The tightening face

As seen by the Russian media: Дженнифер Рубин.

Great news from Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post: She thinks hack Ed Gillespie is likely to pull an upset over Mark Warner in the Virginia Senate race (echoing yesterday's "exclusive report" by Alex Pappas at the Daily Squalor and this morning's breakfast for Dr. William Kristol, the only pandit in history of a wrongness so pervasive as to get him sacked from the New York Times, a feat not even David Brooks has been able to accomplish). So I think we can take it as a given that Warner is safe.

Two late polls showing the gap in what was nearly a 30-point race shrinking to single digits has lifted Republicans’ spirits in Virginia.

Has they indeed, then?

I for one welcome our new DJ overlords

Niv Bavarsky, Zombie DJ.

David Brooks is taking Halloween off, and turned his space over to one of those Google experiments analogous to the self-driving car, for an entirely automated piece composed by his Gmail account.

Verbatim David Brooks, "Our Machine Masters", October 31 2014:

Some days I think nobody knows me as well as Pandora. I create a new music channel around some band or song and Pandora feeds me a series of songs I like just as well. In fact, it often feeds me songs I’d already downloaded onto my phone from iTunes. Either my musical taste is extremely conventional or Pandora is really good at knowing what I like.

I'd say the two options kind of feed off of each other. Also, I'd kill myself if I felt that way.

The War of the Chickenshit

Image via Canadian Thinker.

Danielle Pletka for the American Enterprise Institute:

Let’s get this straight: Bibi et al, who have what most would agree is a legitimate and existential fear of an Iranian nuclear weapon, are “good” because they’re, er “chickenshit” about launching a strike on Iran; oh, and Bibi is also labeled a “coward” for having been “chickenshit” in that regard. But he’s “bad” because he won’t cave to a Palestinian Authority and Hamas so riven by terrorism, corruption and incompetence that they won’t “accommodate” with each other.

No, I don't think you have it straight yet.

1. Jean-Paul Sartre wants his adjective back: what is Prime Minister Netanyahu doing with an "existential fear"?

Whatever else they take from me, they can't take away my dignity...

Just a little respect.

...because I sold, it, for a cool quarter of a million. From Heritage's "Daily Signal":

SOCIETY COMMENTARY

Why Did CNN Think Bristol Palin Recounting Being Called a ‘F***ing C***’ Was Funny?

Katrina Trinko / @KatrinaTrinko / October 23, 2014 / 0 comments

Oh, Katrina, do you really want to know?

Partyism like it's 1999

Buster Keaton in, I think, Spite Marriage (1929).

Verbatim David Brooks, "Why Partyism is Wrong", New York Times, October 28 2014:

There are several reasons politics has become hyper-moralized in this way. First, straight moral discussion has atrophied. There used to be public theologians and philosophers who discussed moral issues directly. That kind of public intellectual is no longer prominent, so moral discussion is now done under the guise of policy disagreement, often by political talk-show hosts.

Second, highly educated people are more likely to define themselves by what they believe than by their family religion, ethnic identity or region.

Third, political campaigns and media provocateurs build loyalty by spreading the message that electoral disputes are not about whether the top tax rate will be 36 percent or 39 percent, but are about the existential fabric of life itself.

Like what kind of world is that where your religion has to take a back seat to the stuff you believe, for heaven's sake?

What part of "graven image" don't they understand?

It is appalling that this monument was attacked. Those who committed this crime will be caught & held responsible pic.twitter.com/SkYiyUwO8W
— Governor Mary Fallin (@GovMaryFallin) October 24, 2014

There's some surprise running around over the case of Michael Reed, 29, of Oklahoma City, who urinated on the Ten Commandments monument outside the Federal Building (the replacement for the Murrah Building blown up by Christian Identity terrorist Timothy McVeigh) and then smashed it by running it over with his car, under instructions, he said, from Satan, who also advised him to spit on a photograph of President Obama and kill him. But he's a Christian.

According to KOCO TV (via SEK at Raw Story),

And we win one!

Updated below:

Breaking from the New York Times:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Sunday night outlined New York State’s mandatory quarantine policy for health care workers returning from West African nations with Ebola outbreaks , bringing the state closer into line with federal protocols and marking a significant break with the way the policy has been carried out in New Jersey.

