[NOTE: I’ll be bumping this up to the top every now and then through the holidays, just as a reminder. I’ll probably be changing the musical selections as the season progresses.]
How’s that for shameless self-promotion?
I’ve realized that yes, once again it’s November. It’s almost Thanksgiving. And that means that Christmas, Chanukah, and whatever other holiday might suit your diverse fancy are all coming up sooner than you think.
So I’m encouraging you to feel their hot breaths on your neck and solve all your gift-giving dilemmas by turning to that online colossus, Amazon.
And if you use those widgets on my right sidebar to click through for all your Amazon purchases (now and at any other time of year) you will also be giving a small but still not insignificant gift to neo-neocon (it adds up, folks), and all without spending any extra money yourself. What could be more wonderful?
I thank you all in advance.
And for those of you of a sarcastic bent about the length of the Christmas buying season, I offer you this musical expression of delight:
[NOTE: In case you have ad blocker or something of that sort, and the Amazon widgets don’t show up on your computer, go here. You can also click on any Amazon book link within a post and anything you order during that click-through gets credited to me. I believe it’s true even for things you put in your cart but don’t order till a bit later, although there’s a time limit on how long they can be there and still get credited when ordered (I’m not sure what that limit is, though, so best to order sooner rather than later).]
Recently, researchers found these mammals…have a unique way of coping with extremely dark Arctic winters: Their eyes change color.
During the sunny time in their habitat, reindeer have yellowish-gold eyes, but during the cold season, the eyes turn a noticeable hue of blue, a new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B reported.
It’s because of changes in a light-reflecting tissue layer behind the retina, according to Science. “This structure, called the tapetum lucidum (Latin for ”˜bright tapestry’), gives the eye’s light-sensitive neurons a second chance to detect scarce photons in low-light conditions. (The layer also produces the ”˜eye shine’ that can make animal eyes appear to glow in the dark.)” In other words, it makes the eyes extremely sensitive to light.
This photo, which accompanied the article, does not show the blue eyes. But at least it’s a reindeer, looking rather nonplussed:
I’m not very familiar with M. Stanton Evans, although he’s an elder statesman of the conservative movement. One of his books, Blacklisted by History, is a revisionist account of Joe McCarthy. It’s on my list of interesting-books-I-hope-to-get-around-to-reading-someday.
But looking up Evans’ Wiki entry just now, I came across some great quotes, well worth highlighting:
“We have two parties here, and only two. One is the evil party, and the other is the stupid party. I’m very proud to be a member of the stupid party. Occasionally, the two parties get together to do something that’s both evil and stupid. That’s called bipartisanship.”[speech from 2007]
“[N]o matter how bad you think something is, when you look into it, it’s always worse.”[2010]
“Most conservatives know when they come to Washington that it is a sewer; the trouble is, too many of them wind up treating it like a hot tub.”[1989]
He tricked colleagues into sharing their passwords with him, saying that as systems administrator he needed to have them.
In addition, NSA had failed to install the latest anti-leak software at the Hawaii facility where Snowden worked. Most other facilities seem to have had the software. My guess is that Snowden knew all of this, since he obtained the Hawaii job for the express purpose of amassing the material and leaking it.
Snowden was good at exploiting the weak links in the system, especially the personnel. My guess is that his mild-mannered, affable appearance caused them to suspend any suspicion (or judgment) they might otherwise have had. If just one person had hesitated and checked with higher-ups, perhaps Snowden’s cover would have been blown.
The offenders have now been “removed from their assignments.” Hope they won’t just get transferred to new ones at NSA or some other high-security operation.
I’m sorry that Obamacare supporter Cathy Wagner’s premiums have risen so much. But what did she think would happen, if pre-existing conditions were now required to be covered, and extras like maternity benefits became mandatory?
Wagner herself seems to at least understand a little bit about the way the insurance business works, because she’s quoted as saying, “The whole plan was to get everyone enrolled so there’s a larger risk pool and our costs go down.” The article doesn’t give Wagner’s age, but since it does say she took early retirement my guess is that she’s somewhere in her 50s. She is correct that the young were expected to enroll and make the premiums for the older relatively lower (and for the younger relatively higher; did she factor that in?). But the increased benefits for all had a good chance of offsetting that gain, even for the older enrollees. Plus, premiums for the first year of operation are based only on estimates rather than actual enrollment—which probably turns out to be fortunate for Wagner, considering the fact that (at least so far), the young are barely enrolling at all and if this continues it could well precipitate a steep rise in future premium levels.
Oops. And yet that last phenomenon, that of the young and healthy giving Obamacare a pass, was always a good bet and in fact was predicted by most of the right. All it took was one look at the toothless penalties to know that only the old and the young and sick were likely to be enticed into this endeavor, not the young and healthy.
And yet Wagner was hardly alone in feeling “so hopeful that this plan was going to move us forward.” Nor is she alone in now saying, “in fact I think it’s moving us backward.” The puzzlement is not why she now thinks the latter, it’s why she ever thought the former.
