We'll just have to muggle through

Hogwarts. Image via Blithe Sea.

[Note: Looked at Brooks this morning, plugging a "moral meditation" by Yuval Levin, and asked myself wearily, "Doesn't he ever go on vacation any more?" Actually he goes on vacation quite a lot, of course. As a year-end exercise I thought I'd rerun this, from one of those happier times, last August, a piece that didn't get read all that much at the time.]

As our nation lurches from crisis to crisis this summer, with ominous movements taking place everywhere from Afghanistan to Scotland and an increasing climate of unquiet here at home, where institutions as important as Meet the Press rock and teeter toward a possible doom, when what we need most is a voice of unity to speak to our fears and hopes with a calm but convinced voice, one key figure appears to have gone AWOL, abandoning us for the golf course or whatever he does when he's not working, puttering while Rome burns, vanishing on an unprecedented number of vacation days in the face of the people's anxiety and uncertainty.

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a kamikaze bot?

It's pretty likely, of course, that it can't fly either. But be very afraid, Bibi, because that's what the voters like. Image via Farsnews.

Prime Minister Netanyahu greeting Senator Graham:

Iran today conducted an exercise with a suicide drone. I don’t have to convince you, Senator, that the most important task before us is to prevent this dangerous regime from having nuclear weapons. And I believe that what is required are more sanctions, and stronger sanctions. And I welcome your leadership in this effort. 

Suicide drone? What?

Matt Novak at Gizmodo:

Today Iranian military forces tested various unmanned aircraft that some are calling "suicide drones." Because "suicide drone" sounded more intimidating than "model airplane that we could fly into things nearby."

Oh, of course.

Cheap shots: Steve Scalise

#SteveScaliseExcuses What? I thought they said White Suprematist. I kept asking everybody, "But where's the gallery?" pic.twitter.com/KrtOTf3MBB
— YULEstreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) December 30, 2014

Image: Suprematist Non-Objective Poetry FS1987CT03, Cecil Touchon, 12x9 inches, collage on paper (1987).

From the Washington Post:

¡Cuomo lo deseas!

Image from last September via WNYC Radio. Don't they look as if they're taking an exam and Andrew's thinking about cheating?

Governor Andrew Cuomo, fresh from his turn as Pontius Pilate in the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation review of natural gas fracking in the state—they came to the right decision, which is a really good thing, but it's evident that Cuomo's chief concern was to not be seen as making a decision at all, and instead of welcoming the ban and its protection for the health of New Yorkers and the integrity of the environment he gloomily predicted a "ton of lawsuits" that are not in fact going to take place at all—

Benevolent Despots

Bill de Blasio and Chirlane McCray arriving for the service. How the rank and file really feel when the PBA bosses aren't choreographing them. Photo by Mike Segar/Reuters in the Daily News.

I didn't fully get the picture that the cops turning their backs on Mayor de Blasio as he gave a eulogy for murdered officer Rafael Ramos yesterday were outdoors performing for the cameras, out of the mayor's sight, while inside the church things were different, as they should be:

Jon Swift Memorial

One of the eleventy meanings of the Italian word batocchio (a blind man's cane, a door knocker, a comedian's slapstick) is this long-nosed style of Venetian Carnival mask.

The Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2014 is out, with a feast of self-selected best pieces of the year from bloggers big and small curated by the great Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar. So read it.

Global whacking: Clarifications

Robert Salmon, Storm at Sea (1840). Wikimedia Commons.

Duff writes, in comments, with reference to the previous post:

"Sabine, Feely et al. 2004 modelled the time scale of acidification" [my emphasis]. Ah yes, that titchy little word that means so much!

Modeling, Duff, is how science is done. Copernicus and Galileo did not truck around the solar system with surveying equipment measuring where things were in relation to each other ("Got to the sun yesterday, about 93 million miles from Cracow!"); they stayed home and imagined how it might be structured and what consequences such a structure might have that you could observe from earth.

Annals of Derp: Global whacking

John Shortt-Smith, Storm Blowing up over Edeowie.

Storm blowing up! House troll duffandnonsense in comments over at No More Mister Nice Blog has been touting a climate-science scandal that "eclipses even the so-called climategate event" according to its discoverer, a somewhat long-in-the-tooth graduate student (he got his BS in Plant and Soil Science in 1980) working on a PhD at the University of New Mexico, Mike Wallace, who is accusing Dr. Richard A. Feely of the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) of fraud.

Though not, as far as I can tell, at his own website; he's leaving that to the experts at American Thinker and the Arizona Daily Independent and WattsUpWithThat, and Marita Noon at the climate change denial website CFACT.

Feely, it seems, is responsible for the following graph, purporting to illustrate the increasing acidification of the oceans in tandem with an increase in atmospheric CO₂ levels, referenced a couple of weeks ago at the San Francisco PBS affiliate science website Quest:

My Weakly Reader

Rudolph Valentino and Agnes Ayres in The Sheik (1921).

Somewhat Shorter David Brooks, "The Sidney Awards, Part 1", New York Times, December 26 2014:

As always, over the past year I looked at a number of magazine articles that I wasn't able to parlay into columns on their own, some of which might as well be listed as the best magazine articles of the year, either because they are or because they're useful for underscoring some little point I wanted to make:

Don't they know it's Christmas?

