Why can't Johnny read?

Best thing I've read on #Syria in some time - @bbcnews: "Syria's protracted conflict shows no sign of abating" bbc.co.uk/news/world-mid…
— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) May 9, 2013

Hmm, let's see.

BBC (by Paul Danahar):

The situation in Syria is complicated. If you are not confused by what is going on there, then you do not understand it. 

McCain:

I also know the situation in Syria is complex and there are no ideal options. But the basic choice we face is not complicated...

BBC:

Firstly, the FSA - that you have been hearing so much about - does not exist.... the Syrian opposition's political leadership - which wanders around international capitals attending conferences and making grand speeches - is not leading anyone. It barely has control of the delegates in the room with it, let alone the fighters in the field.

McCain:

we should work with our closest friends and allies to support opposition groups inside Syria, both political and military, to help them organize themselves into a more cohesive and effective force that can put an end to the bloodshed and force Assad and his loyalists to leave power. 

BBC:

America is not acting because it does not know what to do or whom to do it with. Neither do the European countries. Having spent the last few days in Beirut and Damascus, talking to the international community, Western diplomats, FSA activists and Syrian regime supporters, it is clear that nobody knows how to end this crisis. That's just about the only thing all sides agree on.

McCain:

The benefit for the United States in helping to lead this effort directly is that it would allow us to better empower those Syrian groups that share our interests—those groups that reject Al Qaeda and the Iranian regime, and commit to the goal of an inclusive democratic transition, as called for by the Syrian National Council. If we stand on the sidelines, others will try to pick winners, and this will not always be to our liking or in our interest.

Maybe the thing McCain liked so much wasn't actually the article, just the 8 words mentioned in the tweet. I.e., the part he knew already. And the part that makes him happy. What a tool.

Via Stuck on Stupid.

The terrifying trend that is terrifying everybody, with real terror

Image by Nightmare Soldier at DeviantArt.

I wanted to get in on the big scandal rocking the US military and found something totally astonishing, but let me build up to it first.

Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force weighs in on possible reasons for the increase in unwanted sexual contact in our armed services, from 4.4% of women in active duty in 2010 to 6.1% last year (don't even ask about the men).

“Some of it is the hookup mentality of junior high even and high school students now, which my children can tell you about from watching their friends and being frustrated by it,” Gen. Mark A. Welsh III said at a Senate hearing on the issue.

You think that might be it? Nasty public-school kids infecting the services with their nasty civilian behavior? Or maybe not, because when 4.4% of women in active duty were [jump]

Open wound

German immigrants in Madison, Wisconsin, 1897. Spartacus Educational, UK.

Brooks is scratching at the open wound in the conservative movement, which is the issue of immigration. When the Nixonians first pitched the big tent of the Southern Strategy which was to join together the Republicans of yacht club and country club with the unreconstructed nullificationists of the South, it was always a doomed coalition, and immigration was [jump]

West of Eden: Update

The Times leads:

The White House insisted Monday that it would not be thrown off its cautious approach to Syria, despite Israeli military strikes near Damascus and new questions about the use of chemical weapons in the civil war there.

Booman thinks the paper is actually gunning for war, with Bill Keller's abominable column ("Syria is not Iraq"—well, whoop-de-doo, and it's not New Jersey either, Sparky, is it? I guess you could say every country is unique in its own way, or better still, you could shut up) yesterday and now this story. (Per Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice it's just blowback from their being bored with Afghanistan. Also it's not just the Times.)

It's certainly a very curiously constructed opening sentence. Are they suggesting it would have been less newsworthy if the White House were inspired by these to become less cautious???

Reuters via Al Jazeera.

This is pretty hard to take, but I think we need to appreciate Obama's discipline, when he is using any means necessary, including those verging on the unscrupulous, to avoid military stupidity: when the pressure becomes just immense. As on the subject of Iran (where he doesn't mind a rather cruel strategy of extremely harsh sanctions as long as war itself is averted), Libya (where there was a non-stupid approach available), Yemen and Somalia (where as bad as the drone campaign looks it is nevertheless a minimizing of how bad it might be).

