There are many many things one might say about this photo.
But I’ll stick to: the shoes. Why? How?
Your turn.
Spambot of the day
The philosopher-spambot:
Research: What I’m doing, when I don’t know what I’m doing.
Totten and Hanson discuss war and peace
Two of my favorite people talk to each other: Michael Totten interviews Victor Davis Hanson.
Here’s Hanson on the value and purpose of studying war, his particular specialty:
Military history is didactic, and those who study it can get some idea why wars break out, how they progress, how they end, and how peace is kept. I can’t think of where you could get that information other than from the study of wars in the past.
There’s also a moral element. Not all history is equal. If people are willing to wage their entire existence in a few brief seconds, those moments are more worthy of commemoration and study than others.
I once wrote a book called Ripples of Battle that traced the great art and literature that came out of just three battles””the Battle of Delium, the Battle of Okinawa, and the Battle of Shiloh. I could have done that with hundreds of battles.
History is not equal, and whether we like it or not, strange things happen during wars that don’t transpire as often in peace time. We have to nurse the next generation on some knowledge of the collective sacrifice of prior generations, otherwise the society won’t understand what it gave up in the past to enjoy in the present. So it’s also a moral issue.
And here Hanson discourses on what the “peace studies” folks think about the war studies folks:
They think we feel that war brings out the best in people, that war is a ritual that’s necessary for society, or that war is a macabre interest like video games are for some people. It’s like assuming an oncologist must like cancer, because why else would he study cancer?
They often don’t agree with supposedly archaic ideas like the balance of power, pre-emption, and deterrence. President Obama is a good example of a product of that kind of thinking. He seems to believe that if he can just sit down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Hugo Chavez that he can talk to them as a reasonable and charismatic person and convince them of the logic of not having a bomb.
But if you take the classical tragic view, it makes perfect sense for Iran to have a bomb. I see it as a win from Iran’s point of view…
It’s a natural expression of the European Enlightenment. Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Locke deified their God, reason. It was a quantum leap in human thinking, in intellectual evolution. We no longer had to explain natural phenomena through superstition. Just as we could explain the tides and eclipses and no longer had to rely on Zeus, so too human existence could be charted and predicted and changed. That really got going in the 20th century with advanced technology, better nutrition, and so on. War is a disease, and since we conquered all these other things, why can’t we conquer war the way we conquered polio?
It’s an attractive idea because the alternative is medieval. Some people have a hard time accepting that we’re no better than medieval man, that the only thing that keeps some of us from clubbing somebody else is the fear that they’ll be clubbed worse.
There’s more, much more, including the following fascinating anecdote:
MJT: It seems to unnerve the Europeans now that Obama is to their left.
VDH: It does.
MJT: They seem uncomfortable being to the right of the United States in some ways.
VDH: I had an interesting conversation two years ago just before Obama’s election with some military people in Versailles. They were at a garden party, and everybody was for Obama. But an admiral said to me, “We are Obama. You can’t be Obama.”
Everybody looked at him. And I said, “What do you mean?”
He said, “There’s only room for one Obama.”
I said, “So we’re supposed to do what? Take out Iran while you trash us?”
And he said, “Right out of my mouth. I couldn’t have said it better. Bush understood our relationship. We have to make accommodations with our pubic, which is lunatic. You don’t really believe there’s going to be an EU strike force, do you? Nobody here believes that. If you become neutral, what are we supposed to do?”
That’s what he said. I was surprised at his candor. And it’s worrisome. On the one hand I like it because they’re getting just what they asked for, but on the other hand, it’s tragic. And it’s dangerous. We shouldn’t be doing this.
Pigs fly, and the Times chides Obama on the oil spill
Yesterday I noticed what passes for a hard-hitting editorial in the NY Times. Despite the usual boilerplate Obama excuses (“…he took office under an extraordinary burden of problems created by President George W. Bush’s ineptness and blind ideology. He has faced a stone wall of Republican opposition…” blah blah blah), the Times editors criticize Obama for his treatment of the current crisis.
The piece ends this way:
It certainly should not have taken days for Mr. Obama to get publicly involved in the oil spill, or even longer for his administration to start putting the heat on BP…
It took too long for Mr. Obama to say that the Coast Guard and not BP was in charge of operations in the gulf and it’s still not clear that is true.
