Did you see the supermoon last night? I was driving my car right around the time the moon rose, and I saw it without having read anything about the phenomenon beforehand. So I didn’t know what I was seeing, but it was quite obviously spectacular.
I kept trying to stop and get a good photo, but each time I did it eluded me by hiding. So I’m awfully glad other people got pictures, which you can see here and here, and plenty of other places, too.
Three of my favorites:
This dress isn’t as spectacularly awful as most I feature here. But it’s awful in a particularly odd way, I think. There’s a certain combination of Flash Gordon, Transformers, upholstery, 1950s apron, old antimacassars, and Octoberfest barmaid:
For those who don’t get the Flash Gordon reference, I’m talking about Ming the Merciless:
And for those who don’t get the Octoberfest barmaid reference (is there anyone who doesn’t get the Octoberfest barmaid reference?), here’s an example:
(Yeah, I know, I know. But I gotta get that traffic up somehow.)
And just to balance things out, here are some old antimacassars, in case you’re not familiar with the term:
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of 9/11, is now on trial along with four accomplices. And it’s in a military court rather than the civilian courts the Obama administration would have preferred.
Thank goodness. One of the worst excesses of the Obama administration was its effort to move this trial, which had already begun in military court and was moving along nicely but was abruptly stopped by Obama and Holder several years ago. Now it’s back where it started, after an enormous amount of wasted time and expense, and a few changes:
Barack Obama came to power as president promising to scrap the military tribunals and close the Guanté¡namo prison because they were “a symbol that helped al-Qaida recruit terrorists to its cause”, but Congress blocked the move.
The president did oversee important changes to the conduct of the military trials including new rules that do not allow a defendant’s own confessions under torture to be used against him. But the statements of others who were tortured can be used which permits the interrogations of the five accused to be used against each other.
That being the Guardian speaking, the word “torture” is used to describe waterboarding, although whether it is actually torture or not is still controversial.
I’ve written about the case many times before; I’ve already made it clear that I favor military tribunals, and why. So there’s no need to repeat myself much, but here’s a little reminder, something I wrote back when the administration was first trying to transfer the case to the civilian court system:
If anyone is an illegal enemy combatant, it would be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and he should not be afforded the benefit of liberal rules of discovery designed to protect civilian defendants but which allow other al Qaeda terrorists to obtain valuable information about our methods of intelligence gathering: what we know, how we learned it, and about whom we know it. This decision also puts the entire city of New York at risk again by forcing it to house these terrorists and making their trial the proverbial three-ring circus, as well as giving them a bully pulpit for more attention.
I can hardly imagine a worse decision by the Obama Justice Department on these issues, except to let the terrorists go free and set them up in penthouses on the upper East Side.
So I consider this latest development an excellent one. However, it won’t stop people such as Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, from saying predictable things like this:
“The Obama administration is making a terrible mistake by prosecuting the most important terrorism trials of our time in a second-tier system of justice…Whatever verdict comes out of the Guanté¡namo military commissions will be tainted by an unfair process and the politics that wrongly pulled these cases from federal courts, which have safely and successfully handled hundreds of terrorism trials.
That “second-tier” system of justice is good enough for our military, and it was good enough for the conspirators who assassinated Abraham Lincolm as well as the German war criminals of WWII. But it’s not good enough for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
Just to refresh your memory, in addition to 9/11, KSM was personally responsible for the beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl—meaning, he didn’t just mastermind it, he performed it (and no, that link is not to the video of the beheading, to which I will never link).
I can’t get quite as worked up about the Elizabeth Warren Cherokee flap as so many others have. That’s because I decided long ago (even before my political “change”) that however well-intentioned affirmative action may have originally been, it’s a bad thing in a host of ways.
So this particular incident doesn’t surprise me especially. The entire policy has long been subject to abuse, and if Elizabeth Warren was one of those who made a false or exaggerated claim of minority status she would hardly be the first. The drive for diversity in hiring has always been far less about the actual life of the actual person hired, and whether he/she (or his/her immediate ancestors) has in fact experienced any sort of meaningful discrimination, than in the numbers and the lists. An institution must prove it has enough minority hires or be under fire for discrimination. Equality of opportunity simply isn’t good enough; it can only be proven by equality of outcome.