The announcement comes after the Obama administration pressed New York to rescind its order, issued only two days ago in a joint press conference with New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie. New Jersey officials, who stood by their decision on Sunday, have yet to explain many details of their quarantine policy. The state has come under scathing criticism for the treatment of a nurse returning from Sierra Leone, who was forced into quarantine in a hastily erected tent at a New Jersey hospital even though she had not displayed any signs of illness and tested negative for Ebola.

Earlier in the day, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that the treatment of the nurse, Kaci Hickox,had been shameful and vowed that New York City would do all it could to honor the work of the health care workers here and those who go to help fight the epidemic in West Africa.

Via Funny or Die.

I still won't vote for Cuomo. Don't care for the way he buckles under pressure, even when he's buckling in the right direction. Subject to hysteria, not a steady hand like Howie Hawkins. And speaking of buckling, thanks, thanks, thanks Mayor de Blasio and President Obama for your firmness in sticking by the rational approach in the face of media and political panic. You guys are great.

Update:

Annals of derp: Politico

Issa: Public doesn't trust Obama is handling Ebola http://t.co/4dfK46NQY6 pic.twitter.com/LFq7C8QRKO
— POLITICO (@politico) October 26, 2014

Dozens of subtweeters falling over each other in their excitement over this evidence of how the nation has given up on our president. Though last I heard 61% somewhat or very confident make up a majority, even in the Senate. Not sure why Politico posted it, unless it's maybe meant as snark. But I fear Allen and Vandehei are not that good at math, to say nothing of Issa.

Ex Africa Semper

Updated

Image from Brotha Wolf.

Continuing the rant...

Just heard some audio of Cuomo saying, "I'm old enough to remember HIV—we didn't know how HIV was communicated," implying that we're in the same situation (somewhat imaginary, because it was almost from the beginning clear that gay men were not passing HIV to their many female and straight male friends and relatives and associates whereas among straight people afflicted by AIDS, especially in Africa, the transmission was strictly between male and female sex partners and their children) in regard to Ebola.

Oh, right, HIV comes from darkest Africa too, just like those killer bees.

Pure Serene

One year at Greyfriars I played on the same eleven as Keats and Chapman, but I found them very standoffish and unfriendly, which made my shyness even worse. The headmaster thought I was being ridiculous; "It's not a cocktail party, for God's sake, it's cricket," he said. "What difference could it possibly make whether they talk to you or not?" But the thing was, they kept whispering, and I felt they were whispering about me.

Moreover, the captain insisted on playing me as wicket-keeper, a position for which, for technical reasons I need not go into, I was entirely unsuited. Keats finally noticed how upset I was and asked, rather kindly I thought, if there was anything he could do, but what could I say? I knew I'd never be any good at the game till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bowled.

From Tom Brown's School Days, 1877, via The Vatican of Sport.

Dedicated to Smut, without whom I might never have known of the genre, and the late Brian O'Nolan/Myles na Gopaleen.

Jack Bruce

R.I.P.

At the Zeche Bochum in Bochum, January 1983, with David Sancious, guitar, and Bruce Gary, drums.

Fearless City: Postscript

Andy 'n' Chris: "Look how serious we are! Awesome!" But a little smile on Cuomo's lips as he contemplates the captive press, paying him attention but unable to ask him a single question about his role in Albany's corruption and secrecy. Photo by Katie Orlinsky/New York Times.

Not that fearless. I guess I spoke too soon.

Friday started off pretty well, with New York as a whole resolutely refusing to panic and Mayor de Blasio and city health commissioner Mary Bassett keeping things that way, as our own Ebola victim, Dr. Craig Spencer, remained in stable condition:

Annals of Derp: Bobo's (Political) Party

Louis Wolheim as Sgt. Bulba in Tempest (1928). 

David Brooks is in full campaign mode now, looking for quirky and intellectual-sounding reasons for voting Republican without saying so and supporting policies like means-testing Medicare, supplementing the wages of the working poor with taxpayer money so Walmart and McDonalds can continue to pay slave wages, and shifting immigration from preserving families to draining other countries' brains, because sisters and cousins and aunts are a dime a dozen but we can never have too many English-deficient computer coders and anesthesiologists. And the long-cherished circle-squaring fantasy of a "progressive consumption tax", though he doesn't really believe he'll ever catch that unicorn.

Today's column prompt is an extremely interesting essay by William Galston of the Brookings Institution, "The New Challenge to Market Democracies", which works from the blandest and broadest of analyses (his bothsiderism is international, pitting suprapartisan pictures of statist Europe/Japan and corporatist United States against each other) to rather radical Pikettist prescriptions: in order literally to save liberal democracy from authoritarianism, the US needs to start with

Fearless City

New York takes pride in acknowledging Dr. Craig Spencer, "gifted", "goofball", and specialist in international emergency medicine, generous volunteer, speaker of Chinese, French, and Spanish, and general person who knows what a New Yorker should do after a spell of taking care of Ebola patients in Guinea for Médecins Sans Frontières: go bowling in Brooklyn, have a nice dinner, do a three-mile run if you're feeling a little off your form, and take your temperature twice a day. And don't panic.

I hope very much for his happy recovery and have no worries whatsoever for the other eight million of us.

Dr. Spencer, via New York Times.

More, with a precious classic link, from Steve.

It's not rocket science

Amalie Atkins, Girl in reeds with bolex, chromogenic print, 20 x 30”, 2010, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

So apparently there was a pretty promising-looking Ebola vaccine around for ten years, 100% effective in monkeys, but no money for testing it in humans:

“There’s never been a big market for Ebola vaccines,” said Thomas W. Geisbert, an Ebola expert here at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and one of the developers of the vaccine that worked so well in monkeys. “So big pharma, who are they going to sell it to?” Dr. Geisbert added: “It takes a crisis sometimes to get people talking. ‘Ok. We’ve got to do something here.' ”

If only there were some kind of super-organization that could dispose of the necessary billions for doing stuff like that without having to worry about profits and screaming shareholders!

The vaccine was actually produced, in Winnipeg by the Public Health Agency of Canada. The Canadian government patented it, and 800 to 1,000 vials of the vaccine were produced. In 2010, it licensed the vaccine, known as VSV-EBOV, to NewLink Genetics, in Ames, Iowa.

The Canadian government donated the existing vials to the World Health Organization, and safety tests of the vaccine in healthy volunteers have already begun.

Yeah, exactly! You could call it "Canada"!

Lede, buried: Thom Tillis

Gustave Boulanger, Le Marché aux Esclaves, ca. 1882.

North Carolina's GOP Senate candidate, Thom Tillis, showed up in the New York Times yesterday in a way that deserved a lot more attention than it seems likely to get, in a story about state regulation of personal installment loans, for emergency needs like car repairs or medical bills.

These are a kind of subprime loan offered by companies like the Citigroup unit OneMain Financial:

Bristolnacht

Image via Crime Scene Kansas City.

"Bristolnacht" is Tengrain's name for the Spilla in Wasilla, when the Clan of the Palins betook them in their limo to beat the shit out of everybody they saw and then retired in confusion on all sides, and I realized that's what it would be called if it was a German opera, which it really should be. And this is what it would look like, approximately:

Bless them all!

This is great, from Shane Harris at Foreign Policy: it seems that at the same time as General Keith Alexander was running the National Security Agency he was really busy speculating in commodities, potash and aluminum, with weird and unpredictable markets and connections to our favorite spying targets, China and the Russian Federation:

The Artside

Alice Goodman, in a Guardian interview of 2012:

"The guards at Auschwitz were able to do what they did because they had dehumanised the people who came through. It's that whole process of dehumanising that I hate. To have made Klinghoffer into the Klinghoffer the critics wanted would have been to play into that enterprise of dehumanising – dehumanising your enemy, dehumanising your friends as well."

I wasn't planning to see the new production of Alice Goodman's and John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer at the Met, not for political reasons. I can't afford to see even a small fraction of everything I want, and I saw the opera at Brooklyn Academy of Music in the semi-staged production of 2003, and frankly I thought it was static and the music weak. Then came Monday's twitterstorm in advance of the production premiere and the demonstration outside the opera house, and opera fan Rodolfo Giuliani pitted against Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Bill de Blasio, and I said to myself, boy, whose side are you on? and ordered tickets. For Guy Fawkes Day, as it happens.

The right to aspire

"Make that respect for me, not for you." Via somebody's tumblr.

Just about everybody you might want to hear from is on this astonishingly offensive remark by the governor of New Jersey, but I'd like to help pile on:

"I gotta tell you the truth, I'm tired of hearing about the minimum wage, I really am," Christie said during an event at the Chamber of Commerce in Washington, according to a recording of his remarks by the liberal opposition research group American Bridge.