The death of Anthony Shadid, 43, of asthma, as he was working undercover in Syria, was an enviable one in a classical-Greek sense, in that it was so glorious—a kind of dramatization of his bravery and commitment, when he was at the height of his powers as reporter and writer. For the rest of us, it's pretty bad news. Partly because of his knowledge of Arabic, but even more because of his curiosity about and concern for ordinary folk in the war zones, he captured again and again the things we really needed to know about Baghdad and the other dangerous places where he made himself at home, in a way hardly anybody else came close to.
Achilles and Ajax playing dice. Black-figure amphora by Exekias, late 6th c. B.C.E., from Heritage Key.
The idle 'prentice executed at Tyburn. From William Hogarth's Industry and Idleness (1747).
The Times this morning, Landon Thomas, Jr., was all on about the young people of London who are never in their natural lives going to have jobs—
Perhaps the most debilitating consequence of the euro zone’s economic
downturn and its debt-driven austerity crusade has been the soaring rate
of youth unemployment. Spain’s jobless rate for people ages 16 to 24 is
approaching 50 percent. Greece’s is 48 percent, and Portugal’s and
Italy’s, 30 percent. Here in Britain, the rate is 22.3 percent, the
highest since such data began being collected in 1992.
And indeed it's horrible, the sequence of stories of... Hang on a minute, when did Britain [jump]
NPR sports analyst Mara Liasson, covering the "caucus-race" trial heats in the coveted White House Stakes competition, said something unexpected--I guess that's news in itself:
Talking Head Makes Original Observation
Effects on Market Uncertain
Anyway, she said President Obama is responsible for the recent froth in the candidacy of Rick Santorum; the announcement of new regulations on health coverage of birth control has brought the "social conservatives" to a boil and they're out in force, with their mistrust of the Mormon and longing for purity. So I'm like whoa, as the young folk say, could Obama be doing this on purpose? Keeping the Republicans undecided, or worse, trying to get Santorum the nomination? Some of that 11-dimensional chess?
Today's case starts with the Egyptian minister of planning and international cooperation, and an old pal of Suzanne Mubarak's, Fayza Abul Naga, who is said to be the person mainly responsible [jump]
Potato Eaters, by Albert de Vos. From Tim Harrison's blog.
Whoever said that "God must love the common folk—he made so many of them" (Dr. Google seems to be stumped on this one, with a pretty big majority going for Abraham Lincoln, but not one of them citing a source) was being snarky, but the panelists on Fox News's The Five were being something else yesterday; they said in effect that liberals must hate the poor because they are attempting to exterminate them—as ThinkProgress reports it, [jump]
Jeremy Lin—Linsomnia! Lintoxication!—and the newly competent Knicks won their sixth game in a row, the first one with Amar'e Stoudemire back from his brother's funeral. Welcome back Amar'e! I couldn't watch the game on the television since my cable company and their network are having one of those greed competitions, but I saw the extraordinarily dramatic last couple of minutes over my son's shoulder on his computer. I also got to hear the Tweets celebrated on ESPN:
Dave McMenamin, Lakers Beat Writer
The Lakers’ players lounge just erupted when Lin hit that big 3. World
Peace emerged and ran through the locker room yelling ‘Linsanity!!’
Preoccupied as I was with car bombings, I totally forgot that World Peace was not world peace at all but merely Metta World Peace, that is the Artest formerly known as Ron, and so got the impression that Lin's feat was even more consequential than it actually was, though I couldn't have said why world peace would choose the Lakers' players lounge as the venue for its appearance anyway.
The Jeremy Lin of Wagner singing (calm, modest, extremely hard-working, and then out of nowhere spectacular beyond reason), Jay Hunter Morris, brought the two-year unfolding of the Met's and Robert Lepage's new Ring cycle to a close with his Siegfried in Götterdämmerung. At the close, world peace actually did emerge on stage, although that was written into the orchestral score and had little to do with the singing.
Morris did have a couple of moments of vocal weakness, one unfortunately at the heartbreaking moment when Siegfried dies in a preposterously difficult sotto voce head tone. Deborah Voigt, who I was worried about a year or so ago when her Brünnhilde voice in Walküre sounded a little dry to me, did not seem to have any weakness at all. Happy Valentine's Day, Debbie! Watching them "live in HD" at the old Ziegfeld on 54th Street, and seeing their faces closer than the folks in the $300 seats, I have been impressed through the whole series (unlike this guy) by the quality of the acting, which sometimes achieves a depth that you really don't imagine coming from singers (especially Iain Paterson as Gunther and Hans-Peter König as Hagen).
Stately bungalows of Aurangzeb Marg. From bornrich.com.
As you know, yesterday afternoon Tal Yehoshua-Korene, who works along with her husband at the Israeli embassy in New Delhi, was riding up Aurangzeb Road on her way to picking up her children from school when the rear of the car blew up. She was badly injured, with shrapnel in the spine, and is in critical condition; her driver and two other people were hurt as well. A security camera picked up the image of a young man in leather jacket on a motorcycle riding up to the car while it was waiting at a stoplight, just a few seconds before the blast, and "placing something" on the trunk; it's thought that it must have been a bomb mounted [jump]
Matter of fact, you know that transportation bill into which the Roy Blunt not-about-contraception legislation is to be folded as an amendment? It has another remarkable provision that
would strip several thousand workers within the rail-industry of their
federal minimum-wage and overtime protections, potentially making
low-wage jobs pay even less.
I haven't seen much response to yesterday's Times report about the poor but conservative and their dependence on government money, but it's pretty extraordinary reading. It's not your Tea Party clowns who really think Medicare isn't a government program, it's people [jump]
Noting Minority Leader McConnell's plans to push the Roy Blunt bill to permit any employer to deny family planning coverage in their employees' health insurance plans, John Cole is reduced to sputtering:
I’m simply speechless. I honestly can not believe that in this day and age, the GOP
is going to go all out and wage this war. This has nothing to do with
religious liberty, and this is just a war on women. They are just done
pretending they are anything but religious zealots and fanatics.
With all respect and affection for this great blog artist, I don't think so—not "just" a war on women, though women are clearly the primary targets. I think [jump]
Bishops are very concerned about blogs. From Abbey Roads.
This is a Rectification issue that makes me really crazy; today's trigger is a perfectly goodhearted and well-written and useful Kos diary by DemFromCt on the Great Contraception Crisis story that happens to quote a Republicanish opinion piece by one Alan Weil in the New England Journal of Medicine to the effect that
Under the principles of federalism that have guided the development and
implementation of policy in this country since it was founded, there are
three potential benefits associated with permitting states to make
these decisions with respect to the EHBs...
And then DemFromCt goes on to use "federalism" in this sense through the rest of the piece. Which is by no means an unusual occurrence.
But it isn't right. The word "federalism" as it was used by the Founding Fathers who [jump]
Normally I go to Union Square on Saturdays for my locovore fruits and vegetables, but yesterday I was at the opera-at-the-movies for the Götterdämmerung marathon, so today I trucked down to the Natural History Museum, where I can go on foot. Pickings were not unexpectedly slim (animal foods and breads are way too expensive), although I left behind some very photogenic kale because I didn't feel like cooking it.
But the guys who were selling the kale (and the broccoli rabe and red onions, pictured) had another treat, which was the music they were playing in their little white pavilion. I thought I'd pass it on. They had much better sound, but I've got video:
Jizo statue—representing an unborn child—at the Hasedera temple in Kamakura, Japan. By Don Lee, from the website Sacred Destinations.
I think I may have the crude outlines of a solution to the problems of America's Catholic bishops, currently facing potential martyrdom in that they may be forced by an unfeeling government to buy insurance that covers the abomination of birth control pills, with no co-payment, for the employees of Catholic institutions that have a lot of non-Catholic employees, such as church-owned universities, hospitals, and charitable foundations.
An unfeeling federal government, I should say, because as we have repeatedly noted [jump]
I just want to keep savoring that bit of word salad for a while as created in a collaborative effort by Rick Santorum, reporter Michael D. Shear, and a shamefully inattentive Times copy editor:
“It’s not about contraception,” Mr. Santorum said. “It’s about economic
liberty. It’s about freedom of speech. It’s about freedom of liberty.
It’s about government control of your lives, and it’s got to stop.” [In fact, as noted in the previous post, the Times report is incorrect: Santorum said "freedom of religion", not "freedom of liberty".]
In the first place, if "it" is the government proposal for having health insurance plans cover contraception, exactly how is it not about contraception but is about freedom of speech?
Is it a new definition of speech, like the way in Buckley v. Valeo money is speech, [jump]
PAUL: If you had an honest bailout, the people who owned those bonds would
have been protected. But he turned ownership over to the unions. So,
that is not fair. He used force to transfer -- he was wrong to break
the contract.
....
MORGAN: ...would you honestly look at them in the eye and say they had to have that child if they were impregnated?
PAUL: No. If it's an honest rape, that individual should go
immediately to the emergency room. I would give them a shot of estrogen
or give them --
If it's a dishonest rape, you see—one where the cad starts out by taking her to an hotel and plying her with a small port wine--then it's her lookout. It's the same the whole world over, it's the poor what takes the blame; it's the rich what gets the pleasure, and that's why they call it conservative.
... he hammered Mr. Obama for policies that he said had undermined
the country’s future and the liberty of its citizens. As an example, Mr.
