We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Military executes brilliantly. The usual nincompoops around White House err, and err, and err. PowerLine:
Military and intelligence professionals executed an important mission brilliantly, carrying out their assigned task of killing Osama bin Laden and dumping his body into the ocean. Ever since, the administration has undercut the professionals' achievement with a succession of now-inoperative accounts of the raid's climactic moments....
All of these narratives--apart from the disadvantage, in some instances, of being untrue--share a common defect. They assume that the SEALs are in the dock as accused murderers, and need to be seen as acting in self-defense. This is ridiculous.
I steal this from Theo only as an example of tasteless humor:
Hottest drink on campus this week: The OBL. Two shots and a splash of water.
Semi-related: I see that moonbat Michael Moore speculates that Osama was under a sort of house arrest cum protection by the Paki government or ISI. Sounds actually plausible. A caged rat.
Like you, I always find it particularly irksome when I do acrobatic stunts in my airplane and one of the wings suddenly snaps off. You look out the window and think, "Crap! I lost another wing! This is really getting irksome!"
Well, there isn't much to do at that point except get the dang thing back on the ground and glue on another wing.
Were Martin Heidegger alive today, would he be granted an honorary degree from the City University of New York (CUNY)? We might consider that question in the matter of whether playwright Tony Kushner should be granted an honorary degree from CUNY.
Perhaps so. Honorary degrees are granted for many reasons, influence – academic or political, fund raising, agreement with the honoree’s views, to get a cheap graduation speaker. The defense of granting honorary degrees to some whose non-academic writings or speech or activities are controversial is that these are separate matters from the influence of the person. On the other hand, an honorary degree honors the whole person, unless the granting writ specifically excludes certain aspects of that person’s works and describes why others are more important. Not done, so it is the person who is being honored. (Update: Statement by CUNY Trustee below.)
(See below re: Tony Kushner and why he shouldn't be honored.)
Good interview with George Leef, who contends that half of the kids who go to college in the US these days do not benefit and should not bother. Higher ed has become a self-interested industry with a greater investment in sales than in product...the product often being an unaccomplished, ignorant person with a piece of fancy paper in hand.
When you think about it, it is rather remarkable that there is no exit exam of advanced intellectual achievement. I would offer to design one. Maybe I will design one, just for fun (there will be Math because, in my reality, there is no higher ed without Calculus and Statistics).
All sorts of stories are going around. Here's my conspiracy theory: After ten years of work, last summer the CIA believed that they tracked down bin Laden to an old ISI safe house in a city just north of Islamabad. After collecting all of the data they could, a SEAL team was trained for the killing job. When the government finally gave the OK, they secretly choppered in from Afghanistan in stealth choppers and shot up the place, while nabbing bin Laden's corpse and a pile of computer stuff. Then they left after 40 minutes without a scratch, but after blowing up one downed chopper.
But who could believe a crazy story like that? SEALs could believe it, because it's the sort of thing they do routinely. I think this turned out to be an easy job.
This is an awesome admission of categorical intellectual, political and
moral failure. For two decades greens have arrogated to themselves the
authority of science and wrapped themselves in the arrogant certainty of
self-righteous contempt for those who oppose them. They have equated
skepticism about their incoherent and contradictory policy proposals
with hatred of science and attacked their critics as the soulless hired
shills of the oil companies, happy to ruin humanity for the sake of some
corporate largesse.
He quotes Monbiot:
“All of us in the environment movement, in other words – whether we
propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None
of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this
mess. None of our chosen solutions break the atomising, planet-wrecking
project. I hope that by laying out the problem I can encourage us to
address it more logically, to abandon magical thinking and to recognise
the contradictions we confront. But even that could be a tall order.”
So many people refused to drink the Kool Aid. I'd like to see the enviros and greenies get back to the sorts of rational conservation efforts which prosperous societies are the best at doing - and truly do care about. Conservation, minus the Socialism and totalitarian aspirations.
Here's the official reaction of the Mormon Church to the South Park crew's take-off on Mormons, "The Book of Mormon", that liberals love on Broadway -- with strike outs to insert the reaction that won't be issued by Imams, Hamas, Fatah's military wing, the Moslem Brotherhood, et. al. to photos of Osama bin Laden's final pose.
