If could be worse. In fact it was.

April 1968. Via Ghosts of Baltimore.

Michel Martin at NPR remembers the riots following the 1968 murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., personally, from when she was a little girl in New York City: her father was that rare bird, an African American firefighter, so she has a wonderfully round perspective. It made her think to interview some veterans of 1968, a Baltimore cop and a Washington firefighter, both white, to put the current Baltimore disturbance in context.

One thing that stands out is how small-scale this disturbance seems in contrast to those days, when it was whole neighborhoods, not a few individual buildings, that were burning, and went on for much longer; there are areas in Baltimore that still haven't recovered from the property damage of 40-odd years ago, it's one of the urban-rot problems that makes the city such a mess. The current disturbance is awful, but it's nothing like the awfulness of back in the day. I think we really need to recognize this.

Courting

Musée de Cluny.

Roberts:

“You’re not seeking to join the institution, you’re seeking to change what the institution is."

How do you join an institution without changing it? When Jews wanted into the country club, couldn't it be argued that they were changing it from its identity as an institution without any Jews? "It's not that I don't like Jews, it's just that I like a place where I feel comfortable." No, of course, they didn't say that. Gentleman's agreement. They only said it out loud when it was about black people. And women—they still say it about women. "I can't really be myself if there are women all over the place. I can't really relax."

People who seem icky and situations that are distasteful

Dove and snake in Canterbury Cathedral. Probably not intended as a representation of the ideal politician's mind.

World famous political scientist David Brooks is intrigued by the data:

There was an interesting poll result about Hillary Clinton last week. According to a Quinnipiac poll, 60 percent of independent voters believe that she has strong leadership qualities. But when these same voters were asked if she is honest and trustworthy, the evaluations flipped. Sixty-one percent said she is not honest and trustworthy. Apparently there are a lot of Americans who believe that Hillary Clinton is dishonest and untrustworthy but also a strong leader.

I'd say it's rather more interesting that only 51% of the independents had an unfavorable opinion of HRC (43% favorable, 3% don't know). This pattern is rather stronger over the sample as a whole (Democrats, Republicans, and independents), where she scores 46% to 47% on favorability, and an appalling 38% to 54% on honesty. Thus there would seem to be a lot more Americans who feel that she is dishonest but don't see that as a reason to have an unfavorable opinion. "Sure she's dishonest, but does that make her a bad person?"

You can come fisking too

A 30% increase in hurricane damage over the rest of the century. Via Jeff Masters.

BooMan made me look at PowerLine, so you can blame this on him.

There has been quite a bit of news coverage of this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Don’t ask me why.

Just let me get on with giving it some more, huh?

Spies on the Prize

Image from Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers by flamedrake.

Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo in the Times:

When Ms. Feinstein was asked in a meeting with reporters in 2013 why she was so sure she was getting the truth about the drone program while she accused the C.I.A. of lying to her about torture, she seemed surprised.

“That’s a good question, actually,” she said.

But she's just had so much on her mind in the intervening months. The answer is probably somewhere in there too, but who knows where she stashed it?

Advertisements for Myself

I don't retweet mentions of me, but this post on NYT's David Brooks's (mis)use of my wk on conditionality is spot on: http://t.co/q6lnFZS6LA
— Alfie Kohn (@alfiekohn) April 26, 2015

Just saying, hem-hem.

Cheap shots and a side of matzoh brei

Giant Head in Window.

Via Driftglass, a detail not reported at his place: David Brooks did a book-promo interview with The Forward, in the Times offices on West 42nd Street. On the third day of Passover, America's noted Jewish thought leader offered the representative of America's preeminent Jewish newspaper a toasted bagel.

For Armenia

Not in the mood today, but don't want to miss what might be the only time I ever get a chance to agree with noted foreign policy wonk Kim Kardashian. Yes, it was genocide, by any plausible criterion, and I wish President Obama would use the word (as Bundeskänzlerin Merkel and Papissimo Francesco, both of whom have tenser and more fraught relations with the Turkish government than we do, have done).

Kanye, Khloe, Kim, and Knorth at the Kardashians' ancestral home in Gyumri, north of Yerevan. Hello Magazine.

Also clicks.

Love and Merit, Love and Merit

Go together like a Stick and Carrot?

Lon Chaney and Mary Philibin in The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Via PaxRomano.

The Sage of Cleveland Park may have arrived at the stage of blaming Dad, who always liked you better than me, for why he's so fucked up:

Verbatim David Brooks, "Love and Merit", New York Times, April 24 2015:

Parents unconsciously shape their smiles and frowns to steer their children toward behavior they think will lead to achievement. Parents glow with extra fervor when their child studies hard, practices hard, wins first place, gets into a prestigious college. This sort of love is merit based. It is not simply: I love you. It is, I love you when you stay on my balance beam. I shower you with praise and care when you’re on my beam. The wolf of conditional love is lurking in these homes.

Or maybe he's having a fight with his own kids who complain that he always made them feel worthless by not praising them and he's trying to make an argument that it was for good reasons, not that he just wasn't paying attention. (The acknowledgments to The Road to Character say "My ex-wife, Sarah, has done and continues to do an amazing job raising our three children", suggesting he himself has rarely seen them at all, at least until they started showing up dressed for dinner instead of being put to bed during the cocktail hour.)

Y, Carly?

Via the Orange Juice Blog.

Just shoot me.

Republican voters aren’t yet excited about their candidates because not one of them has broken out with a lead in the polls. Considering this, counting out Carly Fiorina would be pretty stupid.

And why, A.B. Stoddard at The Ineffable Hill, would I want to not count out old Demon Sheep?

West of Eden: Imagine

Displaced people from the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp queue to receive aid in Syria on 16 April 2015. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images.

