Violence: Exchange with Senator Rubio

Nothing especially original here, just for the record. No, wait, updated:

@NARAL that US a bold lie and I don't even support Cruz. Name the person and what violence they support.

— Rise for Rubio (@RiseForRubio) December 3, 2015

@Yastreblyansky @NARAL so those who believe in capital punishment are pro-murder and violence? How are those the American thing?

— Rise for Rubio (@RiseForRubio) December 3, 2015

Thoughts and Prayers: A Fulmination

West of Eden: Just saying

The last Caliph in Baghdad, al-Musta'sim, in 1258, locked by Hulagu Khan in his treasury without food or water: "Eat of thy treasure as much as thou wilt, since thou art so fond of it." Actually that's just a myth; in reality they wrapped him in a carpet and had horses trample him to death, so as not to spill any royal blood. Via Wikipedia.

In September 2014 I wrote:

Everybody hates ISIS. Not just Americans and Europeans, Persians, Shi'ites, Arab Christians, Yazidis, and Turkmen. Al-Qa'eda hates them, as has often been pointed out, and if the Sunni Baathists from Iraq who joined forces with them in Syria don't hate them yet they soon will. (I believe they thought they were the senior partners, about to restore Saddamism, and that hasn't been the case.) And the populations under their brutal, corrupt, and incompetent control in places like Mosul hate them the most of all. Yes, they're horrible and capable of doing a lot of harm, but they can't survive.

Today Ben Hubbard for the New York Times brings forward some evidence from people who have fled the "state" of how they're doing, which is pretty much on schedule, failing to happen, feeling pressure from Kurdish and Shi'ite troops and coalition airstrikes no doubt, which are interfering with the oil and smuggling industries, but most of all wrecking the project themselves. They're losing fighters fed up with pay cuts, they're losing professionals unable to deal with the religious oppression, they're creating the Islamist equivalent of China's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s,

David Brooks is not optimistic—so I guess everything will be fine

Photo by Frank J. Regan via examiner.com.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Green Tech Solution", New York Times, December 1 2015:

Sure Republican politicians are bad, pretending to believe there's no such thing as global warming out of fear of Rush Limbaugh, but aren't Democratic politicians more or less the same, hoping that a formal agreement among 130-something countries to reduce carbon emissions could help to slow the warming process? After all, governments will probably cheat, so it would be much better to get corporations to do everything.

Brooks's example of governments cheating is China:

Why is a blastocyst like a slave?

Republicans abolished both of them? No, that can't be right...

@benshapiro This only makes sense to those who actually think.

— Marcelo Garcia (@MGarcia1775) November 30, 2015

.@gaslightingsbad @benshapiro We had this discussion on Thanksgiving when the liberals in my life went quiet & sad and I became sad as well.

— MoreDebate (@MoreDebate) November 30, 2015

I think Marcelo Garcia means, "This only makes sense to those who are actually on drugs." I think Ben Shapiro is mistakenly under the impression that being pregnant is similar to being a white man in the antebellum South, in that um what? Pregnant women can lawfully terminate their pregnancies in all states through the first semester and white men in the antebellum South could force their slaves to work without pay in appalling conditions, buy and sell them separating their families, and treat them with extreme cruelty in many ways, and there is some kind of analogy between these two situations...

At the Planned Parenthood grocery store

Modern sliced what? (Actually they're crimini mushrooms). I always wonder what the anti-choice terrorist or terror supporter imagines the ghouls of Planned Parenthood are doing with their ill-gotten baby parts (somehow I don't think life-saving scientific research is on their list of possibilities). Maybe casseroles?

An Affair to Misremember

Um, of all words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are, "It might have Ben."

Bloomberg, November 26:

Donald Trump on Nov. 30 “will be joined by a coalition of 100 African American evangelical pastors and religious leaders who will endorse the GOP frontrunner after a private meeting at Trump Tower,” his campaign says in a statement.

What do you mean by "target"?

Image via CNN.

Well, that didn't take long. From BuzzFeed:

Zigmond Post, who told BuzzFeed News he was a neighbor of Dear’s in Hartsel, said the man once gave him anti-Obama pamphlets.

Post said he once went to Dear’s home to retrieve two dogs that had gotten loose. “We were there for a minute and the guy was already handing us anti-Obama pamphlets,” he said. According to Post, Dear said “Obama was ruining the country and needed to be impeached.”

