Month: September 2009

(Hat tip: BF)

The latest twists in the story here. Suicide does not seem to me plausible, but motives for the murder are still under investigation.

Lowry loved Scheuneman's speech. But the import is as follows:

Palin is an authentic, powerful voice of the populist right and in the speech she implicitly connects its call for limited government and sensible fiscal policy with America's role as a world power. Palin can play a very important role in channeling the inchoate populist anger out there in a responsible direction, which makes it all the more important that she engage on the issues in a serious way and avoid rhetorical over-kill.

There is, of course, nothing authentic about Palin – including this speech dictated to her by the neocons.

She remains a monument to cynicism, opportunism and deception. But her endorsement of maximal American military projection across every inch of the globe is an important backstop for establishment conservatism's embrace of endless empire. It helps them claim the mantle of limited government, even as they embrace open-ended, trillion dollar nation-building halfway across the planet, and expand government's reach and incompetence at home. She's a starburst meant to hold the teetering coalition together. And Lowry's still tumescent.

An amazing archeological discovery in England:

The Staffordshire Hoard contains about 5kg of gold and 2.5kg of silver, making it far bigger than the Sutton Hoo discovery in 1939 when 1.5kg of Anglo-Saxon gold was found near Woodbridge in Suffolk. Leslie Webster, former keeper at the British Museum's Department of Prehistory and Europe, said: "This is going to alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England as radically, if not more so, as the Sutton Hoo discoveries.

"(It is) absolutely the equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells."

One of the better submissions so far:

If you visit a farm, you'll notice it stinks like manure. But if you live there, you don't notice a thing.

Unlike the frog metaphor, it is biologically true that the intensity of a smell drops after the nose adjusts, but this phrase doesn't have the same deadly message. Another reader:

There are good natural selection reasons why a simple biological analogy will be false. But not if you change the valence of the end state.

If I try to run 6 miles today, I'll probably give myself a heart attack.  But if I jog a quarter mile today, and tomorrow, and every other day this week, and then a half mile every day next week, and three quarters mile the third week etc, then in 6 months, I'll be able to run 6 miles.

And there are analogies from perception.  One is the volume on your car stereo which you turn up just a bit, and then up just a bit, and then up just a bit.  Then you get home and turn the car off.  When you get back in the car, "Boom!"  How did the volume get to be so loud? So you dramatically reduce the volume on the stereo and on the way to work you turn the volume up just a bit, and then up just a bit…

(Photo: Andy Lyons/Getty.)

James Poulos brilliantly defends his fellow pomocons by rebutting Nate Silver, who has labeled Glenn Beck a pomocon. This insight into Beck is priceless:

A word about Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck is the worst. But why? Not so much because of who he distrusts or why. From where I’m standing, Beck is so awful because he theatrically combines and conflates performances of ultimate sincerity with performances of ultimate sarcasm. I think this is a telltale sign of a soul disordered by a confusion of love, power, and resentment. It becomes impossible, in such a person, to tell quite where their selfless solidarity, their egotism, and their hatred borne of weakness begin or end.

And the titillating quality of this unstable charisma is precisely what they latch onto and exploit to become less a famous person than a famous happening. Their individual being becomes incidental to the phenomenon they represent. They actually corrode or dissolve their own identity in order to experience some hugeness that seems impossible to experience as a normal, integral human being. Any actual pomocon looks on that kind of allure as troublesome and dangerous, and the kind of personin thrall to it as no pomocon.

"Packaging's Life" from Silvio Giordano on Vimeo.

“This is the Abu Ghraib of journalism!…Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib, everywhere you go. I heard that two million times, from when they reported in 2004 to right now. This is the Abu Ghraib of Abu Ghraib. Abu Ghraibs for everyone! NEA Abu Ghraib! White House Abu Ghraib! ACORN Abu Ghraib! Journalism Abu Ghraib! You’ve all been exposed, you corrupt bastards," Andrew Breitbart, discussing the ACORN videos unveiled by his website, BigGovernment.com.

It's becoming clearer that Hollywood has made Breitbart nuts. I understand why. But embracing torture simply because a few celebs oppose it seems, well, a function of the derangement that has helped destroy the right for the past few years. That is not to say that Breitbart's sponsorship of the ACORN bust is a bad thing – just that the self-congratulation and paranoia undermines the impact, rather than helping it. Shafer gets it right, I think. It was:

one part 60 Minutes, two parts Punk'd, three parts Ali G, and four parts Michael Moore, all bubbling under a whipped topping of yellow journalism.

Which is what the First Amendment is all about.

Larison makes the realist case with his customary bluntness:

Egypt and Jordan can remain at peace with Israel despite the profound unpopularity of this arrangement because the governments are unaccountable and authoritarian. Surely the elections in Gaza should tell us that democratization allows people with deep grievances to vent them by empowering the most extreme and radical elements. This has proved to be ruinous for people in Gaza and far from what Israel wants. Democratization and regional stability are incompatible. If you desire one, you cannot have the other.

I don’t buy the argument that in the long run, autocracies are more stable than democracies, even in the Middle East. 

Look at Iran. There are enormous risks to over-speedy democratization, especially in the Arab Middle East, but in the long run, democracies, by giving people the ability to vent and protest through nonviolent means are far stabler than the alternative. It’s how to get from there to here in a minefield full of ancient grievance and weapons of mass destruction that’s the hard part. For that we need leaders of judgment and skill. For the first time in quite a while, we may have some.

Responding to this ad, "No On 1" proponents hit back hard:

The Maine press is also exposing the anti-marriage side's fear-mongering and lies.