we strive to consider the strongest arguments we can find on all sides,
seeking to deliver both nuance and clarity. Our goal is not to please
those whom we report on or to produce stories that create the appearance
of balance, but to seek the truth.
A detail I especially like is the recognition in that "all sides" rather than "both" that it isn't ever just a question of adopting what she said or what he said but of developing an independent understanding.
This does not constitute an endorsement of Mamma Stamberg's frozen cranberry relish.
Persian War, the hurdler, by Persian Gulf out of the Chanteur II mare, Warning, born 1964. The story of his brave and arduous life and more pictures are at TVG Community.
So, where were we? On the 21st, Netanyahu and Barak said General Dempsey was "serving Iranian interests" by having the chutzpah to disagree with them. On the 22nd, the IAEA announced that the current round of talks with Iran over weapons inspection had failed after their team was barred from inspecting the military plant at Parchin, where Iranians are suspected of working on trigger explosives for the nuclear weapon. On the 24th, US intelligence repeated what it has been saying since 2007, that there is as yet no evidence that Iran has decided to build one.
There's lots more, but I am more and more of the opinion that what is mainly happening is elections—Iran's first of all (this week!), Israel's likely next, (they don't have to come till 2013, but Netanyahu knows his chances of winning are more likely to get worse than [jump]
Now that the Dow has closed above 13,000 for the first time since May 2008, I wonder if the Times is going to redo their famous chart showing the stock market difference between Democratic and Republican presidents from October 2008:
Given that it's already up 56% since Barack Obama took office three months after that, it might even lead a person to suspect that the Times has a liberal bias and is waiting till October 2012 to do it. If things carry on as they have been doing, that's going to be pretty graphic, as they say.
But speaking of liberal biases, I now have a new idea on the foundational difference between Democrats and Republicans that is directly related to this news. Like so many others who have grown to feel that the liberal-conservative classification doesn't apply any more, I have been talking for quite a while now in terms of a conservative party that we have to vote for and a crazy party that explains why we have to vote for the conservative party, but I'm not really satisfied with that either.
Partly because it's still fun to vote for Democrats, because they're still so truly forward-looking in so many little ways, whether we're talking about same-sex marriage or [jump]
Kos exploded around lunchtime yesterday with news from the WikiLeaks dump of internal mails from the global strategies espionage firm/paranoid travel magazine Stratfor, and the revelation that Israel had destroyed all of Iran's putative nuclear weapons facilities sometime late last year. It was wonderful watching how the wisdom of crowds works—by the time I was done with lunch just about the whole mob of us had come to realize that the story was just idle gossip and [jump]
In a sane world, it would be the New York City United Federation of Teachers local that would be clamoring for the city to release the test score–based teacher ratings to the public, while the Department of Education would be begging to keep them a secret, because it only takes a glance at the numbers to see how stupid and unserious these numbers are, using the scores of tests that have been totally discredited in the first place, leaping all over the map for any individual teacher from year to year, and with incredible error margin spreads of 35 percentage points for the math scores and 53 (!) for English.
“No principal would ever make a decision on this score alone, and we
would never invite anyone — parents, reporters, principals, teachers —
to draw a conclusion based on this score alone,”
said Shael Polakow-Suransky of the DOE, trying to be reassuring, but why would they make any use of it at all? The numbers are basically arbitrary, and should not play any role in principals' decisions whatever. The fact that they have used them shows, really, what bad faith the mayor and his chancellors have been bringing to the table in this long debate.
Also in a sane world, if the city's police force wants to investigate potential terrorists, instead of infiltrating Muslim student organizations all over New Jersey they could try infiltrating the FBI, because pretty much every terrorist plot they have uncovered over the past x many years has had an FBI informant right in the middle of it—doing practically all of the work, too. There's a pattern there.
The irrepressible Rick Santorum was chatting with folks at James Dobson's American Heartland Forum in Columbia, Miss., February 3, when he got to the subject of slippery slopes and the example of the Netherlands, where, he said, elderly people feel the need to wear bracelets saying "Do not euthanize me" to keep safe from the murderous medics prowling the cities:
Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, but half the
people who are euthanized every year — and it’s 10 percent of all deaths
for the Netherlands — half of those people are euthanized
involuntarily, at hospitals, because they are older and sick. And so
elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital, they go to
another country, because they’re afraid because of budget purposes that
they will not come out of that hospital if they go into it with
sickness.
You can hear the audience gasping in horror: Those poor old folks! But it's not true, [jump]
Juan Cole, whom we depend on for interpretations of mid-East events, has been adding something quite new to his bag of tricks: translations from the Persian of Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Umar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nisaburi al-Khayyami (1048-1131), better known to the rest of us as Omar Khayyam. Unlike the heavily scented Victorian versions of Edward FitzGerald, Cole's translations are as clean and crunchy as celery, sometimes funny and always bracing:
If a stranger proves faithful,
I adopt him into the family.
But if a relative sins,
I take a dim view of him.
If poison proves helpful,
it is actually an antidote,
and if an antidote attacks me,
it is really a toxic sting.
I don't think we know when they're going to show up, you just have to follow the blog.
The Friendly Bear. Persian miniature, 18th century.
The above illustration is from the extraordinary blog (multilingual, but mostly in English, sometimes not quite idiomatic) Poemas del río Wang, and a very lengthy post on bears, which ranges from an excerpt from a dialogue by Erasmus in which a bear and a lion discuss correct Latin pronunciation to a very recent short-short story translated from the Czech.
Gill Mann at Rumproast offers an answer to the age-old question of what if Michael O'Hanlon were an advice columnist.
The Brookings Institution wunderkind warrior (actually in his 50s, but
tousle-haired as ever) would definitely have his own distinctive voice.
The website Letters of Note collects letters by the famous and not-so-famous, from Billie Joe Armstrong to E.B. White and so on, including this masterpiece, written or dictated in August 1865 by the freedman Jourdon Anderson and addressed to his erstwhile owner, Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, in response to an invitation to come back and work on his farm.
The story itself doesn't quite live up to the headline—Cantor wouldn't acknowledge that Americans oppose his agenda, of course, so he just didn't answer the question—but isn't it fun to imagine him losing that perpetual sneer for a moment, scratching his head, and telling the interviewer, "Honestly, I don't have a clue. Strangest thing I ever saw, in fact."
in fact, this big battle that I’ve, uh, totally won with Keith Olbermann by the way, like, not only won once but twice and three times… uh, there were individuals saying, [high voice] “Oh what about the Virginia rape? The rapes that, the forced rapes of women who are pregnant?” What!?
Wait a minute, they had no problem having similar to a trans-vaginal procedure when they engaged in the act that resulted in their pregnancy.
What Dana doesn't realize is that most boyfriends don't have stainless steel penises.
In a nice little human interest story about a Rodeo Drive screening room (Oscars color commentary), Susan Stamberg mentioned that the subject matter of the film The Flowers of War is "the Rape--some have called it--of Nanking". (Audio here.) That's NPR's recalibrated objectivity policy: when they say they don't want to seem biased to conservatives, they include Japanese conservatives, some of whom prefer to call it the "Blind Date of Nanking", where the two parties had a nice time but decided it wasn't really going to lead anywhere.
Japanese soldiers practice their bayonet technique in Nanjing, on live Chinese prisoners. From Dismal World.
And in other moderation news, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation has hired a special PR firm to help them deal with the fallout from the foundation's unintentional attempt—well, it wasn't everybody's intention—to do something bad to Planned Parenthood: Penn Schoen Berland (PSB), founded by former Democratic pollsters (doesn't say what the "former" applies to) Mark Penn and Doug Schoen. Penn's strategy is as yet under wraps, but rumor has it he'll be raising an entirely meaningless slogan and subtly suggesting that Planned Parenthood uses cocaine.
There's something about a bishop...
There's something about a bishop that is
comical but at the same time deeply unnerving.
From Flavius Josephus, at Byzantine, Texas. The Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.
Bulgaria's commission charged with
announcing the names of people who collaborated with the country's
former communist-era secret services announced on January 17 2012 that
11 out of 15 members of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church's governing body,
the Holy Synod, had worked for State Security....
The Australian government is contemplating plans for a marine reserve of a million square miles, but they need expressions of international support; you can send one through the very international Avaaz, athttp://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_coral_sea_4/?vl.
Just about the same time as I got the message from Mara Liasson that the new rules on insurance coverage for family planning were all part of Obama's 11-dimensional election strategy which involves getting Rick Santorum the Republican nomination—actually it's not her fault, I made most of it up—the august Markos was coming up with a similar idea: that Democrats should go vote for Santorum in the upcoming primaries and caucuses that allow it, starting with Michigan, by way of, if not actually nominating Santorum, at least making Romney's victory as painful and exhausting as possible; he called it Operation Hilarity.
High-minded Kossacks rose, however, in protest against the plan, which smacked [jump]
Just when I realized I hadn't done anything to commemorate Presidents' Day (I always think of it as Nixon's Birthday, movable because Nixon wasn't exactly born), out comes Really Tom Friedman with the original version of his Sunday column in the Times, with all the fire and fervor those copy editors leach out of his prose, and on a presidential subject, calling for a centrist third party candidate!
As I’ve said many many many many times before, and not only because
my iPad’s word processor gets its default style stuck on “antedated
David Broder schtick,” America’s two parties are in no shape to
undertake the radical reformation of capitalism necessary to make us
thrive in the 22nd century. Santorum and Obama are symptoms of a
national disease: idea-having. One has the big idea that marginal tax
rate increases should fund increased safety-net and infrastructure
spending. The other believes that Jews have horns full of diamonds. My
point is, there has to be something in between those two positions, some
path between boring old reason and the wild farragoes of what I’m only
assuming was a failed lobotomy.
So have a happy—at this point in the day perhaps it should be have had a happy holiday and get some sleep.
While I was preparing my effusions on the literary efforts of James Poulos, I was not alone. Hordes of bloggists leapt at Poulos's text like hounds on the umbles (actually, no; the hounds get random bits of flesh, which might be a better metaphor anyway, while the umbles are reserved for the servants, baked into umble pie; but I digress); in addition to the links given in the earlier post I should mention TBogg, SEK, Betty Cracker, and Rich Yeselson. But the most startling approach is undoubtedly that of Doctor Habilitatissimus Michael Bérubé, who laid down a claim that Poulos's writing is not merely not bad but actually in some sense—well, extraordinary; "modern," he says, "perhaps on the very cusp of the post-modern," citing as evidence the following text:
to the
growing discomfort of many, that framework hasn’t come anywhere close to
answering even the most basic questions about what women are for —
despite pretty much universal recognition across the political spectrum
that a civilization of men, for men, and by men is no civilization at
all, a monstrously barbaric, bloody, and brutal enterprise. Given the
existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann
of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua [jump]
If somebody were to turn over a very large amount of cash to me, I could not only pay off all my credit card debt and the mortgage, but buy a new, much larger apartment, with a washer and dryer, and a big pantry with a chest freezer.
Then I'd do my basic shopping at Costco, and buy a whole free-range chestnut-fed pig from a gentleman farmer and make my own sausage, and that's not all. I'd start getting really
good clothes—especially shoes—so that I wouldn't have to buy them so
often, and season tickets to the opera and the Philharmonic, and
memberships in all the museums. Jesus, being rich can save you so much
money!
All the people with power keep telling us that a
national economy is just like a family, meaning that the nation has to
sit down around the kitchen table (assuming it can afford [jump]
Everybody keeps telling us that small business is the "engine of job creation" in the United States, but it's not so clear. Following up a post from Ontario at Kos:
According to Who creates jobs? Small vs. large vs. young by John C. Haltiwanger, Ron S. Jarmin, and Javier Miranda, NBER Working Paper No. 16300 (2010), small business is not that much of a job creator. Looking at Census Bureau data for the decade from 1992 to 2005, they found that
businesses tend to create jobs in proportion to their importance in the
economy. Thus, large mature firms—those more than ten years old and
with more than 500 workers—employed about 45 percent of all
private-sector workers and accounted for almost 40 percent of job
creation and destruction in this study.
Where small size of the firm had an effect, it wasn't because it was small but because it was new:
The real driver of disproportionate job growth, they find, is not small
companies, but young companies. It is the startup firms that generate
the surge of jobs that earlier research attributed to small companies.
After which they sell out to Microsoft (that's the program), or fold and put together a job-creating emo band or gourmet taco truck.
Paleo at Daily Kos notes a speech where Rick Santorum more or less called for the abolition of public schools. You say you're not surprised? Fine, but what I want to call attention to is an unusually upfront example of what I have called "retroactionary" ideology, the place that's so far right it's physically impossible—the belief that rather than just reverting to the way things used to be (the reactionary way) we should literally aim backwards in time.
Aristotle as depicted in the 1493 Nürnberger Chronik, from Wikipedia's article on "Anachronism"
Say what you will about those ayatollahs, you can't deny they have a sense of humor. To punish the European Union for imposing an embargo on Iranian oil, effective July 1, Iran's oil ministry has announced that it has stopped selling oil to Britain and France right away, with hints that Spain, Italy, and Greece could follow. Crude oil prices went up to $103 a barrel in US markets yesterday, "up 12 percent in the last 6 weeks and up 21 percent from a year ago" according to the Fairfax News (they had the most vivid numbers). That way the Europeans will get an early chance to find out if they really like the sanctions or not so much.
Roy Edroso has been inviting us to savor the writing of James Poulos, at the Daily Caller, on the topic of "What are Women For?", a question you may never have asked yourself.
Thers, whose opinions I normally revere, insists for some reason that James Poulos does not truly deserve to be called the worst writer on this or any other Internet (his italics); he thinks [jump]
Said the pediatrician: I'm afraid he's going to be severely conservative, Mrs. Romney—but with suitable care and a loving home environment there's no reason he shouldn't have a fulfilling life...
Jeremy Lin and Landry Fields Special Nerd Handshake
Now that Michelle Bachmann's not running for president any more, she's back to her old job of making the other Congresspersons look sane by comparison. From Huffington Post:
The House and Senate both approved a payroll tax cut bill on Friday that would extend unemployment benefits through 2012.
But according to Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), the extension is hardly the bill's crowning achievement.
"They're extending unemployment, too, but the big thing that we get
is no longer can a welfare recipient walk into a strip club and get
money out of an ATM machine to pay for a lap dance," she told
conservative radio host Mark Levin on Thursday night. "Now, I'm not
making this up. That's the big thing that we get out of this bill."
And remember these?
At a Santorum rally in Tacoma, Paul Constant (h/t Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice) reports a little crowd taunting a lone freedom-from-religion protester,
pinching their noses and miming as though they were swatting away flies. "I can't stand the smell of this guy,"
one fly-swatter said, adding, "it's like he's got garbage in his
pockets." An old woman told the nose-pinchers, as she squeezed past the
whole scene, "Watch out for the maggots." Another woman clucked her
tongue, and told her friends, "If you're an atheist, you'll just believe
in anything."