This secularization of Christmas has got to stop! Relentless commercialism, nonstop shopping, eating, and promiscuity; greedy children; pretentious, drunken hipsters and their lowlife girlfriends, merciless mockery of solid entrepreneurs, not one mention of the Blessed Child. And of course the bourgeois gets stuck with the bill!

Christmas Eve in Paris, 1837. And whatever you do don't let Rush Limbaugh watch this video because he'll go apeshit. (Note: the video isn't really 40 minutes: the act is only 20 minutes long, and then it repeats)

Happy Yule,  everybody!

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Christmas Exceptionalism

Away from a manger. Nicolas Poussin, La Nourriture de Jupiter (1636-37). Wikimedia Commons.

"Biblical theologian" Scott Hahn, author of Joy to the World: How Christ's Coming Changed Everything (and Still Does) (2014), doing a book tour interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO in that curious style of hers, where she always seems to be working backwards, taking a prepared text and interpolating questions into it:

LOPEZ: Why is it important to notice that Jesus “doesn’t behave like a conventional hero”?

I' faith, you have drunk too much

From Sergey Eyzenshteyn, The Battleship Potemkin, via.

David Brooks has read every single modern book on religious faith, enabling him to say with perfect confidence:

The best modern book on belief is “My Bright Abyss” by my Yale colleague, Christian Wiman. (paragraph 2)

Also he's so in at Yale, as Brady-Johnson Distinguished Practitioner of Grand Strategy at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs (course load of one class per year and a little team teaching), that he has colleagues in the Divinity School now.

But I'm not so sure he's really read all that much, because he sounds surprised at having heard quite recently how much reading is involved:

Cheap shot: Dr. Ben

Takes a tough man to make a tender superPAC. But you can keep fucking that chicken, Dr. Ben, as long as you don't marry it. Image via 365 Bars.

The Times seems to be interested in taking Dr. Ben Carson seriously as a presidential candidate:

One of the clearest indicators of his intention to run is that he has met recently with communications experts to tone down his remarks. In an interview, he blamed “the P.C. police” for frequently twisting his meaning. “When I mention bestiality or pedophilia in the same sentence with homosexuality, people say ‘Carson says they’re the same.’ Of course they’re not the same,” he said. “That point was if you change the definition of marriage for one group, you’ll have to change it for the next group and the next group.”

J'accuse, Ed Mullins

Montage from The Conservative Treehouse (Motto: "I want you to be Andrew Breitbart"), dated December 7.

Saturday afternoon, when many of my tweeps and I were watching in horror as the news of the killings of Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos dripped out of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Daily News came out, in one of the most circumstantiated early reports, with a weird detail, that the suspected killer, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, might have been a member of a gang known as the "Black Gorilla Family" or "Black Guerilla Family" that had been threatening to avenge the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner by attacks on the New York police. It's vanished from the much-updated original story, but still extant at the moment in a followup from later that evening, from which the screenshots below are taken:

In which I pitch Seth Rogen

Think The Great Impersonation meets Gung Ho. 

As I watched the trailers for The Interview, repeatedly—like a lot of us I'm not likely to be watching TV unless it's at 11:00 to midnight Monday through Thursday and they were advertising it constantly, in connection, I fear, with the interviews of the stars by Stewart and Colbert which I assume are the quid for the quo—I was really bothered by a lot of things about the movie, though concern with the possibility that it might hurt the feelings of First Secretary Kim Jong-un of the Workers' Party of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was not among them.

Appeal

Just to get you in a good mood...

Over at the World O' Crap, a blog whose greatness really does not need discussing, the proprietors are face to face with a pretty serious, though temporary, emergency involving not having enough money, and would appreciate some help, which some of you might be able to participate in extending to them. They've given you a lot of uncompensated joy over the years, and if they haven't it's your fault for not reading them. Please click the link provided.

Truthiness from David Brooks

Montreal cops in 2008 or 2009 protesting against government messing with their pensions by dressing down. They are a real union. You never hear of Montreal cops killing unarmed black men. Coincidence? You decide. Via CyberSmokeBlog.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Union Future", December 19 2014:

I'm not going to lie, police departments are pretty abusive. Kind of like teachers, refusing to fire incompetent officers, refusing accountability in the form of body cams, refusing to apologize. Some socialists accuse them of racism, but even-the-liberal-Conor-Friedersdorf will tell you the real problem is they're unionized.

Happy Trails, Stephen

Imperial

President Theodore Roosevelt leaving the White House on Bleistein, 1903. Via White House History.

Peter Baker in the Times annoyed me a bit—

The historic deal broke an enduring stalemate between two countries divided by just 90 miles of water but oceans of mistrust and hostility dating from the days of Theodore Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill and the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cuban missile crisis.

—leaving the impression that he and his copy editor don't realize San Juan Hill is in Puerto Rico.

Kassenpiepsen

Via a colleague at work. Somewhere in Germany an Edeka supermarket, 13 hidden cameras, and 9 (rehearsed) cashiers.