But this certainly has no direct bearing on the question of whether Robert Dear was "targeting Planned Parenthood" when he shot his way (legally open-carrying an AK-47) into a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs and killed three people and wounded many more once he got inside. Surely there are lots of Obama haters who couldn't care less about Planned Parenthood. Or used to be, anyway, before a few months ago, right? Along the lines of that guy who called them

Dangerous Attitudes

Via SimplifiedSafety. Not suggesting any attitudes on the bosses' part—I guess that's why they call it "simplified".

Harrowing story in the Times by David W. Chen on the epidemic of fatal construction accidents in the ongoing construction boom in New York City, doubling over the usual average during the past fiscal year:

Seven workers have died on the job since July, including three in a nine-day stretch before Labor Day, according to records of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA.

The city’s Buildings Department keeps its own count of construction deaths, injuries and accidents, offering a broader look at safety year over year. There were 10 construction-related fatalities in the most recent fiscal year, from July 2014 to July 2015, according to city figures. In contrast, the annual average over the previous four years was 5.5.

Meanwhile, 324 workers were injured in the last fiscal year, a jump of 53 percent, and the Buildings Department recorded 314 accidents over all, an increase of 52 percent from the year before. The total was more than two and a half times what the city tallied in 2011. In comparison, permits for new construction projects grew by only 11 percent in the last fiscal year and permits for renovation and other work by 6 percent.

You have to read this story, which does a wonderful, horrifying job of getting to some of the individual humans behind these statistics. But the thing I want to focus on is who, in demographic terms, has been dying, namely the "illegal aliens" we keep hearing about:

Brooks no argument

Olive Thomas in Alan Crosland's The Flapper (1920). Via QuirkyLadyBookworm.

So Brooks went to visit this progressive Small High School of Choice in Bensonhurst—the Expeditionary Learning School for Community Leaders—and found that it was a nice place. He didn't go so far as to say it radiated, but he did say it glowed.

So that's nice. I really don't have the heart to work this one over, other than to point out the school's success involved working closely on its innovations with the teachers' union (Brooks: "the single biggest impediment to school reform"), beefing up its funding with philanthropy from sources like the Gates Foundation (Brooks: "The problem is not lack of attention, and it’s not mainly lack of money.... American public spending on schools is high by global standards,"), and working to eliminate high-stakes testing as an issue, by turning as much as possible to performance-based assessment for the students and non-quantitative evaluation methods for the teachers (Brooks: "Ravitch thinks the solution is to get rid of the tests. But that way just leads to lethargy and perpetual mediocrity. The real answer is to keep the tests and the accountability but make sure every school has a clear sense of mission").

In short, succeeding by disregarding all Brooks's advice on education.

Americano

Literally floating signifier.

Shot from The High Line, 11/27/2015.

Cheap shots: Thanksgiving

Former McDonalds restaurant, Broadway near 82nd St. The manager of the property, named in the placard at lower left, is some kind of Marxist joke.

Jay Nordlinger of the National Review on disturbing subway ads:

 a sign read, “You spent the night in Manhattan but left your birth control in the Bronx. Maybe the IUD is right for you.” Honestly — laugh if you must (and you must!) — but I’m not entirely sure what that sign means.

No comment. If you want to ask somebody, Jay, make sure you don't ask Rush Limbaugh.

And a little more below the fold:

Spiritual wut?

La Sainte-Cène du Patriarche, Jean Huber, 1772-73. Image via German Wikipedia. I think Diderot is the wigless man in black seated at right; Voltaire, in the red cap, the Patriarche of the title and the host of the gathering at his exile home in Ferney, is waving for attention, about to make a quip. 

This nation was not founded on political principles - this nation was founded on spiritual principles. https://t.co/CoKDlQOGYn #PFF15

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) November 21, 2015

Just the same old shit, obviously, that according to the Declaration of Independence all men are

endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights

which means that they're spiritual rights, not political rights, since the Lord laid them on us without even asking which ones we wanted, though it seems to me like a questionable reading in the first place; I mean honestly what is spiritual about "liberty" or "the pursuit of happiness"? If you believe in a kind of personal Creator, who endowed you with a nose, does that mean your nose is a spiritual rather than physiological property? If it's thanks to the Deity that we have a propensity to argue about politics, does that mean political discussion itself is spiritual rather than political?

