Data. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

David Brooks writes:

If you were to ask me to give a cute-sounding name to the hottest metaphysical trend in the intellectual world, I would call it Dataism, not to be confused with Dadaism,  after the android Data in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a soulless computer that knew the dimensions of everything and the value of nothing. In much the same way, our world is currently being quantified to a fare-thee-well, to the point where the pullulation of data threatens to overwhelm reality, blanketing it like a lead-filled duvet. There's a feeling out there that this is a good thing; that everything that can be measured should be measured, because data gives us the straight dope on the way things are, unmixed with the confusions of passion and bias, and this purity, like the purity of crystal, supposedly gives it a kind of magical power—enabling the scientist to predict the future.

Tiburtine Sibyl, from Ernst Freymund, Der Klugen Sibyllen verbessert astrologischer Weissagungs-Calender auf das Jahr 1741 (Nürnberg, 1741; VD18 90148967). From Research Fragments.

In coming months, I'm planning to take a long hard look at the universe of Dataism, seeing how it measures up against gut instinct on the turf, in relatively fair weather. When is it a good idea to give the facts a rain check and go with your intuition? When do the facts come up from behind to bound ahead in the stretch, leaving your intuition in the dust? What kinds of things are predictable with this modern numerology and what are not? 

I have to say I'm pretty skeptical. People have been trying to predict the future for centuries, and astrology, with all the numbers in the world, is no more successful than the Delphic oracle. Nevertheless, it's a known fact that data is really good at some things. 

In the first place, data has a way of showing you that something you thought was obviously true actually is not. For example, I'm told that casino gamblers believe in a phenomenon called the Just Universe, according to which if your luck has been going one way for a very long time, then it's time for it to start going the other way. Thus, when the roulette table at Monte Carlo hit black 26 times in a row, it was assumed that it was due for a similar streak of red. But according to Tversky and Kahneman, data proved that it never happened. 

Similarly, in a recent presidential election in a large Western country, members of the relatively conservative party were totally convinced that their candidate was going to win, displacing an unpopular leftist incumbent. There was just an electrical something in the air, they claimed; moreover, the relatively conservative campaign had more money than God, and was in the hands of a political wizard and math genius, or, rather, not exactly in his hands, which would have been illegal, for certain complicated reasons, but sort of run in parallel. Anyway one sniveling stripling statistician, on the basis of nothing but pure polling data, kept insisting that the unpopular leftist candidate was going to win, and he did. This is because the universe is not in fact just. And he probably had more money too. 

Second, data can reveal patterns in reality that simply thinking about things would not lead one to expect. Thus, I've always thought that if I used a lot of first-person singular pronouns in my speech or my writing that would mark me out as egotistical, which is probably why I hardly ever do. But as James Pennebaker of the University of Texas notes in his book, "The Secret Life of Pronouns", the real reason people use a lot of first-person pronouns is that they feel insecure. Thus, President Obama uses fewer first-person pronouns than any modern president. I don't think that means he has a self-esteem problem. 

By the same token, methods of statistical inference can be applied to the study of the question whether the grammatical structures used by a given writer, say Krugman, are more primitive, and his lexical selections less recherché, than those of another, say myself, proving that I really have nothing to be insecure about. 

In summary, data is transforming our world and is amazing stuff. But can it really predict the future? I'll just go check my Magic 8-Ball and let you know, heh-heh.

The prophet Daniel. Russian icon, 18th century, from Wikipedia (German).

Literary Corner

Image by Eefa Khalid for Dawn (Pakistan).

Best-written sentence in today's Times, by Robert F. Worth, Mark Mazzetti, and Scott Shane:

As the five men stood arguing by a cluster of palm trees, a volley of remotely operated American missiles shot down from the night sky and incinerated them all, along with a camel that was tied up nearby.

(Shouldn't be distracted, it's an upsetting article, but that camel! A perfect little poem.)

Worst-written sentence, by Thomas Friedman:

It’s hard to escape a visit to India without someone asking you to compare it to China.

(Field Marshall von Treppenwitz here, whose idea of reporting a trip is to report how he answered the questions everybody was asking him. But the spectacularly bad bit is the unintentional implication that the column is going to be about how he got out of India, or got out of going there altogether.)  

It was mortifying

Cilice, via Daily Mail.

From the Washington Post, via Doug at Balloon Juice:

After all three Masses on the weekend of Jan. 19-20, parishioners of St. Aloysius Catholic Church in Springfield, Ill., were handed a statement written by Bishop Thomas Paprocki. The bishop explained that St. Aloysius’ pastor, the Rev. Thomas Donovan, “is suffering from a psychological condition that manifests itself in self-bondage as a response to stress.”

The statement was a response to a 911 call in November by Donovan from the parish rectory. In it, the priest tells dispatchers he had placed himself in handcuffs and asks police to help free him. After the recording of Donovan’s 911 call rocketed across the Internet, Paprocki was in a unique situation. His priest had not done anything illegal, and yet he’d been found doing something most people would consider bizarre. In Paprocki’s 1,038-word response to parishioners, he took the unusual step of delving deep into Donovan’s psychological problem. With the priest’s consent, the statement includes a description of what Donovan’s own clinical therapist had diagnosed as “non-sexual self-bondage.”

