Enjoy this brief interlude, while they sweat without showing it:
Spambot of the day
Shameless sycophant spambot:
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Wikileaks on Afghanistan
The story du jour—and for probably quite a few more jours—is the Wikileaks dump of classified information on the war in Afghanistan.
Revealing previously classified information about ongoing wars has become a sort of cottage industry, with the word “classified” taking on lesser and lesser meaning as time goes on. This is mostly because there are virtually no consequences for the perpetrators of such leaks, and no shortage of outlets willing to disseminate them, encouraged by the United States’ lack of an Official Secrets Act such as is the law in Britain (I’ve already written extensively on issues related to the question of whether this country should pass a similar statute).
What do the most recent leaks actually reveal? Not much (see also this). Anyone who’s been paying attention to the Afghan situation already knows that the government of Pakistan and especially its military intelligence arm has ties to the Taliban, and that civilians have been killed in this war, which are the main facts revealed by the present leaks.
Just about everyone paying attention also knows that a central issue is that the goal of our continued presence in Afghanistan has not been clearly defined. The original reasons we went there were related to the 9/11 attacks and fact that their masterminds were being sheltered by its then-rulers, the Taliban. Now the whereabouts of many of the former are unknown, and the Taliban are not officially in charge, although they’re still highly influential and perpetually resurgent. Our commitment there—by both the Bush administration (after the initial push), and the Obama administration today—has been what I could crudely call half-assed, and the definition of what success would actually look like is murky.
Are we still nation-building there? Are we still looking for the elusive (and perhaps deceased?) Bin Laden, and won’t leave till we get him? Is Pakistan an ally in name only? These are the questions that need to be asked, and answered, posthaste, ones that I’m afraid will not be answered by this administration, which used the Afghan War as a campaign weapon to demonstrate macho hawkishness in the “right” war, and to bludgeon Bush for fighting the “wrong” one.
The 6-items-of-clothing diet
If I had to choose only six items of clothing to wear for a month (plus underwear), it wouldn’t be these six—bore-ing (especially that sad sack of a dress):
But oh, what would my own selections be? To start with, they’d have more color. I’d have one blogging/relaxing/grungy outfit, two pairs of slacks and two shirts or blouses, and one snazzier dress.
What a stupid idea, though, to limit things to six—although cutting down on the wardrobe isn’t a bad idea in general. After all, I tend to wear only a small percentage of my clothes regularly anyway, which the article describes as typical. The rest of my collection consists of (a) older items I can’t quite fit into at the moment, but have fairly recently and might again some day (I’ve only fluctuated about a size and a half during the last fifteen years; the really skinny clothes from my starvation/dancing days are long gone); and (b) stuff I thought looked good on me at the time of purchase but was always a mistake.
Buying this latter variety is one of the perils of shopping alone, which I’ve done for most of my adult life, alas. I say “alas” because I much prefer to have a friend along—not a husband or the man in my life (sorry, guys), though, because I’ve never had a husband/boyfriend with the superhuman patience to come along on these lengthy excursions, nor one who could withstand the admitted double-bind of that ancient question: does this outfit make me look fat?
Horrific stampede in Germany
A deadly stampede has occurred in Germany, especially terrible because most of those killed were young people. As Matthias Roeingh, one of the organizers of the event (ironically) called the Love Parade said, “one single entrance through a tunnel lends itself to disaster.”
I have written at length about stampedes before, and I can attest to the truth of what he says. There are certain commonalities in fatal stampedes, and they need to be heeded in all planning of large events:
The situation, as far as I can determine, is a bit analogous to the elements that go into a tsunami, strangely enough. That is, a huge and extremely powerful force (in the case of crowds, the moving people; in the case of tsunamis, the moving water) is initially spread out horizontally. Then, some sort of blockage impedes that horizontal movement and converts it, at least partially, into a vertical one. I haven’t found a website that explains this too clearly, so I’m not linking to any source for it, but it appears that, in the case of a stampede, people become stacked up and those on the bottom are the ones who are crushed by the force of those above….Any sort of bottleneck or narrow passage through which the crowd must funnel itself represents a grave danger, because it potentially impedes that flow of horizontal movement.
See also this.
My big fat size 10
Model Crystal Renn is what passes for “plus-size” in the distorted world of modeling. Take a look at Ms. Renn, who is 5’9″ and wears a size 10:
To me, Renn looks attractive and robust but still relatively trim and fit, although certainly not skinny. The fact that a woman of Renn’s size is considered plus by anyone is rather sad, although I suppose if a person were under five feet tall and wore a 10 she might be a trifle plump.
