Month: November 2009

Beastie Boys meets Star Wars. "It's a trap!"

Original "Sabotage" here.

Going down the artistic rabbit hole.

In thinking through the rather good ads that eventually came out in Maine, many are arguing that future marriage campaigns need to go negative against the anti-gay forces. Steve Hildebrand tells Rex Wockner:

We are fools to have spent all this money and time and not have defined the opponents. It's not enough to answer their charges. We need to hit them back and not let up on it until voters don't buy their lies anymore. Malpractice in my opinion.

We can, of course, do both. A campaign that in future took on the Catholic hierarchy for its tolerance of child abuse while denying grown people marriage rights would be a promising start. Ads reminding people of the Mormon church's long, long history of racism would also be salient. We're new to this, and we're learning.

With a shoe.

Jim Windolf explores the science behind adorable animals:

“It’s part of our DNA to react to cute things,” says Meg Frost, who founded Cute Overload in 2005. “What makes me post certain pictures is if I have an audible reaction—a squeal—when I see the picture. I’m kind of annoyed at myself for having no control over thinking these things are so cute. […]

Specifically, [biologist Melanie] Glocker’s series of experiments demonstrated that the act of looking at baby pictures stirs up an ancient part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. “It’s in the midbrain,” Glocker says, with a slight Teutonic accent, “which is an evolutionarily older part of the brain involved in reward processing. This region has also been shown to be activated by a variety of rewarding stimuli, including sexual stimuli, food stimuli, and drug stimuli.” Dr. Glocker is too much of a scientist to say so, but her experiments more or less prove that cuteness is physically addicting.

FU Penguin fights the urge to cuddle with the cute dog above:

This dog's name is Snapdragon, which not coincidentally is the PERFECT FUCKING NAME for this Muppet-looking motherfucker. I was sent in this picture by a person pretending to be the owner, but honestly is there any possible way this is a real dog? And if it is a real dog, it should be taken away because it is clearly fucking out of its mind high. THERE IS NO WAY I'M COMING TO SIT ON THAT COUCH WITH YOU, DOG. I don't care how many episodes of Planet Earth you have cued up.

Moshe Halbertal, a professor who helped craft the Israeli army’s ethics code, picks apart the Goldstone report and critiques its "overall biased tone." Nevertheless, he calls the siege of Gaza "morally problematic and strategically counterproductive." Money quote:

Radical groups such as Hamas start their struggle with little support from their population, which tends to be more moderate. They increase their base of support cynically, by murdering Israeli civilians and thereby goading Israel into an overreaction (this is not to deny, of course, that Israel can choose not to overreact) in a way that ends up causing suffering to the Palestinian civilians among whom the militants take shelter. The death and the suffering of the civilian Palestinian population, in the short run, is a part of the Hamas strategy, since it increases the sympathy of the population with the movement’s aims. An Israeli overreaction also leads to the shattering of Israel’s moral legitimacy in its own struggle. In a democratic society with a citizen’s army, any erosion of the ethical foundation of its soldiers and its citizens is of immense political and strategic consequence.

I suspect in due course that Gaza will be understood as immoral, and counter-productive. It repelled me in a way that nothing Israel has done repelled me. It was an act of anger and vengeance and cruelty. And it will come back to haunt the Jewish state.

DiA notices that the leaders of both parties are no longer overwhelmingly southern:

Southerners haven't lost their country, but they have lost power—a power they disproportionately enjoyed for nearly the entire Clinton-Bush II era…"I want my country back," has become a conservative-populist rallying cry. They have not truly lost their country, but have seen a wild swing of power north and towards the coasts. It won't last, either. But it's a painful reality right now for a region that once revelled in separatism, then dominated the country as a whole for an oddly long stretch.

But the South's control of the GOP has never been tighter.

A blog cataloging what bank robbers write to cashiers. At least this guy was polite about it:

The site even has a "thanks" tag.

(Hat tip: BF)

Claire Belinski says the recent tapes and transcripts tell us nothing very interesting or new about the Iron Lady:

The second thing Thatcher told Gorbachev, according to the transcript, was: “A destabilization of Eastern Europe and breakdown of the Warsaw Pact are also not in our interests.” Why might she have said this? Why would not say instead, “We are fomenting the destruction of the Warsaw Pact in the hope of swiftly burying you?” For the answer, recall that in September 1989, no one imagined that within two months, the Iron Curtain would dissolve without a drop of blood.

Much more easily envisioned was a Soviet crackdown and a brutal bloodletting, which had happened, within living memory, in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and which the Chinese had just perpetrated months before in Tiananmen Square. Reasonable observers were worried that East German leader Erich Honecker was about to massacre thousands of people on the streets of Leipzig and Dresden—a step for which Honecker was preparing by stockpiling body bags. It was equally reasonable to fear that Gorbachev was on the verge of sending in Soviet troops. The transcript suggests that Thatcher’s goal was to reassure.

A cop facing a panicked criminal with a loaded gun and a room full of hostages is surely better off saying, “We do not plan to kill you, so stay calm” than “We want you dead, so you better shoot your way out of here.” Thatcher’s goal, at such a meeting, would have been to buy time and do what she could to keep the Soviets from panicking. No responsible politician would have told Gorbachev that she was praying for the destruction of the Warsaw Pact, particularly at a private, high-level diplomatic meeting. It would have been an idiotic provocation.

A less convincing version of Fox News? Greenwald continues the scrutiny:

The Post today has two former Bush officials, one former Reagan official, two right-wing politicians, a Fox News neocon, the CEO of America's largest oil and gas producer, a defender of the right-wing Honduran military coup leaders, and one liberal columnist.