Well, that explains everything.

Donovan’s hands were cuffed behind his back with the keyhole facing up, so he couldn’t unlock himself, according to the police report. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit and “a leather bondage-type mask with a bar in his mouth.” The officers uncuffed Donovan, and asked if he needed medical attention. The priest said he was fine, he was alone, and that he “does this from time to time.”

It was a non-sexual leather bondage-type mask. The kind you wear for your non-sexual bondage stuff. Like, with your buddies from work. When there's nothing good on TV.

What, exactly, “this” was must have been the topic of conversation when Donovan was summoned to Paprocki’s office 11 days later. During that meeting, the bishop learned that Donovan was “mortified” by what happened, but insisted he’d been alone “the whole time of this incident,” and “denied that there was any sexual component to this,” according to Paprocki’s statement.

OK, that's clear, then. There is not any sexual component to this, or "this".

The bishop said that after a review of Donovan’s “work and lifestyle patterns,” the diocese had found he “severely-compromised patterns of self-care with respect to diet, exercise, sleep, work hours, and unreasonable expectations of himself as a pastor.” Such patterns, the bishop continued, can lead a person to self-medicate. Sometimes that comes in the form of alcohol, drugs, gambling or pornography. In Donovan’s case, according to an unnamed therapist the bishop cited, stress reduction came in the form of self-bondage.

Oh, snap! Back up there a minute! Did you say "mortified"? As in "mortification of the flesh"? But that's totally normal, right? It's not sexual if it's theological. It's like the hair shirt and discipline, only hip. I mean, it's the 21st century, you can't expect a chap to go out to the desert and sit on a pillar. If he was mortified, that only means it was working, for goodness' sake!

Thaipusam, Georgetown, Penang, from RealMagick.

High Horse

Cross-posted to the New York Times:

• RobertS
• Queens, New York

FLAG

l have read the white paper on this and it is pretty clear that to kill Americans who are actively supporting, planning and carrying out operations against our country should be legal. If you want to comment then at least read what the government is basing this on. And I can't really see why anyone has a problem with this. I would rather they be killed then my family, friends, neighbors and citizens of the United States.

Get off you high horses, these people mean business and any American who sides with them gets what they deserve, a quick trip to paradise. Let the government do what needs to be done and I wish them good hunting, for all our sakes!

• David Bloom
• New York, NY

You really need to try to imagine that you are somebody like the nice Queens-dweller and good citizen I am sure you are with a family member or friend or neighbor who happens to be wandering around Yemen without a good reason, or without a reason that is clear to the US military. There are lots of people in Queens like that and just as nice as you: Arabic speakers on a study break, young men looking for wives, businesspeople making contacts. I am a hundred percent sure that President Obama doesn't want to kill such a person and works very hard to avoid it, but I don't think he succeeds in avoiding it a hundred percent of the time. And I am mindful that not all presidents are as conscientious as he is.

I really am on a high horse here, of lives and fortunes and sacred honor. If you say you would rather have innocent people killed than be endangered yourself you are not being what I would call a good American.

High Horse, by Bloody Bishop.

I might add that I'm not even yet ready to condemn Obama on this—still wrestling—but an argument like that of Robert S is really how "the terrorists will have won."

Hardly shocking

Man Bites Dog. From Mr. Smash Goes to Washington.

From Karoli at Crooks & Liars:

If you're Al Gore and you own 20 percent of Current TV, and Current TV is sold to Al Jazeera, which is owned by Qatar's royal family, and Qatar's royal family also profits from oil trading, have you sold out the cause of global warming?

That's the question Howie Kurtz brought up on Reliable Sources this morning. I think it's a manufactured issue, but Dana Milbank begs to differ, saying "[H]e's been a big spokesman on global warming, a principled man and now he is this big, fat target." Continuing his rant, Milbank said Gore is "worth $300 million more than Mitt Romney and basically he's seen as a guy now who enriched himself, rather than advancing his cause --opening up to the criticism of people like this global warming denier."

The Blaze writer Amy Holmes was predictably banal in her response, claiming Gore has "been telling the rest of the world to, you know, restrain and constrain our spending while he personally is becoming a wealthier man through, you know, his attack on Mother Nature."

I don't think that Holmes is banal, I think she's a lunatic. When did Gore tell us to constrain our spending? When did he attack Mother Nature? Does she think it's patronizing or sexist to suggest that Mother Nature can't handle a few greenhouse gases on her own, is that it? No, I didn't think so either. She's making it up out of who knows what kind of fantasies. And that "restrain and constrain" is authentic Palinese.

Milbank is an extraordinary little bitch, there's no other way of putting it, if only for the repetition of metaphorical "big" and "fat" so he can middle-school taunt Gore without violating the Village Code. In the same way he and Kurtz manage to slime Gore without legally slandering him, by conversational indirection and the dextrous use of Cokie's Law.

Kurtz just asks if there's something wrong with being an advocate for the environment and selling a cable channel to the Emir of Qatar, but doesn't allege anything in particular. Gore, of course, publicly wishes people would use less hydrocarbon fuel, ostensibly in order to save our planet for future generations of humans and other animals, and plants too (but who knows what he's really after, bwahahaha?). The Emir makes money off of people using more hydrocarbons. Isn't it odd?

