If you get an outfit you can be a cowboy too!

Denver, Colorado. Solomon D. Butcher. 1905. 
Nebraska State Historical Society. [Digital ID: nbhips 12615]

Nothing particular to say, I just liked the picture. From what looks like an online high school class from Stanford U.

Hostage crisis

This is what Special Interests look like. From Native American Community Academy.

Senator Cornyn feels that our Constitution forbids Native American police officers and courts to do anything about white men raping or beating or otherwise harming Indian women on reservation territory. Nor can a woman get help from the police of the state where the reservation is located. It was the clear intention of the Founding Parents, according to Senator Cornyn, that victims of that sort of violence should head out to the nearest US Attorney's office, no matter how many hundreds of miles away it may be, or else just suffer, so that white men can exercise their God-given right not to be investigated by brown people. So he can't allow the Violence Against Women Act to be renewed with a new provision rectifying that situation. It even makes him a little sad:

“This is a bill which could do so much good in the battle for victims’ rights, but unfortunately it is being held hostage by a single provision that would take away fundamental constitutional rights for certain American citizens,” Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said on the Senate floor on Thursday. “And for what? For what? In order to satisfy the unconstitutional demands of special interests.”

Funny, I never heard the Senator was especially concerned about the Fifth Amendment, except insofar as it concerns real estate. Indeed, Senator Cornyn and Fifth Amendment rights for humans have a little history of disagreement.

I guess the plan will be to arrest that hostage-taking provision. And torture it. 

Brennan curiosity

MacLeod Cartoons, via In Medias Res.

What Wyden asked (clipped from discussion at Crooks & Liars):

SEN. RON WYDEN: ...What do you think needs to be done to ensure that members of the public understand more about when the government thinks it’s allowed to kill them, particularly with respect to those two issues, the question of evidence and the authority to use this power within the United States?

JOHN BRENNAN: I have been a strong proponent of trying to be as open as possible with these programs, as far as our explaining what we’re doing. What we need to do is optimize transparency on these issues, but at the same time optimize secrecy and the protection of our national security. I don’t think that it’s one or the other. It’s trying to optimize both of them. And so, what we need to do is make sure we explain to the American people what are the thresholds for action, what are the procedures, the practices, the processes, the approvals, the reviews. The Office of Legal Counsel advice establishes the legal boundaries within which we can operate. It doesn’t mean that we operate at those out of boundaries. And, in fact, I think the American people will be quite pleased to know that we’ve been very disciplined, very judicious, and we only use these authorities and these capabilities as a last resort.

What Wyden didn't ask: So, uh, what's stopping you?

I'm pleased to hear that Father Brennan thinks I'll be pleased to know how disciplined and judicious they've been, but not sure I'll be as pleased as he thinks I'll be. Or whether what he regards as a last resort is the same as it would be for me. Do they have a sequence of steps they follow, beginning with a warning letter? (Dear Sir, Our current information indicates that you are a paid-up member of Al Qa'eda in the Arabian Peninsula. Please either provide evidence to the effect that you are not currently an imminent threat to the United States or its interests. Failure to respond will be regarded as unfriendly and may lead to adverse consequences for you, your family, your house, and any persons or animals who visit you. Also we would advise you to stay out of motor vehicles.)

It's humiliating to say, but I can't sustain any interest in the legal justifications at all—though I was very much intrigued by Emptywheel's suggestion that the recently "leaked" White Paper seemed to be cobbled together out of different sources, those that found the President's authority to conduct targeted assassinations in the Authorization to Use Military Force of September 2001 and those that found it in Article II of the Constitution (acting without congressional authorization in the nation's self-defense). Perhaps they have inadvertently revealed the real secret of the memos: that they're embarrassing, inadequate, and incompetent.

What I'd really like to see is how the rules are put into action. It's the evening of January 23 and Rabae Laheb is out in a double-cab Toyota Hilux on the road from Marib to Sanaa with four Yemeni companions and one or two Saudis, or perhaps a driver, Saleem Muhammed al Qawili. Laheb has been reported dead before, in a drone strike of last November, when Yemeni army colonel Adnan al Qadhi was killed (although he could easily have been arrested by local authorities and may not have been a militant at all). At 8:00 PM a drone passes overhead and four missiles fall out of the sky to hit them, completely destroying their vehicle and burning them all beyond recognition. Did anything happen in the White House? A blip floating across a screen? ("Old Laheb's on the road?" "I thought we killed that sucker six weeks ago!") Or is the White House finished once they've declared him an imminent threat?

Is there a team watching all Sanaa 24 hours a day on video screens somewhere, reporting who gets into a car and where they're driving throughout the entire city? Or is it guys on the ground following particularly those higher up on the list and calling home to say when a target is in a killable situation (i.e., not with wives and children or other non-imminent threats), and the video watchers (and the drone) take over from there?

