Well, wouldn't you know it?

Black Helicopter Lifecycle. From a wonderful piece of elaborated snark at zapatopi.net.

Mr. Zerohedge, who blogs the imminent collapse of the US economy amid the black helicopters (just as soon as the Messiah gets here, I guess, or maybe he's just trying to become the leader of a short-selling religious cult) under the nym "Tyler Durden" and tweeting with a somewhat startling gravatar (what exactly are you trying to tell us, Mr. Zero?), got unbearably excited by the story of the Las Vegas cop-killing—at last, he thought, mad gunmen who aren't from the right!

Suspect Yells "Tell The Police, The Revolution Has Started" Before Shooting Spree In Las Vegas WalMart http://t.co/MCc1dmmcJy
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 8, 2014

Although come to think of it, not all self-denominated "revolutionaries" are Communists, you know. Like some of them are Senator Cruz:

Cheap shots and fashion tips

With Oscar Peterson leading and Herb Ellis, Ray Brown, and Louie Bellson.

Via Crooks & Liars:

Fox News media analyst Lauren Ashburn on Sunday suggested that former prisoner of war Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl could be a Taliban sympathizer because he was released after five years of captivity wearing a Muslim "smock."

And Andrew Cuomo is Miklós Horthy

As Ross sees her.

As everybody else sees her. Could we at long last be moving beyond the Reese Witherspoon thing to facing up to some serious mommy issues?

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, increasingly identifies himself with a party-within-a-party, the Reform Conservative movement, which you might define as the faction of Republicans who remember some of the stuff they learned in [jump]

Liberal Fascism watch

Via Nairaland.

Culture War reporting from Raw Story:

The [Colorado] Civil Rights Commission last week upheld an administrative judge’s finding that Christian bakery owner Jack Phillips had violated Colorado’s anti-discrimination statutes.

“I’m beginning to think, are re-education camps next?” [Family Research Council president Tony] Perkins wondered aloud. “When are they going to start rolling out the boxcars to start hauling off Christians?”

Clickbait and switch

Shorter David Brooks, "President Obama was right", New York Times, June 6 2014:

No, seriously, he was right.

About Sgt. Bergdahl.

You know me, I wouldn't be so partisan as to deny it.

It's just not how I roll.

I call it the way I see it.

...

...

...

Well, it was kind of vulgar the way he did it, wasn't it, kind of Oprah-like if you know what I mean, and if you don't I'm sure you can make a good guess, and inaccurate rhetoric, unworthy grandstanding, astonishing tone-deafness, and hyperindividualized failure to make use of my well-known views on how you should always rescue a stranded individual, not for the individual's sake but for the common good, and never use spurious moral hazard arguments, but oops look at the time I don't have space to go into any of this stuff in detail especially about the inaccurate rhetoric.

Other than that...

... 

Buster Keaton in Our Hospitality, 1923. Via Film Flammers.

Also, Steve. The always estimable Driftglass gives Brooks a break, awarding him a pair of long pants for a rare acknowledgment of the truth, but I disagree for once: the nastiness of the Brooks peroration disqualifies him.

Wut we need *moar* stupid?

A mysterious result of Googling "neoliberal kittens". From Radioactive Mongoose.

Teaser from Peter Beinart's new foreign policy piece in the Atlantic:

A new critique of the president's "don't do stupid shit" doctrine is emerging—and it's coming from within his own party.

Honest. Like that cowardly Obama, refusing to deploy the stupid-shit weapon, which has served us so well in the past.

Beinart sets up a left-right-'n'-center trichotomy of Obama criticism with a right represented by Senator McCain demanding that the administration do more bombing, and a left represented by Prosecutor Greenwald denouncing the Obama administration as a prolongation of the war-mad dictatorial Bush administration, just with different faces, with which thoughtful citizens can't negotiate at all, only groan "O tempora! O mores!" and go their weary ways. The center, in this picture, is what you might call the hipster faction, as in "you probably haven't heard of them yet":

Reefer Dowdness

Dowd, on her bad THC chocolate trip in a Denver hotel room:

Sitting in my hotel room in Denver, I nibbled off the end and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more....

Focus Pocus

Wake up! When your therapist is sleeping.

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (interview by Paul Holdengräber, Paris Review, Spring 2014):

What interests me most is when people are trying to be on the subject and can’t help but go off it. When somebody is really trying to articulate something, genuinely struggling to articulate something, as if they will know when they’ve done it. And in the process of trying to do that, they say all sorts of other things.

Newspaper columnist David Brooks is, precisely, going to articulate something. He's going to tell us how to be less distracted by email, text messages, and YouTube clips, so that we can focus and get stuff done. He knows all about it because he suffers from this problem himself. Though he earns a fabulous salary from the Times for work that [jump]

Jennifer's Convertibles: Meat the New Right

The other Jennifer Rubin in Bad Dreams, 1988.

Rubin's "distinguished pol" award goes out in the plural this week, to conservative reformers who have decided to advocate—surprise!—reform conservatism, which gets the poor thing in some noun phrase trouble at first, and then in an increasingly violent conflict with a mob of ruthless metaphors.

The distinguished people this week were the group of conservative reformers, including elected officials like House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and GOP Senators Mike Lee (Utah) and Tim Scott (S.C.) who rolled out a unifying  theme and agenda for the right – reform conservatism.

She doesn't mean to suggest that Lee and Scott are not elected officials or that Cantor didn't join in the theme-rolling, she's just warning us that some unelected non-officials in the conservative reform–advocating reform conservative camp are in the [jump]

I triple dare you

Bob Bergdahl. MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images.

God damn, I cannot even begin to say how much I hope the House Republican Caucus decides to impeach President Obama for defying the law that says he must notify Congress 30 days before releasing detainees (unconstitutionally held, by the way) from Guantánamo, in order to liberate a captive American solder, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

I don't have any words for how much I look forward to hearing John Boehner explain how Sgt. Bergdahl should have continued to languish in Waziristan in order to show [jump]

Straw dogs

Straw Dog photo from China News Service. Typical People's Republic, no credit to the photographer or even the author of the piece it illustrates, but there's an editor name, because hierarchy.

Via Steve M ("Libertarian Talk is Cheap"), I'm looking at a weird article by the editor in chief of Reason, one Nick Gillespie, who's been living by his own account off Koch brothers philanthropy for 21 years and wants us to know that old Charles and David are not hypocritical moralist Republican authoritarians but literally—wait for it—too liberal for the John Birch Society:

Vampire foreign policy

"I never drink... wine."

Shorter David Brooks, "The Autocracy Challenge", May 30 2014:

Obama's proposal to make U.S. foreign policy less violent is all very well, but autocrats. It has been scientifically proven that autocrats need to be cockslapped every 17 months or so. And there's an autocrat under my bed, Daddy, I'm scared.

Big Dick Cheney was visible on the TV complaining about Obama, and specifically his approach to Iraq and Afghanistan, and I was so shocked by this public display of um, [jump]

Interlocutors

Zurich striker Loris Benito copes with a marten on the field, March 2013. Photo by Marcel Bieri.

So I'm listening to the Steve Inskeep interview of the president on foreign policy this morning, basically on the above-the-fold wars, in Ukraine and Syria, and it sounds to me, to tell the truth, as if he's waffling—waffling and maybe blustering a bit, using a lot of words like "robust" and "success", but the thing is: he's not arguing with me.

Or rather, he's not arguing against me; the imaginary person he's debating is the one represented in Inskeep's questions, who's worried or affects to be worried [jump]

The Glennemy within

Chips and sandwich. Photo by Jim Rice, Sydney Morning Herald.

It is quite possible that I will never read any reviews of Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, NSA and the US National Security State, but if I do, Michael Kinsley's effort in the New York Times Book Review will not be one of them, because I'm one of those stupid people whose judgment of who to pay attention to is biased by prior experience; I hardly ever read anything by Greenwald unless the fact of his writing it is the news in its own right or I'm really looking for trouble, because I can't stand his style and figure if he has anything important to say somebody else will repeat it; and I never read anything by Kinsley because I can't imagine he would have anything important to say. Well, OK, I'll look at it.

Yup, he does say

Tough-minded man gets mushy

Update: Welcome Cowgirls and Cowboys from Mike's Roundup at C&L! Make yourselves at home! (and thanks for the shoutout, TG)

Animation from Edward Muybridge's Descriptive Zoopraxography (1893), via Wikimedia Commons.

The simple, shapely format Brooks adopted for Part I of his "Summer Reading—Not" list, a list of four items bookended by an opening and a concluding paragraph, has turned out to be too hard to sustain, and this morning's Part II is just a mess, but there's something interesting going on.

He begins with a Brooksian dichotomy between "Athens" and "Jerusalem", the former for books that will improve you by firing up your external ambition, the latter by cultivating your spiritual side. But he only has one Athens book in mind, really, Thucydides's [jump]

I believe in Slovenia

Beppe Grillo of the Movimento Cinque Stelle, at a press conference.

As the world began fretting today over the fascist takeover of the European Parliament (which is not in fact going to happen, I'm glad to say; the elections results are bad and no doubt very embarrassing to a lot of people, especially in France and England, but there will be maybe 87 anti-Europe MEPs at the most out of the 751 total seats, not enough to bring the edifice down), it occurred to me that the election results provided the data for a little test of a hypothesis I'm interested in: the idea that high voter turnout tends to benefit the left but may also benefit the extreme right. Especially because nobody was talking about turnout except to observe, vapidly, that it was higher this year than in 2009 (43.1% overall compared to 43.0% last time, which is about as significant as—well, probably not very significant).

Anyway I found the results with turnout figures by country at the Parliament's own website, and used them to construct the chart below, which cost me many hours and probably brain cells that could have been useful as I slouch toward senility, and probably still contains some serious errors:

Fretful symmetry

Astroturf nail art by Marlene Vinha.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, the apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, is interested in the fate of the "Tea Party" in last Tuesday's primaries and in its long-term effect on the Republican party, which he thinks he can clarify by comparing it to something even more imaginary:

think about another recent grass-roots movement that reshaped our politics: the netroots/Deaniac/antiwar insurgency, which roiled the Democratic Party between 2003 and the ascendance of Barack Obama.

I swear I was right there, joined MoveOn in 2003, and I'm still waiting for our politics to be reshaped or at least to see the old party just a little bit roiled. My best recollection [jump]

We send Tweets

Following on reporting from Tengrain and M. Bouffant on the Associated Press's cowardly misreporting of what happened at Richard Martinez's press conference on the murder of his son Chris by a person who should not have been permitted to carry a gun, I have sent the following Tweet to the AP:

@AP RIchard Martinez's words "Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA." should have been in your story
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 26, 2014

And while we're up, here's—my, my, my, it's Todd Kincannon speaking, as TBogg says, for his comrades of the conservative persuasion on his view of Richard Martinez:

Annals of derp: The latest from Benghazi

War criminal Allen West trying to go full McCarthy, with a tale of a seatmate on a flight from Detroit who told him what *really* went on in Benghazi:

West’s source also informed him that there was a covert weapons scheme going on in Benghazi that saw us arming radical Islamists with weapons so they could overthrow Gaddafi. West says that it’ll make Iran-Contra “look like the Romper Room,” and that it came back to bite us in the end.

Worst was when those thugs found out they were wasting their time, given that Qaddafi had been dead for nearly a year.

Image by Liza Sabater.

(I think it's pretty well known that if the CIA was funneling weapons anywhere out of Benghazi it was to opposition in Syria, which is bad enough to make Iran-Contra look like, maybe, Teletubbies, but only because it looked like Teletubbies in the first place.)

Can't let West go without noting the extraordinarily McCarthyite shamelessness and slime with which he attempted last week to impugn the patriotism of Rep. Tammy Duckworth, who lost three limbs in Iraq (of course West lost his honor as a man and a soldier in Iraq, so maybe he feels as if he's her equal in some respect).

Why, this room is filthy!

Get all that dirt back under the rug where it belongs!

From a totally irrelevant discussion at ChessWorld.

From the must-be-read long piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the subject of reparations to the black community for the centuries of crimes perpetrated on it by the majority population:

A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested.

“It’s because it’s black folks making the claim,” Nkechi Taifa, who helped found N’COBRA, says. “People who talk about reparations are considered left lunatics. But all we are talking about is studying [reparations]. As John Conyers has said, we study everything. We study the water, the air. We can’t even study the issue? This bill does not authorize one red cent to anyone.”

Yep. We can't study it. And I think it's pretty clear why: because we know in advance what kind of conclusions such a commission would be forced to reach if it had any intellectual honesty at all, that reparations are owed. And that "full faith and credit" they love to talk about was tossed out long ago, on this issue. They'd have to take that blindfold off.

Of course Congress decided a long time ago it should be against the law to study whether gun violence affects the nation's health, finally lifting the prohibition last October, and the House just ordered the Defense Department not to study climate change. Do I detect a pattern?

Great Brooks of the Western World

Hedgehog, via NPR.

David Brooks writes:

People constantly ask me what my favorite books are, and while I think it would be self-indulgent for me to devote a column to that I'm going to write two columns instead, covering four books this week and four next, because after all summer is practically here, and the new interns haven't shown up yet.

"A Collection of Essays" by George Orwell. I learned everything I know about good writing from Orwell, along with C.S. Lewis, who is practically the same in the sense that both use strong and simple language, and it's from [jump]

Autumn in New York, starting early this year

Trump University campus as visualized by Darrow at Vanity Fair.

New York Times trying to create some drama over the local elections in June, suggests that attorney general Eric Schneiderman could be in trouble:

New York Republicans, vastly outnumbered and hungry to reclaim a statewide office after years of famine, are energized at the prospect of taking on Mr. Schneiderman, a Democrat, and say they have a realistic chance of dethroning him in November....

Revolutionaries

Canada gosling (and parent), Riverside South; overdone lighting by Google+.

Via Frank Rich reporting on the rightwing self-described "humorist" Greg Gutfield:

 In Not Cool, Gutfeld writes that “the haters of the old white male forget that it was a hardy group of old white men who created this country.”

That's an interesting misapprehension. They were undeniably white and male, but they weren't especially old. In 1776, in fact, they were almost all quite a bit younger [jump]

Roots of D'Souza's Rage: Postscript

Philandering, inebriated Indian pro-colonialist cops plea, will take ten months of not very hard time.

Unsound Dinesh D'Souza gazes at the beyond, as the shikara-wallah (head cut off by the camera-wallah, because what would he need a head for?) propels him into the Heart of Darkness. From his movie, via Albany Times-Union.

To tell the truth, I don't know whether he's inebriated or not, but I wouldn't be surprised. I bet he has a G&T when the sun goes over the yardarm just for the memories of keeping the malaria at bay and then says, "Shall we have the other half?" And then a little [jump]

If it's Tuesday, this must be a revolution

Image via ComicVine.

So, remember all that heart-rending stuff about how if we want to understand human problems we have to go beyond data, research, and even journalism to experience the Other through affection, empathy, and selfless love? Well, that's just so last week.

This week Brooks has a favor to do for some influential people, the editor-in-chief of The Economist and its Schumpeter Columnist (that's a real title!), John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, with a new book that needs publicizing from the various organs of the vast rightwing conspiracy, so now all his selfless love has to be channeled out to [jump]

Cheap shot: Li'l Tucker

Via Crooks & Liars, 2010.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Sunday said that liberals were making a “racist attack” by pointing out that “white privilege” exists in America.

During an interview on Fox News, Carlson noted that conservative columnist Kurt Schlichter had been criticized for a recent column claiming what people thought was white privilege was “just me being better than you.”

“I mean, it’s silly on its face,” the Fox News host opined. “Some white people are privileged, some aren’t. Some black people are, some aren’t. It’s strikes me as, by definition, a racist attack in that it’s making a generalization — a negative one — based on skin color.” (Raw Story)

I know right.

Tucker has a dream... of being judged not by the color of his privilege but by the contents of his portfolio. http://t.co/ZKuH93NYOm
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 18, 2014

Sunday troll-baiting: Weapons of Mass Disjunction

From boarmasters.com.

The genial Barracks O'Bama had spotted the quarry first; she was an extremely frisky specimen, and by the time I ran across them Barracks was feeling some fatigue:

.@PennyDreadful81 As long as you've admitted that Cheney lied about WMDs so he could profit off our soldiers' deaths, my work here is done.
— Barracks O'Bama (@P0TUS) May 18, 2014

Thus gloriously and unwounded did Barracks retire from the field. But a deep fog of derp still hung about the meadow, the birds sang, and my blood was up. Dr. Google and I dumped some tempting evidence in front of the opening to the troll's cave:

Cheap shots and balls in the air

The Amiga Juggler, via Jason Scott.

Maureen Dowd on Condoleezza Rice (whom she naturally calls "Condi"):

But, as Russell Baker once noted, she was trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube, spinning her wheels in the second term trying to undo the disasters of the first.

She has nothing particularly surprising or even wrong to say on the subject; what really interested me is that she managed to find Russell Baker, of all people, using two desperate clichés in one brief sentence, as remarkable a feat in its way as finding rhinestones in a pearl oyster.

Actually (thanks as ever, Dr. Google!), what Baker said in his great 2008 New York Review article is so refreshing as a kind of palate cleanser after a few Dowd paragraphs that it's worth quoting at length:

And in the international Greenwalding circuit

Used for somewhat relevant purposes by YoStatus.

Earlier this week, Greenwald came so close to noticing himself being wrong about something:

Snowden was almost certain this meant that the NSA had identified him as the likely source of the leaks, but I was sceptical. "If they thought you did this, they'd send hordes of FBI agents with a search warrant and probably Swat teams, not a single NSA officer and a human-resources person." I figured this was just an automatic and routine inquiry, triggered when an NSA employee goes absent for a few weeks without explanation.

But the moment passed quickly. It wouldn't be the last time, anyway, that he was unnecessarily terrified of the jack-booted thugs of our police state. There was this, for instance, from October 2013:

Glenn Greenwald would like to go home to the United States, at least for a visit. But the Guardian journalist and blogger is afraid to do so. He still has material and unpublished stories from his contacts with fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden that he believes U.S. authorities would love to get their hands on.  The nine-hour detention and interrogation of Greenwald's Brazilian partner David Miranda by British security services at London's Heathrow airport in August has only compounded his fears.

I remember! I was so struck by the way Wallace Shawn was forced to go to hot, unpleasant Brazil to stage a private performance of his Greenwald play just last January so Greenwald could see it without risking his life. And yet our intrepid journalist managed to show up in April to collect his Polk Award. So now he's afraid to go to England:

There’s only one country that has been consciously excluded from the tour – in fact, only one country in the world that Greenwald says he absolutely will not visit. It is the UK. The wounds left by the detention under the Terrorism Act of his partner, Miranda, at Heathrow airport last August, are still open and deep.... “I don’t trust them not to detain me, interrogate me and even arrest me. Their behaviour has been so extreme and offensive, and the political and media class was so supportive of it, that I feel uncomfortable with the entire atmosphere,” says Greenwald.

Does that mean he's angling for a Hackademy Award from the Press Gazette for his work getting interviewed by Guardian reporters? Only Time (or more likely Spiegel) will tell. Meanwhile Zandar the Great and Terrible informs us that Glenn got that movie deal, with Sony Pictures, or as Glenn affectionately calls them

Liberal Hollywood has produced the ultimate hagiography of the most secretive arm of America's National Security State, while liberal film critics lead the parade of praise and line up to bestow it with every imaginable accolade

 so it's all good.

Saturday cheap shot: The nativists are restless

Image via Blog with a View.

From the Heritage Facebook page, clickbait that would do NewsMax proud:

The Heritage Foundation

2 hrs · 

Why isn't this headlining the news?

The Shocking Secret Obama Won't Talk About -- And It's Putting You In Danger.

Bowing to pressure...it's no excuse.

THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION

Share

Actually, though, the story isn't exactly a secret, having been reported by CBS and USA Today, among others, and has approximately zero connection to President Obama, and it's maybe a little less shocking than it thinks, too. It's the report of a report by the [jump]

Chutes 'n' Ladders of Understanding; or, Which Way is Up?

Ani's a Spaceman (or is Spacewoman used?) by Scott Altmann, via How to Carve Roast Unicorn.

This is your intergalactic correspondent David Brooks reporting from a little-known corner near the Andromeda Cluster where he's been trying to get the skinny on the inhabitants of this curious little blue planet, but it hasn't been easy.

Let’s say you wanted to move from a dry, statistical understanding of a problem to a rich, humane one. How would you do it? What steps would you take on your climb toward understanding?

I think I'd ask why I was starting with a dry, statistical understanding in the first place. I'd want to start someplace at least moderately humane so I'd have a clue what the data were about, you know what I'm saying?

Well, obviously, first you’d start with the data.

No, I really wouldn't. I'd—

Annals of Derp: Upshot or Upstoned?

Image via Kumar Deepak.

Just caught a remarkable piece of fluff or perhaps navel lint signed by Brendan Nyhan at the Times's new Upshot site: a Wisdom-of-Crowds piece on how while we all know that coin tossing does a better job of making predictions than media pundits, if you put them together to make one big parallel-processing device you might get something worth knowing.

Thus, for example, a Wall Street Journal exercise (see table below) put together a list of 17 Republican and Democratic holders-forth and their predictions as to which party would win the Senate in November. Their numbers turned out to be strictly partisan [jump]

Biden their time

Via.

This, via Euro-paranoid correspondent Oui at the Booman Tribune (he's the smartest and best informed paranoid you ever want to deal with, no snark), is very disheartening news as far as I'm concerned:

Joe Biden’s Son Appointed to Board of Directors of Ukraine’s Largest Gas Company

May 13, 2014 in Exclusive, Government, World

Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, has been appointed to the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, a privately-owned natural gas company operating in the Ukraine since the year 2002. Burisma Holdings has become a considerable player within the Ukrainian natural gas and oil industry, with licences covering  the Dnieper-Donets, Carpathian and Azov-Kuban basins. The production capability has reached over 10,500 barrels of oil equivalent per day (BOEPD) which has left the company with considerable reserves.

And from the snark staff at the Guardian:

The Self-Confidence Man

David Brooks writes:

There's an astonishing article in the current issue of The Atlantic summarizing a new book by Catty Kay and Claire Shipman, The Confidence Code.* Social science reveals, it turns out, that women suffer from a lack of self-confidence!

Harold Lloyd in Movie Crazy (1932), via The Man on the Flying Trapeze.

No, for reals, with empirical evidence. They consistently underestimate the value of things they've done, like their results on a test, or what they will do in the future, like the size of their paychecks five years from now.** [jump]

The Devil his due

"Young Goodman Brown", from PowerPop Comics.

So remind me, Kathryn Jean, about where you stand on the vital importance of religious freedom in our exceptional country, where our Founding Fathers understood so deeply how important it is to protect the bishop/CEO from having any portion of any check cut by his accountant go to lowering the price on some nurse's aide's IUD?

Ah, yes, on the Black Mass planned for the Queen's Head Pub on the Harvard campus, as disapproved by Harvard Divinity Professor Father Francis X. Clooney:

Annals of derp: Climate of hostility

This is me over the weekend dealing with an extraordinarily resolute climate change troll:

Devil's snare. Via harrypotter.wikia.com.

@LTCFBurns @ElMonte08 @intelligencer Oh please. You do not understand the data better than all these people. http://t.co/u4M8BTH7Td
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 10, 2014

And pretty much downhill from there:

Mother's Day

We lost my mom just over two years ago. This kind of music—progressive jazz that remembers it comes from the dance floor, and Ella—was her favorite, so I just thought I'd lay it out. I could add that she was about the best mother anybody could ever have, teaching us everything we need to know about food, politics, and love. She's still the audience of all my interior monologues—look, Ma!—but sometimes I miss her like hell, her answering voice.

Hop on Cop

Via Bill of Rights Defense Committee.

Oh dear, NYPD, you're disappointing me. I was awfully pleased to hear last month about the disbanding of the so-called Demographics Unit sending plainclothes officers to spy undercover on the city's Muslim community, but now:

Jazz for cows

Watch it all the way through, it's only a couple of minutes. Trust me, however you feel at the moment you will feel better.

Parry and thrust

Update 3/2023: A little discouraged to see how much Russian propaganda I could take seriously at this point almost nine years ago... I still think Obama would have been right to try negotiating if that's what he was doing.

FDR found it helpful to negotiate with the lunatic Great Helmsman too. Image by Reuters via LatitudeNews.

I've been reading and rereading a remarkable piece by Robert Parry, who I think of as a kind of Seymour Hersh [update: LOL] of the blogosphere, and I mean that in a good way, for his extraordinary stories of October surprises in the 1968 and 1980 elections suggesting that your worst fantasies of Nixon's and Reagan's dirty tricks are probably true—this post, though, is about Ukraine, and President Obama's behind-the-scenes struggles with his most implacable enemies, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

Well, maybe not exactly, but close: it really is about power issues inside the US foreign policy establishment and limits on presidential power, especially as applied in the [jump]

Safari so good

Urban Warrior collection from Sanabora Design House, Nairobi.

David Brooks starts out at a respectable pace with complaints (extracted from a famous 2005 Granta essay by Binyavanga Wainaina) about exoticism in writing on Africa from a hodgepodge of sources which appears to include the National Geographic vintage around 1965, Ethiopian famine porn, and appreciations of Disney's The Lion King, but quickly bogs down into the misapprehension that bare breasts and distended bellies are not OK only because Africa has changed since the 1990s and is no longer the exotic place it once was. (They were never OK.)

Hence Brooks's interest in the #BringBackOurGirls agitation against Boko Haram in the social media, to which he seems to take some kind of exception because [jump]