Milbank explains: what's wrong with it, actually, is that Gore has made himself a "target". He is now "open to criticism"—meaning, I suppose, that they're talking about it where Cokie Roberts has her hair done. Milbank is criticizing Gore not out of any idea that Gore has done something actually wrong but simply because criticizing him is possible. And fun, naturally, if you're Dana.

Bodhi, the debonair dog. From Daily Beast.

There is something rather bad that Gore might conceivably have done: he might have sold the channel to Al Jazeera in the full knowledge that Al Jazeera was going to use it to propagandize in favor of burning more carbon. Except, you know, that they don't. In fact Al Jazeera is notable for the high quality of its environmental coverage, far better than any US channel, and the Emirate aims to generate 16% of its electricity from solar power by 2018 (the US would be pleased to make 10% by 2025). And it was Qatar that sponsored last year's big climate change conference (though even when they're in New York Al Jazeera still gives them more air time than US network TV, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, or even C-Span).

Do Howard Kurtz and Dana Milbank ever ask about Fox News being owned by Rupert Murdoch, who is an owner of Genie Oil & Gas and American Shale Oil LLC (with Dick Cheney!)? Or how Fox Business News doesn't mention Murdoch's name when it is touting the Genie Venture?

Fox Business host Stuart Varney declared, "The next big oil power in the middle east, Israel? Can you believe that? Well, it may be the case because of shale oil. Israel's got a lot of it, and we're covering it."

And Murdoch has after all been running a criminal enterprise in England for years ("It's really chilling, though hardly shocking,"  said Kurtz, that NewsCorp was spying on the personal communications of Tom Watson, MP). And Fox News says that the global temperature basically hasn't changed since the Ice Age, etc., etc., openly encouraging people to stop worrying about it. Isn't Murdoch a "target"?

",Jewish owned press" have been sternly criticised, suggesting link to Jewish reporters.Don't see this, but apologise unreservedly.
— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) November 18, 2012

Kurtz boldly said, "The wording is too cryptic to know for what exactly he's apologizing."

Isn't Murdoch "open to criticism"? I guess he is. But then I guess if you accused Murdoch of advancing his financial interests through his control over the editorial operations of his newspapers and television stations that would be quite different from suggesting that Al Gore sold his business somehow corruptly. Saying such things about Murdoch would be "hardly shocking".

Dana Milbank calls Nico Pitney a dick. From Gawker.

Certain scientists

Ordovician sea with trilobites and other animals, ca. 450 million  years ago,  from  Paleoart. But then there's evidence on both sides of the table (on top of it and under it), and Certain Scientists say it's only about 4,000 years old, contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in China, and the migration of Ethiopians to Kenya.

Generations Radio host Kevin Swanson interviewing the documentary filmmaker Kevin Peeples, from Right Wing Watch via Wonkette:

Swanson: I’m beginning to get some evidence from certain doctors and certain scientists that have done research on women’s wombs after they’ve gone through the surgery, and they’ve compared the wombs of women who were on the birth control pill to those who were not on the birth control pill. And they have found that with women who are on the birth control pill, there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb. They’re just like dead babies. They’re on the inside of the womb. And these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.

Peeples: We’ve actually heard on both sides of that. We’re researching that and want to make sure we speak correctly to that in our second film. But we have medical advice on both sides of the table there, so we want to make sure that we communicate that properly.

Swanson: It would seem, and I realize that people are a little split on what are all the effects of the birth control pill, but it would seem that there’s a tremendous risk in the use of it for the life of children.

Just wow. This man still has the creativity of a six-year-old. The mommy and the daddy do it, you see, and the violence of the action makes an egg hatch, up in the mommy's fallopian tubes. Out drifts a tiny sleeping creature, like a fairy, toward its bed in the womb—but no! There's this noxious birth control gas, it struggles to breathe, beats its tiny fists against the wall, and expires! And this happens again and again until this womb is a catacomb.

But we have medical advice on both sides of the table there, and other explorers say what we're talking about is just trilobites, ancient marine fossils, evoking babies, the way manatees made people imagine mermaids and rhinoceroses seemed to be unicorns. Who can say? The womb is so old, and vast!

The Obama Doctrine

While all the emoprogs out there are running around howling about Obama the mass murderer, a story by NPR's Ari Shapiro suggests he thinks he's earning that Nobel Prize by a "shift in the way the U.S. wages war." This is what's signaled by the three big national security nominations of Kerry to State, Hagel to Defense, and Brennan to the CIA—two Vietnam vets and a crypto-Jesuit. In the less than happy phrasing of Karen Greenberg, director of the National Security Program at the Fordham University Law School,

"Remember, President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize by saying war is necessary... He's somebody who understands, to his mind, what he sees as the need of war to create peace."

(I would say most people are people who understand, to their minds, what they see themselves as understanding, whether they indeed understand it or not, and whether the reader understands it or not too.)

Via Chitramala.

