Month: November 2008

Posters noticed by a Dish reader in Paris this weekend. Sarkozy is nothing if not shameless.

Listen up:

Look it’s hard enough to satisfy the basic carnal needs–it’s even harder to satisfy those needs, and satisfy the basic emotional and mental ones too. There is a good chance that your long-term relationship will one day fail. A great way to up the chances of truly epic fail, hot grits, I’m talking hot grits fail, burn down the mansion fail, is to shrink the pool of your potential partners.

Jason Kottke points to a list of recipes from Leningrad during the Nazi blockade. This is gut-wrenching:

Soup from pets and domesticated animals

Meat is ranked by taste in the following order: dog, guinea pig, cat, rat. Gut the carcass, wash well and place in cold water. Add salt. Cook for one to three hours. For aroma: bay leaf, pepper, any sort of herbs, and, if available, grain.

Hilton, Iowa, 7.28 am.

Not all statesmen refuse to learn. Holbrooke:

"[In 1995, McGeorge] Bundy began writing tortured notes to himself, often in the margins of his old memos — a sort of private dialogue with the man he had been 30 years earlier — something out of a Pirandello play. Bundy would scribble notes: “the doves were right”; “a war we should not have fought”; “I had a part in a great failure. I made mistakes of perception, recommendation and execution.” “What are my worst mistakes?” For those of us who had known the self-confident, arrogant Brahmin from Harvard, these astonishing, even touching, efforts to understand his own mistakes are far more persuasive than the shallow analysis McNamara offers in his own memoir, “In Retrospect”…

In case anyone is in any doubt what we’re up against:

Doctors working in a hospital where all the bodies, including that of the terrorists, were taken said they had not seen anything like this in their lives. "Bombay has a long history of terror. I have seen bodies of riot victims, gang war and previous terror attacks like bomb blasts. But this was entirely different. It was shocking and disturbing," a doctor said.

Asked specifically if he was talking of torture marks, he said: "It was apparent that most of the dead were tortured. What shocked me were the telltale signs showing clearly how the hostages were executed in cold blood," one doctor said.

The other doctor, who had also conducted the post-mortem of the victims, said: "Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again," he said.

The pathological anti-Semitism of the Islamists is a trade-mark, isn’t it?

It’s crudely reductive, as even Neal Gabler is forced to concede. The American conservative era owes just as much to Goldwater’s libertarianism and Reagan’s pragmatic freedom agenda. It’s also bundled up with Buckley’s erudition, Gingrich’s populism, and the first Bush’s realism and prudence. But Gabler is surely onto something in seeing the McCarthyite strain in American conservatism being more tenacious and transmittable, because human resentment is more common and politically potent than agreement about limited government. The resentment theme also tends to get stronger when there is too little raw political talent around: when you have the limited grasp of the world of W and Palin, a resort to McCarthyism is often helpful, even necessary. When you’re as desperate as John McCain in August, ditto. Nixon, again, was the purest of the type:

McCarthy’s real heir was Nixon, who mainstreamed McCarthyism in 1968 by substituting liberals, youth and minorities for communists and intellectuals, and fueling resentments as McCarthy had. In his 1972 reelection, playing relentlessly on those resentments, Nixon effectively disassembled the old Roosevelt coalition, peeling off Catholics, evangelicals and working-class Democrats, and changed American politics far more than Goldwater ever would.

Because we’re all human, resentment is part of us. It will be a part of all political movements – as class resentment often emerges on the populist left. The key is that it be complemented and, with any luck, massively diluted by more positive arguments. This year revealed how almost all the positive arguments in American politics have come from the left. The exception was Ron Paul. On the right, the collapse of governing coherence led to a campaign and a party of almost pure ressentiment. It leaves a truly Coulter taste in the mouth. And it will take one hell of a pallette cleanser to forget it.

As Obama weighs how to move forward, the false dichotomy that argues that somehow retaining the Bush-Cheney torture regime makes us any safer is exploded by this kind of testimony from a leading interrogator in Iraq:

Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there’s the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

He reminds us that we found Zarqawi through interrogation by traditional methods, and that this humane approach would have given us better information and helped us turn around the Sunnis against al Qaeda sooner:

One actually told me, "I thought you would torture me, and when you didn’t, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That’s why I decided to cooperate."

The perils of micro-sculpting. An amazing story from an amazing Englishman.

Theresa Honeywell is into extreme knitting:

From a recent interview with the artist:

‘I decided on making cozies for empowering objects which happened to be very hard, masculine, recognizable objects. The covers kind of softened them up and changed their determined roles.’

While beginning this line, she saw a knit toilet-paper cozy at a flea market.

‘It kind of made me a little sad to see someone’s handmade craft discarded and being sold for pennies, but it mostly saddened me because it was such a bizarre and useless object,’ Honeywell said. ‘I pictured a sad housewife with nothing better to do then knit up a cozy for a roll of toilet paper.

‘I knew then that I wanted to use that same lonely technique, and meaningless process, to cover up an object that I wouldn’t ever need or have the opportunity to use again in my new role as a housewife. And it also was a way to embrace the object. By knitting for it, I basically took on a maternal role and wanted to embrace these empowering objects. I was really longing for change in my life.’

Honeywell uses cheaper acrylic, what she calls ‘granny-style’ yarn, for the bigger works, because she wanted to stay true to the style of the discard afghans and cozies in flea markets and thrift stores.