He should not have hesitated to suspend the expanded oil drilling program and he should have moved a lot faster to begin political and criminal investigations of the spill. If BP was withholding information, failing to cooperate or not providing the ships needed to process the oil now flowing to the surface, he should have told the American people and the world.
These are matters of competence and leadership. This is a time for Mr. Obama to decisively show both.
But the Times editors are forgetting one important thing: a person cannot decisively show qualities he/she lacks. The presidency, or any executive office, is not an acting competition. We are not in the West Wing and Obama is not Martin Sheen.
Earth to NY Times: Obama is not a competent leader. He can pretend to be one during a campaign, and the press can assert that he is one when he has so little record to refute their claims. But that is not reality, it’s a co-constructed narrative that can easily fall to pieces when it faces events in the world.
The Times editors, who still appear to believe that Obama could show these things if he would only choose to do so, fail to understand the principle. But as wordsmiths who’ve most likely never had to show results in their lives (including an increase in circulation; theirs has been in freefall), but who believe something to be so merely by asserting it and/or bluffing, they must be very puzzled indeed.
That old HCR bait and switch
Is anyone actually surprised by this news?:
Late last week saw the first leaks of the administration’s draft regulations for implementing the ObamaCare law — and everything is playing out just as the critics warned.
The 3,000-odd pages of legislation left most of the really important (and controversial) policy decisions to the regulations that government agencies were told to issue once the bill passed. Now that those regs are starting to take shape, it’s clear that the Obama team is using its new power to exert tight control over the payment and delivery of all formerly “private” health insurance.
Remember Pelosi’s famous statement about passing HCR first and then finding out what was in it? Well, we’re still only starting to find out. But those who made educated guesses that it would expand the role of government in health care insurance mightily—and that, despite all of Obama’s promises about keeping the health care insurance you have if you like it, vast numbers of people would be forced to change—appear to have been correct.
Fancy that.
The mechanism for this is the discretion given to the Health and Human Services agency, and the 160—count ’em, 160—new agencies created under it by the HCR bill tasked with setting new rules on medical care.
Give a federal agency power and it will take the ball and run with it. According to a leaked report, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is doing just that:
…[T]he draft regs envision more than half of all policies having to change within three years — an unmistakable break with President’s Obama’s oft-repeated promise, “If people like their insurance, they will be able to keep it.”
…Ultimately, these rules force consumers to buy one of just four health policies — which vary mostly only by trading off higher co-payments for lower premiums, while offering essentially the same actual benefits. In arguing for passage of the law, ObamaCare’s defenders claimed the rules were aimed at health plans sold in the “exchanges.” Oops: Now Sebelius is applying them to employer plans. Eventually, this would force all but the very wealthiest Americans into a single government-designed insurance scheme.
…In recent weeks, [Sebelius] has said that the new law gives her authority to review and even set the rates on health policies sold in private markets, a role previously left to state insurance regulators.
I repeat: none of this should come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention. From the start, bait and switch has been the name of the game. I would say that the Democratic legislators and the Obama administration (and their legions of co-conspirators in the MSM) were counting on the gullibility of the American public in order to pass this law, but that’s not strictly true. A majority of the public had caught on to the ruse even before the bill was passed.
Unfortunately, our Democratic members of Congress didn’t care. Their contempt for the wishes of the American people was palpable, and their lust for power profound. And so they passed this bill anyway, knowing that it would be difficult to undo once it became the law of the land.
The press and Obama: where’s that lovin’ feeling?
Please go to PJ for this piece of mine about the end of the press’s love affair with Obama.
Did I say “the end?” To paraphrase (and invert) the famous Churchill quote:
Now this is not the end. It is not even the end of the beginning. But it is, perhaps, the beginning of the end.
What’s going on with the feds…
Genetic studies indicate what Jews already knew…
…which is that Jews are more closely related to other Middle Eastern peoples than they are to the natives of the countries they encountered in their millenia of wanderings, and that they are also very closely related to each other:
The two genome surveys…refute the suggestion made last year by the historian Shlomo Sand in his book “The Invention of the Jewish People” that Jews have no common origin but are a miscellany of people in Europe and Central Asia who converted to Judaism at various times.