And how do they know it's him? Especially given that he's supposed to be dead? Have they reopened his file on the receipt of new information? Is he tagged like a Wyoming wolf? (But if he's impossible to arrest, as he's supposed to be to get on the kill list, then he must be impossible to tag.) And how do they get confirmation? (Here in urban Yemen I can see it, but up in North Waziristan where the Pakistani troops themselves dare not move?)

And what about the cost-benefit analysis: How much harm has Laheb been doing, to Americans and American interests, how much since he went on the kill list, how much will have been prevented by his death? How much harm does his death do, how many friends or sons or nephews join the AQAP because of it, how many join some other party to the civil war because the government can't protect them. How many Yemeni doctors and teachers and civil servants will escape to some other country because they can't stand any more grief and terror, thus making Yemen a still more difficult place to live?

The vehicle Rabae Laheb was riding in. Yemen Observer via Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

You have any numbers on that, Father Brennan?

So crazy it just—worked already

A truly inspiring education story in today's Times, from Union City, New Jersey, teaser for a forthcoming book by David L. Kirp (Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America's Schools, to be released this April).

It's about one of those districts that seems to be doomed by factors entirely outside a superintendant's control—

a poor community with an unemployment rate 60 percent higher than the national average. Three-quarters of the students live in homes where only Spanish is spoken. A quarter are thought to be undocumented, living in fear of deportation. [jump]

But because of a comprehensive program developed over the last 25 years, from near-universal pre-K to literature seminars in high school, it looks very different:

From third grade through high school, students’ achievement scores now approximate the statewide average. What’s more, in 2011, Union City boasted a high school graduation rate of 89.5 percent — roughly 10 percentage points higher than the national average. Last year, 75 percent of Union City graduates enrolled in college, with top students winning scholarships to the Ivies.

And yet it hasn't achieved this by becoming a factory for the production of test scores:

It hasn’t followed the herd by closing “underperforming” schools or giving the boot to hordes of teachers. No Teach for America recruits toil in its classrooms, and there are no charter schools....

Nor, it might be added, did it divide the big high school into imitation charter schools so they could fire the Russian teacher and the track coach and hire more principals and assistant principals. What did it do?

To any educator with a pulse, this game plan sounds so old-school obvious that it verges on platitude.

Eugenio Maria de Hostos Center for Early Childhood Education.

They did, honestly, what teachers have been begging them to do for decades.

The district’s best educators were asked to design a curriculum based on evidence, not hunch.

There's nothing wrong with quantified data—indeed, it's necessary—but you mustn't confuse it, as the Rhees and Duncans do, with reality, and it has to be, as most of theirs isn't, reliable. (Did you see Rhee on the Daily Show last week, explaining that she knew her data was garbage, but gee, you have to go to war with the data you've got, not with the data you might wish to have, you know?)

Learning by doing replaced learning by rote.

Students who have studied how to take the tests don't actually know the material, they just know how to look as if they do; whereas students who have learned the material and ignored the test will do fine on the test anyway.

Parents were enlisted in the cause. Teachers were urged to work together, the superstars mentoring the stragglers and coaches recruited to add expertise.

Collaboration is hard to achieve when you've got a two-way race to the top and the bottom, where the superstars are moving to hipster Hoboken on their merit pay while the principal gets brownie points by denying tenure to the stragglers and eventually dumping them and you've got a staff turnover rate of 20% and more. That's an appealing strategy to "leaders" who like to make "tough decisions", like punishing Greece for borrowing from German and French banks, but it doesn't improve the situation. And guess what? Money does.

That these schools are generously financed clearly makes a difference — not every community will decide to pay for two years of prekindergarten.

Doesn't mean you should drop it on the school from a helicopter (with Greece that could be a good idea). Spend that money carefully—above all don't give a cut to rent-seeking charter school managers—but it has to be spent.

Union City High School class of 2011. Photo by Doug Bauman/The Jersey Journal.

Cheap shots: Blizzard edition

Beyoncé and Kathryn Jean in happier times (K-Lo in costume as a Discworld Dwarf). Photo via Heyonick

Kathryn Jean Lopez of the National Review (via ThinkProgress) wants to know:

Why can’t we have a national entertainment moment that does not include a mother gyrating in a black teddy?

Sorry, but that's a little too much like why can't we have a White History Month? Gyrating mother-free national entertainment moments are a dime a dozen where I come from. I wonder what cable company she has.

So he plead guilty, do he? Typo of the week, from ThinkProgress:

Floyd Corkins, 28, of Virginia on Wednesday plead guilty to a shooting a man at the conservative Family Research Council in August, CNN reports. As a motive, Corkins told a judge he wanted to intimated gay rights opponents.

Floyd, Floyd, that's not how to do it. You'll catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

Banker suit by Vivienne Westwood, fall-winter 2013.

I wish I'd written this:

To be read in the voice of Paul Harvey.

And on the eighth day God looked down on his planned paradise and said, “I need someone who can flip this for a quick buck.”

So God made a banker.

God said, “I need someone who doesn’t grow anything or make anything but who will borrow money from the public at 0% interest and then lend it back to the public at 2% or 5% or 10% and pay himself a bonus for doing so.”

So God made a banker.

God said, “I need someone who will take money from the people who work and save, and use that money to create a dotcom bubble and a housing bubble and a stock bubble and an oil bubble and a commodities bubble and a bond bubble and another stock bubble, and then sell it to people in Poughkeepsie and Spokane and Bakersfield, and pay himself another bonus.”

So God made a banker.

Click to Play

Dodge’s 'farmer' ad

In this Super Bowl ad, Chrysler pays tribute to the American farmer.

God said, “I need someone to build homes in the swamps and deserts using shoddy materials and other people’s money, and then use these homes as collateral for a Ponzi scheme he can sell to pensioners in California and Michigan and Sweden. I need someone who will then foreclose on those homes, kick out the occupants, and switch off the air conditioning and the plumbing, and watch the houses turn back into dirt. And then pay himself another bonus.”

God said, “I need someone to lend money to people with bad credit at 30% interest in order to get his stock price up, and then, just before the loans turn bad, cash out his stock and walk away. And who, when asked later, will, with a tearful eye, say the government made him do it.”

God said, “And I need somebody who will tell everyone else to stand on their own two feet, but who will then run to the government for a bailout as soon as he gets into trouble — and who will then use that bailout money to help elect a Congress that will look the other way. And then pay himself another bonus.”

So God made a banker. 

Brett Arends, MarketWatch; via Crook & Liars.

Humility Watch:

From AntTracts.

At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Obama called for “humility” that “carries over every day, every moment.”

“Let us retain that humility not just during this hour but for every hour,” the president said. “And let me suggest that those of us with the most power and influence need to be the most humble.

But in his Thursday radio broadcast, [the American Family Association's Bryan] Fischer concluded that God must be ignoring Obama if he has to pray for humility every day.
Raw Story (http://s.tt/1zy1M)

Yes, Fischer got his humility after one go. Little trick he picked up from David Brooks. That Obama is such a scrub, huh?

Ralph Lauren, David Lauren, and  the bathtub Matisse. Found art by Guccifer.

I have absolutely nothing to say about the heist of Bush family emails reported in the Smoking Gun, including George W.'s portraits of unclothed portions of his body (totally SFW unless you're supposed to be, like, working) except to express my childlike and nonpartisan delight at the news (to me) that Neil Bush's daughter is married to the son of a famous fashion designer (pictured above), making her name (drumroll) Lauren Lauren.

Also too, an illustration of partisan bias affecting even me:

In a December 27 e-mail to his four siblings, Jeb Bush saluted his ailing father’s “kindness and good nature” and pointed to “how kind he was with President Clinton and he helped restore his sordid reputation. A very tough thing to do but with kindness, dad probably helped Bill Clinton than anything he himself has done.”

I swear I had no idea Clinton was suffering from a "sordid reputation" when he left office with a 66% approval rating. I thought it was Clinton who was doing old George a favor, taking time to hang out with him. 

Data. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

David Brooks writes:

If you were to ask me to give a cute-sounding name to the hottest metaphysical trend in the intellectual world, I would call it Dataism, not to be confused with Dadaism,  after the android Data in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a soulless computer that knew the dimensions of everything and the value of nothing. In much the same way, our world is currently being quantified to a fare-thee-well, to the point where the pullulation of data threatens to overwhelm reality, blanketing it like a lead-filled duvet. There's a feeling out there that this is a good thing; that everything that can be measured should be measured, because data gives us the straight dope on the way things are, unmixed with the confusions of passion and bias, and this purity, like the purity of crystal, supposedly gives it a kind of magical power—enabling the scientist to predict the future.

Tiburtine Sibyl, from Ernst Freymund, Der Klugen Sibyllen verbessert astrologischer Weissagungs-Calender auf das Jahr 1741 (Nürnberg, 1741; VD18 90148967). From Research Fragments.

In coming months, I'm planning to take a long hard look at the universe of Dataism, seeing how it measures up against gut instinct on the turf, in relatively fair weather. When is it a good idea to give the facts a rain check and go with your intuition? When do the facts come up from behind to bound ahead in the stretch, leaving your intuition in the dust? What kinds of things are predictable with this modern numerology and what are not? 

I have to say I'm pretty skeptical. People have been trying to predict the future for centuries, and astrology, with all the numbers in the world, is no more successful than the Delphic oracle. Nevertheless, it's a known fact that data is really good at some things. 

In the first place, data has a way of showing you that something you thought was obviously true actually is not. For example, I'm told that casino gamblers believe in a phenomenon called the Just Universe, according to which if your luck has been going one way for a very long time, then it's time for it to start going the other way. Thus, when the roulette table at Monte Carlo hit black 26 times in a row, it was assumed that it was due for a similar streak of red. But according to Tversky and Kahneman, data proved that it never happened. 

Similarly, in a recent presidential election in a large Western country, members of the relatively conservative party were totally convinced that their candidate was going to win, displacing an unpopular leftist incumbent. There was just an electrical something in the air, they claimed; moreover, the relatively conservative campaign had more money than God, and was in the hands of a political wizard and math genius, or, rather, not exactly in his hands, which would have been illegal, for certain complicated reasons, but sort of run in parallel. Anyway one sniveling stripling statistician, on the basis of nothing but pure polling data, kept insisting that the unpopular leftist candidate was going to win, and he did. This is because the universe is not in fact just. And he probably had more money too. 

Second, data can reveal patterns in reality that simply thinking about things would not lead one to expect. Thus, I've always thought that if I used a lot of first-person singular pronouns in my speech or my writing that would mark me out as egotistical, which is probably why I hardly ever do. But as James Pennebaker of the University of Texas notes in his book, "The Secret Life of Pronouns", the real reason people use a lot of first-person pronouns is that they feel insecure. Thus, President Obama uses fewer first-person pronouns than any modern president. I don't think that means he has a self-esteem problem. 

By the same token, methods of statistical inference can be applied to the study of the question whether the grammatical structures used by a given writer, say Krugman, are more primitive, and his lexical selections less recherché, than those of another, say myself, proving that I really have nothing to be insecure about. 

In summary, data is transforming our world and is amazing stuff. But can it really predict the future? I'll just go check my Magic 8-Ball and let you know, heh-heh.

The prophet Daniel. Russian icon, 18th century, from Wikipedia (German).

Literary Corner

Image by Eefa Khalid for Dawn (Pakistan).

Best-written sentence in today's Times, by Robert F. Worth, Mark Mazzetti, and Scott Shane:

As the five men stood arguing by a cluster of palm trees, a volley of remotely operated American missiles shot down from the night sky and incinerated them all, along with a camel that was tied up nearby.

(Shouldn't be distracted, it's an upsetting article, but that camel! A perfect little poem.)

Worst-written sentence, by Thomas Friedman:

It’s hard to escape a visit to India without someone asking you to compare it to China.

(Field Marshall von Treppenwitz here, whose idea of reporting a trip is to report how he answered the questions everybody was asking him. But the spectacularly bad bit is the unintentional implication that the column is going to be about how he got out of India, or got out of going there altogether.)  

It was mortifying

Cilice, via Daily Mail.

From the Washington Post, via Doug at Balloon Juice:

After all three Masses on the weekend of Jan. 19-20, parishioners of St. Aloysius Catholic Church in Springfield, Ill., were handed a statement written by Bishop Thomas Paprocki. The bishop explained that St. Aloysius’ pastor, the Rev. Thomas Donovan, “is suffering from a psychological condition that manifests itself in self-bondage as a response to stress.”

The statement was a response to a 911 call in November by Donovan from the parish rectory. In it, the priest tells dispatchers he had placed himself in handcuffs and asks police to help free him. After the recording of Donovan’s 911 call rocketed across the Internet, Paprocki was in a unique situation. His priest had not done anything illegal, and yet he’d been found doing something most people would consider bizarre. In Paprocki’s 1,038-word response to parishioners, he took the unusual step of delving deep into Donovan’s psychological problem. With the priest’s consent, the statement includes a description of what Donovan’s own clinical therapist had diagnosed as “non-sexual self-bondage.”

Well, that explains everything.

Donovan’s hands were cuffed behind his back with the keyhole facing up, so he couldn’t unlock himself, according to the police report. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit and “a leather bondage-type mask with a bar in his mouth.” The officers uncuffed Donovan, and asked if he needed medical attention. The priest said he was fine, he was alone, and that he “does this from time to time.”

It was a non-sexual leather bondage-type mask. The kind you wear for your non-sexual bondage stuff. Like, with your buddies from work. When there's nothing good on TV.

What, exactly, “this” was must have been the topic of conversation when Donovan was summoned to Paprocki’s office 11 days later. During that meeting, the bishop learned that Donovan was “mortified” by what happened, but insisted he’d been alone “the whole time of this incident,” and “denied that there was any sexual component to this,” according to Paprocki’s statement.

OK, that's clear, then. There is not any sexual component to this, or "this".