I may actually have something new to say on this subject (I'm going to sketch an argument that Jefferson's formulation of natural rights owes less than commonly understood to the good Protestant Locke and much more to the atheist Diderot), but I want to work toward it backwards, starting on the more familiar territory of what Jefferson, as opposed to the Declaration, said.

If life gives you grenades...

...can you make grenadine? I guess not, but maybe if you're sufficiently "deluded in good ways about your abilities" you might think you can, and perhaps that's all you need.

Charley Chase in  Mighty Like a Moose (1926), directed by Leo Carey.

Shorter David Brooks, "Tales of the Super Survivors", November 24 2015:

This is the age of terror, when people are constantly subject to unexpected stabbings, shootings, and bombings, but I think we need to maintain some sense of proportion here. After all, scientific research demonstrates that a good 75% of people never develop post-traumatic stress disorder under these kinds of conditions. So really. what's all the fuss about? Moreover, of those who do get PTSD, some are "super survivors" who heal from the damage, and come out radiating love and joy, and you know how I feel about people who radiate stuff.

In which we go Godwin

You know who else used to talk nonstop about freedom? Via TodoPorMéxico.

Via Mother Jones:

At a campaign event in New Hampshire, Carson noted that many people believe a situation like what took place in Germany in the 1930's and 1940's could never happen in America. "I beg to differ," Carson said. "If you go back and look at the history of the world, tyranny and despotism and how it starts, it has a lot to do with control of thought and control of speech."

At a press conference after the speech, reporters asked Carson who he thinks is like Adolf Hitler in the U.S. "I'm not going to go into that that. I think that example is pretty clear," he responded, without elaborating.

Running away, as you see, from his poison remarks. Carson loves to complain about "political correctness" preventing him from talking about slavery and Nazism, though as has been noted, he talks about them unhesitatingly all the time, but what's really wrong with what he does is the cowardly way he does it, throwing those scary words out into the discourse and then just leaving them there, refusing responsibility.

Exchange: Liberal Fascism Watch, eugenics section

The embodiment of Liberal Fascism (well, he said he was a Liberal, from 1904 to 1924, Jonah, rather more than Hitler said National Socialists were socialists): Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty sharing a moment with Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1913. Via MaritimeQuest.

From a comment thread at Crooked Timber:

ZM 11.23.15 at 1:37 am

Thinking about re-appraisals, Woodrow Wilson was a fan of the children’s author Jean Webster who wrote Daddy Long Legs and Dear Enemy. I read these when I was in mid primary school, re-reading them a few years ago as an adult was weird (apart from just due to me reading one backwards from end to start — this is as they are epistolary novels so I read the last letter, then I read the second last letter, and so on back to the first letter of the book — I didn’t mean to do this, I was just flicking through the end but I got hooked and read to the beginning to see how it started) — because the former was more socialist than I remembered, and the latter was disturbingly in favour of eugenics, which I didn’t remember at all:

“The Fabian Society in the early 1900s advocated the ideal of a scientifically planned society and supported eugenics by way of sterilisation.

If you’d like to see the charming side of Fabian Socialism, you should read Jean Webster’s two delightful books: Daddy Long Legs and Dear Enemy. Both are epistolary novels written in the 1910s. One is set at a women’s college (Vassar-ish) and the other is set in an orphanage. The former presents a pretty picture of Fabian Socialism and the latter sweetly and ardently advocates eugenics.

Cheap shot: Worst Brooks in the world

Mo Brooks, via The Last of the Millenniums.

Really, while I yield to none in my contempt for David Brooks of the New York Times and Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) is the worst Brooks we have:

Instead of viewing refugees as people fleeing the violence that has claimed more than 200,000 lives, Brooks saw a host of incoming welfare queens intent on taking advantage of Americans’ generosity.

“We’re paying them about $15,000 a year in free health care, free food, free shelter, free clothing, free transportation,” Brooks said. “That answers very quickly why so many of them want to come to the United States of America.”

“We’re paying them to come here,” the Alabama congressman concluded. “It’s a paid vacation!” (Think Progress)

"Shut up, kids," says father as shrapnel from another barrel bomb blows in the window, severing Abdul's left leg, "we'll have dinner when we get to America. Get a tourniquet, Rukmini! In fact with that $15K we may well get breakfast too, once in a while. It's a paid vacation! Those Americans are such saps, it's just there for the taking. If you can hold out till 2017."