I have become convinced that a large number of people never understood what Obamacare entailed. Some people just weren’t paying attention, although Wagner does not appear to have been among them. For some who were paying at least some attention, their ignorance may have been in part because the facts weren’t all that easy to come by, between the secrecy and the speed with which the bill was passed, plus the bill’s length and the purposely misleading claptrap put out by the administration and the Democrats and much of the press about it.
But for others, even though they knew the main facts, they did not understand their possible significance for the future, either because they are math-challenged or logic-challenged, or wanted so desperately to believe in Obamacare, or some combination of the three.
I have also become convinced that very few people in America really understand the basic principles of the insurance business. They do not understand the concept of risk. They believe the liberal propaganda that insurance companies are just plain mean to charge the sick more for health coverage, for example. They believe that insurance company profits are way out of line with other industries.
They believed Obamacare would stop all that and replace it with a “fairer” system. And they believed in unicorns.
Now, we’ve had this problem with the website…I wanted to go fix it myself, but I don’t write code.
As though the problem was a lack of people who can write code.
As though if Obama did know code he could ride in on his white horse and fix it.
But one thing that gives me a little hope for the American people—a teeny weeny bit, anyway—is the humor in the comments to the article. Here are some favorites [punctuation/typos corrected]:
“I’d fix the economy if I knew anything about economics.”
“I’d fix unemployment if I knew anything about how to run a business.”
“I’d put people on entitlements to work, if I knew anything about work.”
Call Al Gore, he invented the internet.
Aw come on Barry, a smart guy like you who went to Harvard could probably learn to write Code over the Net in a correspondence class.
How flippant. And no – even if he could write code – he’d be out campaigning about how great the code he’d write would be.
Please do not go in there and fix it yourself, this debacle has enough problems!!!
Ever notice how Obama’s idea of a joke is never funny, and always has something to do with how great he is?
[NOTE: For those unfamiliar with the reference in the title, see this.]
A message from Netanyahu to Barack Obama and John Kerry and the European international community:
But Kerry and Obama have a very different definition of “bad” than Netanyahu, because their goals are—well, what are their goals, really? To pretend that Iran is a sincere player interested in peace? To suck up to the European international community and show how weak and docile the US has become? To empower Iran? To screw Israel? To get some more Nobel Peace Prizes? All of the above?
Here is what Iran will not do pursuant to the agreement. It will not permanently stop its uranium enrichment, close its Arak and Fordo nuclear facilities, or ship its already 3.5 percent”“enriched uranium outside of the country.
Moreover, says Benjamin Weinthal, “there is no definitive method of verification to ensure that Iran’s clerical regime ”” a notoriously deceptive group ”” will comply with an agreement.” The West’s easing of economic sanctions will be verifiable; Iran’s “temporary freeze” will be extremely difficult to verify. Recall our experience with North Korea.
Finally, the “freeze,” if any, will be temporary. Iran could “unfreeze” its program at any time. A comprehensive sanctions regime, on the other hand, will be exceedingly difficult to restore.
To pursue this wonderful deal, as Jonathan S. Tobin points out (and please read the whole thing), the Obama/Kerry team had to break some promises:
The president and Secretary of State John Kerry promised [the American people and U.S. allies] that there would be no move to dismantle the economic sanctions that had been implemented against the Islamist regime for anything short of an agreement that would end Tehran’s nuclear threat. But it as it headed back to round two of the reconstituted P5+1 nuclear talks today in Geneva, the administration is steering in exactly the direction it said it would never contemplate.
We already know that the promises of Obama and Kerry mean about as much as the promises of the government of Iran—which is to say they mean absolutely nothing. But somehow the U.S. is trusting the Iranians to comply with this? And Obama and Kerry are thinking that this “finely calibrated effort” will serve to “coax the Iranians back from the brink”? With no way to check to see whether the Iranians are cooperating with their very small end of the bargain, while dismantling the very thing that led the Iranians to the negotiating table in the first place?
It’s incomprehensible—that is, if you think that Obama and Kerry have our interests, or the world’s, or Israel’s, in mind. What is their true motivation? Tobin writes, “the administration’s real priority with Iran is to avoid having to take action, not stopping the threat of an Iranian bomb.” That resonates with me, but I think their secondary goal is to curry favor with the appeasement-loving international community in Europe, as well as their leftist friends at home. They are more than willing to sacrifice Israel’s security in the process. And John Kerry is the perfect man for the job.
Oh, and this would just be the official lifting of sanctions. The administration has been quietly undermining them for quite some time.
[ADDENDUM: Netanyahu: “Israel is not obliged by this agreement and will do everything it needs to defend itself, to defend the security of its people.”
