Month: March 2011

The Forbidden Question

Ron Rosenbaum recounts the moving tale of the Cold War Major kicked out of the Air Force for asking whether flipping the nuclear switch could ever be considered lawful orders. Rosenbaum tracked him down to understand why the question still matters:

Any president could, on his own, leave a room, and in 25 minutes, 70 million (or more than that) would be dead. Not likely but in the new, more unstable, multi-polar nuclear age we've entered, Maj. Hering's question about the instability or sanity of the president himself remains valid, as does the larger sanity question: Can any order to kill 20 million with the twist of a wrist be sane? 

“Nobody Goes To Jail”

Matt Taibbi checks in on the banking industry:

The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don't feel real; you don't see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They're crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let's steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy.

Where The Hell Is God?

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Jim Martin offers some Jesuit reflections on the theodicy question in the wake of the catastrophe in Japan. This anecdote made me smile:

Believers are rightly suspicious of easy answers to suffering. My mother once told me of an elderly nun who was living at a retirement home with my 90-year-old grandmother. One day the woman's religious superior came to visit. The elderly nun began to speak about how much pain she was enduring. "Think of Jesus on the Cross," said her superior.

The elderly nun replied, "Jesus was only on the Cross for three hours.”

But Martin's real point is less trivial:

Richard Leonard, an Australian Jesuit priest, wrote about his experience with such facile answers in his recent book Where the Hell is God?

Richard's family has been touched with great suffering. His father died of a massive stroke at the age of 36, leaving his mother to care for Richard, then two, and his siblings. At dawn on Richard's 25th birthday, his Jesuit superior woke him to summon him to the phone for an urgent call from his mother. His sister Tracey, a nurse working at a healthcare facility for aboriginal people, had been involved in a terrible car accident. When Richard and his mother reached the hospital their worst fears were confirmed: Tracey was a quadriplegic.

Through tears, Richard's mother began to ask him questions about suffering that put his faith to the test. Richard called it "the most painful and important theological discussion I will ever have in my life.” "Where the hell is God?" his mother asked.

(Photo: In this handout image provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), model runs from the Center for Tsunami Research at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory show the expected wave heights of the tsunami as it travels across the Pacific basin March 11, 2011. By NOAA via Getty Images)

Quote For The Day II

"Movement Progressives should stop and think for a moment about what is happening in America before they go and AEI themselves. That’s when a formerly innovative and insightful group fails to recognize that they have won the war of ideas, can’t stop lashing out at old enemies and subsequently turns into a bastion of harpies shell of its former self," – Karl Smith.

What It Is To Be Old

Jane Miller reflects:

I have no attachment to this new look. But its very foreignness affords solace, curiously, and I have no impulse to apologize for it or cover it up, even when, as happened recently, a two-year-old boy looked up from his scooter to ask me if I was a man. I suppose he wouldn’t have asked if there hadn’t been some chance of my not being.

(Video: One Minute Puberty from bitteschön.tv on Vimeo)

Another Neocon War!

"I think at this point you probably have to do more than a no fly zone. You probably have to tell Qaddafi he has to stop his movement east and that we are going to use assets to stop him from slaughtering people as he moves east across the country. We might take out his ships in the Mediterranean. We might take out tanks and artillery," – Bill Kristol, demanding another full-on war in a country he doesn't understand.

Kristol, recall, was one of the architects of the two worst military clusterfucks since Vietnam – a decade long nation-building effort in Afghanistan (why not the Congo?) and an invasion of Iraq on false pretenses, leading to the deaths of over a hundred thousand people while the country was under direct US supervision. It is, I understand, too much to ask of such war-mongerers whether they have any sense of shame left – that tends to be surgically removed during Fox News contract negotiations. But is it too much to ask that they acknowledge that the last two wars they argued for with such moral preening led to a human catastrophe, with no long-term security gains for the US, and vast amounts of debt? Is a total lack of reflection or responsibility now mandatory with these people?

The Place To Be Anonymous

Vanessa Grigoriadis visits the 4chan underworld:

There are almost 800,000 posts a day on 4chan, more than 550 per minute, and few rules on the site, other than “1. You do not talk about /b/. 2. You do not talk about /b/. 3. If it exists, there is porn about it. No exceptions.” The posts are often posed in the form of questions, soliciting responses, like “Can someone please post hot girls biting their lips”; “Can we do a DDoS attack on the conservative government in the UK over student tuition fee increases, hate those bastards”; “I messed up with my girlfriend, well I’ve only IM-ed with her because she lives in Canada, but I didn’t write her back last night and now she won’t talk to me, please help”; “My dog is dying, I put her down tomorrow, I put a steak on the grill but what else should I do to make her life good tonight?”; “Guys please post pictures of sexy men dressed as cute girls, but I am straight, ok?” Also, lots of cats. Trolls, as it turns out, love cats.

The Toll

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The most arresting visual imagery of the earthquake and tsunami off Japan is here. It's an interactive aerial photograph of various locations before and after the tsunami – from the Australian Broadcasting Company. The Atlantic's slide-show, whence the image above, by Alan Taylor is here.

Readers have asked why we haven't covered this event exhaustively. My answer is that this is a natural disaster, unlike, say, a revolution or a war, which requires little added comment. The news speaks for itself. But as it unfolds, we will keep our eyes open.

(Photo: A wave approaches Miyako City from the Heigawa estuary in Iwate Prefecture after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck the area March 11, 2011. Picture taken March 11, 2011. By Mainichi Shimbun via Reuters.)