Brooks also went on to accuse Democrats who support giving shelter to Syrian refugees and protecting the rights of Muslims of only doing so in order to win their votes.

Because that 0.8% of the population is enough to sway any election.* Explains everything. Tell me about your so-called compassion, you panderer. You'll just do anything to win.

*An Ipsos poll of November 2014 found Americans think the percentage is around 15%.

And another TPP of the hat

Debris at Bento Rodrigues, Minas Gerais, after the dam collapse. Photo by Ricardo Moraes/Reuters via The Guardian (which along with a number of sources spells "Rodrigues" without its second r).

Erik Loomis reports, and there's more information and pictures at greenpeace, on a dam collapse in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, on November 5, releasing millions of cubic feet of mining waste, mud poisoned with arsenic, lead, chromium, and other heavy metals—more than "25,000 Olympic swimming pools"—into the mining community of Mariana, where it has killed at least 17 people and displaced hundreds more, and that's just the beginning:

The mud surged through rural communities and into the Rio Doce, the major river in southeast Brazil. Since November 5th, it has been slowly working its way downstream — contaminating the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people and turning protected forest and habitat into a desert of mud. The tragedy will continue to spread over 500 kilometers as contaminants from the sludge make their way towards the Atlantic coast, eventually endangering the Abrolhos National Marine Park. 

Loomis notes,

Brazil has issued a preliminary fine of $66 million and that will no doubt be higher in the end. But Brazil has also gone straight ahead with its modernization program that includes cutting down the Amazon for cattle ranchers and allowing mining companies to do basically whatever they want to. The government might act in a time of crisis like this, but it’s opened itself to resource extraction as its path to modernization, whether the government is right or left... It would be nice if the voters held [president Dilma] Rousseff accountable, but given the power of the mining companies, it’s unlikely that there are going to be any successful anti-mining political movements.

And it suddenly occurred to me that in a better world there might be something that could be done in a case like this.

Profiles in Courage

Updated 11/22/2015

How can you be sure they're not Belgian terrorists? Their passports could be fake too! Image via LifelineSyria.

Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY), in a position of unofficial leadership as former head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, joined 46 other Democrats in support of the American Security Against Foreign Enemies SAFE Act to stop screening refugees for admission to the United States while regulations are written to lengthen the two-year period it already takes.

Because there may be a massive refugee crisis radiating out from destroyed Syria to the rest of the world, and it may have been caused by the terrible social and physical destruction brought on in the Iraq-Syria region in the ten-year war fought by the United States against, well, whoever they were fighting against, it kept changing from month to month, as the new Salafist forces that had never been in the region before began to establish themselves in the chaos outside the zone the US forces were able to control, and we may now regret our refusal to admit refugee Jews to the US in 1938-42 making us directly responsible for as much as a third of Hitler's six million, but—

Let them eat bacon

Terrorists don't expect the Spanish Inquisition. Via Food is Love.

Via John Amato at C&L:

Jeb Bush on Tuesday dug in further on his position that the United States should prioritize bringing in Christians from among the refugees of the Syrian civil war — and he insisted that people can even prove that they’re Christians.

“Well you’re a Christian,” Bush started off saying to reporters. “You can prove you’re a Christian. It’s—”

“How?” a reporter asked.

Bush gave a shrug: “I think you can prove it — if you can’t prove it then, you know, you err on the side of caution.”

I know how you do it. Make them eat pork! Technique developed in Spain 500 years ago for outing secret Muslims, and Jews of course, always works.

The Spanish Inquisition — officially known as the Holy Inquisition Against Depraved Heresy — was established in 1481 in the city of Castile and subsequently spread throughout the Christian territories. The Inquisition was directed against conversos, former Jews, who were accused of religious heresy and political subversion through secret Jewish practice. To establish such practice, the Inquisition trials (under the direction of Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, who, perhaps not surprisingly, was also of converso origin) took testimony about the accused’s alleged Jewish activities — many of them, as it happens, culinary in nature. (Forward)

Some people might think adopting the methods of the Spanish Inquisition sounds a little un-American, but I'd just call it conservative. That's what "err on the side of caution" means, right? If you're a little bit suspicious, better to let them die, bcause why should we bear any of the risk? Tough times call for tough measures.