In any case, it's about the Drone Wars, and other such "targeted and surgical" operations, and the general End of Big War as We Know It. Obama really means it, as I have been speculating, as a way of making war less grievous and less cruel, and above all smaller:

The White House emphasizes that both Kerry and Hagel understand the full cost of war — in money and in lives. Obama says he believes that makes them the right men for this moment, as the administration shifts its approach following a decade of big, expensive, bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, puts it: "I don't think we can necessarily say without a doubt that there will never be a large war again. However, certainly we've moved conceptually toward a more targeted, surgical approach that focuses on al-Qaida."

The argument as I imagine it—certainly not the way Father Brennan would make it—is like this:

1. There's no such thing as a just war. No matter how unavoidable it may, after a certain point, have become, no matter how much in the right one side may be, it's always the result of a failure.

No, I don't know what could have been done short of war to stop Hitler and the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, or for that matter what the Pandavas could have done to avoid slaughtering the Kauravas, as Arjuna wished he might do when he paused, before the ultimate battle, for a conversation with his charioteer, who happened to be a god and could thus explain a good deal. All I claim to know is that it follows directly from the existence of a state of war that people are going to be doing things they know to be morally wrong, taking those Tough Decisions, committing unjustifiable homicide.

Soldiers (including sailors, marines, etc.; I do not use the phony-glorifying terms "warrior" and "warfighter") know this. Marine captain Timothy Kudo has recently written eloquently about it:

While I don’t know why individual veterans resort to suicide, I can say that the ethical damage of war may be worse than the physical injuries we sustain. To properly wage war, you have to recalibrate your moral compass. Once you return from the battlefield, it is difficult or impossible to repair it. 

VA has started calling this problem “moral injury,” but that’s as deceptive a euphemism as “collateral damage.” This isn’t the kind of injury you recover from with rest, physical therapy and pain medication. War makes us killers. We must confront this horror directly if we’re to be honest about the true costs of war.

2. Nothing can mitigate this—not grace and gallantry, not the wickedness of the enemy—except reducing it: seeing that fewer people get killed, in particular fewer of those that are not directly trying to kill you, or "civilians". And that's not good enough either, but it's all you can do. And it can take distinctly ungraceful and ungallant forms.

3. Drone warfare is very ungallant. In terms of traditional military gallantry it is downright cowardly, probably more so than any form of fighting previously invented. (That's only true for the shooter: I would imagine the confederates on the ground calling in the strike may need to be very brave indeed.) It is also very efficient, especially in contrast to such methods as carpet bombing and poison gas: potentially, it allows you to kill only those persons who are trying to kill you. According to NPR,

There is wide uncertainty about how many civilians have been killed in U.S. drone strikes. One estimate from the New America Foundation says around 300 civilians were killed in Pakistan from 2004 to the beginning of this year.

There is at least one case where U.S. officials, including Panetta, knew that a woman was present at a possible strike site, and the attack was ordered anyway. A U.S. official told NPR a strike with non-combatants in the area would only happen in "exceptional circumstances against very high-level terrorists."

Incidentally, Father Brennan walked back the lie, or incredibly naive assertion, that there had been no civilian deaths for 12 months up to June 2011; now he says,

there had been a period of time where the U.S. "had no information about a single civilian being killed." But, he added, "unfortunately in war there are casualties, including among the civilian population." He said "sometimes you have to take life to save lives."

And you know what "the U.S. had no information" means: it means the information had no official status as it floated up and down the hierarchy.

It's amazing how freely they've suddenly begun talking about it:

As head of the CIA, Panetta oversaw the U.S. drone campaign against al-Qaida. When the intelligence identified the location of a particular target, Panetta often had to decide whether to fire.

"As a Catholic, suddenly realizing I had the responsibility of saying, 'We're going to go after somebody,' it was something I did not take lightly," he says. "It's a lot of responsibility."

Panetta justifies the use of drones as a necessary tool to "keep the country safe," which he says was his mission both as head of the CIA and as defense secretary.

"I felt they were legitimate if we followed the law, and did what we had to do under our law, to make sure that we were being true to the American people with regard to our responsibility," he says.

Is Panetta sure that's not going to get him jailed? And why not?

In any event it's really ugly and being carried out by people who are not entirely to be trusted, and I may add that I don't think it's winning any hearts and minds, but no, Obama is not a mass murderer. As yet. Just a second-rate theologian, which makes him an order of magnitude better than most of the theologians on the case.

B.A.D. Karma

Update: Welcome, visitors!

It's Blogroll Amnesty Day, when bloggists everywhere and in memory of the great Jon Swift/Al Weisel are encouraged, via Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, to link to somebody our readers (if any) might not otherwise think of linking to.

From Zen Comix.

We're supposed to link to blogs smaller than our own, and we're not supposed to make crass jokes about how there are no blogs smaller than our own, which makes it a bit of a challenge for me. NO, I mean because I don't actually know whether they are or not, so if you're a friend of rectification who believes that your blog is smaller please be assured that I thought you were going to link to me but I'm not disappointed at all. Really, I don't mind.

Everything I really read is already on the blogroll anyway. The following are the cream of an afternoon spent looking for new stuff.

The Non Sequitur

The Hasbara Buster

Dohiyi Mir

Idées reçues: vérités notoires d'aujourd'hui et d'hier

Shut up David Brooks

Gustave Flaubert, via G0ne Fishin9.