Because clearly some kind of intervention in Syria, though unlikely in the extreme to save even a single life, is clearly deeply desired by a lot of people. Not that they've finally noticed how many people are being killed. I imagine there must be some kind of Syrian Chalabi  (the new prime minister-in-exile Ghassan Hitto, conveniently domiciled in Texas from 1980 until recently?) making the cocktail rounds in Georgetown. Or the Syrian Support Group?

Officially formed in the spring of 2012 by a group of Syrian expatriates living in the U.S. and Canada, the SSG has acted as a conduit for information between Syria's Supreme Military Council, which commands the rebel armies, and outside governments ever since the U.S. severed diplomatic ties with Syria in February of 2012. It has also been raising money from private donors to support the Syrian rebels and lobbying Congress and the Obama administration to send military assistance to the fighters.

Syrian expatriates such as executive director Brian Sayers and  media relations director Dan Layman. Huh.

Insight

Dr. Turk writes:

No matter how much they want to say otherwise, it's pretty clear that that gay guy, John Maynard Keynes, was absolutely right in how important spending is to job growth.

That's what it's about, isn't it? The evidence shows he's right, so they have to find some other reason why he's wrong. E.g., Al Gore is fat.

Shortly after the discovery of the vacuum cleaner, ancient Egyptians learned that puppies weigh exactly the same as bowling balls.

Insider Pooper Scoopers: Who're you gonna call?

#Break: Rush Limbaugh may leave Cumulus politico.com/blogs/media/20… via @politico
— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) May 6, 2013

Looks like young Dylan got him a Scoop! With anonymous source and all, and writing it up like he's reading it off his Hildy Johnson Junior Journalist Secret Decoder Ring:

The Rush Limbaugh Program is considering ending its affiliation agreement with Cumulus Media at the end of this year, a move that would bring about one of the biggest shakeups in talk radio history, a source close to the show tells POLITICO.

Son of a gun! How did that happen, O source close to the show?

According to the source, Limbaugh is considering the move because Cumulus CEO Lew Dickey has blamed the company's advertising losses on Limbaugh's controversial remarks about Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student.

Personal disclosure: My name undoubtedly figures among the petitions to various advertisers asking them to dump the Rushster, so I'm getting a little quiver of We Built That. So is he [jump]

Questions, questions...

Cares about the future.

With him it's just sex, sex, sex.

Did Niall Ferguson say something true?

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson posted an "unqualified apology" on his personal blog on Saturday after saying that British economist John Maynard Keynes did not care about the future because he was gay and had no children. The comments were "as stupid as they were insensitive," Ferguson wrote.

Well, they were that. (He also said they were "off the cuff", suggesting he really needs to start patronizing a different laundry, since he has found the same remarks on his cuff before.)

Something Wiki this way comes

The other day Jared Bernstein, contemplating the Reinhart-Rogoff massacree, was inviting us to note that from an institutional point of view the fact that the peer review issue was less important in the general fiasco than the issue of the openness of the data—nobody could figure out what the authors had done, let alone what they had done wrong, until they finally released their spreadsheet. It made me imagine a world of open economic data, a Wikinomics database where any unaffiliated idiot could test a hypothesis—association between gun deaths and Evangelicalism?—on reputable numbers.

Well, it looks like the retroactionary gods were listening, because today I learned from a Guardian article that there already is a Wikidata, still in its infancy, part of the Wikimedia family.

If you have a Wikipedia name and password you can log right in and start working, although you will have to be more patient than me to find out what kind of work is available. When I say in its infancy, I mean there is really nothing for users at this point—it is in the care of the truly dedicated and technically endowed. But it's going to be wondrous!

The opposite of leadership; or, Why it's always projection

CNN at the NRA convention in Houston, via BooMan:

Palin argued the president was practicing the "politics of emotion" by "flying in grieving parents on Air Force One, making them backdrops in his perpetual campaign-style press events."