But a person of privilege (which the young Elizabeth Warren actually was not) can be of any race. And even if Ms. Warren had been half Cherokee, instead of 1/32 or whatever miniscule fraction she’s supposed to be, so what? The far more important characteristics of any candidate for acceptance to a school or a job are what that person has accomplished—and yes, what they’ve overcome along the way. That speaks to brains, character, and drive. But mere membership in a race or ethnic group doesn’t tell you that; the person’s own history and resume tells you far more.
When it was instituted, affirmative action by racial or ethnic category quickly became a form of reparations, an attempt to make up for injustices done to a person’s group’s ancestors by a present-day favoritism to a person of that group, and a present-day injustice to members of other groups designated as privileged. Not a good idea. What’s more, the real focus of affirmative action became not the student accepted or the person hired, but the school or company itself, which needed to point to statistics giving a head count of their designated minorities and/or victim groups, and show that they’d racked up the proper count.
Thus, we get incidents like this one, where the Harvard Crimson claimed (in 1998) that Elizabeth Warren was a Native American hire (although Harvard is now refusing to say whether Warren is the one Native American professor they list in their diversity roster).
I would guess this has always been more about Harvard than about anything Warren actually got out of it. After all, if you think about it, merely being a women would have been enough diversity back in the days when she was hired. Harvard Law and other schools have long been under great pressure to hire more minorities and/or other groups that have been defined as victims of discrimination, such as women, and the head count is a very serious matter and continues to this day.
There is something so profoundly ironic about the whole thing, isn’t there? Combating racism with more racism, sort of like curing a hangover with the hair of the dog that bit you.
[NOTE: I probably need to make it clear that, if Warren had falsely claimed Native American status in order to be hired, that would be a serious issue. As a voter I would consider it an important strike against her (although I wouldn’t be voting for Ms. Warren in the first place). But the nature of affirmative action as a whole is what interests me far more than anything Ms. Warren did or didn’t do.]
…stupid.
I noticed something worth mentioning: according to this memeorandum roundup of articles, this time around even many of the liberal and leftist newspapers and blogs are reporting this as bad news, and not ignoring the fact that a lot of people have dropped out of the workforce.
Interesting, no?
Living together may sound like a good idea, but in practice it seems to lead to a higher percentage of break-ups and divorces. And this appears to not just be because those who live together are pre-selected for characteristics that make it more likely that they’ll part, but because there seems to be something in the act of living together itself that helps to foster break-ups.
One thing that is not in dispute is that the percentage of people living together before marriage has skyrocketed beyond the growth in population over the same time:
In 1960, about 450,000 unmarried couples lived together. Now the number is more than 7.5 million.
Another fact is that, whatever the reality, the perception (at least among young people) is that living together before marriage makes it less likely that a split will occur:
In a nationwide survey conducted in 2001 by the National Marriage Project, then at Rutgers and now at the University of Virginia, nearly half of 20-somethings agreed with the statement, “You would only marry someone if he or she agreed to live together with you first, so that you could find out whether you really get along.” About two-thirds said they believed that moving in together before marriage was a good way to avoid divorce.
The phenomenon of living together causing more breakups is called the “cohabitation effect”:
Researchers originally attributed the cohabitation effect to selection, or the idea that cohabitors were less conventional about marriage and thus more open to divorce. As cohabitation has become a norm, however, studies have shown that the effect is not entirely explained by individual characteristics like religion, education or politics. Research suggests that at least some of the risks may lie in cohabitation itself.
Why? Here’s one idea about the explanation, and it makes a certain amount of sense:
Women are more likely to view cohabitation as a step toward marriage, while men are more likely to see it as a way to test a relationship or postpone commitment, and this gender asymmetry is associated with negative interactions and lower levels of commitment even after the relationship progresses to marriage.
