The Brooksie Awards

Kokoro ("Heart"), 17th-century Japanese calligraphy via Onmark Productions.

David Brooks writes:

In my work as projectile-eclectic philosopher and continental observer at good old Yale University, where I have served in recent years or at least months in an endowed chair as W.F. Buckley Memorial Professor of Humility Studies, I frequently have an opportunity to tell students eager to learn the writer's craft from a diligent if diffident craftsman that eighty percent of the work is done before a fellow puts thumb to thinkpad, in preparatory work, in the accumulation of the literary gold dust of fact and wisdom, and in hammering it into preliminary shape in the interior of one's mind.

Thus when it comes time for me to write a column, after a hearty breakfast and an hour's sitting meditation, I like to begin by gaming it out in [jump]

Singapore food pron

Lau Pa Sat satay. Via.

Woke up in the middle of the night with a blogger anxiety dream, I suppose engendered by the way I've neglected the site over the course of the Asian Vacasian, which is partly a function of various technical challenges, especially marshaling enough power points for sufficient time-periods to charge all our various devices and keeping track of where my reading glasses are. That and the power point issue are at least somewhat resolved at the moment.

It took a form like that of an indexing dream, where you toss and turn over an imaginary term that you might have spelled wrong, worrying that you'll lose it before you get to work: something I was determined to blog about but wouldn't have sufficient information [jump]

At the Sign of the Eminent Frog

Frog porridge shop, Lorong 19, Geylang.

En route

Yastreblyansky is going on a short Asian vacasian. At the moment in the Cathay Pacific terminal at JFK near the M&Ms shop (pictured). There will be no WiFi on the plane I believe (difficult negotiations with the Chinese authorities as yet not concluded). So blogging will be not merely light but, between this afternoon and sometime in Singapore on the other side of the International Dateline, as it were lighter than air. God Jul and Buon Natale to all!

Christmas Eve Sermon

Exotic pie. Ad art by Psyho Studio, Ukraine, via CK's Weblog.

The Christianists are saying that Piers Morgan was "smacked down" on the sodomy subject by Dr. Michael Brown, the former "LSD-using Jewish rock drummer" whose mission nowadays is to "proclaim salvation to the Jewish people". Actually, as you'd expect, the argument is quite familiar and easily dismissed (though only if you've either [a] memorized the Bible or [b] have easy and quick access to Dr. Google, as Morgan presumably didn't during the interview). But it also has a really funny twist that I'm sure I've never noticed before.

When Morgan asked Brown to cite just one instance of Jesus condemning homosexuality, he probably thought that he had already won the debate. But alas, he was hoisted on his own petard.

Brown cited not one, but three instances of Jesus condemning homosexuality.

Caption contest

Fairway Market, Broadway and 74th St., December 23 2013.

Et tu, Brute? Not exactly.

Moise Brutus.

Here's an inspirational tale being pushed by the rightwing wind machine, in today's Morning Bell from the Heritage Foundation: the story of Floridian Moise Brutus, who was 20 years old when a 2010 motorcycle accident left him a triple amputee and is now a college student and competitive cyclist in training for the 2016 Paralympics. The improbable villain of the story? Wicked big-government Medicaid! That is...

Don't you wag your foot at me, sir!

Monty Python foot via ComicVine.

Peggy Noonan on Ronald Reagan, New York Times, October 5, 1989:

I FIRST SAW HIM AS A FOOT, a highly polished brown cordovan wagging merrily on a hassock. I spied it through the door. It was a beautiful foot, sleek, perfectly shaped. Such casual elegance and clean lines! But not a big foot, not formidable, maybe even a little . . . frail. I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from un-smooth roads.

I was yanked from my reverie by the movement of an aide, who bent past the foot and murmured, ''You're in luck, Mr. President. The meeting with the speechwriters is canceled.'' The foot stopped, then wagged more merrily still. Talk and light laughter. Someone closed the door.

From Lawyers, Guns & Money, from Balloon Juice, from Eternity. I've restored the second paragraph which to my mind makes it less porn, but arguably more surreal.

Roman foot, by Fornasetti, Designer of Dreams.

Social Conservatives and Social Climbing

Shorter Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, "Social Conservatives and Social Science", New York Times, December 18, 2013:

Why don't social conservatives become economists? Why don't they become social scientists at all? Can't be because they're innumerate, or unable even for the sake of argument to suspend their preconceptions and prejudices, can it? Must be because all those liberal social scientists make them feel weird and unwelcome.

Via glitternglue.

And I guess it's not their bold entrepreneurial spirit that keeps them away from academia in favor of the choice between running their own businesses or living on wingnut welfare, either. I think it's mainly that they can get all the benefits of studying social sciences (like Ross Douthat, Harvard 2002, magna cum laude in history and literature, who prognosticates on social science week after week) without actually studying them.

Listening

Image from ESL.culips.

This from the presidential task force on NSA abuse is a particularly valid response to an annoying thing Obama does a good deal:

It is tempting to suggest that the underlying goal is to achieve the right “balance” between the two forms of security. The suggestion has an important element of truth. But some safeguards are not subject to balancing at all. In a free society, public officials should never engage in surveillance in order to punish [jump]

Jonah Ownah

I used the @twittername of Jonah Goldberg today, not in the hope of attracting his attention, but just because it autocompleted itself, in a remark about the use of the term by rightwingers to abuse the left:

@RightOrgs @jonhartmannjazz And rightwingers using the term "fascist" that way (@JonahNRO's trick) smells just the same. Just postmodern.
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) December 21, 2013

"Fascism," my friend added, "is the control of government by corporations," and that did attract his attention, however; not with the explosive defensiveness of a Glenn Greenwald, but with a kind of weary patience:

Image via And Magazine.