Cheap shots, 2/1/2013

PresObama said a decade of war is ending War on Terror is 25yrs old It will continue PresKennedy said"it will be a long twilight struggle"
— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) January 27, 2013

OK, Senator, I get that the War on Terror really started in 1988 when Al Qa'eda was founded, but you'll have to admit we didn't commit that many troops right away, or even, in fact, know about it, and then what did happen 10 years ago wasn't the War on Terror either but the War on George Bush's Inferiority Complex in Iraq, although a kind of Qa'eda ultimately showed up once the room had been cleared for them. But I'm virtually certain President Kennedy wasn't talking about Osama in 1961. Or even Khrushchëv.

Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.

What did you do in the struggle against war today, Chuck? What did you do today about poverty and disease, Senator? What did you do exactly to earn the right to throw Kennedy quotes in people's faces?

Chuck thought the long twilight struggle was the Romney campaign. August 2011, from the Washington Post.

You might be a conservative if...

The following is a Heritage statement on immigration, in its entirety. Read it carefully; there will be a test:

America’s heritage of immigration has fueled our nation’s strength and diversity, yet our immigration system has become so politicized and dysfunctional that it causes untold personal tragedies, strains the fiscal capacity of public services in many states, and prevents many from pursuing the American Dream. Complex, comprehensive legislation based on back-room deals never works, and the Senate immigration proposal announced this week and echoed yesterday by President Obama—to the extent that it repeats the mistakes of the past—will further polarize Americans, fail to solve the real policy problems, and make matters worse.

Immigrants come to our country for freedom and economic opportunity. We are concerned that many aspects of the framework for comprehensive reform will undermine the very foundations that make for America’s exceptional success. Policymakers should refrain from committing to such broad statements before the actual legislative language is available for public review. A proposal that would grant individuals who are in this country illegally a pathway to citizenship violates the rule of law and is unfair to those who have obeyed our immigration laws.

The Heritage Foundation believes that America’s immigration system must be reformed through an open and public step-by-step, problem-solving approach that unites Americans and creates a system that welcomes immigrants, protects our sovereignty, encourages assimilation, and expands opportunities for everyone. Once such common-sense reforms are in place and working, lawmakers can determine how to respond in a fair, compassionate, and constitutional way to those who have come to our country illegally.

Questions:

1. What were the mistakes of the past? Does the Senate proposal repeat them? If so, what untold tragedies will they cause, which states will they strain the fiscal capacities of the public services of, and how will they prevent many from pursuing the American Dream? Be specific.

2. To what extent does the Senate proposal repeat the mistakes of the past? Is it enough to polarize Americans, fail to solve problems, and make matters worse? How many problems and how much worse? State your evidence.

3. Which aspects of the framework for reform will undermine the very foundations that make for America's success? Which foundations in particular?

4. What broad statements have which policymakers publicly committed to?

5. Why is it OK for the Heritage Foundation to make broad statements before the actual legislative language is available for review?

6. How does a law establishing a way for undocumented immigrants to be in compliance with the law violate the rule of law?

7. How is a law establishing the path to citizenship unfair to those who have obeyed immigration laws? Is it more fun to be illegal, or what?

8. Does the Heritage Foundation have an alternative plan? Describe in detail how it avoids untold tragedies, straining the fiscal capacities of the public services of many states, and preventing many from pursuing the American dream?

9. What exactly would be the harm in being fair, compassionate, and constitutional right now?

If you can answer 5 to 7 of these questions based on the given information, you might be a conservative. I whipped off my metaphorical cap and cried, "This thing is totally semantically empty!"

Cattle Car, via Rocketboom.

First they came for the collateralized debt obligations, and I said nothing...

Idaho state senator Sheryl Nuxall, via ThinkProgress, explaining why she compared insurance companies under Obamacare to Jews under the Third Reich:

“I felt badly for the Jews — it wasn’t just Jews, but Jews, and Christians, and Catholics, and priests. My thing was they didn’t know what was going on. The insurance companies are not realizing what’s going to end up in their demise.”

It was an unbearably poignant sight as they shoved the corporations into the cattle cars—manufacturers separated from their finance arms, banks from their brokerages. I saw a mother company pushing her little subsidiary away: "It's too late for me... run, darling, run... for the Caymans!"

Two, three, many GOPs

David Brooks writes:

Bette Davis and William Dix in The Nanny, 1965. Via Unimonster's Crypt.

The Republicans have been getting down to cleaning up the place, with admirable dispatch. Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana announced to the National Republican Committee that you actually can go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, and that it's time to say goodbye to being the stupid party. Representative Paul Ryan spoke to the National Review Institute on why prudence is preferable to spasmodic protest, and I'm sure Mr. Buckley was smiling down when I typed "spasmodic", a word that young idiot Lowry probably doesn't even know how to spell.

For some reason the Institute didn't ask me to speak, although I'm told Charles Krauthammer did give me a shout out.* Of course it's partly the price I pay for remaining serenely above the fray, as a public intellectual, and I don't really mind. I do have some advice for Republicans, though, to the effect that stupid is as stupid does, and if they want to get out of that hole Obama dug for them, they'd better get smart.