I have little doubt that these differences can work the other way; there are lots of women who use living together as a way to avoid commitment, as well. For both sexes, it can happen that, “I felt like I was on this multiyear, never-ending audition to be his wife [or her husband],” as one of the article’s interviewees says.
Doesn’t that sum up the essence of it? Doubt and questioning can become a habit. If we enter a relationship constantly evaluating it, we can keep on evaluating it on a moment-by-moment basis. That’s a recipe for trouble in a marriage. To always be on trial means to be always found wanting, because who among us is so perfect that someone else would want to be with us every free minute of every day?
Some people would chalk up these problems to a lack of religion. And although that may be part of it, it’s certainly not the whole explanation or anywhere near it. My parents, for example, were not religious, and yet they would never have lived together before marriage, nor would they have divorced except under the most egregious circumstances, and maybe not even then. It just Wasn’t Done by nice folks. You leapt into marriage and that was that, because that was where you tended to stay and you knew it at the outset.
I don’t think we can go back, either. We’ve become used to freedom, and social ostracism does not follow divorce the way it used to. And that’s not likely to change, either.
[NOTE: I’m fairly certain that some commenters will bring up the idea of the unfairness of some divorce awards, and the fact that many people—particularly men—avoid marriage because they perceive (rightly or wrongly) that they will lose everything in a divorce initiated capriciously by the other party. I left that whole discussion out of this post because I don’t think it explains the cohabitation effect, which is the topic at hand. Those risks of unfair distribution of assets after divorce would be true whether or not a couple lives together before marriage.]
The Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman “narrative” keeps shape-shifting. Ferreting out the truth at this point seems pretty much impossible, but it needs to be attempted.
The trial will disclose much more. That’s part of what trials are for, although the truth can often remain a very, very difficult quarry in a situation in which intents and perceptions are important, and there are no witnesses (or very few good ones) to the initial confrontation and the crucial events surrounding it. Forensics can help, of course, but they can’t tell us everything we need to know.
Take this set of facts:
One of those inconsistencies [between Zimmerman’s story and the evidence]: Zimmerman told police Trayvon had his hand over Zimmerman’s mouth during their fight on the night he shot Trayvon.
The Sentinel’s source confirmed that Zimmerman’s statements include that allegation. But authorities do not believe that happened, the source told the Sentinel, because on one 911 call, someone can be heard screaming for help. If it were Zimmerman, as he claims, his cries were not muffled, the source said.
And this commentary by the Martin family attorney:
Reached in Birmingham, Ala., Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump said Thursday that Zimmerman’s claim that he was screaming in the 911 call and that his mouth was covered by the teen don’t add up.
“[Trayvon’s father] Tracy Martin told me that that’s what [police] told him,” Crump said, of Zimmerman making those statements to police.
“It’s either one or the other, it can’t be both,” Crump said.
Of course it can be both. It’s hard to cover a person’s mouth effectively while fighting without taking your hand off his mouth once in a while. Why couldn’t the screams have occurred during such an interval or intervals?
These are just small details, but I mention them to illustrate the larger point of how a case like this, aired in the MSM, is mostly garbage in, garbage out at this stage. But that doesn’t stop the partisans from making propaganda galore out of rumor and logic based on incomplete information. And how many people will ever learn otherwise? Don’t first impressions count an awful lot in these things?
Other news today brought home the same idea. Remember Dominique Strauss-Kahn? First a rapist, then a mere purveyor of paid quickie sex (or not-sex, in the Clintonian sense)? In France, rather than New York, the allegations keep flying and the legal battles go on, but not about the Sofitel incident. Read this is you’re interested, but don’t say I didn’t warn you; it’s not exactly family fare.
It’s not in any real dispute any more that Strauss-Kahn likes to have paid sex in hotels, sometimes in a twosome and sometimes in groups. Even that much information gives a picture of the man that makes John Edwards look like an old-fashioned romantic. But is Strauss-Kahn a rapist, or are the new accusers just piling on, as it were? There is no way to know yet; your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps if I sat in the courtroom for the entire trial and heard all the evidence (with a translator!) I might come to a pretty strong conclusion. But I don’t think that “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” is good enough.
