Month: June 2007

Sorry, I can’t help it. Like many non-lefty homos, I just can’t get enough Camille (as enraged former New Republic readers in the 1990s will recall). Who else could scan the world and come up with this pet peeve:

Inert, over-enlarged, weight-trained hands and limp, dangling arms are my beef against our current crew of starlets – like Kirsten Dunst, who’s appealing enough as an Angie Dickinson without the sizzle but whose klunky man-paws we’ve been forced to contemplate from "Marie Antoinette" through "Spider-Man 3."

Has Camille seen Madonna’s hands lately?

"Freedom, my friends, is hard. And until you recognize that key fact, nothing – over there or over here – can get done," – Brad at The Crossed Pond.

This time – in Ethiopia:

Swedish citizen Munir Awad, 25, who was only released three weeks ago, told Der Spiegel that he had travelled with his 17-year-old girlfriend Safia Benaouda, also a Swedish citizen, to Mogadishu in December. He says that after the Ethiopian troops invaded they fled to Kenya, where they were arrested by local militia and US soldiers and sent to the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.

Awad claims that they were held on a military base and interrogated, sometimes for 12 hours at a time or longer, and were not given access to a lawyer. He says that they were accused by the Americans of being al-Qaida fighters. DNA samples were taken and they were questioned about Swedish Muslims. He says they were sometimes beaten or choked and only those who cooperated were allowed to sit or were given something to eat.

It just keeps getting better, doesn’t it? Headline Junky comments here.

The eternal question. Or "Bart Kein Bart" in the original German. I’m growing mine for the whole James Russell Lowell schtick. Hey, I’m at the Atlantic now, home of the nineteenth-century-serious-fucking-beard cabal. Matt and Ross are catching up, but they really need to put in more effort:

I was about 50-50 on this fascinating video online science test. Try it yourself. Apparently,

when a smile is genuine, the eye cover fold – the fleshy part of the eye between the eyebrow and the eyelid – moves downwards and the end of the eyebrows dip slightly.

I hope that’s not a spoiler.

(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty.)

I’m generally opposed to any government attempt to regulate membership in private clubs, but this British proposal exempts gender-exclusive clubs and targets only those clubs that allow women, but as second-class members. I guess the point is: you can discriminate but you can’t condescend.

A science blogger looks at a Gallup poll of Americans. I wouldn’t go as far as Pharyngula, but when bloggers  or columnists argue that Christianism hasn’t profoundly altered what it means to be a Republican, consider this:

Interesting, isn’t it, that Independents are the most Darwinian. I’m guessing that large numbers of religious African-Americans skew the Democrats toward fundamentalism.

Here’s a pretty revealing statement:

By a 2-1 ruling, the court held that an alien terrorist who is lawfully in the United States may not be held without trial as an enemy combatant.

Notice that Andy McCarthy knows that someone is an alien terrorist – before any trial or any due process. How does he know? Because the president has said so.

"The political left has basically degenerated into a self-congratulatory echo chamber of moral status competition whose Potemkin village ideals the actual steelgrip working class can no longer even recognize, and therefore votes conservatives instead," – blogger fourthcheckraise. Wait, there’s more.

We are all subject, apparently:

The American people seem to understand, however — and historians will certainly agree — that the war itself was a catastrophic mistake. It was a faulty grand strategy, not poor implementation. The Bush administration was operating under an international political illusion, one that is further discredited with every car bombing of a crowded Baghdad marketplace and every Iraqi doctor who packs up his family and flees his country.

The only significant question still hanging is whether Iraq will turn out to have been the biggest strategic mistake in U.S. history. Vietnam was a much greater moral disaster, of course, and led to far more death and destruction. But, just as the war’s critics predicted in the 1960s, Vietnam turned out to be strategically irrelevant. Saigon fell, but no dominoes followed; the balance of Cold War power did not change.

Iraq has the potential to be far worse. One of the oft-expressed worst-case scenarios for Iraq — a repeat of Lebanon in the 1980s — may no longer be within reach. Lebanon’s simmering civil war eventually burned itself out and left a coherent, albeit weak, state in its ashes. Iraq could soon more closely resemble Somalia in the 1990s, an utterly collapsed, uncontrollable, lawless, failed state that destabilizes the most vital region in the world.

I agree with all of that except the last. The Middle East is only truly important because of our addiction to oil. And we have the ability to change that – not that anyone seems seriously to be trying. The moment when politicans get serious about that, they’ll propose a real gas tax increase. Right now, they’re still unserious.