The bishop said that after a review of Donovan’s “work and lifestyle patterns,” the diocese had found he “severely-compromised patterns of self-care with respect to diet, exercise, sleep, work hours, and unreasonable expectations of himself as a pastor.” Such patterns, the bishop continued, can lead a person to self-medicate. Sometimes that comes in the form of alcohol, drugs, gambling or pornography. In Donovan’s case, according to an unnamed therapist the bishop cited, stress reduction came in the form of self-bondage.

Oh, snap! Back up there a minute! Did you say "mortified"? As in "mortification of the flesh"? But that's totally normal, right? It's not sexual if it's theological. It's like the hair shirt and discipline, only hip. I mean, it's the 21st century, you can't expect a chap to go out to the desert and sit on a pillar. If he was mortified, that only means it was working, for goodness' sake!

Thaipusam, Georgetown, Penang, from RealMagick.

High Horse

Cross-posted to the New York Times:

• RobertS
• Queens, New York

FLAG

l have read the white paper on this and it is pretty clear that to kill Americans who are actively supporting, planning and carrying out operations against our country should be legal. If you want to comment then at least read what the government is basing this on. And I can't really see why anyone has a problem with this. I would rather they be killed then my family, friends, neighbors and citizens of the United States.

Get off you high horses, these people mean business and any American who sides with them gets what they deserve, a quick trip to paradise. Let the government do what needs to be done and I wish them good hunting, for all our sakes!

• David Bloom
• New York, NY

You really need to try to imagine that you are somebody like the nice Queens-dweller and good citizen I am sure you are with a family member or friend or neighbor who happens to be wandering around Yemen without a good reason, or without a reason that is clear to the US military. There are lots of people in Queens like that and just as nice as you: Arabic speakers on a study break, young men looking for wives, businesspeople making contacts. I am a hundred percent sure that President Obama doesn't want to kill such a person and works very hard to avoid it, but I don't think he succeeds in avoiding it a hundred percent of the time. And I am mindful that not all presidents are as conscientious as he is.

I really am on a high horse here, of lives and fortunes and sacred honor. If you say you would rather have innocent people killed than be endangered yourself you are not being what I would call a good American.

High Horse, by Bloody Bishop.

I might add that I'm not even yet ready to condemn Obama on this—still wrestling—but an argument like that of Robert S is really how "the terrorists will have won."

Hardly shocking

Man Bites Dog. From Mr. Smash Goes to Washington.

From Karoli at Crooks & Liars:

If you're Al Gore and you own 20 percent of Current TV, and Current TV is sold to Al Jazeera, which is owned by Qatar's royal family, and Qatar's royal family also profits from oil trading, have you sold out the cause of global warming?

That's the question Howie Kurtz brought up on Reliable Sources this morning. I think it's a manufactured issue, but Dana Milbank begs to differ, saying "[H]e's been a big spokesman on global warming, a principled man and now he is this big, fat target." Continuing his rant, Milbank said Gore is "worth $300 million more than Mitt Romney and basically he's seen as a guy now who enriched himself, rather than advancing his cause --opening up to the criticism of people like this global warming denier."

The Blaze writer Amy Holmes was predictably banal in her response, claiming Gore has "been telling the rest of the world to, you know, restrain and constrain our spending while he personally is becoming a wealthier man through, you know, his attack on Mother Nature."

I don't think that Holmes is banal, I think she's a lunatic. When did Gore tell us to constrain our spending? When did he attack Mother Nature? Does she think it's patronizing or sexist to suggest that Mother Nature can't handle a few greenhouse gases on her own, is that it? No, I didn't think so either. She's making it up out of who knows what kind of fantasies. And that "restrain and constrain" is authentic Palinese.

Milbank is an extraordinary little bitch, there's no other way of putting it, if only for the repetition of metaphorical "big" and "fat" so he can middle-school taunt Gore without violating the Village Code. In the same way he and Kurtz manage to slime Gore without legally slandering him, by conversational indirection and the dextrous use of Cokie's Law.

Kurtz just asks if there's something wrong with being an advocate for the environment and selling a cable channel to the Emir of Qatar, but doesn't allege anything in particular. Gore, of course, publicly wishes people would use less hydrocarbon fuel, ostensibly in order to save our planet for future generations of humans and other animals, and plants too (but who knows what he's really after, bwahahaha?). The Emir makes money off of people using more hydrocarbons. Isn't it odd?

Milbank explains: what's wrong with it, actually, is that Gore has made himself a "target". He is now "open to criticism"—meaning, I suppose, that they're talking about it where Cokie Roberts has her hair done. Milbank is criticizing Gore not out of any idea that Gore has done something actually wrong but simply because criticizing him is possible. And fun, naturally, if you're Dana.

Bodhi, the debonair dog. From Daily Beast.

There is something rather bad that Gore might conceivably have done: he might have sold the channel to Al Jazeera in the full knowledge that Al Jazeera was going to use it to propagandize in favor of burning more carbon. Except, you know, that they don't. In fact Al Jazeera is notable for the high quality of its environmental coverage, far better than any US channel, and the Emirate aims to generate 16% of its electricity from solar power by 2018 (the US would be pleased to make 10% by 2025). And it was Qatar that sponsored last year's big climate change conference (though even when they're in New York Al Jazeera still gives them more air time than US network TV, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, or even C-Span).

Do Howard Kurtz and Dana Milbank ever ask about Fox News being owned by Rupert Murdoch, who is an owner of Genie Oil & Gas and American Shale Oil LLC (with Dick Cheney!)? Or how Fox Business News doesn't mention Murdoch's name when it is touting the Genie Venture?

Fox Business host Stuart Varney declared, "The next big oil power in the middle east, Israel? Can you believe that? Well, it may be the case because of shale oil. Israel's got a lot of it, and we're covering it."

And Murdoch has after all been running a criminal enterprise in England for years ("It's really chilling, though hardly shocking,"  said Kurtz, that NewsCorp was spying on the personal communications of Tom Watson, MP). And Fox News says that the global temperature basically hasn't changed since the Ice Age, etc., etc., openly encouraging people to stop worrying about it. Isn't Murdoch a "target"?

",Jewish owned press" have been sternly criticised, suggesting link to Jewish reporters.Don't see this, but apologise unreservedly.
— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) November 18, 2012

Kurtz boldly said, "The wording is too cryptic to know for what exactly he's apologizing."

Isn't Murdoch "open to criticism"? I guess he is. But then I guess if you accused Murdoch of advancing his financial interests through his control over the editorial operations of his newspapers and television stations that would be quite different from suggesting that Al Gore sold his business somehow corruptly. Saying such things about Murdoch would be "hardly shocking".

Dana Milbank calls Nico Pitney a dick. From Gawker.

Certain scientists

Ordovician sea with trilobites and other animals, ca. 450 million  years ago,  from  Paleoart. But then there's evidence on both sides of the table (on top of it and under it), and Certain Scientists say it's only about 4,000 years old, contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in China, and the migration of Ethiopians to Kenya.

Generations Radio host Kevin Swanson interviewing the documentary filmmaker Kevin Peeples, from Right Wing Watch via Wonkette:

Swanson: I’m beginning to get some evidence from certain doctors and certain scientists that have done research on women’s wombs after they’ve gone through the surgery, and they’ve compared the wombs of women who were on the birth control pill to those who were not on the birth control pill. And they have found that with women who are on the birth control pill, there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb. They’re just like dead babies. They’re on the inside of the womb. And these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.

Peeples: We’ve actually heard on both sides of that. We’re researching that and want to make sure we speak correctly to that in our second film. But we have medical advice on both sides of the table there, so we want to make sure that we communicate that properly.

Swanson: It would seem, and I realize that people are a little split on what are all the effects of the birth control pill, but it would seem that there’s a tremendous risk in the use of it for the life of children.

Just wow. This man still has the creativity of a six-year-old. The mommy and the daddy do it, you see, and the violence of the action makes an egg hatch, up in the mommy's fallopian tubes. Out drifts a tiny sleeping creature, like a fairy, toward its bed in the womb—but no! There's this noxious birth control gas, it struggles to breathe, beats its tiny fists against the wall, and expires! And this happens again and again until this womb is a catacomb.

But we have medical advice on both sides of the table there, and other explorers say what we're talking about is just trilobites, ancient marine fossils, evoking babies, the way manatees made people imagine mermaids and rhinoceroses seemed to be unicorns. Who can say? The womb is so old, and vast!

The Obama Doctrine

While all the emoprogs out there are running around howling about Obama the mass murderer, a story by NPR's Ari Shapiro suggests he thinks he's earning that Nobel Prize by a "shift in the way the U.S. wages war." This is what's signaled by the three big national security nominations of Kerry to State, Hagel to Defense, and Brennan to the CIA—two Vietnam vets and a crypto-Jesuit. In the less than happy phrasing of Karen Greenberg, director of the National Security Program at the Fordham University Law School,

"Remember, President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize by saying war is necessary... He's somebody who understands, to his mind, what he sees as the need of war to create peace."

(I would say most people are people who understand, to their minds, what they see themselves as understanding, whether they indeed understand it or not, and whether the reader understands it or not too.)

Via Chitramala.