And then there’s someone like Herman Cain. Remember him? He’s been awfully quiet lately, and the allegations against him have just faded away. When they were big news, I wrote about the issue at some length, and came to the conclusion that…that…we don’t know, although the accusers had serious credibility problems.
Jurors in a courtroom are told to weigh the evidence and to only find a defendant guilty if culpability is established beyond a reasonable doubt. But the “reasonable doubt” standard is really a judgment call, and is not amenable to strict definitions, although definitions are certainly attempted:
The standard that must be met by the prosecution’s evidence in a criminal prosecution: that no other logical explanation can be derived from the facts except that the defendant committed the crime, thereby overcoming the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty.
If the jurors or judge have no doubt as to the defendant’s guilt, or if their only doubts are unreasonable doubts, then the prosecutor has proven the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and the defendant should be pronounced guilty.
The term connotes that evidence establishes a particular point to a moral certainty and that it is beyond dispute that any reasonable alternative is possible. It does not mean that no doubt exists as to the accused’s guilt, but only that no Reasonable Doubt is possible from the evidence presented.
But anyone who follows trials and verdicts knows that the standard isn’t always applied that way; sometimes logical and possible alternative explanations are rejected as improbable, based on jurors’ hunches. In practice, isn’t “reasonable” really what any individual juror feels it to be? And don’t we all tend to think that we are the reasonable ones?
I don’t usually push products, but this is one I’ve been addicted to for over thirty years.
You’ve probably seen and maybe even heard all those newer and fancier sound machines that are supposed to lull you to sleep. They’re digital, and they feature gushing waterfalls and ocean waves and chirping crickets and other sounds that are purported to soothe you into dreamland. But all their sounds have a tinny quality to my ear, an unnaturalness that the old tried and true “Sleepmate” lacks.
I’ve learned there are two types of people in the world: those who want absolute quiet when they sleep, and those who prefer low and monotonous sound, especially if they need to mask the snoring of a loved one or the sirens of city traffic, or even the spring peepers in the country (a sound I happen to love, but not for sleeping).
That’s the headline of this Politico piece: “The dangerous new Obama book,” referring to David Maraniss’s new biography of Obama, which I discussed here yesterday.
Dangerous? Pul-eeze. The entire Politico article is laughable:
The product of [Maraniss’s] big dig, “Barack Obama: The Story,” seems to be a nuanced, even sympathetic portrayal culled from people who still admire Obama. Yet, make no mistake, this is a dangerous book for Obama, and White House staffers have been fretting about it in a low-grade way for a long, long time ”” in part because it could redefine the self-portrait Obama skillfully created for himself in 1995 with “Dreams from My Father.”
The success of “Dreams” has given Obama nearly complete control of his own life narrative, an appealing tale that has been the foundation of his political success. But Maraniss’s biography threatens that narrative by questioning it: Was Obama’s journey entirely spiritual and intellectual? Or was it also grounded in the lower realms of ambition and calculation?
Do you mean that Obama was actually ambitious? That he thought about his political career and even did some planning? That his head wasn’t in the clouds as he just tried to be all that he could be, spiritually, morally, intellectually?
Does anyone believe this sort of claptrap? Even those who still adore the guy? It’s funny how the premise of the Politico piece fits into the point I made at the end of my earlier post from today, which has to do with the Alice Palmer incident:
[What Obama did to Alice Palmer] was nasty, it was ruthless, it occurred at the beginning of Obama’s career when he was supposedly untested and relatively naive””and he got away with it, because most people haven’t a clue that it occurred, or what it revealed about his most-definitely-not-a-nice-guy character.
Anyone who has studied the bare facts of Obama’s political career—and that must include the folks at Politico—has to have become aware of the fact that Obama was one of the coldest and most calculating politicians right from the get-go. If you’re still unfamiliar with what happened, take a look. This story has been in the public domain for a long, long time, and anyone ignorant of it or unaware of what it indicates is either so negligent that he/she shouldn’t be writing political columns, or is lying.