Plus-size stores tend to begin around size 14 or even 16, and go up from there, so technically Renn is not plus at all. But to models and those who manage them, 10 is gargantuan, gigantic, swollen, rolling in mounds of flesh. Models used to be bigger, but now the industry’s sample size is a big fat 0 (yes, you read that right, zero), a size that didn’t used to exist when I was growing up. And remember, these are not petite women; they’re tall, and a tall 0 size represents either a rarity in nature or a woman who has starved herself.
Renn is the participant in a recent controversy over what she claims was some overzealous photoshopping of a magazine article that showcased her. For anyone interested, here’s a statement by the photographer, featuring the original photos and the photoshopped ones; I can’t see a ton of difference myself, although the “afters” are slightly thinner.
But I’m more interested in the idea that this woman and her size-10 body represent some sort of fatness. If you go to comment threads on the subject—like this one—you’ll see the raging arguments that have ensued. Many say the idea of Renn’s plus-ness is a ridiculous absurdity, while others claim that a size-10 woman is a fat pig who ought to be ashamed of herself.
And for comparison, here’s Renn in her anorexic days. Feast your eyes:
Shirley Sherrod should have quit while she was ahead: accuses Breitbart of wanting to enslave blacks
Gee, give Shirley Sherrod enough rope and she proves she’s got a racial chip on her shoulder the size of the rock of Gibraltar, and a finely-honed and relentless ability to play the race card [the relevant part begins around 1:50]:
For those who don’t have the patience to listen to the video, I’ve kindly provided a transcript. The important section begins with Anderson Cooper quoting Breitbart—“If anybody reads the sainted, martyred Sherrod’s entire speech, this person certainly has not gotten past black vs. white”—and asking her to comment on whether she has in fact gotten past black vs. white. Sherrod replies emphatically, “I know I’ve gotten past black vs. white,” and then proceeds to show just how very far she’s gotten past it (that is, not at all):
SHERROD: [Breitbart’s] probably the person who’s never gotten past [black vs. white] and never attempted to get past it. He can’t see, because he’s never tried…he can’t see what I’ve done to get past it, and he’s not interested in what I’ve done to get past it.
I don’t think he’s interested in seeing anyone get past it, cause I think he’d like to get us stuck back in the times of slavery. That’s where I think he’d like to see all black people end up again. And that’s why…
I think he’s so vicious—yes, I do—and I think that’s why he’s so vicious against a black president, you know…I don’t even think it was the NAACP he was totally after. I think he was after a black president.
It goes on, and at one point Sherrod demands that Breitbart prove he’s not a racist. She stops just short of asking him to prove he’s stopped beating his wife.
But Sherrod has rather convincingly proven herself to be a person who sees all criticism through the lens of black vs. white, the very thing she claims to have gotten past. Unfortunately, that sort of attitude is now rampant in the ranks of the Democratic Party.
Goosicide
[Hat tip: Althouse]
New York State’s got a plan to eliminate 170,000 Canada geese—not by deportation, but by wholesale slaughter:
The captured geese [would be] placed alive in commercial turkey crates. The geese would be brought to a secure location and euthanized with methods approved by the American Veterinary Medical Association. Euthanized geese would be buried.”
There’s an interesting comment thread afterward; the very first one should chill the blood if nothing else does:
Funny how often humans figure the best solution is massive slaughter. Seems to me that reducing the human population of the state by about the same number would have a huge beneficial impact on the environment, general safety, the economy, and so forth.
Anyway I hope this dastardly plan comes back to haunt them, when some unforseen result like population booms in even more invasive, destructive species, shows up.
Most of the commenters are strongly against the goose killings, although they don’t all express themselves in quite the violently anti-human manner as that first one. As for me, I question whether the plan isn’t just a stopgap measure—won’t the remaining ones reproduce fast enough to replenish their numbers in almost no time at all?
Where I live, Canada geese are known as flying rats. There’s a whole bunch of them and their now-grown-up goslings in the neighborhood. They’re cute but create vast quantities of poop. Basically, I can’t stand the bloody things, although they’re attractive—and they also sometimes cause air crashes, which is the point of the NY goosicide in the first place.
This comment is reasonable, IMHO:
It’s about time. The goose population is, as the article says, completely out balance. There are no predators to reduce their numbers or control their tremendous rate of reproduction. They don’t even migrate anymore because the living is so good here. Do nothing?????!!!!! Are you insane???!!!
How many of you want yourself or your loved ones to be the unfortunate air travellers who die on impact because Capt. Sully wasn’t there to land them in the Hudson?
This commenter makes an interesting point—although I part company with him on the final part of his last sentence:
These over-populations are an example of both the lack of natural predation together with the decline of hunting as a recreational activity in New York.