The production photos may attempt to entertain audiences for an evening, but the Book of Mormon Koran as a volume of scripture will change people’s lives forever by bringing them closer to Christ Mohammed and virgins.
President Obama KOs the photo entertainment. "It's who we are." -- Moral equivalence with Muslims heralding 9/11 photos and our soldiers and other innocents. - Question awaits: Will President Obama and Michelle have a date night on Broadway for the Book of Mormon?
Our post about hoarders the other day had me thinking about overeating. Overeating is hoarding fat cells. Once you create new fat cells, you can never get rid of them.
Odd and dysfunctional behavioral symptoms are all ways of dealing with uncomfortable internal states. Most people have at least one character defect or wiring defect which creates some sort of discomfort or uneasiness.
For some people, food is a center of existence and thus becomes a way of coping with being oneself, fending off boredom and a sense of emptiness - all of the cliches. In my line of work, we term this solution "orality." It works, in prosperous societies, and harms no-one but oneself.
For starters, this lady needs a physical job and needs to get out of the house. Her life is too easy, undemanding, and too dull. She'll end up on Disability, if she isn't already. Her son seems like a good kid, and wisely doesn't try to fix her. She has given up on life by taking on the victim role - she is a "victim of a food addiction."
I happen to be a doughnut epicure. I only care for plain doughnuts (God forbid, not "whole wheat"), deep fried in fat to a dark crunchy crust. If somebody insists on a dash of confectioner's sugar on top, that's OK but I'd be just as happy without it.
Cake doughnuts are revolting, like the ones at Bird Dog's favorite coffee joint or at the supermarket. You can feed them to kids and dogs, though, and they seem to thrive on them. Don't even talk about that Krispy Kreme gooey junk.
A real fried doughnut, and a cup of black coffee. Heaven. Then maybe a smoke to finish off the coffee. You do have to look around, though, to find places that make real doughnuts these days. Real doughnut-lovers know where they are.
In the rain, out my window today. That's an Eastern Cottontail baby, destined to be dog food, or hawk food, or owl food before reaching maturity. The odds are against baby bunnies. Cute things. I think the family lives under my shed, along with a Chipmunk family.
Is it all about the 2012 election or about national security?Without a doubt, the domestic economy will weigh most heavily. But, the question and peril in the background will be whether matters abroad make the US safer or not and whether our leadership is up to the challenges.
President Obama is, to say the least, conflicted between his leanings toward disengagement from prior foreign commitments and realities on the ground. Potential Republican candidates are, to say the least, also conflicted between Republicans’ ordinary strong suit of sticktoitness abroad and most Americans’ war weariness.
The restrained, many say half-way and too weak or too unfocused, administration path in Libya has highlighted the divide. It comes down to attitudes of do the least, or if doing it do the job. Not even doing the least in Syria, comparable to a comparatively stronger involvement in Libya, further argues for the weakness at our helm.
Nonetheless, the potential Republican candidates as well as the administration’s loyalists continue to spin their PR as if the choices are similar to the 2008 election, if not the 2006, in the case of the Democrats wanting withdrawal, or not important enough to take a strong stand, in the case of Republicans.
Let’s step back, then, to President Bush’s courageous decision to surge in Iraq in 2007. This game changer accomplished our core objective, to set up an Iraq that would not be a sanctuary for terrorists or home of WMDs.
President Obama reluctantly approved a surge-light in Afghanistan while at the same time announcing a quick drawdown and withdrawal. What the American press has presented the public with since is the bravery of our troops operating under highly restrictive rules of engagement, the corruption and backstabbing of Afghanistan’s Karzai, and the sanctuary for the Taliban in Pakistan. No wonder most Americans want free of the mess.
News reports (Washington Post, for example) have the Obama administration using the death of Osama bin Laden, though anymore a figure-head, as justification to speeding our withdrawal from Afghanistan. But, our core objectives are not met by that, setting up an Afghanistan that isn’t a source of terrorists or a Pakistan whose real nuclear weapons won’t fall into the hands of evil doers.
Peter Bergen, who has long studied bin Laden, national security analyst for CNN and the liberal New America Foundation, delivers a read-it-all analysis in the liberal New Republic of where we’re really at in Afghanistan, “Can We Win in Afghanistan.” Bergen’s article is full of useful background and current information.
