Month: October 2007

Obsidian Wings:

None of the statements that I’ve read today give me any real information or reassurance about what he will do as Attorney General. Not without a specific denunciation of the 2004 and 2005 OLC torture memos; or a willingness to say that specific techniques like waterboarding, hypothermia, and painful stress positions are banned; or a pledge to release the publicly release the legal justifications for “enhanced interrogation” & wireless surveillance instead of treating the administration’s constitutional law arguments as state secrets. The statements that “I categorically denounce torture,” “the United States doesn’t torture,” “torture is antithetical to our values”—they are meaningless from members of this administration. It’s past time for the press to learn this, and to stop writing credulous headlines about how the “Attorney General Nominee Rejects Torture.” But I doubt that’s going to happen when the Democrats abdicate and fail to ask hard questions.

Amen to all that. And: sigh.

My favorite Monty Python sketch ever:

The debate explodes again with James Watson’s public statements about differences between Africans and Europeans. Saletan comments here:

Never be afraid to consider testable claims about your sex or ethnicity.

No one disputes that the raw data overwhelmingly show clear bell-curve differences between racial groups on IQ. That applies just as much to bell-curve variations between Asians and Caucasians as between Africans and Caucasians. No one disputes either that the IQ variations within ethnic and racial groupings exceed any differences between them. What’s disputed is the relative influence of genes and environment – and their interaction – on these results. One thing Watson undoubtedly gets right: before too long, we will know a great deal more. The advances in genetic understanding and neuroscience could begin to resolve this question as an empirical matter. Then, of course, there’s this (PDF file):

The United States, which is home to just 4% of the global population aged 5 to 25 years, accounts for more than one-quarter of the global public education budget.  It spends as much as all governments in six global regions combined: the Arab States, Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, South and West Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa.

The American government spends 28% of the world’s public expenditure on education, a proportion that exceeds its share of global wealth – which represents 21% of global GDP.  Similar cases are seen in France, Germany and the United Kingdom, where their shares of education spending outweigh their individual proportions of the world’s school-age population and global wealth.

Just one indicator, of course: campaign donations from active service military members. And guess who’s first? Ron Paul. Second? Barack Obama. Those tasked to actually fighting this war get it, don’t they?

A dog models a rain coat and a rescue jacket, designed to be used in emergency situations, at a Security and Safety Trade Expo on October 18, 2007 in Tokyo, Japan. The jacket, designed by a Japanese company, Sidereal, enables dogs to carry their own emergency goods including water, biscuits and bandages. By Junko Kimura/Getty Images.

Finally gets a serious rapid responder.

In honor of Friedrich’s 163rd birthday (Monday), here’s a classic Atlantic piece by one great American iconoclast about one great Polish one. Yes, Polish:

As for Nietzsche himself, the one firm faith of his life was his belief in his Polish origin. He cultivated a disorderly, truculent, and what he conceived to be Polish façade, wearing an enormous and bristling mustache. He wrote a book, which was privately printed, to prove that the true form of his name was Nietzschy, and that it was Polish and noble. It delighted him when the people at some obscure watering-place, deceived by his looks, nicknamed him ‘The Polack.’ The one unforgivable insult was to call him a German…

Do not mistake me here. I am not saying that the Germans adopted Nietzsche in any general and unanimous sense, as the Arabs, for example, adopted Mohammed, or as the Americans adopted the Declaration of Independence.

To the common people he was inevitably a dose of very bitter caviare: in so far as they were aware of him at all, they could scarcely understand him, and in so far as they could understand him, they were mocked and outraged by him. Nor was he more palatable to the elements which represented, in the new empire, the ideas carried over from the last and previous ages—for example, the adherents of the church and the survivors and mourners of the old aristocracy. For that church and that aristocracy he had only the fiercest of scorn. Against the one he was yet to launch _The Antichrist_, without question the most devastating attack ever made upon Christian morals in ancient or modern times. And at the aristocracy he had already flung the insult of ranking it second in his new order of castes, putting it with ‘those whose eminence is chiefly muscular,’ and dismissing it as fit only to ‘execute the mandates of the first caste, relieving the latter of all that is coarse and menial in the work of ruling.’ Nor were these the only groups which found little but effrontery and atheism in his new scheme of things. He was iconoclast even before he was prophet. His whole philosophy was a herculean treading upon toes.

The president, he believes, can break some laws. But he’ll try to prevent complete lawlessness in the executive branch. Good grief.

Heilemann says so. From his mouth to God’s ears.

What happens when 111 guys decide to go to the Abercrombie Store in NYC and coordinate a collective shirt-removal at 4.37 pm? A mild amount of culture clash. Heh:

Soon enough, the model growled: "I’m not playing your game any more." Video here.