If the hand-wringers here don’t want the state to engage in such culls ”” let them be supportive of introducing natural predators. Adding a few foxes and wolves to Prospect Park would do wonders for cutting down the numbers of both the over-populated, non-migratory, Canada geese as well as those yappy little dogs one finds there.
It strikes me that the softhearted naysayers are profoundly ignorant of what they profess to revere, ecology.
And a lot of people say “eat the geese,” which sounds reasonable but is rated as not a great solution by those who claim to know what Canada geese taste like.
Talking to liberals
A while back, commenter “Steve H.” asked a question. It’s one to which I unfortunately still don’t have a good answer, although I’m highlighting it because it’s a question I’ve been increasingly asking myself for some months now:
We all know people and perhaps have friends who support this administration. How do we even converse with them after this? Do they not see the rage, polarization and tearing at the social fabric of this country they are causing?
Of course,the more general question of how to deal with friends whose political persuasion is so different is one I’ve been wrestling with in one form or another for many years. In fact, it used to be one of the main topics on this blog. That’s because my “conversion” happened gradually but quietly. Call me naive, but when I finally began to talk to liberal friends and family (which for me meant nearly everyone I know) about that political change of mine, I expected interesting but cordial discussions on the merits.
Was I ever in for a surprise—the rage and in some cases shunning that met me was a profound shock. You see, as a moderate liberal, I had always assumed that liberals believed in “tolerance” of the ideas of others.
But apparently I had gone over to the dark side. And as time progressed, I wrestled with my own feelings that they were the ones on the dark side, if only the side of the sort of ignorance that can allow evil to triumph. This latter notion was helped along by the fact that some of these friends—not all, but a goodly percentage—really were relatively uninformed about everything except the headlines and maybe the first paragraphs of the version of the news offered by the MSM, especially the NY Times or the Boston Globe. Some, of course, had a greater interest—those who read the Nation or loved Michael Moore or Howard Zinn or did have a special interest in history, but they were far fewer in number.
So I thought my task might be to gently urge them to at least read other sources of information, and if they agreed to receive them, I sent them links to articles I thought especially good. It didn’t change any minds as far as I knew (well, maybe one or two), but at least I’d tried.
Now I don’t know what to do. I am not sure whether any of my friends are paying much attention to events now (when I ask them, they mostly say they are not). I don’t think they would agree with me about how deeply liberty is threatened right now even if they were paying close attention, and I’m not even sure how much they value liberty versus PC thinking. And anyway, they’re used to dismissing such notions of threatened individual freedoms as scaremongering right-wing nutjob tactics (unless the one doing the threatening of liberty is George Bush or Dick Cheney, that is) and McCarthyism (the actual history of which they are also mostly unaware). If I were to voice my concerns, they would think it evidence that I’ve lost my mind and that I’m becoming dangerous. So I must tread carefully if I wish to retain my credibility.
I have no desire to become a hermit. People here have given me the advice to make new friends. But that’s difficult to do at my age, and new friends almost never can replace old. These are people I know and love—sometimes from childhood, sometimes from when our now-very-grown-up children were babies or even from when we were pregnant, some from college or high school. I cannot suddenly desert them, and I don’t think I should.
But I have come to believe that they are enemies to liberty, although not intentionally. Do intentions matter? I think they do. Will they wake up? Perhaps if things get much worse—but then will it already be too late? And in the meantime, what do I do with my own anger? And how much do I try to engage them in conversations that might be not only futile but actively counterproductive? And if I do engage them, what approach do I take—rage does not cut it or convince anyone; that much I know.
I don’t have the answers, but I certainly have the questions.
[ADDENDUM: I added this in the comments section, to clarify: Intentions matter in terms whether change in opinion can occur. It has to do with how susceptible people are to rational argument and facts””in other words, whether they are fools or knaves. It matters in terms of whether you are wasting time talking to them or not.]
Beware the lame duck Congress
Charles Krauthammer says it here.
Not to brag, but I also said it, exactly one month ago. It’s not every day I beat Krauthammer to the punch.
I sincerely hope we’re both wrong, though, about the substance of what we think the Congressional Democrats are planning for their lame duck session.
From Buckley to Breitbart?
Scott at Powerline thinks that Andrew Breitbart is the new William Buckley for the conservative movement.
I wish. I agree that both men demonstrate[d] a good sense of theater, but I stand by my comparison yesterday of Breitbart to Yippies Hoffman and Rubin. Buckley’s most salient characteristic, apart from wit, was an extraordinary intellect and a rapier-sharp ability to express it in either spoken or written words. Breitbart’s a smart man, but he’s no Buckley in that regard—few are.