In war, perceptions tend to lag behind reality by a considerable distance. In Afghanistan, our efforts were widely thought of as successful for several years after things had clearly begun to deteriorate on the ground. Today, it appears that we have the opposite problem: improvements on the ground that are widely dismissed amid a narrative of defeat.
Bergen believes that President Obama will stay the course. His article was likely written before today’s reports of the Obama administration trying to speed disengagement.
Regardless of whether Bergen will fall into line with this latest Obama administration gambit, his article stands as strong argument why President Obama more hastily trying to retreat should be confronted by those who care more for the US national security than pandering to war weariness for 2012.
Our neglect of national security challenges during the 1990s fed into our being forced to face harsher realities during the past decade. Will we repeat that grave error?
President Obama was literally pulled from a golf outing and escorted back to the White House to be informed of the mission. Upon his arrival there was a briefing held which included Bill Daley, John Brennan, and a high ranking member of the military. When Obama emerged from the briefing, he was described as looking “very confused and uncertain.” The president was then placed in the “situation room” where several of the players in this event had already been watching the operation unfold. Another interesting tidbit regarding this is that the Vice President was already “up to speed” on the operation. A source indicated they believe Hillary Clinton had personally made certain the Vice President was made aware of that day’s events before the president was. The now famous photo released shows the particulars of that of that room and its occupants. What that photo does not communicate directly is that the military personnel present in that room during the operation unfolding, deferred to either Hillary Clinton or Robert Gates. The president’s role was minimal, including their acknowledging of his presence in the room.
Sounds like the grown-ups took over. I wonder whether that report is accurate
You can sense, in the question she addresses, that childlike yearning for a scientific and medical utopia from which, presumably, unfair forces are excluding us. I call them Edenic fantasies.
The comment thread is interesting in that regard as well.
For Fish a great sentence is like a great athletic performance. It is an example of something done supremely well, so well that it cannot be bettered. Other similar feats will come along, but only to stand alongside it. What exactly is done in such a performance? There is no single answer, indeed no finite answer since there is no limit to the things that can be done with words. But it is what Conrad called the “shape and ring” of sentences, the perfect adaptation of form to achievement, that Fish wants to share.
The Arab world is experiencing a series of convulsions resulting in the quotidian slaughter of citizens in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and elsewhere. Yet the reaction on American college campuses is comparatively muted.
Muted compared to what, you ask? Compared to the tragic shedding of one life in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Having directed Jewish Studies programs in universities for most of my career I can assure you of this: If Israel were to inflict the type of violence on Palestinians that Arab regimes (and Iranian ones) casually inflict on their own dissenting populations in the course of one day, many colleges across America would be virtually shut down....
I am struck, however, by the relative calm on American campuses as each day brings forth fresh and repulsive evidence of civilian massacres in the Arab world. No demonstrations. No “teach-ins.” No “die-ins.” And there is less calling out of professors who support(ed) these regimes than I would ever have imagined possible.
This is not to say that faculty and students are unconcerned. It’s more as if they are speechless, unworded. They are not protesting, as much as they are trying to puzzle this catastrophe through (and let me be the first to say that this is precisely what people on college campuses should be doing).
Their speechlessness confirms a truism: The old dominant paradigm for explaining Mideast dysfunction is not working. It is hard to understand what the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has to do with Muammar el-Qaddafi strafing his own citizens or Bashar Assad unleashing his goons on protesters (though whether all of those protesters are offering more democratic alternatives is a conversation I will leave for another day).
No, sorry, not a new paradigm on campus, rather the same old one. Ignore the atrocities of the supposedly downtrodden or former colonized, and don't forget to bash the West and Israel. The "old dominent paradigm" never worked, in reality, but reality has little to do with the penchants of the leftists on campuses.
U.S. forces searched the compound and flew away with documents, hard drives and DVDs that could provide valuable intelligence about al-Qaida, a U.S. official said. The entire operation took about 40 minutes, officials said.
It sure would be interesting to be on the team which is reviewing those things.
The Martini
I happen to be a doughnut epicure. I only care for plain doughnuts (God forbid, not "whole wheat"), deep fried in fat to a dark crunchy crust. If somebody insists on a dash of confectioner's sugar on top, that's OK but I'd be just as happy without it. 