Cheap shots: Advent Edition

Rhetorical question?

why should all mortal flesh keep silent? http://t.co/WYjgbBrgfK #Advent
— Kathryn Jean Lopez (@kathrynlopez) December 19, 2013

OK, it's meant to be cute (From Kathryn Jean's "casual corner" at Patheos):

What do Fifty Shades of Grey, Downton Abbey, Andrea Bocelli, have in common with Benedictine nuns in Missouri? Billboard, and guess who’s been in the lead?

Habakkuk. Russian icon, 18th c. Via Wikipedia.

Single women look at the government as their husbands

Ann Coulter (via Asshole of the Day):

“By the way, Republicans don’t have a problem with women,” Coulter opined. “They have a problem with unmarried women who think, ‘No, we don’t need national defense, we need our birth control paid for.’”

“And why? Because single women look at the government as their husbands,” she added. “Please provide for me, please take care of me.”

Wikipedia:

Coulter has been engaged several times, but never married.

Now we know that's not exactly true! She's been sort of married the whole time.

 

How should I know? I'm just a federal judge!

NSA data collection. Photo by Julian Stratenschulte/EPA, via The Guardian.

Adam Serwer at MSNBC, showing how

Judge destroys ‘just metadata’ argument

it is the collection of metadata that Snowden’s leaked court order exposed – the frequency, duration, and identifying numbers for the calls – which can reveal a universe of information about a target even without capturing the content of the conversation. 

Croque-monsieur

Wordburglar, composer of the only known rap on the subject of the croque-monsieur.

New York Times London bureau chief Baron Stephan von Erlanger, in breaking news from Monaco, reports that the Saudi, Israeli, and French foreign ministries do not entirely approve of President Obama's foreign policy. No, that's making it sound too exciting. Some old retired guys who may possibly in some sense represent the Saudi and Israeli [jump]

Common to the Core

This (from NPR this morning) is the problem:

a southern California mom has created a new princess series with modern sensibilities. At the heart of her series, The Guardian Princess Alliance, is what animates any fairy tale: simple storytelling.

Publisher blurb:

Megyn Kelly was white--I mean right

Before everybody forgets about Kelly and her angry rejection of the idea of Santa Claus as penguin, which is somehow racist, and some of the responses which alleged that the historical St. Nicholas might have been sort of Turkish—

Father Christmas outsources to China!
"OK, elves, we need to hustle!!! Three million more VHS players and two million Barbies by Monday morning! Let's make those quotas!!" "Hao!!" (Via)

Just for the record, St. Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, was so not Turkish. Though his home province of Lycia was in the southwestern corner of what is now Turkey, it was culturally and ethnically Greek and had been for a very long time. The worship of Artemis of the [jump]

Bugger the imagination!

Dogg's Hamlet by the Whistler in the Dark company, Charlestown, Massachusetts.

Here's what Tom Stoppard claims to be willing, even eager, to put up with:

As for our spooks, I know what I want from them. I want them to eavesdrop on the phones, the emails, on every tap of the keyboard of anybody who comes under suspicion. Somebody somewhere has the responsibility, indeed the necessary duty, of identifying those who bear us ill. I would like there to be secret cameras in their houses. I would applaud the technological means to survey and interpret every breath they take.

Holy cow! Anybody who comes under suspicion? I am so not signing up for that! Why is it that Stoppard's protesting against our Surveillance State and I'm not? I'll get to that shortly.

What worries him to the point of getting him to sign on, with the rest of the 500-odd World's Leading Authors, to the petition published in Monday's Guardian for an International Bill of Digital Rights is something much, much worse—only it seems difficult to explain exactly what it is:

So you don't trust Obama? Compared to the Eye of Sauron?

.@pierre certainly is for me. When giant unaccountable corps align against a govt with electoral system I will always be biased toward govt
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) December 11, 2013

I'm pretty sure I really mean this, though it's always hard to be totally certain. Government is not always right by any means, and it may not be right in the present case, but if it is pitted against Microsoft, Facebook, Google, AOL, Yahoo, and LinkedIn that is to me a prima facie indication that it just might be right this time. Or not "right", that's absurd when you're talking about the behavior of intelligence agencies, but more interested than the corporations, in spite of appearances, in being on my side and on the side of the rabble in general.

Has there ever been a historical case where an elected government clearly in the wrong was opposed by the corporate establishment? Did the railway and telegraph magnates tell [jump]

Headquarters of Field Marshal Lord Raglan, sometime between 1855 and 1865. 

Friedman on education: In a class of his own

Image used (post-ironically) at JudWilhite.com.

I wanted to write something about last Sunday's column by Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Mystax Sapientis, on this year's Program for International Assessment (PISA) results in the evaluation of American 10th-graders, but the Jersey Jazzman just about has it completely covered in fine style, and you really have to read his post if you have not already done so.

The Jazzman does, as it happens, miss the one little thing that got me most overwhelmingly exercised. His Mustacherie quotes at length from the views of the head of the Pisa project, Andreas Schleicher, on what makes a successful school, in words that make a great deal of sense: