Surveillance is for little people

Hide and seek. From The Little People Project by Slinkachu.

Let's just try this one more time:

I really don't like the idea of everybody's communications metadata, including mine, being collected, but I do like it better than one alternative, which is that exemplified by, say, the German Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, speaking of Orwellian names), of spying only on one's political enemies, adherents of obnoxious sects and soi-disant religions, and threats to "free enterprise":

While the BfV uses all kinds of surveillance technology and infiltration, they mostly use open sources.^[1] The BfV publishes a yearly report (Verfassungsschutzbericht) which is intended to raise awareness about anti-constitutional activities.^[8]

Main concerns of the BfV are:

The opportunist coalition

Via Coltons Point Times.

Shorter David Brooks: "The Opportunity Coalition", New York Times, January 31, 2014

I could spend the remainder of President Obama's term—sorry, I mean his other term, I keep forgetting he's already had one—making small incremental improvements in my general critique, gently mocking some of the themes proposed in his State of the Union address on Tuesday if I can be bothered to find out what they were (didn't he say something about patent law?). I might even score some points that way.

Or alternatively I could think of myself as liberated from the need to campaign against the president, since he's definitely not running any more, and try to think in larger terms, transcending the tired categories of small-government conservative and big-government liberal: I could come out as a Whig!

The most useful view of Brooks's amazing column might be that proposed by Matt Yglesias:

Correction

In its report of an interview following President Obama's State of the Union Address in which NY1's Michael Scotto asked Representative Michael Grimm (R-NY) to discuss the ongoing investigations into the financing of his 2010 congressional campaign, the Times noted that Mr. Grimm "threatened to toss Mr. Scotto over the balcony, employing an obscene adjective to characterize the balcony." In fact the adjective, which was "fucking", did not in any way characterize the balcony, which was neither fucking at the moment nor normally used as a venue (by analogy with "dining room", "smoking alcove", etc.) for that purpose; Mr. Grimm used the adjective as a pure term of affect to convey his personal feelings about the balcony, which are those of a warm regard.

Moreover, when Mr. Grimm proposed to break Mr. Scotto in half "like a boy" he did not mean to suggest that this procedure is more properly or conventionally applied to boys than to other persons, merely that the methodology for breaking boys in half is the one he would choose.

The novelist William Burroughs sawing himself in half. Image by Oliver Harris.

Faith and begorrah

Shorter David Brooks, "Alone, Yet Not Alone", New York Times, January 27, 2014:

Have I told you about my religious ecstasy side? Well, I haven't actually tried it out yet, but I read a book about it. Kind of like Rabbi Heschel, only humble. Think some of that weary white Christian contemporary piano pop.

Gianlorenzo Bernini, L'Estasi di Santa Teresa, ca. 1652, via.

Bonus: Look first upon this picture, then on this:

Great soul

Goodbye Pete Seeger, wonderful musician and inveterate radical.

The Temptations of Saint Huckabee

Defenestration, installation by Brian Goggin, San Francisco 1997. Image via infoteli.

And speaking of floridly bad writing, here's Sir Charles C.W. (Constant Worry) Cooke, Bart., in the National Review:

No sooner had the word “libido” left Huckabee’s lips than all context, judgment, and verisimilitude were hastily defenestrated; Huckabee, who has not held public office since 2007, had been turned into the de facto spokesman for the entire Republican party; and the word had gone out across the Kingdom that there was a new monster at the gates....

Orientalism

Image from Bartlett School of Architecture.

I was trying, for legitimate work-related reasons, swear, to find out whether the Chinese phrase 热目 (rèmù) "hot eyes" has some idiomatic meaning, without if possible having to "read" any Chinese, and pretty much without success too, but came across some hysterical bad writing from Louis Joseph Vance, Red Masquerade (1921):

On land the buildings lined a cobbled street, from dawn to dark a thoroughfare for thundering lorries and, twice daily, in murk of early morning and gloom of early night, scoured by a nondescript rabble employed in the vast dockyards whose man-made forests of masts and cordage, funnels and cranes, on either hand lifted angular black silhouettes against the misty silver of the sky.

Internish evidence

Joel Pett/Lexington Herald-Leader. Via Down With Tyranny.

Senator Paul Meets the Press (via PoliticsUSA):

Well, you know, I mean the Democrats one of their big issues is they have concocted and says Republicans are committing a war on women. One of the workplace laws and rules that I think are good is that bosses shouldn’t prey on young interns in their office, and I think really the media seems to have given President Clinton a pass on this.

You see what he did here, right? Beyond the fact that, like Sarah Palin, he doesn't speak in sentences because he doesn't have a message to transmit as much as an attitude of equal parts paranoia and spite and because his English isn't very good.

He has no intention of discussing any of the issues revolving around the alleged Republican War on Women (though he personally happens to be in moderately good odor on this front himself at the moment, having signed onto Kirsten Gillebrand's effort to do [jump]

Retroactionary Watch: Cruzin'

Still-Canadian* Senator Rafael Edward "Ted" Cruz Faces the Nation (via PoliticusUSA):

Well, Bob, with all due respect, I don’t agree with the premise of your question. Throughout the government shutdown, I opposed a government shutdown. I said we shouldn’t shut down the government. I think it was a mistake that President Obama and the Democrats shut the government down this fall.

Breaking: Talking Head Shows Up on Television

Lopez Discusses Obama’s Policies against the Catholic Church as He Preps to Meet Pope Francis

By NRO Staff

For reals: Kathryn Jean Lopez appears (briefly) on Fox News. Why is this headline so small?

Polar bear facepalm, via Paco Enterprises.

Generation of diapers

Via The Queen of Myself: Meaning, Moxie, and Majesty for Midlife Women.

Shorter David Brooks, "It Takes a Generation", New York Times, January 24, 2014:

It goes without saying that the problem with poor people isn't the fact that they don't have enough money. It's that they can't control their impulses, can't form attachments, don't possess resilience, and lack social and emotional skills. Even people who can afford to live in $300-per-night hotels while they recover from a divorce can suffer from these issues, which shows that they're more important than what's in your bank account. [jump]

Cheap shots: Cries and whiskers

"Like a Surgeon"

Dana Loesch: 'Imagine if Madonna's name was Phil Robertson' http://t.co/h5nG14PPHy
— TwitchyTeam (@TwitchyTeam) January 18, 2014

And imagine if Dana Loesch's name was Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade. That would explain why she thinks a penis is indistinguishable from a vaginal probe wand.

And much much more below the fold!

Fart of Darkness

Rich Lowry, Newt Gingrich, and Dinesh D'Souza (in the pith helmets), voyaging into the Heart of Darkness. Image from The Deeper Root of Raging Anti-Colonialism.

Far be it from me to mock that fearless fighter for Empire, former pseudo-intellectual, college president, and husband Dinesh D'Souza for having gotten busted for the crime of laundering $20,000 in excessive contributions to the 2012 Senate campaign of Wendy Long, a candidate so hopeless that barely a year later even those who voted for her (27%, against Kirsten Gillebrand; incidentally, she also failed to disclose 51.4% of her donations) can't remember her name. You can't suspect him of trying to buy favors from her, since the odds of her ever being able to do him a favor were vanishingly small. I rather think it must have been that "sweet, just, boyish" innate gallantry.

Wendy E. Long. Image from Wikipedia.

Snow point in pretending

Like an overeager surfer leaping on a wave that isn't really there, the National Review's Rich Lowry in his Kips Bay office couldn't wait for the snow disaster to start before he started denouncing it, to demonstrate that our new bloodthirsty Bolshevik mayor is also incompetent, issuing a plaintive tweet as the traffic inconsiderately continued to flow into the evening rush hour:

Obamacare Tragedy Watch

Via Gifbay.

My very excellent health insurance, with low out of pocket & deductibles, just jumped from $461 to $979/mo. Thanks #Obamacare.
— Jane Hamsher (@janehamsher) January 20, 2014

Funny, she lives in DC, maybe in a groovy neighborhood like Adams Morgan, where the most expensive zero-deductible Platinum plan I can find on the Exchange for a 54-year-old is $782.58 per month. I bet NSA's screwing around with the website just to fuck with her.

Of the aching of Brooks there is no end

Henri Vidal, 1896. From Wikipedia, "Facepalm".

Catherine Woodiwiss, associate Web editor for Soujourners: Faith in Action for Social Justice, writing last August:

events this year — from the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act to the House eliminating funding for food stamps to the Trayvon Martin trial — are posing serious challenges to our national progress towards true equality for all....

And a very happy Dr. King Day to you too!

Apparently from an anti-Communist, anti-Semitic site called incogman.net that happily no longer exists.

And in That Corner, John Fund, ever the gentleman, spends his Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday not attacking Dr. King. Instead, he attacks the late Nelson Mandela who, unlike Dr. King, held some improper opinions:

“I hate all forms of imperialism, and I consider the U.S. brand to be the most loathsome and contemptible.”

Because our beloved Mandiba was actually totally a Communist conspirator secretly working to destroy America's freedom forever, or at least a member in good [jump]

Sochi poem

#Sochi2014 is almost here. Write a haiku about Sochi with hashtag #sochihaiku - the best will get published on a special blog on RBTH!
— RBTH (@russiabeyond) January 17, 2014

Russia Beyond the Headlines is an international outlet for le poutinisme, somewhat less sophisticated than Russia Today—it features stories like

Put Putin on your fridge door

 and

Olympic beauty: Sochi girls to meet world famous athletes

Their haiku project backfired a little bit, leading to a "special blog" on BuzzFeed instead, and poems quite unlike the ones RBTH presumably envisaged:

Krasnaya Polyana, Sochi. Via Wikipedia.

Obamacare Tragedy Watch

Image by Peter Laird.

As the heartrending stories of the Obamacare victims who liked their plan and couldn't keep it begin to dwindle away, on account of almost none of them being in any way true, the rightwing propaganda against the Affordable Care Act is having to shift its attentions to a somewhat different angle, that of the spurious quantitative study; and we would be well advised to pay these some attention of our own, because you know they're going to end up on the lying lips of John Boehner and the like.

Right now, for example, the chicken coop (Daily Caller, Breitbart, Townhall, and so on) is clucking its collective head off over an egg laid by a trio of scholars from Grand [jump]

And I'm docking you one letter grade for each day late, Mr. President

Image by XX for kidpub.

Thomas L. Friedman writes ("Obama's Homework Assignment"):

There's just no point in President Obama giving yet another State of the Union Address this year—boRING. Instead, he ought to give a State of the Union 800-Word Rant. Or, better, he should let Secretary of Education Arne Duncan give it for him, because Duncan's already written one, and it's a dazzler. But before I get around to telling you what's in Duncan's speech, or when and where he [jump]