Par for the course, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee faulted the media for being a "reliable, poodle-skirted cheerleader for a president who writes the book on exploiting tragedy."

Politics of emotion, she argued, won't make the country safer. "It's the opposite of leadership. It's the manipulation of the people by the politicians for their own political ends. It's not just self-serving. It's destructive and it must stop."

Our media. From Glamour Daze.

Leadership is:

1. the politics of Vulcan rationality
2. making grieving parents take the bus
3. not campaigning for things

What interests me the most is the implication that Obama is using the Newtown families, for example, for some hidden purposes of his own; not, that is, to pass gun control legislation, but to achieve an end he doesn't name. What do you suppose it could be? Is he a short-seller betting heavily on a fall in Remington shares? Does he represent a clandestine freemasonry or trade union of burglars hoping to rid Middle America of the ubiquitous semi-automatic under the bed? Is he part of a vast conspiracy against the Third Amendment aiming at quartering troops in everybody's master bedroom?

She's not going to think it through that far, naturally; or she'll toss her grappling hooks to New World Order or Socialism and just hang on. But she knows that you can use emotion to suspend people's judgment and make them do what you want, chiefly involving their checkbooks. It's always projection because that's all the sociopathic imagination can do, really.

Cheap shots, and a Sex On The Beach for the minority leader

The Tim Brando sex tape? From Every Day Should Be Saturday.

I'm hearing Collins is a HERO because he made history! Okas a Sports Commentator if I make a SEX tape is that history?The word matters ok
— Tim Brando (@TimBrando) April 29, 2013

Depends what's on the tape, Tim. What have you got? Here's a suggestion: judging from how far you got your foot in, you seem to have a pretty Deep Throat, so you might want to think along those lines.

Hello, sailor! What's your poison? Via TPM.

Senator McConnell attempting to look friendly, with Clint Eastwood's chair and glass of wine evidently for the prophet Elijah or St. Joseph, depending on your persuasion and the time of year. Actually, no: the chair and the drink are both of course supposed to be for President Obama. Two questions raise themselves immediately in the mind of the structural anthropologist. First, why the chair instead of the barstool, so that if the president does sit down, his eyes will be at the level of the senator's substantial embonpoint? Second, why does the senator give himself a beer while the president is invited to take a dainty glass of pinot noir? I think I know the answer to the second one, that he wishes to present himself as Mitch Sixpack and the other guy as the Sheriff of Nottingham.

If so, I'm here to warn you, Senator, this is not going to work. As a Kentuckian, you could get away with bourbon, at least on Derby Day, but there's no way anyone will accept you as a beer guy. They will flee in fear.

Good news in today’s jobs report, but POTUS’ policies still aren’t providing the robust growth we need j.mp/1350iaM
— Speaker John Boehner (@SpeakerBoehner) May 3, 2013

Hint: Policies don't do anything, Mr. Speaker. Until your legislature enacts them.

Engaged or disengaged?

David Brooks has gotten a huge amount of attention from some of the right people for his really egregious self-serving self-portrait in yesterday's Times, earning a notable scolding from Jonathan Chait and a wonderful parody by Atrios.

As you probably have heard by now, Brooks is doing one of his two-roads-diverged numbers, addressed to an imaginary young writer who wants to grow up to be Brooks; he divides the world of writers on politics and policies into two classes: the "engaged", by which he actually means rabid partisan hacks like Paul Krugman, and the "detached", or transcendent sages like his oh-so-humble humility professor self.

The only thing I have to add to the discussion is to note that this is just four days after a column in which Brooks predicts the failure of Obamacare in terms that could virtually have been read aloud from the Republican talking points sheet for the weekend, i.e., provides an example of partisan hackery that is indistinguishable from what Mitch McConnell's chief of staff might have said.

