White House Fool Report: Haunted, but maybe not *that* haunted

The village of Kafr Daryan, with a report in Indonesian accusing "Crusader invaders" of targeting civilians for death there. Arrahmah.com. Sorry, that's what they're calling it. I'm sure you'd rather they didn't. One weird trick for stopping people from talking like that would be not killing civilians.

Hey Mr. P

Sorry to hear about the armed maniacs in your house. I mean, I guess the Secret Service guys were supposed to be there, but the other one...

*rimshot*

I'll get down to the point: Last May, you told us

Note on centrism

VACCINATION against SMALL POX.  Mercenary & Merciless spreaders of Death & Destruction driven out of Society.

Cherub: The Preserver of the Human Race

Man in red: Aye, Aye. I always order them to be constantly out in the air, in order to spread the contagion.

Knife labels: The curse of human kind. (Royal Society)

Eula Biss (author of On Immunity: An Inoculation) on NPR:

There's a great blog, Science-Based Medicine — and one of the writers on that blog pointed out that when you split the difference between information and misinformation, you still end up with misinformation. So I think there are situations where a middle ground is not desirable. Though I'm the kind of thinker who's very drawn to compromises and to nuances...

Cross-posted at Booman Tribune.

Orientalism

Thugs strangling a traveler, early 19th century. Via Wikipedia.

You might not think it, but I do get embarrassed sometimes at how little I have to say that's critical about President Obama. It's partly because I'm so continually appalled at the attacks on him and their overtly racist character; as Melissa Harris-Perry was suggesting a few weeks ago, his presidency is in a lot of ways more important than he is himself. And then I'm not seeing a lot of practicable alternatives to his management, in the current situation in the United States, with a paralyzed legislature and a poisoned Supreme Court and a rotten and poorly informed political press and a rogue intelligence community that, I'm convinced, defies him; Obama is so much the least objectionable part of our establishment, and we ought to be trying to strengthen his hand against the rest of it.

Intellectually, though, he can be pretty ordinary or unimaginative (who can't?), and this bit of analysis from Professor Cole on the situation in Iraq and Syria struck me as kind of important:

Blood moon rising

Blood Moon. By Ironshod at DeviantArt.

Is there an editor in the house? I mean the house on 42nd Street, where Jonathan Weisman writes:

White House Fool Report: Less shocking and awful?

Resistance fighter Idris Kobane, from the Kurdish village of Kobane just inside the Syrian border. Photo by Robert Tait/The Telegraph.

Guardian, last Tuesday:

The first strikes landed just after 2am, directed at sites that Islamic State (Isis) has openly used and that had long been flagged as targets. The jihadis were no longer there though, having blended in with Raqqa’s civilian population, where they knew they would be safer.

I noticed some folks—well, Dr. Turk, of whom I'm a long-time fan—making fun of the allies for blowing up buildings and letting the enemy get away, but it occurred to me that could work as a good, if unconventional idea: Don't kill people (who include civilians), kill infrastructure. Not the way they did it in old Mr. Rumsfeld's day, of course, but....

Tee hee!

Phyllis Schlafly as conceptualized by Michèle Bachmann (Image by Nuddie Naked Lady Golf Tees).

Michèle Bachmann (Mad-Eyed Lady of the Lakelands), Via Silly Rabbit at Kos:

"I believe that Phyllis Schlafly is the most consequential female woman in public policy in the last fifty years of the 20th Century," Bachmann declared. "Had there not been a Phyllis Schlafly, I believe that we wouldn't have seen a rise of the pro-family movement. Had there not been a rise of the pro-family movement, I don't believe that there would have been a Ronald Reagan. Without a President Ronald Reagan, I don't think we would have seen the ability to defeat the evil, and yes that's what it was, Soviet empire and to bring a conclusion to the Cold War. Just as Ronald Reagan was consequential, Phyllis Schlafly was extremely consequential because she was a tee to tee up this president that we had."

Of course that's not to say that as a female woman Schlafly was necessarily as consequential as some of the male women.

Priorities

Heritage Senior Research Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs Brett D. Schaefer at the Daily Signal is shocked to realize how twisted the president's priorities are:

At the 2014 United Nations Climate Summit on Tuesday, President Barack Obama offered a stunning–in fact, deeply disturbing–insight into his views on threats to the United States and the American people.

Allegory, of something

Every summer artists from the Art Students League install seven sculptures in Riverside Park South, in what is billed as the M2M (Model to Monument) program. This year they were very interactive, including the only one I really liked, a piece of comical social realism by Lindsay McCosh, Harbor for Industry, of two figures across a path from each other, one at work with a shovel and the other watching from a park bench, so people took pictures of themselves sitting next to it. I don't know why it was wrapped in police tape the other day, but it was.

How Brooks works

Jackie Coogan in Skippy (1931).

Schematic David Brooks, "The Good Order: Routine, Creativity, and President Obama's U.N. Speech", New York Times, September 26 2014:

1. Steal some anecdotes about the writing routines of Maya Angelou, John Cheever, and Anthony Trollope.

2. Acknowledge your source in such a way as to make it seem not like a source, merely an aide-mémoire, and the author you're stealing from merely a "compiler":

I was reminded of these routines by a book called “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work,” compiled by Mason Currey.

3. Steal some quotations from Sigmund Freud, Henry Miller, and W.H. Auden, ideally from the same book. That's called productivity.

4. Segue to Obama:

Cognitive dissonance

According to today's editorial in the Times,

By any measure, the nearly-six-year tenure of Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has been one of the most consequential in United States history.... It is hard to imagine that anyone who could make it through the current Senate would have an impact comparable to Mr. Holder’s.