Jindal may have put on his little nanny uniform and spanked the party over its stubborn stupidity, but the only policy ideas he offered were as resolutely stupid as ever, repeating the same old saw about how government is evil but governors are good. There seemed to be a conviction that it was fine to be stupid, as long as you didn't look stupid, which is not the way the party is going to reinvent itself.

In the first place, once you've explained that the government is a vicious all-devouring beast, it becomes problematic to articulate a positive program for doing something with it. It confuses people. Frankly, that myth of Encroaching Government and its endless duel with Liberty is about ready to be retired. It has done a wonderful job of recruiting voters from the South and West since Barry Goldwater first took it on tour in 1964, but it will not going to be able to squeeze out much more, now that they're starting to realize that their disability checks and the little scooters they ride around the WalMart with actually come from Washington.

Those Republicans are probably not going to change. It's hard to dress for dinner if you didn't bring a tux, and it's hard to detach yourself from imprudent old ideas if you don't know where to purchase some new ones. Ideas exist in the brain, like a comfortable old line of rail track, and you can't get a new one simply by derailing; that wouldn't be prudent at all. You need an entrepreneur to buy up the the right of way and bribe all the authorities.

What's needed is an additional Republican party, a Smarty party if you will, suited to the more sophisticated conservatives of the coasts and the Rust Belt from Minneapolis to Cleveland. In place of the tedious old myth of the Encroaching Government, it could make use of some new myths, such as Mancur Olson's myth of the Bloated Government and Charles Murray's myth of the American Split into two nations, one high-IQ and one low-IQ. The new Republicans could develop a cocktail of policy ideas to confront both of these imaginary crises at once. Like spiffy new institutions to replace the bloated and sclerotic ones targeted at the needs of the low-IQs, such as day-trading accounts for seniors instead of social security, and no institutions at all for the high-IQs, how does that sound?

Hulk Hogan as Mr. Nanny, 1993, from Bleacher Report.

*When asked who his favorite liberal columnist was, he answered, “David Brooks”  prompting chuckles from the audience.

Never degrading and humiliating enough for you, Jerry

Ancient Roman military latrine, based on ruins of Vercovicium at Housesteads, Northumberland. Painter uncredited.

Retired General William "Jerry" Boykin, famous for explaining to the Ummah that the God of Islam is an idol—and saying Allah is an idol is kind of like saying Jesus is Athena's husband, so wrong it's not even offensive—has now come forward with his problems with ladies and their lady parts coming into combat.

“What I’ve raised is the issue of mixing the genders in those combat units, where there is no privacy, where they’re out on extended operations and there’s no opportunity for people to have any privacy whatsoever,” the retired lieutenant general insisted.

“Now, as a man who has been there and as a man who has some experience in those kinds of units, I certainly don’t want to be in that environment with a female because it’s degrading and humiliating enough to do your personal hygiene and the other normal functions among your teammates,” Boykin opined. (Raw Story)

Yes, bad enough having those nancy-boys scoping out his manly characteristic in the shower, now it'll be girls peeping when he's on the potty! By all means let them fight, but they have to have their own latrines, just like Mrs. Boykin.

Actually, given that he's now serving as executive vice president of the Family Research Council, he might want to look into doing some Family Research on how many American families are having to cope with the single-toilet lifestyle. Perhaps we ought to move them all into Spartan-style single-sex dorms. So the degradation and humiliation can be held to the appropriate levels.

Veni, vidi, vavavoomsi

Rick Scott Conquistador (2011). From The Reid Report.

Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the former vice-presidential candidate, said Sunday that President Obama was ignoring the nation’s problems, choosing instead to focus on the “political conquest” of the Republican Party. (New York Times, 1/27/2013)

That explains everything! That Obama never really believed in the two-party solution. He wants to settle Democrats in Republican territory, where they'll take all the water and arable land for themselves, with their God-and-guns, and Republicans will be reduced to working as hospital orderlies and cucumber pickers. Every time he offers to up the Medicare age, every time he fails to prosecute a criminal banker, he's planting another flag in your Right Bank hills.

You guys are so right to not cooperate—probably the only thing that's keeping you from being totally absorbed.

Bush the Crusader (2008). Image from HorsesAss.

Hipster gun nuts

Image from AttentionDoozers.

From the promotion page for the NRA Wine Club.

Mikeb302000 has discovered a softer side to the National Rifle Association: The NRA Wine Club, which will ship you half a dozen carefully selected bottles every month. A little vernaccia, maybe, to enjoy as you clean that AR-15, or pack the heat of a mellow pinot noir in your Cellar Master Wine Tote for afters when you're out on the prowl for intruders or illegal immigrants. And don't forget that you're helping defend basic freedoms with every sip.

Next up: The NRA Record Club Album of the Month—Ted Nugent Sings the Mel Tormé Songbook.

The Vast Mobility

David Brooks writes:

One of the most entertaining spectacles of the Age of Obama in this second act is going to be the gigantic pro wrestling match over inequality in our society, between Nature in the form of meritocracy and Artifice in the form of government. Because meritocracy, the market-driven process that lifts some of us out of the equality in which we were all born to float to the top like the oil in a vinaigrette, is in direct conflict with the collectivism of the Obama government, which aims to leave us all the same, in cheap black suits with no lapels and a Little Red Book to wave in the air as the president drives by in his limousine. Who do you think is going to win? 

