Month: March 2011

No, not the mother on Real Housewives Of Miami, Elsa. The Daily What has the answer:

Story goes that, in 1731, King Frederick I of Sweden received a lion skin as a gift from the Bey of Algiers. The taxidermist tasked with mounting it had never seen a lion in real life, and only had a vague idea of what one was supposed to look like. The resulting monstrosity (above) remains on display at Gripsholm Castle for all to see. As Redditor Damage02 points out, it makes you wonder how wrong all our dinosaurs sculptures are.

Pareene calls Michelle Rhee's defense of questionable DC test scores Nixonian:

I'm sorry, but this is the "haters gonna hate" defense. It's just a blanket assertion of bias without any sort of attempt to refute the actual charges leveled against her.

Diane Ravitch asks, "What will this revelation mean for Rhee's campaign to promote her test-driven reforms?":

Her theory seemed to be that if she pushed incentives and sanctions hard enough, the scores would rise. Her theory was right, the scores did rise, but they didn't represent genuine learning. She incentivized desperate behavior by principals and teachers trying to save their jobs and meet their targets and comply with their boss' demands.

Earlier analysis by Dana Goldstein here.

They're here:

[A]t these prices, you do sacrifice some of the salon-buying experience. There's no fancy, individual dressing room, fresh-cut flowers in the sitting area and no champagne for you and your entourage to sip as you giggle and try on dresses. Instead, you get one attentive salesperson, a narrow community dressing room with little mirrors, and the appointments are limited to 30 minutes.

If you're brave enough to venture out of the dressing room to look at yourself in the 3-way mirror, you're more than welcome, even encouraged, but be warned that you will also probably be in full view of Costco shoppers, gawking at TVs and cameras, carrying 25-pound pans of microwave lasagne and 50-pound bags of Fresh Step kitty litter.

Via the curation of Courtney Knapp, who comments: "The best part about Costco wedding dresses is the two extra dresses in your value-pack, just in case your first marriage doesn't work out."

Vivaldi's Winter (I) of "The Four Seasons" using a beer orchestra:

Benjamin H. Friedman makes a strong case for funding wars within the defense budget:

[P]utting war funding in the Pentagon budget means that other defense programs get cut to make way, heightening tradeoffs among military objectives. That requires strategy. Robert Gates brags about forcing the Pentagon to sacrifice long-term priorities to fund today’s wars. But what’s extraordinary is the limited nature of his efforts and the Pentagon’s ability to avoid changing its priorities amidst two wars.

Frum wishes Tim Pawlenty hadn't pushed dealing with climate change entirely off the table:

[W]hoever is president after 2013 will inherit both an improving economy – and also an accelerating climate-change problem. Why put yourself on record now in ways that will inhibit responding to environmental challenges in the future?

The above graph shows that public concern on climate change peaked around 2000. Kevin Drum thinks this explains the GOP's climate change reversal.

As the book is being banned in parts of India, the author addresses the speculation:

"The book does not say that Gandhi was bisexual or homosexual," [Joseph] Lelyveld wrote in an email. "It says that he was celibate and deeply attached to Kallenbach. This is not news." … Sudhir Kakar, a psychoanalyst who has written about Gandhi's sexuality and reviewed some of his correspondence with Kallenbach, said he does not believe the two men were lovers. "It is quite a wrong interpretation," he said.

When will these people realize that a man whose greatest love was for another man – whether he was celibate or not – was fricking gay. Being gay is not about having sex, for the umpteenth time. It's about being emotionally and sexually attracted to someone of the same gender. If the facts Lelyveld gathers are correct, then Gandhi was gay, even though those who still have no clue about homosexuality deny it. The same goes for Lincoln. You can put any cultural or historical gloss on it – and, yes, gayness required elaborate forms of euphemism and artifice in days gone by. But a passionate and long-lived crush on another man, romantically and sexually, even if nothing happens, is called homosexuality. Deal with it.

Daniel Holz makes the connection:

Frankenstein’s creation is not inherently evil. He is endowed with the spark of life, and becomes twisted into a dark and inhuman creature through mistreatment, abandonment, and neglect. The nuclear spark is similarly indifferent. Although it can have terrible consequences, it also offers the ability to power our civilization without warming our planet. The dangers attendant with nuclear power almost certainly pale in comparison with the dangers of global warming. The challenge is to learn to control our discovery, rather than become engulfed by it.

Doug Mataconis compares the doctrine of "right to protect" to neoconservatism:

…the R2pers use their own sense of moral superiority and self-righteousness to hide a bitter reality; that their doctrine is far from being the grand paean to universal human rights that they like to pretend that it is. For one thing, it’s fairly clear that not every act of genocide will be addressed by the international community… Libya was picked mostly because it was an easy target, and because Muammar Gaddafi has no real friends left in the world, a fact brought home by the fact that neither Russia nor China did anything to stop UNSCR 1973.  Everyone dislikes Gaddafi, which, combined with the geography of Libya itself, makes him an easy target. The “Responsibility To Protect” Doctrine, therefore, seems more like an excuse for Europeans and Americans on the left to support intervention not because it protects the vital interests of the nations they live in, but because it makes them feel good.

There’s another similarity between the R2P crowd and the neo-cons, of course. In both cases, there is an absolute sense of certainty that causes people to ignore the facts on the ground. For the neo-cons, the certainty that we’d be greeted as liberators by the people of Iraq and Afghanistan caused them to discount the necessity for any kind of post-war planning, and to believe that merely introducing “democratic” institutions into nations that had never known democracy would lead to an immediate transformation that took decades, if not centuries, in the West. For the R2P’ers, it’s absolutely certainty that merely being guided by the desire to “help” people is sufficient to accomplish their goals, meaning that there’s no need to worry about the fact that the rebels you’re protecting are allied with a terrorist group, or that the conflict your’re intervening in may be more tribal than political. Finally, for both the neo-con and the R2Per there is the overwhelming certainty that they are better judges of the future of a nation than the people who actually live there.

(Photo: Samantha Power, an Obama adviser apparently central to his decision to launch a third US-led war in a Muslim country, about which we know close to nothing. By Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for HBO.)

Disgusted by the GOP field, Joe Klein begs Mitch Daniels and Jeb Bush to throw their hats in the ring. Kevin Drum wonders how Daniels would get through the primaries without losing his soul:

When he hops over to Iowa, they'll expect him to denounce sharia law, make jokes about Obama's Kenyan birth, throw himself wholeheartedly into the culture wars, pretend that global warming is a liberal conspiracy, and make dire remarks about the specter of socialism taking over America. In other words, he'll have to act like a public clown, and if he doesn't do it, he'll lose.

So it's pretty much a no-win scenario for him. If he's smart, he'll wait for 2016 and hope that the Republican Party has come to its senses by then.