Which is not to say that Brooks is a partisan hack. He can do partisan hack pretty well, as he showed especially during his tenure at the Weekly Standard, except for the math anxiety issues that sometimes affect his judgment, but it's not his only shtik. What he's engaged in in this column is denial.

Or, as Driftglass puts it,

Did I mention that this is all coming out of the face hole of the same guy who literally bought himself a mansion with the proceeds of a professional lifetime spent pimping one crackpot Republican idea after another? 

The road less traveled. Via People Polarity.

Judge not, lest ye be Friedman

Yes, it's Thomas P. Friedman, more frequently addressed as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Cholericus, with yet another insight to offer to an astounded public.

Aireekah at regretsy.

This one has to do with his wrath, for the Mustache is wrathful today. He is downright sparked off, in fact. We haven't seen him so indignantly quivering since the Iraq War ended in May 2003.

Yes, of course, May 2003. When did you think the war ended? He took his mustache onto the Charlie Rose show to announce it, on the very same day, May 29, as [jump]

Nerdpron, er, prom, with swagbag of Tweets

Nerd Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. From also smarter-than-she-looks romance novelist Sarah MacLean.

That #WHCD was pathetic. The rest of America is out there working our asses off while these DC assclowns throw themselves a #nerdprom
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) April 28, 2013

No kidding, man. Why, as far as I could tell, nobody mentioned Sarah even once.* [jump]

Beyond the wacky rich

Video: White House Correspondents' Dinner: What it's like to walk the red carpet

Oh, Mikey! You're so—big!

Image from FamousDC.

Before turning to national politics, he covered schools and local governments in rural counties outside Fredericksburg, Va., for The Free Lance-Star, then wrote about Doug Wilder, Oliver North, Chuck Robb and the Bobbitts for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, where he nurtured police sources on overnight ride-alongs through housing projects. Allen also covered Mayor Giuliani, the Connecticut statehouse and the wacky rich of Greenwich for The New York Times.

George W driven to Rehab

Uncredited image from Esquire.

Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street Monsignor Ross Douthat joins the choruses of "He couldn't have been that bad":

a lot of liberal criticism of Bush’s record (and especially his domestic record) looks not only misguided but absurd — and I think many liberals know it. Look at Yglesias’s piece, for instance, listing “positive aspects of the Bush presidency that often get overlooked.” It includes signature Bush-era legislation like No Child Left Behind Medicare Part D, plus smaller initiatives like the AIDS-in-Africa push and the “housing first” approach to homelessness, plus the emergency responses to the financial crash, plus some praise for Bush’s failed immigration push and his overridden farm bill veto. That’s almost his entire domestic policy!

First, whatever Yglesias says about No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D (you can tell he's neither a parent nor retired) they were disasters. (And yes, I do know Teddy's sacred name was on the former.) Second,

 That’s almost his entire domestic policy!

I just about rest my case. Third,

True, the list doesn’t include the Bush tax cuts...

Now it's his entire domestic policy. I.e., he had virtually none except to bring the country to fiscal ruin. And to note that Democratic legislators have not been very eager to close the cuts in an attempt to spread the Plame, I mean blame, is pretty disingenuous even by the young Monsignor's standards:

but you may have noticed that the Democratic Party showed no enthusiasm for repealing them for anyone except the wealthy. 

The Bush tax cuts didn't especially benefit anybody except the wealthy.

I don’t really think there are a lot of serious Obama-era liberals ready to argue that, say, Bush’s deficits were actually the grave threat to the republic Bush-era liberals made them out to be...

No, they were much worse—Bush's deficits were what above all made it politically impossible to enact an adequate stimulus after the 2008 crash...

Call for Signatures

Via Echidne of the Snakes:

Beatriz wants to live. She's 22 years old and the mother of an infant, but the 18 week pregnancy she's carrying is killing her -- right now as you read this -- and the government of El Salvador has refused to permit an exception to their abortion ban to save her life.

The fetus Beatriz is carrying is anencephalic; it has no brain and won't survive birth even if her health allowed her to carry to full term. More to the point, Beatriz has lupus, worsened by a kidney malfunction, and it's very dangerous for her to be pregnant. But under El Salvador's abortion ban, both Beatriz and any medical staff involved in providing a therapeutic abortion would face criminal charges, carrying penalties as high as 50 years in jail for her and 12 years in jail for her doctors.

El Salvador's minister of health and the attorney general for human rights both support making an exception to the law for this case, but the supreme court is slow-walking it. There's a petition you can sign, here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Agrupación Ciudadana por la despenalización del aborto Terapéutico, Ético y Eugénesico.  Via  Amnesty USA.

Cheap shots and expensive lifestyles

De Sacha Guitry à Diane Arnaud.

Please tell me David Petraeus with his visiting professor gig at the Macaulay Honors College, City University of New York, isn't burnishing his academic credentials for that presidential run (perhaps it could be a bipartisan Joint ticket with Anthony Wiener). Washington Post:

Petraeus has a doctorate from Princeton University and has written widely on international relations, military strategy and tactics and national security issues.

He says in a statement released by Macaulay he’s pleased to teach at the college, where most students are children of immigrants. He says he looks forward to leading a seminar on the global economic slowdown.

It would be cool to have one of those certified Serious people out there recommending a fiscal Surge on the Sunday morning shows, though I guess around five years [jump]

Got paranoia? The aha moment

Vaughn Bode's The Man (1972), via Matt Seneca.

Via BooMan, a bit of very strong noticing from Walter Katz at The Week involving Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mysterious Armenian friend.

in 2008 or 2009, Tamerlan met Misha, a slightly older, heavyset bald man with a long reddish beard. [Tamerlan's ex-brother-in-law] Khozhugov didn't know where they'd met but believed they attended a Boston-area mosque together. Misha was an Armenian native and a convert to Islam and quickly began influencing his new friend, family members said.

Misha, apparently, was the Salafizing influence, who convinced him to give up music, go to mosque regularly, read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and become a 9/11 truther, and who knows what else?

What occurred to Katz is that all the radical-Muslim conspiracies that our government has stopped since  2001 have had a Misha-like figure, a kind of teacher who explained [jump]

Shays' Longue Rebellion

Army of Lawyers, from Saratoga in Decline.

Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice notes the startling views of cartoonist Ted Rall, who accepts the need for some gun regulation even as he proclaims himself to be (who knew?) a member of the Water the Tree of Liberty Second Amendment Club. He says, [jump]

Got paranoia? Cui bono update

I don't so far see anybody outside Chechen nationalist propaganda organs (which can't by definition be believed, no matter how much you might favor one or another of them politically) sharing in my horrible feeling about the origins of the Boston bombing, with one exception: UK diplomat and human rights activist Craig Murray. Here, he outlines why Russian authorities might not be sorry to see Chechen terrorists attack the US:

Cui Bono? Putin. The alleged actions of the Tsarnaev brothers are a massive setback to the cause of Chechen nationalism. The Russian government have been trying for a decade to conflate the repression of Chechen nationalism with the western construct of “the global war on terror”, with very limited diplomatic success. Now expect to hear continually about “Al Qaeda in the Southern Caucasus” in the next few years. Events in Boston have been a massive diplomatic coup for Putin.

Thug-in-chief Ramzan Kadyrov, from Prague Watchdog. Chechens asked for self-government and Vladimir Vladimirovich gave them government by id.

Does distress make me look fat?

David Brooks writes:

I guess everybody has seen the Dove Real Beauty Sketches video five or six times by now, where the women undergo an experiment where they find out that in the eyes of other people they seem better looking than they actually are, if that's not oversimplifying.

I mean, not really an experiment in the sense of science, footnoted and peer-reviewed and so forth. In fact Gail and Frank and everybody up in New York is telling me that it's art, which is absurd. The guy doesn't even draw [jump]

Greetings, Earth Day

Just in time, the Times did something for Earth Day, and I heard about it from Gomez at Atrios:

Hipster fairy? Herbert, by Paulina Cassidy.