And this would be a tiny bit reassuring—that is, if we could believe it is true, which we can’t (I should include that disclaimer in every sentence about the Obama administration): “a senior [Obama] administration official made clear that only ‘reversible’ sanctions would be eased.”]
[ADDENDUM: More from Kerry on a different, but highly related, subject:
“Failure of the talks [with the Palestinians] will increase Israel’s isolation in the world,” Kerry said. “The alternative to getting back to the talks is a potential of chaos. I mean, does Israel want a third intifada?”
“I believe that if we do not resolve the issues between Palestinians and Israelis; if we do not find a way to find peace, there will be an increasing isolation of Israel. There will be an increasing campaign of delegitiization of Israel that’s taking place on an international basis. That if we do not resolve the question of the settlements and who lives where and how and what rights they have; if we don’t end the presence of Israeli soldiers perpetually within the West Bank, then there will be an increasing feeling that if we cannot get peace with a leadership that is committed to nonviolence, you may wind up with leadership that is committed to violence.”
Contemplate that statement. I don’t really know what the most ludicrous and pernicious part of it is, there are so many to choose from. But I think it just might be his reference to “a leadership that is committed to nonviolence.” Those Palestinian leaders, disciples of Gandhi.]
America heard Obama promise unequivocally, with no caveats or qualifications, that if you liked your health plan you could keep it, if you liked your doctor you could keep your doctor. Period.
So why would he say something as absurd as this?:
“…what we said was you could keep it, if it hasn’t changed since the law was passed.” But that’s not what he said, as even a child with a memory could tell. And the royal “we” is an unhelpful dodge, too.
Obama’s approach is almost incomprehensible—unless you remember that his personality is constructed in such a way as to make it almost literally impossible for him to admit error or wrongdoing.
It also helps to the concept known as doublethink. George Orwell wrote that “doublethink” requires that a person:
…forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.
Obama has been caught in a lie so obvious and egregious and important that he may sense, perhaps for the first time in his life, that he’s in big trouble. So if he can’t fess up, what else can he do? Create a narrative and hope that by doing so he can revise history. If he says it often enough, he can create a new truth for enough people that it gets him off the hook. It also helps to believe that truth is merely relative—although videotape makes that a bit harder to pull off than it used to be.
Obama’s also cuing politicians and pundits on his side, giving them talking points for their public appearances. He’s expecting them to exercise doublethink and get with the program.
But Obama’s face and body language do not convey confidence in this approach, unlike in the past. They are tentative, and he looks shaky and glum.
[NOTE: In comic books, what Obama is doing is apparently called “retconning”:
This isn’t just an update. It’s a backwards revision. Obama is not just changing his claim going forward””he’s attempting to alter what he said in the past as well.]
An effort is being contemplated to put some limits on how much Obama can give Iran in the upcoming talks with its government:
An aide to Corker, R-Tenn., confirms to Fox News Corker is considering a proposal that would prohibit the White House from loosening sanctions on the Iranian regime unless it made major concessions on its missile and nuclear programs. Corker’s plans were first reported by The Daily Beast.
Corker’s legislation would require concessions far beyond those currently being considered ahead of Iran’s talks with the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany in Geneva.
“We’ve crafted an amendment to freeze the administration in and make it so they are unable to reduce the sanctions unless certain things occur,” Corker told The Daily Beast. “They have the ability now to waive sanctions. But we’re very concerned that in their desire to make any deal that they may in fact do something that is very bad for our country.”
This is an interesting development (more details here). I don’t know whether Corker can muster the votes to pass something like that. I’m also not sure whether Obama would abide by such a rule even if passed. His response might be, “Just try and stop me.”
Obama is about executive power. He has been focusing on domestic policies lately, but that doesn’t mean that foreign policy isn’t important to him, especially Iran. Another one of his longed-for legacies would be some sort of “peace” in our times with that country.
I first posted this video six months ago, and it’s only become more apropos since then. I have to avert my eyes now when clips of Carney come on. There is something mortifying about even about being a witness to such voluntary self-degradation.
[ADDENDUM: Carney is caught in a terrible dilemma, unless he is completely amoral (which I don’t think he is, but I certainly could be wrong about that). He either has to lie for the president, day after day, in the most public and embarrassing way possible, or he must publicly break away and become a traitor to his fellows, shunned and despised, and off the guest list at the best parties.
It may sound as though I’m making light of this, but I’m not. How many people have that sort of courage? How many would instead find themselves compromising bit by bit, until they find in the end that they have become something they once would have hated and despised? I don’t know the numbers, but I believe that last group is not small.
I have a dream. It’s a little fantasy I know will not occur. But I still like it. In my dream, Carney stops one day in mid-sentence, looks up at the press corps, and says, “You know, I just can’t do this anymore.” Then he walks out, and walks away from the job.
I know that, even were that to happen (which it will not), Obama would only hire a new liar. There would be many eager for the chance at the spotlight. But still, if Carney could do that, it would be a great moment, wouldn’t it?]