I discovered the Alice Palmer story quite early on in the 2008 campaign. The incident occurred in 1995 and has never been a secret. Just imagine if George Bush or Mitt Romney had done something similar. Do you think for one minute that the American public wouldn’t be reminded of it over and over, ad nauseum?
Two days ago I wrote a post about Obama’s and his campaign ads’ bragging about the killing of Bin Laden and insinuating that Romney would never have done it. Towards the end of the post I wrote, “I’m not sure why this particular episode has galled me so much.”
But today, on reading this piece, I had an insight that helped me understand the reason: it’s the fact that it’s a four-pronged assault. There isn’t just one outrage, there are four:
(1) the bragging, which is unpresidential and unworthy of someone with true valor
(2) the hypocrisy of using the incident for campaign points, after criticizing others for doing so
(3) the misrepresentation of what Romney had actually said, with carefully- and mendaciously-truncated quotes
(4) the fact that despite all this, so many voters still consider Obama above the political fray.
Obama has always been audacious, all right, and so far he’s always gotten away with it. That’s one of the reasons why the Alice Palmer incident galls me so. It was nasty, it was ruthless, it occurred at the beginning of Obama’s career when he was supposedly untested and relatively naive—and he got away with it, because most people haven’t a clue that it occurred, or what it revealed about his most-definitely-not-a-nice-guy character.
It’s what you really want, isn’t it? For me to leave behind all the tedious blather about Obama, and offer some tedious blather about “Dancing With the Stars” instead?
So let me just say that I’m sad today because the guy who was in some ways (not all ways!) my favorite contestant this season, Jaleel White, was voted off last night in a travesty of justice. I already wrote about Jaleel and offered some videos here and here, in the “Vote for Obama, he’s cool” thread.
You may or may not remember White as the quintessentially nerdy character Urkel in the popular TV show of the late 80s through 90s, “Family Matters.” When he began the role he was 12 years old and it was only supposed to be a one-shot deal, but the series went on for 9 years and Urkel was its most popular character, although by the time it was done White found himself typecast as a nerd.
That doesn’t mean he couldn’t dance, though, even back then. Unfortunately, the full video of the Urkel Dance can’t be embedded (I assume for copyright reasons), but you can watch it here. Here’s a partial version:
And now, White’s still dancing, although it’s not quite the Urkel dance:
Mock me if you life, but DWTS is one of my favorite guilty pleasures. I appreciate how hard this sort of dancing is for amateurs, much much harder (and more exhausting) than it looks.
Although I’m heartily sick of the topic of Barack Obama right now, I can’t quite ignore this piece about Obama’s college and immediate post-college years, as seen through the eyes of his girlfriends and the love letters they saved (or perhaps I should say “correspondence”), and the journal entries they turned over to David Maraniss, author of a new biography of Obama that has just been excerpted in Vanity Fair.
I only skimmed the piece, which is long and not really all that interesting. But I read enough to say the following:
Assuming that the letters and other writings are authentic—and I have no reason to doubt that at the moment—we can say that Obama was a not-atypical bright young guy who wrote pretentiously about Literature and Life and Love in classic student style. We can also say that he’s clearly heterosexual, and that much of his personality back then seems very familiar to those who study him now. The coolness, the distance, the sense of someone behind a veil and profoundly unknowable, were already evident even to the women who got closest to him.
I also think it’s interesting to compare and contrast Obama with Romney at approximately the same age. They were almost opposites. Obama was still searching for a father and an identity; Romney had an unusually strong dose of both. Obama was drifting; Romney was a family man who already was married with children and focused on his future (Romney married at 22 and became a father at 23). Obama smoked and drank, and more; Romney was a teetotaler and non-smoker. And yet they both were the products of similar educations: private prep schools and Harvard Law (and in Romney’s case, Harvard Business as well).