The Environmental Protection Agency again is raising objections to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would carry oil from western Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. 

The EPA said that despite more than four years of study, the State Department still has not done sufficient analysis of the project's environmental impact.

Yes, it seems that what's been going on all this time with the Keystone is one of those Village turf wars: the EPA has the expertise to decide just how much of a disaster the pipeline is going to be, but State has the authority to make the decision—because it will cross the international border, apparently making it a Foreign Affair. And the EPA is raising its tiny, tinny, morally and scientifically authoritative voice. I want to believe it will make a difference, I want to believe it will make a difference, I want—clap your hands, children! This sometimes works!

The tale of little white Rambo

Update (error corrected, h/t Tim)

"Funny attractive Mr. Suicide bathtub plug".

Somebody dropped an annoying turd in the comments today, and here is the story.

Last May blogger Feministconservative, a PhD candidate in political science at an unnamed university, got her degree and then took a summer job at the university's admissions office.

I must say it doesn't look like a very substantial dissertation, and I wouldn't be too impressed with the school that gave her a degree for it, or too surprised if it [jump]

Every good big does fine

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Miraculi (Mustache of Wonder), is a Liberal (i.e. a worshiper in the cult of Father Liber and his consort Libera whose feast the Romans celebrated on the future St. Patrick's Day and in similar fashion except without dyeing the beer; then again it did feature a very large phallus image held aloft through a street parade, garlanded at the end by a virtuous matron), and therefore attached to certain ideas that you and I do not necessarily oppose, in spite of the [jump]

Liber and Libera. Drawing by Georg Friedric Creuzer (1771-1858) cited in The Pictorial Language of Hieronymus Bosch by Clement A. Wertheim Aymes (via hub pages)

Notes on Caucasians

Caucus race. By ArtSpark Theatre.

Booman:

I have been somewhat amused by the discussion of their ethnicity. Before we knew that they were literally from the Caucuses, and therefore quintessentially caucasian, there was debate about whether they were white or not. 

ProPublica:

The brothers are ethnic Chechens whose family moved around the war-torn Caucuses region when the boys were young.

[jump]

Grassley inappropriate

The melting of the polar icecaps? Nah, that's not a problem.

Eighty-seven gun deaths every day? Please, it's not like the victims haven't been born yet...

No, when you want to talk about serious problems, how about the fact that some potential foreign terrorists might be getting disability payments, or earned income tax relief. Or maybe not. But that's the thing, isn't it, there's nothing in the law that says they can't, and those precious dollars, if they exist, could be used to buy gallons and gallons of ethanol:

“...How do we ensure that people who wish to do us harm are not eligible for benefits under the immigration laws, including this new bill before us?” (Raw Story)

Glad you got your priorities all worked out, Chuckles.

Senator Charles Grassley, in his stylish cash-register-tape cravat. (When my Aunt Emma got to be his age she was, similarly, given to putting paper napkins on her head at odd moments.) No, wait, it's an optical illusion; actually a briefing paper the hot-under-the-collar senator is using as a fan. AP photo.

Cheap shots and copycat things

Dylan Byers contemplating the Boston Marathon in Politico has a rare moment of self-knowledge (via TenGrain):

We’re standing on the verge of a very important national conversation about something, and we have no idea what it is.

It's that recurrent nightmare where you're about to go on Stephanopoulos and an assistant comes into the green room to tell you McCain can't make it and you look in the mirror and your hair is like totally weird...

Politico staff ID.

[jump]

The latest news in humility

Saw this as a little boy, possibly with my grandmother.

I hope Brooks was wearing his helmet when he wrote today's column, because in attempting a rare triple troll somersault, he appears to have landed on his head.