Jewish communities from Europe, the Middle East and the Caucasus all have substantial genetic ancestry that traces back to the Levant; Ethiopian Jews and two Judaic communities in India are genetically much closer to their host populations…
[C]alculations show that Iraqi and Iranian Jews separated from other Jewish communities about 2,500 years ago. This genetic finding presumably reflects a historical event, the destruction of the First Temple at Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 B.C. and the exile of many Jews there to his capital at Babylon.
The shared genetic elements suggest that members of any Jewish community are related to one another as closely as are fourth or fifth cousins in a large population, which is about 10 times higher than the relationship between two people chosen at random off the streets of New York City, Dr. Atzmon said.
Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews have roughly 30 percent European ancestry, with most of the rest from the Middle East, the two surveys find. The two communities seem very similar to each other genetically, which is unexpected because they have been separated for so long.
Fourth or fifth cousins; that seems about right.
Although there’s unquestionably been a lot of genetic mixing, these studies show how relatively stable these populations have been. However, that trend has probably changed dramatically in the last generation or so in this country, as the pace of intermarriage and assimilation has stepped up.
Which reminds me of a classic Jewish joke (when told orally, the way I first heard it, this features a Yiddish accent for the elderly woman):
A man is sitting next to an old lady on an airplane. They begin to chat, and after the preliminaries she cuts to the chase and asks him, “You Jewish?”
“No ma’am, I’m not.”
“Don’t be shy,” she said “You can tell me.”
“No, I’m just not Jewish” he responds.
“You shouldn’t be ashamed of being Jewish,” she says, as she leans closer.
“I’m not,” he answers. “If I were Jewish I’d be proud. But I’m just not Jewish.”
“Maybe your mother, your father, a grandparent, somebody was Jewish?”
“No,” he said, “nobody.”
The lady gets testier and says, “You know, you’re not fooling me. I’m going to keep asking you until you come clean.”
The man decides to give in, just to shut her up. “Okay, if it makes you happy, okay, I’ll say it: yes I’m Jewish.”
“Funny, you don’t look it.”
Who would have been the best president to handle the oil spill crisis?
Whatever else you may think of her, I think the answer has to be “Sarah Palin.” She’s got the experience dealing with the oil companies, and the requisite gumption to do so.
And, if they were being honest, the left would have to give the same answer: Sarah Palin. And that fact must enrage them no end.
Requiring viewing of pre-abortion ultrasounds: I’m with Crist on this one
Governor Crist of Florida has vetoed legislation that would have made viewing of their sonograms mandatory for women contemplating first-trimester abortions:
Gov. Charlie Crist vetoed a Republican-backed bill that would have required women seeking a first-trimester abortion to pay for an ultrasound exam and, with few exceptions, view the image or have it described to them by their doctor…
“Individuals hold strong personal views on the issue of life, as do I,” Crist wrote. “However, personal views should not result in laws that unwisely expand the role of government and coerce people to obtain medical tests or procedures that are not medically necessary.”
Even if it’s Crist saying it, he’s right.
How is it that Republicans, who are supposed to favor a hands-off attitude towards government intervention in medical treatment, have ended up sponsoring such a profoundly anti-libertarian bill? I know, I know: Republicans are not necessarily libertarians at all.
It is unclear whether first-trimester abortions in Florida already feature ultrasounds in most cases, as they appear to in Oklahoma. A related Oklahoma bill would have required that “the abortion facility…turn the screen at an angle where the mother may view it. She can see it if she wants to look.”
There’s a lot of information out there for women contemplating abortion. There are books and pamphlets with photos of the developing fetus in all stages of development, and Right to Life groups have focused on getting this material out there.
Abortion is a legal medical procedure in this country, albeit a terribly wrenching and controversial one. But doctors, nurses, and ultrasound technicians involved in the abortion process should not be required to follow this agenda of forcing a woman to view her own sonogram; that crosses a certain line that violates their rights and hers, IMHO. What’s next—requiring doctors to show the woman the remains of her aborted fetus?
The Sarah Palin tata brouhaha
Just when you think political debate can’t descend any lower, it goes and takes a nosedive.
