy.

There is no fixed number of jobs in a community, but there are historical moments when there is a shortage of jobs, and they happen when there is a deficit of demand, and that comes when nobody has enough money. Like, uh, now. And if you force people to remain at an advanced age in jobs they don't want (don't look at me, I love my job), it's not going to help. Lumps of Labor have nothing to do with it.

**See the very remarkable Ecological Headstand for a splendid tirade against Professor Krugman, who seems to be somewhat on the right on this topic, a complete history of the Lump of Labor trope, and much more.

***Although, didn't England virtually have to mummify South Asia and later Africa in English cotton in order to keep the industry going?

Vagabond Scholar: Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2012

Vagabond Scholar: Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2012

Batocchio, at Vagabond Scholar, has posted some 57 self-selected best posts of 2012 from mostly small blogs at the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2012. I volunteered a David Brooks piece. Some of the stuff is lovely, and all is worth checking out.

Jon Swift was a blogger posting from the "reasonable conservative" perspective (something like Stephen Colbert only aimed at a literate audience), an imaginary creature possessing the mind of the writer Al Weisel, who died much too young a couple of years ago. His own "Best of Jon Swift" compilation is as rich as a Christmas pudding but much funnier. He was also a strong and generous supporter of little bloggists, whence the annual roundup that Batocchio has continued in his name.

Photo by Lusi, RGB Stock.

Wheeeee!

Or is it Wiiiii?

Former House majority leader Dick Armey says he took an $8 million consulting deal in return for leaving the conservative organization FreedomWorks because the group was "dishonest" and because he "couldn't leave with empty pockets."

The arrangement, he says, will allow him to "never have to work again forever."

In an interview with ABC News as he was winding down his Wii Fit workout, Armey spoke frankly and at length about his dispute with FreedomWorks, his eyebrow raising consulting contract, and the strategy of the Republican Party. (Via Jesse Singal at Political Animal)

Whatever it is, it's delicious. Jesse was reduced to helpless giggles by the detail of the Wii Fit workout, and no wonder—it made me think the whole thing must be a spoof, but the fact is you can't make stuff like that up, at least not unless you're Shakespeare or Flaubert or in that general league.

Image from The MedFriendly Blog.

By the way, Armey denies the persistent rumor that any guns were waved when he shook down his former employer. But the 72-year-old ex-congressman is hardly hiding that it's a shakedown. The payoff is from one of the FreedomWorks board members, "reclusive Illinois millionaire" Richard Stephenson, of the cancer-profiteering Cancer Treatment Centers of America, who has promised to pay Armey $400,000 a year until he's 92, as a consultant. And what is it consultants do, actually?

"So Dick was saying, 'You know, Armey, my family and I have heard your story, about how you can't afford to retire and we want to help with your retirement,'" Armey said. The former leader of the House Republicans said it was a deal he just couldn't refuse.

Heh-indeed!

Image from Geek Preview.

Take your government hands off my senators

Filibusters don't kill bills, senators kill bills, according to McCain's gang of well-fed elderly mavericks (HuffPost, via ThinkProgress):

"We have so many new members of the Senate, about half of the senators have never seen the Senate work properly because they've only been here five or six years," [Sen. Lamar] Alexander said. "So we're trying to get back to the days when the motion to proceed wasn't used to block so many bills and when the majority leader allowed senators to offer almost any amendment. Most of that has to be established by practice, by good behavior, rather than by changing the rules."

Irate Chagrian senator during the Great Galactic War. From starwars.wikia.com.

It's just like child labor. Outlawing it missed the whole point; what they should have been focusing on was more good bosses, who would treat the little scamps with some kindness, see to their getting some kind of rudimentary education, make sure they had a nutritious lunch, and so forth. But no, liberals just couldn't resist getting involved and putting a stop to the whole thing by burdensome regulation, as usual, and what did we get?

Exactly what you'd expect, that's what. If you outlaw child labor, only outlaw children will have jobs, in fields like illegal drug retail marketing, sex trade, and worse—not to mention how much child labor simply got outsourced to places like Bangladesh and Honduras, cutting our country off from who knows what kind of economic growth.

In the same way, the senate worked just fine in the days of John C. Calhoun and Mark Hanna and silver-voiced Everett Dirksen. The problem nowadays isn't the rules of the institution, it's the inferior class of people that run it. No names, but you must have noticed some of those guys sneakily introducing legislation that could lower your ROI, and you know very well why: because the voters like it. Now they not only want to maneuver those Trojan horses into the chamber, they want to force folks to vote on them, just like in France or something. Can you imagine that? And a lot of those bills could pass!

Tooting my own Horne

It's always such a pleasure when a really well-drawn but minor character shows up after a long absence, like Thomas Pynchon's "Pig" Bodine or Chloris Leachman as Frankie Muñiz's vile crypto-Slavic grandmother in Malcolm in the Middle, so I'm gratified to report a sighting of Arizona's own White Whale, attorney general Tom Horne.

In the past, we've watched Horne as a champion in the conservative battle against racism, as when he fought bravely against the Tucson school district's Mexican-American Studies program ("It's just like the Old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it"), or when he claimed (probably falsely and possibly perjuriously) to have participated in Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington. Now he shows up as a moderate in the struggle to arm America's schools, between the two extremes of making all the teachers pack heat (conservative) and doing nothing at all (apparently liberal?).

"The ideal solution would be to have an armed police officer in each school," Attorney General Tom Horne said in a news release Wednesday. But budget cuts have limited the number of Arizona schools with "school resource officers" on campus, he said.

The "next best solution," Horne said, "is to have one person in the school trained to handle firearms, to handle emergency situations, and possessing a firearm in a secure location." (CNN, via ThinkProgress)

The one person would be the principal, or "another designee". (I guess the real leftist extreme would be raising the property tax to pay for the real cop.)

Grandma Ida

There is awesome comedy material in this setup. Obviously nobody on the staff wants the job, if only because of the Weekend Warrior training aspect, and all the teachers are under orders from the union rep not to do it because it's not in the contract, and so it goes to the most unsuitable person on the staff, a suckup vice principal with delusions of grandeur. Presumably a man, but think Chloris Leachman. Only I don't see how it ends without some serious bloodshed.

Chloris Leachman's model? And Tom Horne's favorite music critic.

Talk of the Townhall

Thomas Sowell:

If someone wrote a novel about a man who was raised from childhood to resent the successful and despise the basic values of America -- and who then went on to become President of the United States -- that novel would be considered too unbelievable, even for a work of fiction. Yet that is what has happened in real life.

Not unbelievable, just postmodern. Anyway Nixon's been dead for years, why are you suddenly bringing him up now?

Just asking.

WFMY News, Greensboro.

And Ann Coulter:

Is it just me, or does Kwanzaa seem to come earlier and earlier each year?

That would be you, Ann. I'm guessing you've been getting that first drink earlier and earlier on December 25, so that the Kwanzaa kind of sneaks up on you.

And the extraordinary Robert Knight on the difference between charity and socialism,

in which income is forcibly seized and then redistributed to groups and individuals favored by government officials. Socialism is rooted in the formula from Karl Marx—“from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs.”

That’s a fine arrangement when voluntary, such as in families, churches and private charities. However, when imposed by force—and socialism is always accompanied by force since it violates human nature—it is soft tyranny masquerading as charity. 

I think if you accept all these premises you can prove that charity doesn't exist—it's not socialism if it's voluntary but it's never voluntary—but I won't swear to it. It could be that it violates human nature for government officials to give stuff to people outside their own families or religious affiliations. You could distinguish between homoagapism or giving to one's relatives and pew partners (the belief that charity begins—and ends—at home) and heteroagapism or giving to those who are not our sort, dear, which is necessarily violent, though also soft, i.e., socialism. I trust this is clear. In traditional political theory, of course, charity to one's relatives (nepotagapism) is the conservative mode of government.

From World News.

Skepticism and sifting

James, the Snooker Kid, at the Conservative Club; London, 1997. From Fast Mikey's Pool Page.

The Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, Mgr. Ross Douthat:

Like so many members of that class, Bloomberg combines immense talent with immense provincialism: his view of American politics is basically the famous New Yorker cover showing Manhattan’s West Side overshadowing the world, and his bedrock assumption is that the liberal paternalism with which New York is governed can and should be a model for the nation as a whole.

It’s an assumption that cries out to be challenged by a thoughtful center-right. If you look at the specific proposals being offered by Bloomberg and others, some just look like reruns of assault weapon regulations that had no obvious effect the last time they were tried. Others still might have an impact on gun violence, but only at a cost: the popular idea of cracking down hard on illegal handguns, for instance, would probably involve “stop and frisk” on a huge scale [....] But instead of a kind of skepticism and sifting from conservatives, after a week of liberal self-righteousness the spotlight passed instead to ... Wayne LaPierre.

So the Monsignor thinks LaPierre is a clown, and he's wondering how the right can come up with a dignified opposing partner to that leftist Bloomberg—more cosmopolitan than our bumpkin mayor (who lives on the East Side, thanks very much), with his Massachusetts accent, and equidistant from that imaginary center. He's not exactly sure what's called for, but he has an idea how it smells: "skepticism and sifting".

It's the urbane conservatism of yore! Remember? Brandy and cigars after dinner, and gossip about poor people, blacks and Jews, racehorses and actresses. People are savages, what can you do? Take away their guns and they'll kill each other with tire irons.

Your vulgar new-money conservatives seem to be all about doing things all the time; they didn't quite get the message that government is the problem. It'll be a terrible idea—build moats around all the schools, with alligators!—but an idea nevertheless. Your true clubbable conservative knew better: the job of the rulers is to cover their mouths while yawning, and be mildly amused.

But then some feel that when a bunch of little kids are murdered, mild amusement is not the appropriate response. Indeed Rabbi Jesus himself says something of the sort.