Liberals are furious, but the gun issue will not significantly damage the Republican Party. Sure, it looks bad to oppose background checks, which have overwhelming popular support. Sure, the Republican position will further taint the party’s image in places like the suburbs of Philadelphia and Northern Virginia. Sure, the party looks extreme when it can’t accept a bill sponsored by the conservative Senator Joe Manchin and the very conservative Senator Pat Toomey.

But, let’s face it...

[snip] 

[snip] 

[snip] 

[snip] 

[snip] 

[snip] 

[snip] 

[snip]

... if the insurgent right defeats immigration reform, that will be a sign that the party’s self-marginalization will continue. The revolution devours its own.

Siebrand Circus, early 1950s. From The Circus Blog.

Or, in Shorter form:

The good news is, nothing can damage the Republican party. The bad news is, that's because it's already FUBAR.

Got paranoia?

I'm about to do something really irresponsible, improper, and generally out of line. But unlike others who have been doing the same thing this week, I'm doing it against the stereotype blaming of an ethnic or religious group. Also it's my blog.

Georgia near the Chechen border. Photo by cinto2.

Remember the apartment house bombings in Buynaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk in September 1999, killing 293 people and injuring 651? The Russian authorities blamed it on Chechen separatists (though none of the alleged leaders of the plot were brought to trial), and this was one of the two major pretexts for the Second Chechen War.

Not everybody agreed with the hypothesis, though. Two famous writers, Aleksandr Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya, believed the bombings were a wag-the-dog operation carried out by the FSB (successor agency to the Soviet KGB), and Litvinenko [jump]

Is conservatism a mental illness?

Mighty Typography, by Inde/AdventFont.

1. Edmund Burke on the sublime: God as terror

WHATEVER is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasure which the most learned voluptuary could suggest, or than the liveliest imagination, and the most sound and exquisitely sensible body, could enjoy. (I/7) [jump]

Fool report

Barack Obama in the Rose Garden after the failure of gun control legislation in the Senate:

I’m going to speak plainly and honestly about what’s happened here because the American people are trying to figure out how can something have 90 percent support and yet not happen. 

Hey, you know what? Maybe you could try speaking plainly and honestly all the time. Because there's all sorts of stuff the American people are trying to figure out. Or for that matter just for the hell of it. And you're good at it, too.

Court Fool.--Fac-simile of a Woodcut in the "Cosmographie Universelle" of Munster: folio (Basle, 1552). Image date: ca. 1874. From Eon Images.

Sunday morning getting down

Digby Village Hall, North Kerstevens, Lincolnshire.

Cokie Roberts came up with something. No, really, on a subject she is no doubt passionately interested in, that of who gets invited to Sunday morning talk shows, in the context of Marco Rubio's unprecedented feat yesterday of appearing on seven different programs, which has obviously set certain pulses racing: Chris Cilizza, of the Washington Post's The Fix (Is In) with a video mashup, Adam Clark Estes of The Atlantic Wire ("basically every Sunday morning talk show known to man") , and so on.

We-all on the Upper Left Side have our own ways of discussing the phenomenon, based on the well-respected though unproven hypothesis that the Sunday talk [jump]

Hey, guess what happened

to my neighborhood?

Callery pear on W. 69th St. by Bosc d'Anjou (a pear-fect pseudonym).

The white flowers of callery pear explode one day seemingly out of nowhere. Then, after a couple of weeks, a single sharp wind knocks them all down and shady summer begins.

Running

Nothing I want to say about Boston. I hope everyone that is OK stays OK and everyone that is not OK will get better, or as much better as possible.

Photo by Bella Szandelszky/AP, via NPR.

Muscular moderation

Hold your guts up. Via Mind-Body Moderate.

David Brooks announces that

It’s time to entertain the possibility that President Obama is a right-wing extremist. 

"I say, Holmes, is that an unconventional thought seeping out of the Times?" "I believe so, Watson. A Friedmanity, to be precise, like 'the earth is flat'. It is intended to attract our attention." "Ah, clever bastards."

After all, look at where he’s taking the country over his second term.