Santorum cited the president’s recent decision requiring that health
insurance plans offered by religious-affiliated hospitals, universities
and charities provide female employees with access to free birth
control.
“It’s not about contraception,” Mr. Santorum said. “It’s
about economic liberty. It’s about freedom of speech. It’s about freedom
of liberty. It’s about government control of your lives, and it’s got
to stop.”
Sure, Mr. S., and what about my unalienable right to entitlement? And the pursuit of following things?
Update:
I heard the sound on NPR: Santorum did not say "freedom of liberty" but "freedom of religion", which actually does make some sense—an argument I don't understand myself but which has been made by a lot of people.
The phrase was a mistranscription by the Times's Michael D. Shear writing for their online campaign diary The Caucus, and not noticed by any copy editors. I don't blame Shear, who is probably not getting much sleep, but the copy editor deserves a great big wag of the finger. I'm leaving this post as is in the name of copy editors everywhere (it's not a job, it's a vocation, and you keep doing it your whole life whatever your title may be).
Archbishop is out there with former part-time Governor Palin and the rest of the Tenth Amendment rights-reserved-to-the-states crowd, as suggested by this, quoted from the Times:
“Never before,” Archbishop Dolan said, setting the tone, “has the
federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into
the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience. This
shouldn’t happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first
in the Bill of Rights.”
See, before it was only state governments forcing individuals and organizations to go out and violate their consciences!
Also, too, free exercise of religion does not rank first:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It's the establishment clause that comes first, thanks, and I think that implies that free exercise of religion does not include bishops of any particular denomination dictating exceptions to the law.
The study I wrote about last January purporting to show that small high schools are better than large ones now exists in online published form (I don't know since when, but it is dated January 2012)—
But they did. You know all those state laws I have been babbling about? The ones that mandate employer-provided health insurance to include family planning? and that the Roman Catholic bishops have had to learn to live with? in spite of their howls of terror and despair at a new law mandating the same thing nationwide?
Turns out these laws are simply implementing a rule that has already been nationwide for 12 years: Joan McCarter at Daily Kos (quoting Mother Jones) reports that
In December 2000, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that companies that provided prescription drugs to their employees but didn't provide birth control were in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prevents discrimination on the basis of sex. That opinion, which the George W. Bush administration did nothing to alter or withdraw when it took office the next month, is still in effect today ...
What's new in the new law is the fact that there's no co-pay, since the Affordable Care Act requires preventive care to be dispensed free—oh, and that religious exemption that the more progressive state laws added, just because they wanted to be nice.
So what was it the bishops were upset about again? It was OK to have contraception as long as you shelled out the $25 a month? The religious exemption as it was just made them hungry for more? Didn't have anything to do with the Kenyan Muslim socialist Mau-Mau name on the bill, did it?
There is important Iran news (h/t voteforobamain2012 at Kos) breaking this morning from NBC News, of all places: Anonymous US officials have confirmed that the group responsible for murdering Iranian scientists is the MEK terrorist group (Mujahedin-e-Khalq) encamped in eastern Iraq--anti-Ayatollah and equally anti-Shah before that, a tool of Saddam Hussein in the war with Iran and now a tool of Israeli foreign policy.
It's not exactly news that that's who the killers and their paymasters are. [jump]
Persian warriors. Pergamon Museum/Vorderasiastishes Museum, Berlin; image from Wikipedia.
I weary somewhat of repeating this, but if you are reading Thomas M. Friedman in the New York Times, you are not getting Really Tom Friedman in the cloud, and I do mean cloud.
Look at China. While they were busily denouncing traitors to Communism, or having Great Leaps Forward, or goosing the numbers on Five Years’ Plans, they stayed poor, and more importantly they stayed boring. Seriously. If you have no idea what China was like after the Cultural Revolution, go watch John Adams’ Nixon in China on YouTube. Sooooo Booooring. Many dissidents willingly went to jail just to have the sensory experience of torture.
At least that’s what I read in my “Historic China Enthusiast Book of Guidance in Travels English Vergin” which I picked up last week in Vladivostock. As this booklet reminds us, it’s important to think of people less as beings with values, than as groups with interests. And it’s important to remember volcanoes. For like volcanoes, people are impossible to understand or reason with. They flow like magma beneath the crust of authoritarian regimes, as in Syria, and when they come to the surface who knows what kind of poisonous vapors they’ll release. And that’s the mote in your eye.
I honestly don't know why I love the guy—he's as ignorant as Proust's M. Norpois, or even Chris Mathews, who said
(h/t/ my friendly interlocutor at Kos, Brooke in Seattle)—and he wears that idiotic mustache, and he still hasn't blogrolled me. Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas, I guess.
