Katharine Gammon teaches you how to win 68% of the time:
If all else fails or you're not the flipper, choose the side that starts facing up. The probability of a coin landing as it started is 51 percent. As the coin flies, that side spends more time face up.
Thanksgiving is over, but the right is already gearing up for the next big holiday:
The Liberal Clause: Socialism on a Sleigh is written by David Hedrick, a Tea Party candidate who lost his bid this year to be the Republican candidate for Washington's third district. You may remember him from this recent story where he is accused of physically assaulting his wife. I think I was the only person to buy a copy of The Liberal Clause last night because Hedrick came over personally to shake my hand, talking excitedly about what he'd created (the book costs $20 so I'm not surprised a lot of people passed). The story, he told me, came naturally one night as he was making up a bedtime story for his children (the book is dedicated to them with the warning "Never forget that free goodies from liberal elves often come at a price"). The satire where Obama steals Christmas that Hedrick came up with on that fateful night was too good not to be illustrated and published for all children to enjoy.
Neil Postman's disturbing question illustrated: which one was right about our future?
Ilya Somin reviews a recent book that takes up the question:
Many Ukrainians and some Western scholars argue that this was a case of genocide because Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin specifically targeted Ukrainian peasants for extermination. By contrast, the Russian government claims that Stalin was an equal opportunity mass murderer. The distinction matters because international law defines mass murder as genocide only if it was the result of an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such.” It also matters because of the ongoing debate over whether communist mass murders deserve as much opprobrium as those of the Nazis.
Anne Applebaum has the most judicious take on this question I've read in a must-read in the NYRB. Her core point: the very definition of genocide was created by Stalin to exempt himself:
Soviet diplomats had demanded the exclusion of any reference to social, economic, and political groups. Had they left these categories in, prosecution of the USSR for the murder of aristocrats (a social group), kulaks (an economic group), or Trotskyites (a political group) would have been possible.
A reader writes:
In Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957), Andy Griffith makes his film debut as Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, a vagrant with folksy charm who gets put on the radio and turns out to be a genius at using good ol' country hokum to manipulate his audience into supporting the politics he supports. He ends up remaking an uptight Republican candidate into a 'reg'lar fella' who hunts, sits around the cracker barrel talking politics, etc. And eventually we see more and more of the manipulator behind Lonesome's mask and what he really thinks of his followers.
I've thought of A Face in the Crowd more than once since Sarah Palin's ascent, and even moreso since her "reality show" debuted. If the film were remade today, people would think Palin was a huge inspiration.
The latest Wikileaks bombshell is a bundle of diplomatic cables and documents that could allegedly make headlines:
Washington has warned its ally Israel of potential embarrassment from the expected release of US diplomatic cables on whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, an Israeli newspaper said on Thursday. A senior Israeli official, quoted in Haaretz, said it has been informed that WikiLeaks plans to release hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, some of which could include confidential reports from the US embassy in Tel Aviv. "The Americans said they view the leak very seriously," he told the paper, on condition of anonymity. "They don't know when they will be released on the Internet and what exactly they say, but they didn't want us to read about it in the newspapers," the Israeli official said.
Max Fisher has a remarkable and exclusive story on how for one month last year, Libya balked at the final measure to relinquish its nuclear stockpile:
The month-long crisis, never revealed by the Obama administration or reported in the press, is recorded in U.S. State Department documents obtained by The Atlantic. Those documents tell the story of frantic diplomatic maneuvering as U.S. and Russian officials pushed Libyan leaders to honor their disarmament pledge. A person with access to the cables provided them to The Atlantic in order to publicize the dangers of loose nuclear materials under the control of unpredictable regimes in unstable countries.
A reader writes:
I'd actually like to nominate the Pet Shop Boys song "I'm With Stupid" as a great political song.
Is stupid really stupid
or a different kind of smart?
Do we really have a relationship
so special in your heart?It's classic PSB, because it works on so many levels. Is it really about a personal relationship, or is it about Tony Blair and George Bush? Apparently the PSB performed the song on the BBC and in Germany with dancers wearing Blair and Bush masks….
It's obviously about Blair and Bush – but again, so disguised as a regular song it fails to meet the pious "Shut Up And Sing" criterion. But another reader writes:
Give me a break. An ode to the "power of music" to overcome political oppression isn't a tad bit pretentious?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Pet Shop Boys nerd myself, I'm with you on most of your fandom, and agree with you completely on "Taken Seriously" and so on. But I think Neil fell into the all-too-common trap of, well, taking himself too seriously here. He does that occasionally–so do most people in his position. It's hardly uncommon, or a mortal sin. But if music's power to "transcend everything" is all that's needed, why don't we just buy every Afghan a smartphone and an iTunes subscription? It'd certainly be cheaper than supporting all those troops over there. (Disclosure: one of those troops is my nephew, so I'm not exactly impartial about this.)
Yes, most of PSB's positions are anti-pretension. That doesn't change the fact that this specific song is as egregious as they come, and I say that as a fan.
One important point here is that the lyrics cited by my first reader were actually written by Sterling Void, not Neil Tennant. Alas, Neil added a second verse about environmental collapse. Still, this was not a PSB original, but a cover of a House classic. And its point is not that music will solve everything, but that music will survive, if nothing else does. And note this nuance: "I hope it's gonna be alright." Hope is not a lecture.
And suddenly, fiction becomes fact. Except, of course, that the bomb is a fake one planted by federal agents. In many ways, it's a comforting story – a tale of the government being alert, crafty and successful in finding and trapping a wannabe teenage Jihadist.
A reader writes:
Whom else would we have turned to, for advice on ending the Cold War arms race, if not Sting? He is so pretentious as a given that it's hard to see this song as anything but a reversion to form. I like the riff on Prokofiev, though. And the visuals – vaguely Fritz Lang, vaguely Hitchcock, but with rhythmic gymnastics! And of course wind machines, for Sting's hair.
Another writes:
If you only take one submission for this contest, let it be "Russians", for its preening over an attempt to make moral equivalence look like a brave stand.
The Dish 