Case in point: the burning controversy over whether Sarah Palin’s breasts have had some recent enhancement of the surgical variety.
The rumor was fueled by blogs on the left, and is an example of the continuing liberal fascination with various intimate aspects of Sarah Palin’s body. Here’s the montage that launched a thousand speculations. The older photos are on the left and in the middle, and the newest (which purports to be of the rumored recent additions, and was taken at the Belmont racetrack) is on the right:
Now I will go on the record as saying that, although I myself have so far resisted the siren call of cosmetic surgery (much too much of a wimp), I’m not going to be criticizing politicians who go under the knife in order to look better. Joe Biden’s hair transplants and Nancy Pelosi’s botox injections—to name just two obvious examples from perhaps legions of possibilities—move me not.
I think that, especially in the world of harsh public exposure known as politics, it’s understandable to want to look your best, and as you age that becomes more and more difficult. And if Sarah Palin feels that, after mothering five children (or four, if you happen to believe Andrew Sullivan), her chest could use a bit of help, far be it from me to criticize her. .
That said, I think the case for Sarah having had implants is rather weak, although certainly possible. But those who suggest she has done so based merely on the evidence of the photo above in the white shirt are ignoring a couple of basic things about breasts, clothing, and posture—things most women learn some time during adolescence or shortly thereafter.
The first is that much the same can be accomplished by the wearing of a more structured bra than usual, imparting to the chest a bit more oomph.
The second is that shirts with a scooped and gathered neckline such as the one Palin wears in the photo on the right maximize the area in question. To do the opposite—to minimize—one can wear the sort of tailored blouses and suits Palin usually sports.
The third is that slumping ever-so-slightly (as in those photos on the left and in the middle) tends to make a person look less well-endowed, whereas standing up and arching the mid- and especially the upper back—as Sarah happens to be doing in the photo on the right—does exactly the opposite.
So posture can change the look of things quite a bit. In fact, here’s an example for you—another photo of Palin, taken at the racetrack on that very same day in that very same white shirt. In this one, however, Palin is not arching her back. You may note that, had this been the only Palin photo taken that day, the implant rumor would in all likelihood have never gotten off the ground:
Ah, how the mighty have fallen.
Estrich on political inexperience
With not a hint of self-awareness or irony, Susan Estrich pens a column devoted to the idea that electing the politically inexperienced is dangerous—without acknowledging that, with some mild tweaking, her argument fits President Obama quite nicely.
Now it’s true that he wasn’t technically a newbie to politics. But his political experience was extremely slim on the national level, and what’s far more important is that it completely lacked any managerial or executive component—which at least these Republican businesswomen whom Estrich critiques (such as Fiorina) have in the private sector. It is a puzzlement that Estrich can write the following and not see how perfectly it applies to President Obama; one can only conclude that for various complex reasons, her denial mechanism is working overtime:
Ultimately, this isn’t a game. Ultimately, what matters is not winning but governing. People’s lives depend on it. The nation’s future depends on it. Politics is difficult; governing is hard. Learning lines, winning debates, scoring points against your rival — that’s tough, but not nearly as tough as getting things done once you’re in office.
[NOTE: And Tina Brown proves that the venom and debunking directed by so-called feminist women on the left towards Sarah Palin during and after the 2008 campaign was no fluke or special case. No matter what their accomplishments, women in public life can only get the feminist stamp of approval if they toe the complete party line of the left; otherwise they are imposters.
The same has been long true of prominent and influential African-Americans who happen to be black; if they’re not owned by the left, they’re are no better than Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas in the left’s eyes. As Allahpundit writes, “no matter how diverse the GOP becomes, the authenticity card will always be there to discredit its candidates.”
Ironically (boy, I’ve been using that word a lot lately) it fell to George Stephanopoulos to attempt to correct Tina; he must have known she’d put her foot in it. , Here’s the transcript:
TINA BROWN: But, actually, the only trouble with this one is, it almost feels as if all these women winning are kind of a blow to feminism. Because, each one of them, really, most of them, are, you know, very much, uh, uh, you know, against so many of things that women have fought for such a long time.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, you could argue they’re different kinds of feminists. They’ve had a lot of success in different fields.]