We are all born equal, of course, each in his or her appropriate station in life, and then certain things happen to make us less equal. The first thing is our education system, a gigantic crane claw machine that our colleges and universities use to pluck high school kids out of our towns and villages, but at different levels of skill and resources, so that Harvard, with an unlimited supply of quarters, gets all the teddy bears, while Arizona State has to be satisfied with plastic key rings.

From Lindsay and Christian's wedding at the Rockefeller Chapel.

The smart kids from Leipzig, Pennsylvania, Elbow, Nevada, and West New York, New Jersey who make it into the top schools, coming from a situation of happy equality, now find themselves in tooth-and-claw competition with graduates of ivy-covered boarding schools and Montessori programs who have spent the last twelve years taking lessons in getting themselves noticed, acquiring distinctive accomplishments, attitudes, and manners. Used to a social scene that values roots, they are plunged into one in which mobility is what counts, people flitting like hummingbirds from culture to culture and taking just a sip from each, rootless cosmopolitans concerned only with self-fulfillment. Raised to sweep off their caps and tug their forelocks in the presence of the great, now they encounter the great as their slovenly roommates, leaving the dishes in the sink and the underwear on the floor, careless and supremely confident. 

What's amazing is that this works, turning our slum kids and peasant children into elegant young members of the ruling class. Of course they can't go home again, if only because there's nobody there who could afford to employ them, but there are enclaves all over, from Hoboken to Palo Alto, that serve as magnets where they can live with their kind, with a sufficiency of coffee bars, yoga studios, and Korean restaurants. Or they could get a Ph.D. in political science and get a teaching job, because it turns out a degree from one of those same ten or eleven schools is the main thing you need to get a political science teaching job, according to Robert Oprisko (and a good thing too! though Oprisko, for some reason, seems to think graduates of other places might be able to handle the work).

Barack and Michelle Obama come out of these hothouses of aristocracy, as do most of the members of the administration, most of us writers at the Times, and many of our readers—imagine trying to follow my sophisticated prose if you did your lit classes in Austin or Buffalo! And yet they are doing their best to undo the effects of the system, by redistributing money from high to low. The health care bill alone takes $20,000 from the average member of the 1% and divvies it up among between 25 and 50 more or less indigent families.

University of Chicago women's soccer.

In the first place, this is not enough to make a difference: it's like dividing up a spoonful of caviar ("Care for an egg, dear?"). And then it's going to people in places like the San Joaquin valley, where most don't even have high school degrees, and to make matters worse, they have to spend it on health insurance so they don't even have a chance of spending it where it counts, on tuition at Brown or Williams, or getting a pied-à-terre in Dumbo. 

Obama's relentless focus on redistribution ignores the reality that inequality in our country is caused by the fact that there just aren't enough really good schools to take care of everybody. And centralizing all the decision-making in Washington isn't going to stop the Georgetown graduates from staying there instead of moving back to Iowa and Nebraska to teach their cousins how to make a macchiato and wear those little fedoras. It will just mean more of a division than ever between people who know how to use the lobster fork and people who eat at Red Lobster. 

And I'm not saying Republicans have a better plan for dealing with this. In the first place, Republicans don't think it needs to be dealt with. All I'm saying is, there ought to be a second place here somewhere, but Obama doesn't know what it is any more than I do.

If only he'd written the dissertation instead of that book, he could have had a respectable job. 

Cheap shots 1/25/13: Don't touch that uterus

Senator Paul gesticulated furiously as Secretary Clinton listened, with downcast eyes. Image from Grub Street Lodger.

You think he has mommy issues?

RAND PAUL: I think that ultimately with your leaving you accept responsibility for the worst culpability for the worst tragedy since 9/11. And I really mean that. Had I been president at the time and I found that you did not read the cables from Benghazi, you did read the cables from Ambassador Stevens, I would have relieved you of your post. I think it’s inexcusable. The thing is that, we can understand that you’re not reading every cable. I can understand that maybe you’re not aware of the cable from the ambassador in Vienna that asked for $100,000 for an electrical charging station. I can understand that maybe you’re not aware that your department spent $100,000 on three comedians who went to India on a promotional tour called “Make Chi Not War,” but I think you might be able to understand and might be aware of the $80 million spent on a consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif that will never be built. I think it’s inexcusable that you did not know about this and did not read these cables. (Washington Free Beacon)

Image from Democratic Underground.

The Vixen wonders:

Have we reached infinite football-pull, where it turns out Obama was Lucy all the time? And it's the GOP who will never ever kick the ball? I don't know what that means, but I kind of like it. The GOP can't move the ball without Obama's permission. And he's already said he'll protect our entitlement programs. So what do they get? Niente?  It sort of looks like niente.

In a word, yes. Weird, I know, but we'll just have to start getting used to the idea that you don't always have to be the victim.

11th Doctor vs. a Dalek, by Wild Guru Larry. From Photoree.