As the first African-American to serve as the nation’s top law enforcement official, Mr. Holder broke ground the moment he took office. In a position that rarely rewards boldness — and in the face of a frequently hostile Congress — Mr. Holder has continued to stake out strong and laudable legal positions on many of the most contested issues of our time.

But on the other hand

Panther Justice

Baby panther, via.

Did anybody call Andrea Tantaros out to clarify what she meant?

"He didn't enforce the laws on Obamacare," Tantaros said. "He was droning terrorists without a trial while he was giving them trials in downtown Manhattan. He ran the DOJ much like the Black Panthers would. That is a fact."

It is? I mean, how would the Black Panthers run the Justice Department?

Legalism Watch: Syria

Paolo Uccello, Battaglia di San Romano (ca. 1435-60)

When they tell you that the air campaign against Daesh forces in Syria (yes, I got tired of calling it the "Caliphate") is illegal, we need to keep in mind that that doesn't mean it's illegal like the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as a serious breach of the United Nations Charter; what they're talking about is in the first instance this:

How conservatives think

Celine painted-toe heels, spring 2013. Via.

Something funny from the short-paragraph factory at Heritage Foundation's Daily Dogwhistle, sorry, make that Daily Signal, their would-be counterpart to Think Progress:

War on women. Minimum wage. Climate change.

You hear liberals talking about these same topics all the time. Why?

Autumn in New York

Autumn in New York. It's often mingled with pain. Photo by AP via Huffington Post.

Shorter David Brooks, "Snap Out of It", New York Times, September 23, 2014:

I don't know why everybody's so upset. There's nothing wrong with our government that couldn't easily be solved by eliminating partisanship and getting legislators to dock their own pay if they don't get their work done. Meanwhile it's autumn in New York! And the city's the most walkable it's been in years, in the parts I go to!

I love walking in New York too, I'm not going to lie. Still, it's a little bit fatuous to be so pleased to be a wealthy person (just sold the Cleveland Park place for about $4.5 million, we hear) in the most unequal city in the United States.

Driftglass keeps calling Brooks a Whig, but he's always been a Tory, longing for an imaginary time when America was governed by the well-reared, well-behaved younger sons of a squirearchy:

Uplift!

Via SevenDaysVermont.

Had to share this—it seems that in 1987 the mayor of Burlington, VT, a guy from New York City named Bernard Sanders,  you may have heard of him more recently, recorded a folk-rock album, with the assistance of a local record producer named Todd R. Lockwood. It's a kind of hootenanny performance by a large number of Burlington musicians with Bernie, who neither sings nor plays, just being Bernie, declaiming words of great wisdom and beauty through the instrumental breaks.

Five songs ranging from "Oh, Freedom" to a socialist rarity from Pete Seeger's repertoire, "The Banks Are Made of Marble". Jon Pareles of the New York Times has posted a review at their First Draft site (from which I have appropriated any actual information presented here), and for those who just want to listen to this thing, and I swear you'll be very glad you did, it's at Lockwood's own SoundCloud site.

Cross-posted at Booman Tribune.

Divide and what?

Updated 9/29/2014

Saturday's freeing of the 49 Turkish hostages held by ISIS may have been by a military rescue operation according to the Turkish government, or maybe by the serene clemency of his caliphic majesty Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi according to the caliphic Twitter account, says a  remarkable piece by Metin Turcan in Al-Monitor that gives me what feels like a better sense of what's going on politically inside ISIS-occupied Mosul:

Two major factors may have been at play. The first was the changing balance of power in Mosul: According to Turkish intelligence sources, US airstrikes seriously degraded IS communications between key centers in Mosul, Fallujah, Raqqa and Tikrit it controls. IS withdrew most of its Mosul forces to inland areas. US airstrikes were instrumental in changing the power structure of Mosul by strengthening the role of the Army of Naqshbandi and the Council of Mosul Tribes. Both favored the release of the hostages. The second major factor was the severe reaction from the Sunni world after IS released visuals of the beheadings it carried out of three Westerners. As such, IS' release of the Turkish hostages signifies a change in IS strategy and signifies a move to win over Sunni public opinion.

The takeaways are:

Greeting the UN Climate Summit

I was stuck with some family business (happy stuff: a nephew getting married and a lively time was had by all including your correspondent here, who left the computer at home and found no time to blog by phone) and unable to march today with the 310,000 and more who showed up for the People's Climate March to Change Everything, where a large part of my heart was.

AP photo via Huffington Post.

I hope everything really does start to change from here, as this is the year US carbon emissions started speeding up again (rising 2.9%) after four years of reductions, and that mean atmospheric concentration of CO2 continues to soar beyond the sustainable level of 350 ppm to monthly means of 397 and higher.

And thanks to New York City and Mayor Bill de Blasio for welcoming the climate summit not only with zero arrests of marchers (compared to over 2000 in Copenhagen 2009) but also with a solid program for greening the city.

Startling but true

David Brooks apparently no longer has any editor at all. He must have taken to writing his own headlines, anyway, because no professional could have composed this one:

England hath need of ye

Updated 9/19

Eilean Dornan Castle, Skye. Via.

Dear Scotland,

You know what? England sucks. England doesn't deserve you. England has disrespected you, insulted you, discriminated against you for centuries. It's pretty awful.

And I understand the reasons for voting yes. Because the worst people in the world are urging you to vote no, as Edroso says. Because you can punish those people—Cameron and Osborne—

Sincerest form of flattery, even if it's unconscious

Is Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Mystax Tranquillitatis, channeling me from ten days ago?

And if so, should I be pleased, or profoundly embarrassed?