In any case, it's about the Drone Wars, and other such "targeted and surgical" operations, and the general End of Big War as We Know It. Obama really means it, as I have been speculating, as a way of making war less grievous and less cruel, and above all smaller:

The White House emphasizes that both Kerry and Hagel understand the full cost of war — in money and in lives. Obama says he believes that makes them the right men for this moment, as the administration shifts its approach following a decade of big, expensive, bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, puts it: "I don't think we can necessarily say without a doubt that there will never be a large war again. However, certainly we've moved conceptually toward a more targeted, surgical approach that focuses on al-Qaida."

The argument as I imagine it—certainly not the way Father Brennan would make it—is like this:

1. There's no such thing as a just war. No matter how unavoidable it may, after a certain point, have become, no matter how much in the right one side may be, it's always the result of a failure.

No, I don't know what could have been done short of war to stop Hitler and the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, or for that matter what the Pandavas could have done to avoid slaughtering the Kauravas, as Arjuna wished he might do when he paused, before the ultimate battle, for a conversation with his charioteer, who happened to be a god and could thus explain a good deal. All I claim to know is that it follows directly from the existence of a state of war that people are going to be doing things they know to be morally wrong, taking those Tough Decisions, committing unjustifiable homicide.

Soldiers (including sailors, marines, etc.; I do not use the phony-glorifying terms "warrior" and "warfighter") know this. Marine captain Timothy Kudo has recently written eloquently about it:

While I don’t know why individual veterans resort to suicide, I can say that the ethical damage of war may be worse than the physical injuries we sustain. To properly wage war, you have to recalibrate your moral compass. Once you return from the battlefield, it is difficult or impossible to repair it. 

VA has started calling this problem “moral injury,” but that’s as deceptive a euphemism as “collateral damage.” This isn’t the kind of injury you recover from with rest, physical therapy and pain medication. War makes us killers. We must confront this horror directly if we’re to be honest about the true costs of war.

2. Nothing can mitigate this—not grace and gallantry, not the wickedness of the enemy—except reducing it: seeing that fewer people get killed, in particular fewer of those that are not directly trying to kill you, or "civilians". And that's not good enough either, but it's all you can do. And it can take distinctly ungraceful and ungallant forms.

3. Drone warfare is very ungallant. In terms of traditional military gallantry it is downright cowardly, probably more so than any form of fighting previously invented. (That's only true for the shooter: I would imagine the confederates on the ground calling in the strike may need to be very brave indeed.) It is also very efficient, especially in contrast to such methods as carpet bombing and poison gas: potentially, it allows you to kill only those persons who are trying to kill you. According to NPR,

There is wide uncertainty about how many civilians have been killed in U.S. drone strikes. One estimate from the New America Foundation says around 300 civilians were killed in Pakistan from 2004 to the beginning of this year.

There is at least one case where U.S. officials, including Panetta, knew that a woman was present at a possible strike site, and the attack was ordered anyway. A U.S. official told NPR a strike with non-combatants in the area would only happen in "exceptional circumstances against very high-level terrorists."

Incidentally, Father Brennan walked back the lie, or incredibly naive assertion, that there had been no civilian deaths for 12 months up to June 2011; now he says,

there had been a period of time where the U.S. "had no information about a single civilian being killed." But, he added, "unfortunately in war there are casualties, including among the civilian population." He said "sometimes you have to take life to save lives."

And you know what "the U.S. had no information" means: it means the information had no official status as it floated up and down the hierarchy.

It's amazing how freely they've suddenly begun talking about it:

As head of the CIA, Panetta oversaw the U.S. drone campaign against al-Qaida. When the intelligence identified the location of a particular target, Panetta often had to decide whether to fire.

"As a Catholic, suddenly realizing I had the responsibility of saying, 'We're going to go after somebody,' it was something I did not take lightly," he says. "It's a lot of responsibility."

Panetta justifies the use of drones as a necessary tool to "keep the country safe," which he says was his mission both as head of the CIA and as defense secretary.

"I felt they were legitimate if we followed the law, and did what we had to do under our law, to make sure that we were being true to the American people with regard to our responsibility," he says.

Is Panetta sure that's not going to get him jailed? And why not?

In any event it's really ugly and being carried out by people who are not entirely to be trusted, and I may add that I don't think it's winning any hearts and minds, but no, Obama is not a mass murderer. As yet. Just a second-rate theologian, which makes him an order of magnitude better than most of the theologians on the case.

B.A.D. Karma

Update: Welcome, visitors!

It's Blogroll Amnesty Day, when bloggists everywhere and in memory of the great Jon Swift/Al Weisel are encouraged, via Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, to link to somebody our readers (if any) might not otherwise think of linking to.

From Zen Comix.

We're supposed to link to blogs smaller than our own, and we're not supposed to make crass jokes about how there are no blogs smaller than our own, which makes it a bit of a challenge for me. NO, I mean because I don't actually know whether they are or not, so if you're a friend of rectification who believes that your blog is smaller please be assured that I thought you were going to link to me but I'm not disappointed at all. Really, I don't mind.

