The sun was shining upside down

Harold Lloyd in Girl Shy (1924), via Popthomology.

Old David Brooks ("In Praise of Small Miracles") has been doing some heavy reading, in the World Bank's new report on behavioral economics, Mind, Society, and Behavior,  and so have I, but I seem to be getting a totally different message from the thing.  He doesn't actually mention the report till paragraph 7, so as to make it look, as always, as if he knew all this stuff before reading it, and he calls it "amazingly good" as if he were evaluating it against some vast secret knowledge he has of the subject. But, as we'll see, he's missed an awful lot of it, including its central message.

Like, Brooks keeps worrying about

a bias in the way governments often work. They tend to gravitate toward the grand and the abstract....

Businessy risk

Via.

Look out, it's America's worst law professor!

DECEMBER 10, 2014 11:00 AM

Ignoring Risks to National Security 
The Feinstein report reflects the Democratic party’s contempt for U.S. intelligence agencies. 

By John Yoo

Happened to catch this minutes after seeing Valerie Plame getting interviewed on MSNBC—remember her, the Cheney administration (Karl Rove in particular) got pissed off with her husband for casting doubt on its account of Iraq's imaginary uranium shopping and decided to punish him by revealing her identity as a CIA operative running a clandestine network in Iran, thereby destroying her career and incidentally wrecking for years the US ability to collect intelligence from inside Iran, a country said to be kind of important.

Ex-VP Nabbed in Flagrant Truthfulness

Image credit to UrantianSojourn.com via TPK at Kos.

Out of his own mouth:

“What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation, and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it,” Mr. Cheney said in a telephone interview. “I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.” (New York Times)

Yes, I think at the very least Cheney himself and his office, and the Office of Legal Council, and various people in the Department of Justice, must have known exactly what kind of violence the CIA was perpetrating in our name, right from the Memorandum of Understanding of September 17 2001, as Emptywheel was explaining a couple of years ago:

Of assholes and em-dashes

Image via Business News Daily.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Cop Mind", New York Times, December 9 2014:

I spent literally months in 1983 as a police reporter, between college and starting on my internship with old Mr. Buckley, so you can trust me, I know cops.

But what he knows is not in any way different from anything else you can read from any cop-sympathetic source or for that matter from watching cop-fiction series on television, and it's neither right enough to be interesting nor wrong enough to be worth arguing with.

The only slightly interesting thing about today's column is mainly of interest to copy editors: not the revelation that Brooks knows the word "asshole" but the way the fit-for-the-Times version is styled, where he's discussing the hardbitten and cynical culture that sometimes grows out of policemen's suffering:

Fascist is as fascist does

The new Ukraine Minister for Internal Affairs - looks like a neo-Nazi boot boy. EU supports these types. pic.twitter.com/pFwXEB7z0U
— Peter Chalinar (@TaleahPrince) December 7, 2014

The Tweet got deleted before I thought of making a screenshot, but this was the picture.

Not that we should judge people by their looks anyway, but no, as Dr. Google found out fairly quickly, this is Russian propaganda at its most brazen and ridiculous. It's not the interior minister.

White House Fool Report: Which side are you on?

Playing Guantanamera. Image from Gocce di Note.

At LGM, Loomis took note of the ghastly report by Eric Lipton in yesterday's Times on Republican state attorneys general under the leadership of Oklahoma's Scott Pruitt acting directly at the bidding of energy industry puppet masters to fight against Obama administration regulations. Just as ALEC writes right-to-work and anti-environment bills for state legislatures, so do energy company lawyers draft letters to go to the EPA over an attorney general's signature demanding revisions of rules they don't like or recalculation of evidence that makes them look bad. Both AGs and legislators openly selling themselves to powerful interests that value profit over clean air and safe water.

And it's not just that; the AGs have their own officially constituted gang! The so-called "Rule of Law" campaign,

West of Eden: Weltanschauungsschmerz

As the price of oil falls, so does the Iranian riyal, so that people have increasingly less money to buy increasingly expensive things; Peter Kenyon's NPR story paints a picture not so much of starvation as a constant grind of gradually worsening hardship and a sense that it will never get any better without a lifting of US and international sanctions against the country's economy, which won't ever happen, they fear.

Because Republicans and the Israel lobby don't want it to happen, of course. I've got a theory about that, which is that those people would like to see the Rouhani government defeated and a more conservative government in place in Iran; they'd like to see the relatively progressive forces fail—they'd rather have the return of mouth-breather Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who is apparently mounting a comeback attempt), why? To preserve their world-view. Because the way things are gives them a perfectly clear sense of who is good ("We are!") and who is bad ("Them!") and being forced to rework that would be so unpleasant. They literally can't bear the prospect.

