I blinked. Actually, I blinked for the entire Kardashian phenomenon–except for recently, when brother Rob has been doing a turn on “Dancing With the Stars.”
You think the postal service is bad now?
You should have seen it around 1815:
To send a letter from the United States to Britain, you addressed it by domestic U.S. Mail to a shipping house on the coast, enclosing money to cover ocean travel and inland postage in Europe. The captain of the transatlantic ship was the real carrier, and passengers sometimes undercut him by agreeing to take letters at 25 to 50 cents apiece. But the total cost of a letter from the New World was never less than a day’s wages, or two days’ wages in the other direction. Time taken was rarely less than two months, even if the letter was an important official dispatch carried by fast frigate. In 1817 the new president, James Monroe, wrote to John Quincy Adams in London, summoning him to be Secretary of State, on 6 March; it reached Adams only on 16 April, the fastest of four identical letters sent by different routes.
Early snow comes to New England
It’s not so very unusual for a dusting of snow to occur in New England right around the beginning of November. But a more substantial snowfall is predicted:
Simpson cautioned that the early snowfall is not an indication of what the winter might bring.
“This doesn’t mean our winter is going to be terrible,” he said. “You can’t get any correlation from a two-day event.”
It’s pretty weird, though. But not unheard of. I well remember a fairly large October storm in 1979, although I had the good fortune not to be in Worcester, Massachusetts at the time (a record-setting 7.5 inches).
By the way, speaking of Worcester, Massachusetts (which I rarely do if I can help it), it used to be the location of the best southern Indian restaurant ever. Alas, “used to be,” because the place has been defunct for years. But it’s where I was introduced to this transcendental comfort food, the masala dosa, a jumungous crisp thin pancake made of fermented rice and lentil flour and stuffed with spiced potatoes (the white stuff in the little dish is a great coconut chutney):
Did that seem like an odd segue? The link is Worcester, and the connection is storm=comfort food. And if you don’t think that a fermented lentil-rice pancake stuffed with potatoes sounds good, just try one—if you’re lucky enough to locate an Indian restaurant that features the fabulous vegetarian food of the southern part of that country.
The Left’s view of the racist right and the problem of Herman Cain
The mind continues to reel at the mental gymnastics of the left when confronted with the right’s support for Herman Cain. The latest exemplar is Karen Phinney, who said:
Let’s review the logic here. If Finney starts with what she considers a truism, that the right is racially bigoted, she is faced with a conundrum: how to reconcile this with their support for a black man. Rather than abandon the sacred meme “the right is racist,” Finney must instead reason that support for Cain is just a cover for racism, and that he’s either (a) not a “real” black man; or (b) a certain kind of black man who is acceptable to racists. Finney chooses (b), and rather than call him an “uncle Tom” (the preferred nomenclature for black people on the right) she calls him a black man who “knows his place.”
Finney herself is bi-racial, so perhaps she feels she is inoculated against the charge of racism herself. But she, like much of the left, seems to see almost everything through the prism of race. The fact that a certain not insignificant percentage of the left may have supported and voted for Obama in part because he, as a black man, made them feel good about themselves in the racial sense, is ignored. The fact that many people on the right choose candidates to like or dislike because of their politics rather than their race is also ignored; neither process conforms to the approved narrative.
But the strangest thing about Finney’s observation is that it fits the case of Herman Cain so poorly. This is a man the right supports because he “knows his place”—a phrase which, in the traditional racist sense when used about black people, has always meant their not rising very high in the world? But Cain is an extremely successful man and is in fact running for president of the United States. If that’s his “place,” according to the right, then how can the right be racist?
The mind boggles.
[ADDENDUM: And then there’s Joy Behar, who notes that “the Republican Party hasn’t been black friendly over the many centuries in this country.” It would be hard to find a more Orwellian comment anywhere, and if Behar isn’t even aware of the actual history of the Republican Party and its noble fight against slavery and racism, than we can add abysmal ignorance to her resume.
For those of you who, like Behar, may have slept through the entire American history curriculum, here’s a teeny introduction:
Founded in Northern States in 1854 by anti-slavery activists, modernizers, ex-Whigs and ex-Free Soilers, the Republican Party quickly became the principal opposition to the dominant Democratic Party and the briefly popular Know Nothing Party. The main cause was opposition to the Kansas”“Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise by which slavery was kept out of Kansas. The Republicans saw the expansion of slavery as a great evil.
But perhaps Behar knows all that, to give her the benefit of a doubt she doesn’t probably deserve. And perhaps this is her reasoning, somewhat akin to Finney’s twistings: the Democrats in the South who were actually the racists for lo nigh those “many centuries” were really closet Republicans, and the Republicans were really closet Democrats.]
Time rocks on
Time treats people (even rock stars) differentially.
Some look great: Billy Idol, Bret Michaels (who’s a mere 48, though, so it’s not a good test), and Bruce Springsteen. Pat Benatar looks better than in her youth, and David Bowie looks good without seeming to have had any cosmetic surgery, since his eyes are hooded in a way that’s normal as a person ages.
Meat Loaf looks better, too—but then he had almost nowhere to go but up. Other “goods” are Joan Jett, Van Halen, Tom Petty, Ted Nugent, Sting, Bon Jovi, and Annie Lennox.
The bad ones (and it’s not always due to weight gain, by any means) are Grace Slick, Mick Jagger in one of the worst photos ever of him (they really had to search for that one), Ozzy Osbourne, Iggy Pop (terrifying), the most dreadful photo of Dylan ever (he should sue), Ron Wood (scary), and Neil Young (my goodness).
No doubt some of this is the result of long-term and determined abuse of the body through good old sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The rest? Dunno. And probably some of the “goods” have done their share of partying, too.
More gloomy news for dieters
Of course, I already pretty much knew this. But still–drat!
Dueling Madoff interviews
Bernie and Ruth Madoff, who no longer speak to each other (at her request) since their son’s suicide, have nevertheless got dueling TV interviews going. Hers will be seen on this Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” while his with Barbara Walters is scheduled for Friday’s 20/20, and offers the following interesting (and believable) quote from this remarkably blank individual:
“I feel safer [in prison] than outside,” Madoff said. “Days go by. I have people to talk to and no decisions to make. … I know that I will die in prison. I lived the last 20 years of my life in fear. Now I have no fear — nothing to think about because I’m no longer in control of my own life.”
That has the ring of truth.
I also find the comments to the linked article about the Walters interview interesting. Since there are over 5,000, I’ve only read a small fraction, but they (as expected) excoriate his wife, assuming she knew about his crimes all along and was an accessory before the fact. The amount of hatred directed at her seems nearly equal to that thrown his way.
I’ve never understood that, but I seem to be in a small minority in that regard. From the start, it has seemed quite possible to me that Madoff had managed to keep his perfidy secret from the family, and I’ve seen nothing since to change my mind. If there had been evidence of collusion, family members would have been indicted as well.
Good con artists are really good, and anyone can be a victim, especially in a relationship that assumes love and trust. In January of 2009 I wrote the following, and I stand by it now:
There are people…who say Ruth Madoff must have known; a wife would know and a wife should know. There are people who say the same thing about child molesters, serial killers, adulterers, and most of the other varieties of human wrongdoing. But it is my observation that, although it is sometimes true that wrongdoers leave a clear trail and that any spouse who doesn’t intuit what’s going on is in a state of denial, sometimes the culprits are so slick and so clever, so good at dissembling, that no one would ever know.
To think otherwise is a self-protective lie we tell ourselves to reassure ourselves that we could not be taken in this way; oh no, surely not! But the evidence points to the fact that Bernard Madoff was a master at taking people in, gaining their trust, and then politely screwing them. He fooled people who would otherwise have been wary. His reputation was spotless, stellar, and lengthy.
And his wife, apparently, was part of his game, if only unwittingly.
That doesn’t mean that his wife is any sort of exemplary person; I do not think she was or is. But until I hear something new, I’ll reserve my vitriol for the one who clearly deserves it: Madoff himself.
[NOTE: Another theme in the comments section of the Madoff/Walters article is that Barbara Walters is a POS for giving Madoff a forum. I’m not sure whether I agree with that, either, although I am most definitely no Walters fan. But I’m interested in hearing what makes a financial sociopath like Madoff tick, so I plan to watch the interviews.]
The Democrats never went broke…
…underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
Here’s the strategy:
(1) Presidents Truman and Clinton won re-election by complaining about their Republican-controlled Congresses.
(2) Obama wants to win re-election.
(3) Therefore he and the Democrats are complaining about their Republican-controlled Congress.
Only thing is—Democrats are in the majority in one house of the legislature, the one known as the Senate. The Democrats’ argument is that Republicans “control” that house by the use of the filibuster. They don’t, any more than any minority party with 40 or over seats in the Senate “controls” it; their power is limited to blocking legislation. If “control” is now defined as “having over 60 Senate votes in order to invoke cloture,” then surely the Democrats are closer to “control” of this Senate than the Republicans are, and to say otherwise is sophistry.
But apparently Democrats are counting on the fact that “polls taken over the last several years show that many voters are unclear which party runs the House and/or Senate.” In other words, the people may be getting the government they deserve.
Why is so much of my email spam…
…about replica watches?
The stock market…
…is a complete mystery to me: “Dow headed for best October ever.
Andrew McCarthy on the Libyan War, Obama, and Gaddafi
Here’s an excellent article by Andrew McCarthy that skewers Obama and the left (with a small dig at RINO Lindsay Graham along the way) for their hypocrisy in dealing with Libya and Gaddafi vs. Iraq and Bush. I will quote his piece at some length:
Just to review what happened here: Qaddafi…was not “brought to justice”…In “leading from behind,” our government went rogue ”” to the evident satisfaction of the formerly antiwar Left. Obama claimed to be keeping the peace and protecting civilians while waging an unauthorized offensive war against Qaddafi’s government ”” a regime with which the United States was at peace; a regime with which the United States had made a great show of arriving at friendly relations; a regime to which the United States (urged on by such official emissaries as Sen. Lindsey Graham) had provided foreign aid, including assistance to prop up Qaddafi’s military; a regime to which the Obama administration, including Secretary Clinton’s State Department, had stepped up American taxpayer subsidies ”” including aid to Qaddafi’s military and contributions to charitable enterprises managed by Qaddafi’s children.
Protecting civilians? Please. We jumped in as a partisan on the side of the Islamists, who sported violent jihadists in their ranks and among their commanders ”” including al-Qaeda operatives whose dossiers included a stint at Guantanamo Bay and the recruitment of jihadists to fight a terror war against American troops in Iraq. While NATO targeted Qaddafi, the rebels rounded up black Africans, savagely killing many…When the Islamists finally began seizing territory, which they could not have done without NATO, they raided weapons depots. In Qaddafi’s Libya, his regime controlled the materiel; once the “rebels” swept in, weapons started going out ”” to other Islamists, like al-Qaeda in Northwest Africa and Hamas in Gaza.
And now that the Islamists have won, the first order of business, naturally, was to install sharia ”” Islam’s politico-legal framework that oppresses non-Muslims, women, homosexuals, and apostates. To install sharia, by the way, is the reason jihadists engage in violence ”” it is the prerequisite for Islamizing a society…
Qaddafi had last attacked the United States almost a quarter-century ago. Before that, he’d endured punishing retaliation for his Reagan-era terror attacks. The Bush 43 administration had declared these hostilities settled. The two governments resolved outstanding claims ”” much to the chagrin of those of us outraged by the moral equivalence drawn between Qaddafi’s terrorist aggression and President Reagan’s righteous response…Qaddafi abandoned his advanced weapons programs and began providing what the Bush and Obama administrations regarded as vital intelligence ”” vital, no doubt, because Libya is rife with Islamists who despise America and the West…[A]s the State Department put it in 2008, Libya had become “an increasingly valuable partner against terrorism.”
In the last several years, the Libyan regime never even threatened, much less attacked, American interests. Qaddafi spoke glowingly of Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and of President Obama, the Bush and Obama administrations embraced him and supported his regime. There was nothing close to a casus belli for the United States to launch a war against his government. The rationalization about the regime attacking civilians is nonsense: Qaddafi never stopped repressing Libyans in the years we were allied with him, and our aid to him only increased; Libya is a brutal society in which Qaddafi’s demise will not stop the internecine savagery; and we don’t intervene when hostile governments in Iran, Syria, China, Russia, and elsewhere repress their citizens.
Yet, President Obama invaded without congressional authorization ”” just consultations with the Arab League and a Security Council resolution that called for a no-fly zone to protect civilians, not for war against Qaddafi or regime change. Even as Obama paid lip-service to this charade, promising Americans there would be no U.S. “boots on the ground,” he dispatched covert intelligence operatives to guide the Islamists…
Qaddafi’s escape from his last holdout was thus cut off by NATO airstrikes. Trapped and hidden in a sewer, he was dragged out and brutalized ”” not for intelligence, but for sport. There is video here if you can stomach it. What NATO abetted was not a military capture. It was an assassination. We will be worse off that it happened. And the way it happened should sicken us.
It has occurred to me that, except for the fact that in Libya the US has been acting under the aegis of a US-dominated NATO rather than with a US-dominated coalition of allies as in Iraq, the invasion of Iraq was far more justified than that of Libya, for many of the reasons so ably stated by McCarthy. And yet, as we know, much (although not all) of the left defends Obama’s actions in the former while excoriating and reviling Bush’s in the latter.
Whether or not WMDs were ever found in Iraq, Saddam Hussein had done worse—to his people, his neighbors, and the UN—than Gaddafi ever did, and he did it far more recently prior to the US invasion. What’s more, Saddam had only been a supposed US “ally” briefly, back in the 80s in the war against Iran, on the principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” but Gaddafi had (as McCarthy points out) been recently embraced by the US as a reformed sinner.
I am not saying Gaddafi shouldn’t have been deposed, although McCarthy goes so far as to say just that. I’m saying it should not have been done in this manner, and it most definitely should not be accompanied by continued criticism of Bush’s action in Iraq, which was a model of rectitude in comparison. After all, Saddam had continually and brazenly defied UN sanctions. He was not a US ally. He had committed genocide on the Kurds of his own country, and murdered countless other citizens of Iraq. Bush went to the UN for approval before the invasion, as well as to the US Congress, and got it. After the war, Saddam was tried, convicted, and executed by the Iraqis, not lynched by a mob.
And—very importantly to this neo-neocon—Bush was at least somewhat committed to the US sticking around to manage the aftermath of the invasion. That this was done poorly, especially at first, and that the task was far more difficult than the administration had naively expected it to be, does not alter the fact that there was at least a commitment to do it, and that in the end (post-surge), its efficiency and effectiveness improved dramatically.
Not so for Libya. You might say that, paradoxically, Obama is much more of a pure neocon in Libya (at least as the term is popularly although incorrectly defined) than Bush ever was in Iraq, since Obama seems to have a much lower threshold for military intervention. As for my own neocon persuasion, it comes with the following restrictions that appear to be lacking in the Obama brand: (1) support for liberal democracy that preserves human rights, not just democracy; (2) some responsibility for the aftermath of any war started in its name and in which the US participates, in order to give (1) the best chance of occurring; and (3) the need to determine what a side stands for before supporting it militarily.
[NOTE: It has long been great sport for the left to demonize neocons after setting up a strawman as to what they believe. But if you really want to know more about what neocons actually think, there’s this, this, and this.]
It occurs to me that…
…nowadays, campaign staffs are increasingly composed of moles. Each time an aide quits, doesn’t he/she seem inordinately quick on the draw with the critical interview and/or the tell-all book?
Now staffers don’t even wait for the campaign to be over to start the trash talk. Case in point: Cain’s ex-staffers give the NY Times enough ammunition to create the catchy headline, “As Cain Promotes His Management Skills, Ex-Aides Tell of Campaign in Chaos.”
Has the term “disgruntled former staffer” become a redundancy?