Everything I really read is already on the blogroll anyway. The following are the cream of an afternoon spent looking for new stuff.

The Non Sequitur

The Hasbara Buster

Dohiyi Mir

Idées reçues: vérités notoires d'aujourd'hui et d'hier

Shut up David Brooks

Gustave Flaubert, via G0ne Fishin9.

Cheap shots, 2/1/2013

PresObama said a decade of war is ending War on Terror is 25yrs old It will continue PresKennedy said"it will be a long twilight struggle"
— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) January 27, 2013

OK, Senator, I get that the War on Terror really started in 1988 when Al Qa'eda was founded, but you'll have to admit we didn't commit that many troops right away, or even, in fact, know about it, and then what did happen 10 years ago wasn't the War on Terror either but the War on George Bush's Inferiority Complex in Iraq, although a kind of Qa'eda ultimately showed up once the room had been cleared for them. But I'm virtually certain President Kennedy wasn't talking about Osama in 1961. Or even Khrushchëv.

Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.

What did you do in the struggle against war today, Chuck? What did you do today about poverty and disease, Senator? What did you do exactly to earn the right to throw Kennedy quotes in people's faces?

Chuck thought the long twilight struggle was the Romney campaign. August 2011, from the Washington Post.

You might be a conservative if...

The following is a Heritage statement on immigration, in its entirety. Read it carefully; there will be a test:

America’s heritage of immigration has fueled our nation’s strength and diversity, yet our immigration system has become so politicized and dysfunctional that it causes untold personal tragedies, strains the fiscal capacity of public services in many states, and prevents many from pursuing the American Dream. Complex, comprehensive legislation based on back-room deals never works, and the Senate immigration proposal announced this week and echoed yesterday by President Obama—to the extent that it repeats the mistakes of the past—will further polarize Americans, fail to solve the real policy problems, and make matters worse.

Immigrants come to our country for freedom and economic opportunity. We are concerned that many aspects of the framework for comprehensive reform will undermine the very foundations that make for America’s exceptional success. Policymakers should refrain from committing to such broad statements before the actual legislative language is available for public review. A proposal that would grant individuals who are in this country illegally a pathway to citizenship violates the rule of law and is unfair to those who have obeyed our immigration laws.

The Heritage Foundation believes that America’s immigration system must be reformed through an open and public step-by-step, problem-solving approach that unites Americans and creates a system that welcomes immigrants, protects our sovereignty, encourages assimilation, and expands opportunities for everyone. Once such common-sense reforms are in place and working, lawmakers can determine how to respond in a fair, compassionate, and constitutional way to those who have come to our country illegally.

Questions:

1. What were the mistakes of the past? Does the Senate proposal repeat them? If so, what untold tragedies will they cause, which states will they strain the fiscal capacities of the public services of, and how will they prevent many from pursuing the American Dream? Be specific.

2. To what extent does the Senate proposal repeat the mistakes of the past? Is it enough to polarize Americans, fail to solve problems, and make matters worse? How many problems and how much worse? State your evidence.

3. Which aspects of the framework for reform will undermine the very foundations that make for America's success? Which foundations in particular?

4. What broad statements have which policymakers publicly committed to?

5. Why is it OK for the Heritage Foundation to make broad statements before the actual legislative language is available for review?

6. How does a law establishing a way for undocumented immigrants to be in compliance with the law violate the rule of law?

7. How is a law establishing the path to citizenship unfair to those who have obeyed immigration laws? Is it more fun to be illegal, or what?

8. Does the Heritage Foundation have an alternative plan? Describe in detail how it avoids untold tragedies, straining the fiscal capacities of the public services of many states, and preventing many from pursuing the American dream?

9. What exactly would be the harm in being fair, compassionate, and constitutional right now?

If you can answer 5 to 7 of these questions based on the given information, you might be a conservative. I whipped off my metaphorical cap and cried, "This thing is totally semantically empty!"

Cattle Car, via Rocketboom.

First they came for the collateralized debt obligations, and I said nothing...

Idaho state senator Sheryl Nuxall, via ThinkProgress, explaining why she compared insurance companies under Obamacare to Jews under the Third Reich:

“I felt badly for the Jews — it wasn’t just Jews, but Jews, and Christians, and Catholics, and priests. My thing was they didn’t know what was going on. The insurance companies are not realizing what’s going to end up in their demise.”

It was an unbearably poignant sight as they shoved the corporations into the cattle cars—manufacturers separated from their finance arms, banks from their brokerages. I saw a mother company pushing her little subsidiary away: "It's too late for me... run, darling, run... for the Caymans!"