In September 2013 I issued a proposal for a nonviolent approach to ending the war in Syria: Just get the civilian population out of danger, massively, four or five million in decent refugee accommodations, and leave the Assad government forces and the Caliphate and the other bad Sunni actors with nobody to bully and exploit and destroy but each other.

This was back when it still seemed possible to many otherwise rational observers (as opposed to Senator McCain and his drooling companions, who still believe or affect to believe) that a "moderate Sunni" military force could play a significant role, when Sunni extremists were dominated by the Qa'eda-affiliated al-Nusra front and the Caliphate was just beginning to be a thing. Now it should be clear to almost everybody not a Republican or a "fighter" with the FSA that that alternative is hopeless.

While it so happens that a similar proposal is circulating for a different objective, solving the Mediterranean refugee crisis, in particular from the UN Special Rapporteur for migrant rights, François Crépeau:

Note on Yemen

Photo by NAIYF RAHMA/REUTERS via Al Jazeera.

That was weird yesterday. NPR was telling me about how Saudi Arabia had finished its operations in Yemen on the radio, while the Times was claiming online that they'd already started bombing again. Both, as it eventually turned out, were true: KSA continues to insist it has won:

The talented Mr.—I beg your pardon?

Sorry, I lost the source for this. Quotation here.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Talented Mr. Rubio", New York Times, April 21 2015:

Senator Marco Rubio is a handsome and charismatic young sociopath who would murder friends and lovers and anybody else who stands in his way to attain the easy, elegant, charmed life to which he aspires, and almost certainly get away with it. He clearly has all the qualities to be the Republicans' best choice for the 2016 presidential nomination.

Maybe not *all* roads lead to Rome...

...but you could think of it as a theorem in Traveling Salesman math, the Douthat Conjecture, that you can find an 800-word route to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops from any subject, however remote.

Shorter Ross Douthat, "Checking Charlie Hebdo's Privilege", New York Times, April 18 2015:

If Garry Trudeau really thinks satirists ought to punch up at the powerful and not down at the downtrodden, how come liberals are always making fun of millions of aborted fetuses?

Image by Kate Tiedrich via AwkwardZombie.

Tout le monde est Charlie, ça finira par ne plus être chic!

On March 8, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury strip paid an eloquent tribute to the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists murdered on January 7, making a loving use of some of their own best images (Christ I love that Benedict XVI) and showing, incidentally, one way of taunting the murderers without strictly violating the Salafist rules against the visual depiction of the Prophet:

A softening in the moral sphere

Image of Louise Brooks as Lulu in the G.W. Pabst film of Die Büchse der Pandora (1929), from a time of moral softening, when a narcissistic and relativistic generation replaced the modest and self-sacrificing folks who brought us World War I. Or was that the 14th century? Who knows, I have a deadline.

Shorter David Brooks, "When Cultures Shift", New York Times, April 17 2015:

In the course of my research for THIS BOOK I'VE BEEN WRITING NOT THAT I CARE IF YOU LOOK AT IT OR ANYTHING BUT IT JUST CAME OUT I learned, surprisingly, that the 1960s actually started in the 1940s. That's just the kind of remarkable contrarian stuff that you can find out if you stick with me.

Loud Speaker

Don't know why they gave Israel a bishop, or a pawn down there among the Marsh Arabs. Via Gordon Campbell Plans to Bomb Iran's Nuclear Facilities. No, he didn't really, and it was 2009.

So BooMan gave his readers a challenge: to read what Mr. Speaker Boehner said this morning about the ongoing negotiations between Iran and the P5+1—

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Friday said he hopes the Obama administration fails to reach a deal on Iran’s nuclear program.

Boehner said he did not believe Iran would ever live up to its side of a bargain that would lift U.S. sanctions on Tehran.

“I’ve never been optimistic that we’d get to an agreement, a real agreement that would stop the nuclear threat from Iran and I don’t think the Iranians have any intention of giving up their desire for a nuclear weapon,” Boehner told Fox Business Channel’s “Opening Bell with Maria Bartiromo.”

Asked whether he’s expecting an agreement, Boehner said: “I would hope not.”

“I don’t think we can get to agreement with people who have no intention of keeping the agreement,” he added.

—and then answer a question:

And if I ever go looking for a concrete moral vocabulary again

I won't go any further than my own back yard, because if it isn't there, um, then it's probably in the storm cellar or someplace. Or maybe I left it in the office.

Image via WikiQuote.

From the introduction to The Road to Character:

Populist vs. metapopulist

James Albert Wales, 1880: Senator Roscoe Conkling tries to work out the Republican presidential campaign. Image via Wikipedia.

So I'm listening to this piece on WNYC radio (locally produced, not NPR) about Clinton and Rubio introducing their campaign using the same "populist" language, and how savvy observers recognize that they're actually the same candidate, because we don't know what policies Clinton is going to propose (but we know she has Wall Street backers who aren't worried that it's going to be too radical) and we do know the Republicans aren't going to propose any policies at all, other than a rain dance imploring the money to trickle down from the stratosphere.

Only there's something I did notice about the language, that I think makes a big difference: Clinton's populist language is aimed at the concerns of the population of the United States, Rubio's at the Republican party.

Finesse continued

Art by Gilbert Shelton.

Just when I was bragging on the president's ability to make the Senate Foreign Relations Committee do the right thing, he went and got the Finance Committee to jump rather higher than many of us are going to be comfortable with:

The leaders of Congress’s tax-writing committees reached agreement Thursday on legislation to give President Obama “fast track” authority to negotiate an ambitious trade accord with 11 other Pacific nations, beginning what is sure to be one of the toughest legislative battles of his last 19 months in office.