Circus ex machina, machina ex circo

Probably from a Tellyvision show called "Lost Girl", via TheMonkeyTwin. 

Shorter David Brooks, "When the Circus Descends", New York Times, April 18 2014:

It's centrist street cred time, so I'd like to pause here to mention how fond I am of a pragmatic little idea out there minding its own business when an ideological circus drops on its head, which is a new metaphor for Both Sides Doing It. Thus the crazy right believes that the Common Core State Standards for education are a Communist conspiracy. Also the left doesn't like them either for some [jump]

Cheap shots and fever spots

Dark... edgy... conservative...



Wednesday Addams deals with the national debt. The film's auteur is—apparently—John Hilt, head of the little known and less effective Exposing Marxists PAC (h/t The Wire). His letter to Louisiana Representative Louis Gohmert suggests he's an entrepreneurial job-creaty seeker after some of that wingnut grift:

Ukraine, I kraine...

Things go better w @CocaCola v @Obewise RT @MarquardtA Another from the "Militants with Kids" series from Sloviansk pic.twitter.com/aFOvL3UWlZ
— Ani Wandaryan (@GoldenTent) April 16, 2014

I have a Croatian friend—for well over 20 years, in fact, meaning I first really got to know him during the collapse of Yugoslavia, when he was pretty militant, as you might be too if you knew Slobodan Milošević was trying to murder your mother along with all her neighbors, and even though one of his best friends was a Serb. But he mellowed to some extent thereafter.

At the beginning of 1993, he caught me mocking the Czechs and the Slovaks over the pathetic character of their national breakup, when they couldn't afford to have [jump]

Bad writing

Quintessential Dowd:

It was a sequel idea proposed by Tony Scott, who directed the blockbuster “Top Gun,” before he committed suicide in 2012.

Jerry Bruckheimer, who co-produced the 1986 movie, which he once described as “‘Star Wars’ on earth,” recently revealed to The Huffington Post that he and Cruise are getting “closer and closer” to a deal to make “Top Gun 2.”

It was actually quite a long time before 2012, as the following paragraph makes clear: a good 26 years. Whereas her sentence makes it sound as if he offed himself while the movie was in post-production. Or I'm misreading that comma, and the idea is that he proposed the sequel just before doing himself in, as if it were the idea itself that drove him to despair.

Either way, it has no possible relevance to the subject at hand. If she wanted to make it clear that Scott is not involved in the sequel, she could have said "the late Tony Scott", like any normal writer. But because suicide is a sort of "edgy" concept, and she's deathly afraid that her friends will suspect she might not have known the gossip item (it's two years old!), she's got to squeeze it in somehow, no matter how much it damages her rhythm. What a terrible, terrible writer she is.

From "The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd", via Comics Alliance, 2010.

The times they are a-changin!

Breaking:

The New York Police Department has abandoned a secretive program that dispatched plainclothes detectives into Muslim neighborhoods to eavesdrop on conversations and built detailed files on where people ate, prayed and shopped, the department said.

The decision by the nation’s largest police force to shutter the surveillance program represents the first sign that William J. Bratton, the department’s new commissioner, is backing away from some of the post-9/11 intelligence-gathering practices of his predecessor. The move comes as the federal government reconsiders and re-evaluates some of its post-9/11 policies, including the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection.

Ties that re-bind

Homemade matzoh, via BetterBatter.

Shorter David Brooks, "A Long Obedience", New York Times, April 15 2014:

Passover is such a liberal holiday, with all this emphasis on slaves escaping to freedom and getting to do whatever they want, so I prefer to ignore it, and get an early start on Shavuot instead.

A remarkably rich and insane column, seriously suggesting that the feast of the Passover is mistaken in celebrating the Hebrews' escape from their Egyptian bondage when it ought to be celebrating God's giving to Moses of the Law (613 count 'em 613 commandments) 40 years later (and seven weeks later in the Jewish calendar, when it has its own holiday, as Brooks surely knows, the Feast of Weeks, June 3-5 this year), which Brooks says was a "re-binding", as clarified in the commentaries of Rabbis Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin:

Curious

34th Street. In the old days, CNN would have been where you go to hear Dr. Gupta's stories. How and why did this peculiar inversion take place?

The proof of the Putin

MICEX index April 2013 to April 2014: Wheee! Via Bloomberg from Econbrowser.

In early March, the Russian stock interest lost almost 11% as Russian troops entered Ukraine, and the value of the ruble against the US dollar fell to record lows. A couple of weeks later, while American conservatives laughed at the pathetic sanctions against Russia imposed by the Obama administration, in Russia sanctions laugh at you, and there was more [jump]

Dishonesty on Diversity

Apropos of nothing in particular... Via SpydersDen.

Shorter Ross Douthat, "Diversity and Dishonesty", New York Times, 13 April 2014:

University faculty should be encouraged to engage in research promoting or justifying oppression or tainted by racism, sexism, or heterosexism, because freedom.

Hahaha, just kidding. The Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street merely argued that tenured faculty should be permitted to engage in such research, against the threat represented by Sandra Korn, a Harvard senior and twice-a-month columnist at the influential Crimson newspaper, who wrote a piece in February expressing a certain nostalgia for the Harvard of [jump]

Cheap shot: Soon they'll be demanding reparations

Prominent young right winger says conservatives are the new blacks, Colbert skit amounts to 'political blackface' http://t.co/BMBbgRMdcl
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 12, 2014

So true. Everywhere they go, conservatives face heartrending discrimination simply because of who they are.

Herded into segregated schools.

"Conservatives only" drinking fountains.

Wasn't Rosa Parks ordered to the back of the taxi?

Flag dance

Flag dance choreographed by the Ming dynasty imperial prince, mathematician, astronomer, and music theorist Zhu Zaiyu (1536-1611), famous for his discovery of  a precise method of calculating equal temperament in 1585, ahead of Europeans. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

The image of mastery and omniscience

Nine seconds of trades as seen by HFT algorithms, visualized by Nanex, via TheFutureReset.

David Brooks writes:

Most of us have been seized at one time or another by what I call the explanatory drive, by which I mean a biological urge to explain things at some length, if not to others then at least to oneself; when you are confronted by a puzzle, riddle, or enigma and cannot rest through your long, haunted nights until you have wrestled that sucker to the ground, figured it out, and shouted, "Eureka!" or words to that effect.

We're all familiar with the explanatory drive, but I never realized I could incorporate it into my narrative of how traditional Tory morality makes [jump]

Confirmation bias has a conservative bias

Via.

Yuval Levin on the hot topic of confirmation bias at the National Review:

Without (it seems) a hint of irony, Paul Krugman argued on Monday that everyone is subject to confirmation bias except for people who agree with him. He was responding to this essay Ezra Klein wrote for his newly launched site, Vox.com, which took up the question of confirmation bias and the challenges it poses to democratic politics. Krugman acknowledged the research that Klein cites but then insisted that his own experience suggests it is actually mostly people he disagrees with who tend to ignore evidence and research that contradicts what they want to believe, while people who share his own views are more open-minded, skeptical, and evidence driven. I don’t know when I’ve seen a neater real-world example of an argument that disproves itself.

With the implication that I'm rubber, you're glue, and neener neener neener. Or as Jennifer Rubin calls it,

From the noise machine

Image via Examiner.com.

Another one of those rightwing firestorms, starting with a story in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and almost instantly spreading to all the usual venues, is the story that the New York State Department of Health has been failing to inspect abortion clinics (as every single one of the stories notes, in that remarkable unison in which they always [jump]

Suffering succotash! Holy cow!

Photo from It's a Vertical Life.

David Brooks generally writes from a a kind of extra-terrestrial standpoint, judging but not participating, but there's been some evidence lately that beneath that sternly objective exterior there beats a human heart, as when he returned from his so-called "book leave" in December with a column about arguments for or against suicide, or when he suddenly launched into a lengthy discussion of the "painfully hip" boutique hotel in January (what, he's doing travel writing now?) and it turned out he must be staying in one, in the wake of the breakup of his marriage; serious Brooksologists such as the esteemed Driftglass have asked themselves if he isn't really trying to tell us something, issuing a cry for help.

The good news today is that he may have gotten some:

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself in a bunch of conversations in which the unspoken assumption was that the main goal of life is to maximize happiness. That’s normal. 

Because I do not think it is normal to have a large number of conversations devoted to this unless you are seeing a therapist.

The bad news is that he has decided at the moment that he sort of likes suffering as a thought process, a kind of alternative to economics:

the big thing that suffering does is it takes you outside of precisely that logic that the happiness mentality encourages. Happiness wants you to think about maximizing your benefits.

Thus it makes you more empathetic, like Franklin Roosevelt (had polio), or more likely to write something like the Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln (conducted the Civil War). Or more, um, spiritual?

even when tranquillity begins to come back, or in those moments when grief eases, it is not clear where the relief comes from. The healing process, too, feels as though it’s part of some natural or divine process beyond individual control.... The right response to this sort of pain is not pleasure. It’s holiness. I don’t even mean that in a purely religious sense.

The right response to this kind of babbling is to draw the curtain, put your finger over your lips, and whisper, "I think he's feeling a little better."

[Driftglass analyzes the column, in contrast, as a kind of fortune cookie. But he's got a marvelous bonus, a parody of "Tradition" from Fiddler on the Roof.]

Egg

Who says Easter eggs have no religious significance? At Citarella's Gourmet Market on the Upper Left Side a Jewish egg celebrating the Creation? An aesthete egg celebrating Michelangelo? It's two or three feet high not counting its lotus pedestal and appears to be covered in real chocolate. The buildings are Broadway reflected in window glass. It's years since I've felt myself able to afford anything there other than squid ink,  which I can't find anywhere else, but an astonishing place.

What the elephant left in the room

@blakehounshell I am attempting to explain how this question can be answered, accurately, in different ways.
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) April 7, 2014

Perhaps, though, it would be better to start off with a better question. Shorter Jonathan Chait:

Via.

Spoilers, alerted: Postscript

Nima Shirazi's account of the case, which makes me feel now that I've read it that I shouldn't even have bothered because it is truly comprehensive and informed (so please read it), has been updated to advert to an also indispensable account by Robert Mackey in the New York Times's Lede blog, which points out that there are plenty of former members of the Students Following the Imam's Line engaging in successful diplomatic careers without incident. One fascinating detail that I just have to put on my own record here: seems that the narrative of how ambassador-designate Aboutalebi is a terrorist has been pushed in particular by none other than the Muhajedin-e-Khalq, an organization we have discussed before, an actual terrorist organization, Israel's known partner in the murders of Iranian physicists a couple of years back.

MEK, of course, has since become a non-terrorist organization by means of the magic of the United States State Department de-listing it under monumental pressure from a lot of people (I'm looking at you, Howard Dean) who had plenty of opportunities to know better. It is obvious that their aim, or that of their secret masters/funders, is to derail the Vienna talks that started on Thursday. This is very bad, and it needs to stop.

Hamid Abutalebi looking a little like a Truffaut character, not too terrorizing. Via Al-Monitor.

[Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog]

Spoilers, alerted

Once again, a Jennifer Rubin of a different choler. Via IMDB.

Here's young Jennifer Rubin on the subject of the nomination by Iran's President Rouhani of Hamid Aboutalebi to serve as Iran's ambassador to the United Nations:

If you believe that President Obama’s Iran policy is correct, then you must assume Iran is a normal state like other states, that its leaders want their country to prosper and that it wants to function as a nation-state in the “international community.” For it is only such a state that would willingly give up its illegal nuclear program in order to reintegrate back into the “international community.” Only a run-of-the-mill regime would put the welfare of its own people over the retention of an unusual weapon system, the sole purpose of which is to terrorize and blackmail neighbors.

You know, I really don't want to talk about the character of a regime that would retain an unusual weapon system, the sole purpose of which is to terrorize and blackmail neighbors, but I swear I will if you make me.

I do want it noted that Iran cannot be accused of "retaining" a weapons system that doesn't exist. Or of conducting an "illegal nuclear program" when it has been found repeatedly [jump]

Two Afghanistan pictures

From an exhibition, "Anja Niedringhaus—At War" held at The Cube, Eschborn (Hessen), February-March 2012, via fokussiert.com.

Salavat, Afghanistan, September 2010 © Anja Niedringhaus/AP

Kabul, Afghanistan, September 2009 © Anja Niedringhaus/AP

The photographer, Anja Niedringhaus, was killed yesterday by an Afghan police commander in Khost province, where she was covering the ongoing election with the reporter Kathy Gannon (who was badly hurt). A tribute by Carlotta Gall appeared in today's Times.