Mausoleum of the poet Saadi (ca. 1210-92), Shiraz, via Wikimedia Commons.

Speaking of sanctions, Richard Silverstein yesterday:

Catholic League of Legends

Druid ritual at Stonehenge, 2007? Via Wikipedia.

Right Wing Watch, via Tom Boggioni:

Asked by host Malzberg about his statement that atheists and agnostics die earlier and represent a large proportion of Americans in mental institutions, [Catholic League president Bill] Donohue replied, “Absolutely. You take a look at secularists and compare them to people of faith, there’s a huge difference when it comes to health and happiness: mental health, physical health, individual happiness.”

Or maybe they're just looking at you and your fly is open

Image via SodaHead.

Shorter David Brooks, "Why Elders Smile", New York Times, December 5 2014:

According to scientific research, people in their early 80s are the happiest. They say it's because of biology, with the degenerating brain being better able to ignore unpleasantness, but I'd like to think it can be learned, so I could get there early if I practice hard enough. 

"I don't see race"

I actually heard somebody say that, on the bus heading uptown, a big old loudmouth white woman and I mean that in a good way, reminding me of a particularly dear playground friend from when our kids were in elementary school, but saying "fucked" a lot more. I didn't initially suspect she was going to be anything but fun. We were crawling up Sixth Avenue toward Rockefeller Center and past a lively demonstration where I think I failed to recognize somebody mildly famous at a microphone, and I think she felt it was going to take us a long time to get out of there because of the crowds, and she said several times that we were fucked, to nobody in particular, but we were facing each other across the aisle so that it was as if she were saying it to me.

"Not that I think they did the right thing to that guy, that was fucked, but you have to deal with it the right way, not with violence."

The 2009 tree getting hoisted from its birthplace in Eaton, Connecticut.

I can't breathe

I don't even have anything particular to say, really, that isn't being said by anybody else, about the apparent finding of the Staten Island grand jury that nothing wrong occurred when Eric Garner was killed. I'm sad. I don't understand how this happens. I'm not interested in the arcana differentiating choke holds from vascular holds. There's no technical explanation that can justify the death of Eric Garner to me. Every time this happens, and it keeps happening, it is a terrible, terrible failure on the part of the police and the criminal justice system. They're doing it wrong, and somebody should pay; that's how we stop abuses, if we stop them at all.

Eric and Esaw Garner, via New York Daily News.

Failure to swing

Via.

Bizarre little logic glitch in Friedman today, reporting an email from David Rothkopf of Foreign Policy in which Rothkopf writes:

“not only did we overstate the threat [signaled by 9/11], we reordered our thinking to make it the central organizing principle in shaping our foreign policy.”

This was a mistake on many levels, Rothkopf insisted: “Not only did it produce the overreaction and excesses of the Bush years, but it also produced the swing in the opposite direction of Obama — who was both seeking to be the un-Bush and yet was afraid of appearing weak on this front himself” — hence doubling down in Afghanistan and re-intervening in Iraq, in part out of fear that if he didn’t, and we got hit with a terrorist attack, he’d be blamed.

Elementary, my dear

Gustave Doré, 1872, Wentworth Street, Whitechapel. Copyright Wellcome Images.

I had called upon my friend David Brooks upon the Monday after Thanksgiving, with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season. He was lounging upon the sofa in a purple dressing-gown, a laptop computer within his reach upon the right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at hand, while I wondered how many times I could work the word "upon" into a single paragraph.

“You are engaged,” said I; “perhaps I interrupt you.”

“Not at all. I am glad to have a friend with whom I can discuss my results. The matter is a perfectly trivial one”—he jerked his thumb in the direction of the machine—“but there are points in connection with it which are not entirely devoid of interest and even of instruction.”

I seated myself in his armchair and warmed my hands before his crackling fire. "I have been much concerned of late," he went on, "with events in America. I allude, of course, to the case of Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri."

A Murkier Situation

Image via Tiger Beatdown.

Well, a bit over a year ago, Monsignor Ross Douthat, the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, was feeling pretty chipper about the state of race relations in the United States, to the effect that it was probably somewhat better than 50 years before, when Dr. King had dreamed his dream in the Washington Mall:

Blowback and forth

Oral vaccine, Balochistan. Via Express Tribune Pakistan, 2011.

So in southwestern Balochistan last Wednesday, just outside the provincial capital of Quetta, a van carrying eight women and a boy working in Pakistan's polio vaccination program was attacked by a couple of men on a motorcycle, with guns, who just started shooting. They killed three of the women and a bystander and then sped away. The women screamed for help but there were no police around; there was a "security gap", according to Masood Khan Jogezai, Balochistan representative for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation:

Bedtime for Bobos

Florentin Moser (Germany), The Descent of Man (2010).

