Month: October 2007

Niall Ferguson dissects Barry Posen’s big-think essay on reimagining American foreign policy after Iraq:

Posen has proceeded from relatively familiar premises (the limits of American “hyperpower”) to some quite fantastic policy recommendations, which are perhaps best summed up as a cross between isolationism and humanitarianism. Only slightly less fantastic than his vision of an American military retreat from the Middle East, Europe and East Asia is Posen’s notion that it could be sold to the American electorate—just six years after they were the targets of the single largest terrorist attack in history—in the language of self-effacement. Coming from a man who wants to restart mainstream debate on American grand strategy, that is pretty rich.

Fukuyama is more impressed. It’s a rich series of points and counterpoints.

A reader writes:

It struck me the other day that Alan Keyes is running for president, and we’ve heard next to nothing from him since he announced that he was running. I did a little digging and found that it’s not for lack of effort on his part. The two main factors that have contributed to his ‘silence’ are:

1) He has been denied the right to participate in the major GOP debates thus far.  How cowardly on the part of the GOP.  The only one he has been invited to so far was the one held in Baltimore a few weeks back. None of the major candidates even showed up (Ron Paul was the best known of the group).

2) The media hasn’t reported on his campaign at all!  Fox spent weeks talking about Obama’s lapel jewelry, but has done next to nothing on Keyes (a Republican). Even your blog has been very Keyes-lite.

I’m not supporting him for president, but having Alan Keyes not only in this race, but a vocal part of it, can only have great results for not only the party, but the nation.  He doesn’t have a prayer to win, but his ability to sink into the stupidity. We need an intellectual rottweiler to thin out the pack, so lets let Keyes loose.

Get him on Colbert!

TPM summarizes part of the testimony of the nominee for attorney general, Michael Mukasey, thus:

The Bybee memo is "worse than a sin, it’s a mistake," Mukasey said. He referenced the photographs taken by U.S. troops who liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1945 to document the "barbarism" the U.S. opposed. "They didn’t do that so we could duplicate what we oppose."

"Duplicate what we opposed"? Nazi concentration camps? Does that remind you of anyone?

In a Senate floor speech Tuesday, [Senator Dick] Durbin cited an FBI report describing Guantanamo Bay prisoners chained to the floor in the fetal position without food or water and sometimes in extreme temperatures.

"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control," he said, "you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings."

Is it not clear that Mukasey’s and Durbin’s point is exactly the same? And do you recall, as I do, the phenomenal blog-storm and Fox News conniption and outrage from every other pro-torture platform on the web? Here’s a classic Reynolds-Steyn post ridiculing and scorning those who were concerned about what was going on at Gitmo. Let’s see if Reynolds or Steyn will lambaste the incoming attorney-general on the same grounds, shall we? Or will their double standards reveal their partisan hackery again?

What does it say that a leading Republican can boast of support from an institution that has a deep history of racism and religious bigotry? And what does it say of a Mormon to cater to a man who once denigrated Mormonism? Bainbridge asks the question. The answer is that Romney is putting power before decency, as Bush did before him in South Carolina. That’s something to remember about a candidate. I had a conniption about Bush’s catering to BJU bigotry in 2000 and then swiftly forgot about it. I didn’t see it as the harbinger that it was: of a GOP rooted in religious prejudice, racial fears, and sexual panic. I’ve learned my lesson.

The World Bank says something smart:

Rich countries are largely rich because of the skills of their populations and the quality of the institutions supporting economic activity.

And poor countries don’t get richer because of our foreign aid. 

The photo above is made up of parts of dissected fish. It’s by British photo-artist, Michael England, who is interviewed by Ping Mag here. Money quote:

Why are you so into dissection and rebuilding things? Any special experience in your childhood…?

Dissection isn’t my only approach; I approach some work straighter than others. I came from a typographic and photographic background. As regards what has influenced the whole rebuilding thing, I guess, this would be LEGO: I spent years as a child rebuilding LEGO into what I wanted as opposed to following the instructions. I never really did any work on frogs or other creatures when I was young. I dont want to sound like some graphic Frankenstein nor morbid in anyway I really appreciate life, especially its beauty. Although i am not a vegetarian, I don’t kill anything other than fly’s and mosquito’s.

Did you discover anything special through your production process?

When working in dissection mode, I think what I have discovered is that the most mundane elements offer real beauty when seen in detail, which is usually not noticed with the naked eye. In the rebuilding process you find that form is infinite and the context of the subject can be completely altered into something visually new. It can change conceptually as well.

The nominee for attorney-general is an American. Which means that, in the core of his being, he opposes torture – and holds that the president has no right whatever to over-rule the laws against torture, as he has done. Mukasey even understands that what Bush has done can be understood within the context of the horrors of the Holocaust, of what Americans fought a long and good war to oppose and prevent. This is an extremely heartening development: that the new attorney-general may finally resist and roll back the putsch against the constitution and the rule of law perpetrated by this president, vice-president and their apparatchiks. Know hope. American can come back. We can win this war, without surrendering to the barbarism innovated by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.

What else is Pelosi supposed to do?

Rick Perry sees the analogy.

As they grow older, they seem to sense their mortality and try to compensate:

Worker ants accurately gauge their life expectancy, regardless of their actual age, and take on riskier tasks as they feel their days ebbing away.