"I say, is Obama taking the country somewhere?" "I don't believe they've given him the keys."

It's time to entertain the possibility that David Brooks is a Communist provocateur. I mean, look at what he's calling out Obama for in his current column.

We're living in a country whose government is unable to control its expenditures, as all the Wise Ones agree. Indeed, in some areas it's hard to say they're wrong. The federal, state, and local authorities spend over a trillion dollars a year (around $3000 [jump]

Don't that take the cake!

Pam Ferris as Miss Trunchbull in Danny DeVito's 1996 Matilda.

So police chief Mike Berkemeier of Laurelville, Ohio (a village of some 527 people in Hocking County) found a cake on his kitchen counter when he woke up on Easter morning. So he ate it. He did not ask his girlfriend where the cake came from, or his daughter, or anybody else including the most relevant person, the daughter's friend's boyfriend who seems to have served as the family's personal Easter bunny. [jump]

Dream piece

Hey, I had a blogging dream. President Obama had floated a proposal to change the way lawyers are trained in the US—there would be an undergraduate law degree for people who wanted to practice some kind of basic law and then postgraduate work for specialists—and I was trying to write a blog post about it.

Obviously I was pretty glad to wake up and get out of that, you can imagine what a tedious post it was going to be, but I forced myself to remember it, all day, so I could note the event here. I don't know that I've ever had a less interesting dream. I don't even know if there is any actual subject matter there, but if there is I don't care whether I ever learn about it. Why are brains so weird?

Source: saatchionline.com via Marta on Pinterest

My Father, by Phy La (Cyprus)

Cheap shots: Swat edition

How you can tell the permanent presidential campaign really is in pause mode in spite of the commentariat: when its gumshoe department as represented by Adam Nagourney of the New York Times (famed for his hard-hitting work on Cap'n McCain) is reduced to writing epic screeds on the latest plague to afflict Hollywood, "swatting", in which pranksters call LA's police to report ghastly crimes being committed at the homes of celebrities of the Russell Brand caliber, so as to bring down a SWAT team.

The Los Angeles Police Department sent officers racing up the narrow twists and turns of North Doheny Drive leading to the Brand home. There, guns drawn in a cul-de-sac, they found only a shocked and frightened housekeeper taking out the garbage. Mr. Brand had left 30 minutes earlier.

Ooh, Mr. Nagourney, your paragraphs are so—taut!

Chinese swat team, by 9one.

Of course there is a campaign going on in New York City, but all the candidates to date seemed doomed to be politicians instead of reality-show contestants, in spite [jump]

Please, Mr. Speaker, don't throw me into that chained CPI!

The Booman has now explained it all for us as to how the Social Security cuts are going to be OK, as I expected they would be (remember this olden Goldie?) and I suggest you read it right now rather than wait around for me to try to understand it clearly enough to explain it again.

There is certainly something very wrong with the idea of chaining the Consumer Price Index to the idea of inflation by product substitution turned upside down, if that's [jump]

Copywrong

Just noticed this in a letter to the editor from last week's New Yorker:

Swartz was apparently familiar with laws protecting proprietary-information-management systems, so he should not have been surprised by the severity of the prosecution’s response to his crime. It is a crime, and not a victimless one. I am a retired journalist; during my working years, my salary depended, and today my pension relies, on people paying for copyrighted content. In recent years, as the business that supports journalism has declined, thousands of journalists have lost pay, benefits, and, ultimately, their jobs. Some people may consider illegally downloading content from the “1942 edition of the Journal of Botany” to be benign, but downloading periodicals such as the New York Times—or The New Yorker, for that matter—without paying for them would harm the people who worked for those publications in the past and who write for them today. 

The ignorant cruelty of that is up there with Byron's savage dismissal of Keats's death—

'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuff'd out by an article.

 —which I'm sure he would have regretted if he had understood what he was talking about. In particular the writer does not seem to know, and Larissa Macfarquhar's [jump]