Caroli at Crooks & Liars:

[Fox News commentator Keith Ablow] pronounces President Obama's push for gun control in the wake of the Newtown tragedy as a "hijack" of the issue in order to advance his "personal desire for gun control." Ablow then goes on to say that the real problem is "untreated mental illness."

Ah, but whose mental illness? You probably think that Fox is blaming the mental illness of the Newtown shooter, to deflect it from the lethal instrument?

It's way weirder than that:

Claiming "the autonomy of others did him no favors as a kid when he was abandoned again and again," Ablow goes on to say that this abandonment led Obama to believe "the collective needs to be empowered and all the better if [Obama is] the center of the collective and the most powerful person."

In other words, all this talk of gun control has nothing to do with the rights of children and innocent individuals to live their lives without having them cut short by some lunatic with an assault rifle. No, really, it's just about how Barack Obama's mother left him with her parents in Hawaii while she earned a living and a PhD.

Barack's difficult childhood has left him with an insane compulsion to take your firearms away. He's a ballistokleptomaniac! And his madness inevitably leaves children all over the country unarmed and unable to defend themselves against it. Get that man a psychiatrist quick, or we'll all die!

From ErinEliseMusic.

Don't touch that uterus, Ma'am, it's a crime scene.

Should a recently introduced bill in New Mexico become law, rape victims will be required to carry their pregnancies to term during their sexual assault trials or face charges of “tampering with evidence.” (Think Progress)

Doesn't say where they'll auction the little nippers off after trial.

Concussive evidence

Can't tell you how much I hoped she'd get a chance to say something like this, and say it!

Via ThinkProgress.

What'd I tell you?

Image from Ask the Mighty Italian Moustache.

At +972, Ami Kaufman notes that the Knesset will be a little less fascist than it was before the elections, and with lots more women and social activist types, so that's to the good, and that the biggest losers are American political consultants:

Stan Greenberg: The polls at certain points had Labor well over 20 seats, yet they ended with a mere 15 seats (99% of the vote counted). A mere two seats more than the all-time low that Ehud Barak was responsible for. It takes American genius to only get two more seats after the social protests that should have boosted Labor sky high, if they had played their cards right.

Arthur Finkelstein: According to reports, Finkelstein (who left the country just days before the election) was the architect of unifying Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu, worth 42 seats back then. They’ve dropped to 33, maybe less (99% of the vote counted).

You read it here (for example here) that Netanyahu was a lot weaker than he looked, and knew it, so we're a winner in the prediction stakes, and I suppose his continuing weakness will help the IDF, the Mossad, and the indispensable President Obama keep him from invading Iran, so they're winners too.

Wild man Tom Friedman, Mystax Mysteriorum (Mustache of Mysteries), has an idea on that score:

Rather than negotiating with Iran’s leaders in secret — which, so far, has produced nothing and allows the Iranian leaders to control the narrative and tell their people that they’re suffering sanctions because of U.S. intransigence — why not negotiate with the Iranian people? President Obama should put a simple offer on the table, in Farsi, for all Iranians to see: The U.S. and its allies will permit Iran to maintain a civil nuclear enrichment capability — which it claims is all it wants to meet power needs — provided it agrees to U.N. observers and restrictions that would prevent Tehran from ever assembling a nuclear bomb.

He assumes, I think, that the offer has already been made and rejected in secret. He might get a big surprise! I know if I were his Supreme Leadership I'd be suspicious of such a proposal made in secret—I'd remember what happened with North Korea in 1994—but I'd jump on a public one if the U.S. put out a credible timetable. Friedman's a fool, and it's a fool's idea, but sometimes that's just what one needs, as when the mustached psychotic of Broadway and 79th stops you on the sidewalk to tell you to tie your shoe.

Another foolish idea from Mr. Mystax is this:

On Israel-Palestine, the secretary of state should publicly offer President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority the following: the U.S. would recognize the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank as the independent State of Palestine on the provisional basis of the June 4, 1967, lines, support its full U.N. membership and send an ambassador to Ramallah, on the condition that Palestinians accept the principle of “two states for two peoples” — an Arab state and a Jewish state in line with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 — and agree that permanent borders, security and land swaps would be negotiated directly with Israel. The status of the refugees would be negotiated between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which represents all Palestinians inside and outside of Palestine. Gaza, now a de facto statelet, would be recognized as part of Palestine only when its government recognizes Israel, renounces violence and rejoins the West Bank. 

Or, as his alter id Really Tom Friedman puts it,

In the future we’re all going to speak languages we can’t understand and we must begin with strife in the Middle East. Or North Africa. It works if you just speak loud, simple English. Like: “NO ONE. KNOWS WHAT. JUDEA. AND SAMARIA. ARE SUPPOSED. TO BE. MAYBE THE ROMANS DID.” Or: “I’M SORRY. ABOUT YOUR. GRANDFATHER. YOU CAN’T HAVE. THESE OLIVE GROVES. ANYMORE. BECAUSE SOME HASIDS. FROM LONG ISLAND. LIVE THERE NOW.” 

This time I like the version published in the Times, with the formal recognition, better. In fact it kind of takes my breath away. If Serious People are starting to think like this, perhaps the hopey-changey has really arrived.

Image from Mouse Medicine.