You know that picture of the "Descent of Man", of the march of human evolution as a literal march of ever more erect and hairless male hominids? The concept of David Brooks writing about the "cultural contradictions of capitalism" as he does in today's column calls to mind one of those "Descent of Man" parodies that invert it into a picture of degeneration, from heroic ancestors to wretched present, where such is the bathos of the penultimate phase, the bent-over Cubicle Man, that there's nothing for it but to revert at the end to the knuckle-dragging chimp: muscular Marx, spiritual Weber, anxiety-ridden Daniel Bell, and Bedtime-for-Bonzo Brooks:

White House Fool Report: Thanks, Obama

All our political rhetoric derives from a time when the experience of representative democracy as people had it was quite different from today's, in a two-part division of power between the hereditary executive and his appointed representatives and a relatively weak legislature elected by men mostly of property (the judiciary, appointed out of the gentry and largely unpaid, belonged to the Crown, though it became increasingly able to act independently as the 18th century went on).

So we think of our representatives as "closer" to us when they're chosen by a more local electorate, state legislators as representing us more than federal ones and more than executives, House members more than Senators, and so on, and we worry about the danger that the president will act as a monarch or even "emperor", and look to the Congress, "representatives" of the "people", to defend us against tyranny.

But things look a lot different than they did in 1787, and it's really time to start thinking of the possibility of the federal government protecting us from the tyranny of the state capitols, and the presidency as a bulwark of defense against the abuses of Congress.

Retroactionary justice

Via.

I would like to announce my intense disapproval of clever Judd Legum at TPM explaining how Prosecutor McCulloch did it wrong because hahahaha Antonin Scalia said so in United States v. Williams (1992):

It is the grand jury’s function not ‘to enquire … upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses, but only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor. Respublica v. Shaffer, 1 Dall. 236 (O. T. Phila. 1788); see also F. Wharton, Criminal Pleading and Practice § 360, pp. 248-249 (8th ed. 1880). As a consequence, neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.

And therefore there should have been no testimony from Darren Wilson or evidence suggesting his innocence.

Scalia's ruling in that case was pernicious and an invitation to prosecutorial misconduct and historically wrong. As Justice Stevens explained.

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Oligarchs

Image via Axiomatica.

Most David Brooks columns are about romantic love, or at least sex. But today's piece, "A Unifying Leader", is more about the relationship between a CEO and his 535-odd vice presidents, so you don't get the charged romance you get in normal columns, where a teenage girl is trying to decide whether she should finish high school and go to Yale or sign up for food stamps and her Obamaphone. Instead, there are slightly different kinds of love, probably involving quantum mechanics, in a rhythm of forgiving your partners or sending them into exile depending on which paragraph you wander into, or the relationship between a part-time writer with a full-time salary and a vast right-wing conspiracy with which he is either engaged in a torrid affair or back on the payroll he left a few years back. Just kidding.

David Brooks columns I didn't finish reading:

Hagel's dialectic

Would you take a Titus Andronicus from this man? Henry de Vere, 18th Earl of Oxford, via Wikipedia.

I'm generally very hesitant to take issue with anything Marcy Wheeler says, because I realize she has tens of thousands of pages of legal filings, some incredibly technical, virtually committed to memory, and woven into an apparently nearly coherent narrative, and when I can't follow her arguments I have to assume it's my fault because I'm not smart enough, but the fact is that when I can penetrate the narrative I'm not completely sure I can differentiate it from the kind of narrative that shows how the Earl of Oxford wrote all of Shakespeare's plays and poems (you can make up a story, but it only makes sense if you really want it to), and yesterday, when the folks at Emptywheel were dealing with documents I can understand and vying amongst each other over who can be angriest about how poor pacifist Chuck Hagel was tossed out of the Pentagon because of his interference with the president's plan to plunge the world into perpetual war as Emperor of Mesopotamia, I just got fed up.

In recent days, the press has reported that President Obama signed an order (or on second thought, maybe it’s just an unsigned decision that can’t be FOIAed, so don’t start anything, Jason Leopold) basically halting and partly reversing his plans for withdrawal....
And now that Obama has made it clear he will spend his Lame Duck continuing — escalating, even — both forever wars he got elected to end, he has fired forced the resignation of the Secretary of Defense he hired to make peace.

Aside from noting that there is no reason to suppose that the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan is being in any way halted, let alone reversed, "basically" or otherwise, as opposed to what has been announced, that the boots are going to be in some sense slightly more on the ground than seemed to be the plan, Hagel has been fighting the cuts he was hired to implement in the defense budget from July 2013 until four days ago. His chief firing offense, according to the Times account, was his hysterical public disagreement with the president's hopeful suggestion that the "Islamic state" was less than an existential threat to the entire world: