Sam Steffer, 7, listens to Donald Trump during the 2011 Palm Beach County Tax Day Tea Party on April 16, 2011 at Sanborn Square in Boca Raton, Florida. Trump is considering a bid for the 2012 presidency and is expected to announce his running in the coming weeks. By John W. Adkisson/Getty Images.
The question here is as intense as it was in the Second World War when a Christian preacher with impeccable anti-Nazi credentials decided he could not stand by as the Allies set German cities, crammed with civilians, on fire:
What would Bishop Bell have thought of America’s use of unmanned drones to bomb targets seen only on computer screens thousands of miles away — i.e., at Creech Air Force Base, in Nevada? For unmanned drone aircraft are an extreme case of mediated warfare, in which the combatant — the distant operator of the drone — is so far removed from the action that he or she can only have a highly detached sense of responsibility for the action.
The enemy on the ground is disembodied almost entirely because the combatant is sitting in front of a screen far from the physical site of conflict. Charles Lindbergh warned of this long ago — that bombing from the air could remove the human element from combat.
Bell’s point, in his context, was that aerial bombing was taking human responsibility out of the equation.
The bishop kept pulling photos out of his pocket, which his anti-Nazi contacts had gotten to him, that told their story of the human torches, mostly women and children, that the British raids were creating. Bell felt that if he could just show people in England what was actually happening on the ground in Germany, they would be repelled and question the bombing. He lamented that the Royal Air Force pilots could not possibly see the results of their work and were thereby detached from the human cost of what they were doing.
What I wonder at today is not so much the existence of un-manned drones that kill “anonymously” but that there is so little opposition in this country to their use.
This op-ed, unsurprisingly, was turned down by the Washington Post.
Charles Q. Choi explores why we think our own dreams are so profound:
[Director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Harvard Medical School Robert] Stickgold notes that during REM sleep, when dreaming typically occurs, the release of the neurotransmitter serotonin is shut off in the brain. The only other time that happens is because of LSD, "when people seem to have these totally uninteresting experiences they describe as profoundly meaningful called 'acid insights.'"
This sense of meaning may be a physical phenomenon "just like hunger or thirst, save that it's the excitement we feel upon a great insight, that 'Aha!' feeling," Stickgold says. "Who knows why, for instance, fireworks often seem to trigger it — maybe there's something about the geometric patterns that evokes this sense of awesomeness, the feeling that we can almost understand something amazing but not quite that drives us to seek a better understanding of things. It's like what you feel during a religious experience — you sense the oneness of mankind."
She's back in Wisconsin! And she's doin' her usual. McGinniss notes:
She said, “I’m here as a patriot, as a taxpayer, and as a former union member.”
I said, “Huh?” Lord, lordy, in all my research I somehow must have missed Sarah’s blue collar union days. But at least there’s still time to write about them in my last chapter, due June 4. So I checked.
Turns out that Vince Beltrami, president of Alaska AFL-CIO, already wrote about those glory days – on Feb. 19, in the Anchorage Daily News.
Beltrami was irked by the “utter hypocrisy” of Sarah urging (via Facebook) her “union brothers and sisters” to oppose the protests against Wisconsin Gov. Walker’s signing into law a bill that stripped public employees of union rights.
He wrote, “She belonged to my union, the IBEW, for about a minute, over twenty years ago, one summer, in a temporary position.”
Maggie Koerth-Baker puts our chronology in context:
[E]volution does not work towards making humans. That's entirely the wrong way to think about it. The creatures alive today are not our ancestors. Instead of a stair-step, with humans at the top, we stand alongside the kangaroo and the platypus, each of us at the end of its own narrow road. If we look back, into the past, we can see those paths turn and branch and cul-de-sac. Go far enough, and our paths meet at a crossroads. But in between that common ancestor and ourselves, the road is littered with cousins that didn't quite make it.
(Image: Postcards From Google Earth, Bridges, a collection of messed-up 2D to 3D images by Clement Valla)
A must-see from ITN on the brutal, gruesome fight for Misurata:
The sight of a father carrying his soon-to-die painfully young son is hard to banish from the mind. So fair warning.
A reader writes:
I'm a very long time reader of this blog. I haven't written in before, but this obsession with the Palin baby issue has really been bugging me. I'm the last person on earth who could be considered a fan of Sarah Palin. She's awful for many other reasons. Clearly, somebody's lying about something in this story – the pieces don't fit together – but why does that have to lead to us assuming an implausibly far reaching conspiracy about Trig having a different mother?
Why don't we think she just lied about the going into labor in Texas bit, to exaggerate the story and make it seem more dramatic?
People exaggerate stories to make them more dramatic all of the time. Politicians do this even more than the average person (see Hillary Clinton getting shot at by snipers in Bosnia). And, as we've seen from virtually everything else she's done, Palin doesn't ever like to admit she was wrong, so she tried to hush up the lie about where she went into labor after the fact – not the implausible lie about it not being her kid. Rather than there being a massive conspiracy to fool us about Trig's mother – which in addition to requiring the perfect coordination and complicity of the entire hospital staff, the entire staff in the governor's office, and every single teacher and classmate in Wasilla, and every parent of those classmates who would have known that Bristol was already pregnant, to all magically manage to keep their mouths shut – if you take away that bit about going into labor in Texas, it all starts to make a lot more sense.
She is pregnant. She leaves the conference early for one of a million other possible reasons. She flies back to Alaska. Then she goes into labor, has the baby at the hospital in Alaska. Then she (egomaniac that she is), bluffs about why she left the meeting in Texas early and puts out a tall tale about this prolonged birth saga to make her seem like a tough, dramatic figure in the media. Then she realizes she could be caught in her exaggeration, asks the hospital not to comment about the birth, they comply because they really have no reason not to.
That's a significantly smaller conspiracy, not some massive effort to hoodwink us about Trig's maternity. The imaginative hoops we have to jump through to get to this not being her baby are unnecessary when there's a simpler explanation of the inconsistencies in the story that just involves the normal exaggeration and fibbing we've always expected from politicians.
I find that entirely plausible (although Alaska is a much smaller place than my reader implies, and a conspiracy easier to concot, especially long before Palin was in the same kind of spotlight she is in now). And I agree with my reader that there's obviously something odd going on here, even if there are any number of scenarios that could be true. But if that's true, she doubled down on the oddness in "Going Rogue," writing about contractions while she was giving a speech many hours after she claims her water broke. I mean: please. If it's all exaggeration – which in this case means a plain lie designed to make her seem more like the Alaska heroine than the truth (a glamor-seeking wannabe celebrity), then why do we not have an interest in getting Harper Collins to withdraw or correct the book, as was done with another faked and embellished autobiography, by James Frey? What is it about Palin that makes her somehow less accountable than Frey? And somehow less subject to scrutiny?
And why is it so outrageous to ask a public figure to provide evidence to buttress her own case when she has used her children as critical elements in her public appeal? She has even publicly stated she has released medical records and a birth certificate. Why is it so scandalous to ask if we can see them?
Seth Fischer explains why politicians write bad novels:
[B]eing a politician requires putting the human capacity for empathy on hold, or at least minimizing it. It requires putting an idea or a philosophy or a party above people in order not to go mad. … It’s not a surprise that these members want to write a novel, to create a fictional world that supports their worldview, that shows how their philosophy can help change the world for the better despite all the terrible things that they are tacitly accepting. Like almost every writer, they want to justify their existence through their words. But for the most part, it appears that they are writing ghosts, or character outlines. The characters in these books are ideas, not people, and I can’t blame them for making this mistake. For a politician to relearn how to actually empathize with a character, and hence a person, the pain of the responsibility of their power would become unbearable.
Suzanne Merkelson goes after famous dictators and their bad prose. Who knew Kim Jong Il wrote film criticism?
Carla Fran takes a hard look at the new movie Your Highness, adolescent comedies, and the cult of Danny McBride:
[I]nstead of looking at how hard it is to grow up and be a good dude, especially if unequipped in modern times (the Apatow catalogue), this new branch celebrates adolescent nostalgia while reveling in the failed response of masculine ego. …
It’s a look at the busted dreams of our kidselves, with a good dose of follow-up on the adults that we have become. For the fellows here, it is one long dick joke, and that makes sense. It’s a boomerang of a dick-joke, one started 20 years ago, initially about expectation and wonder, and now about insecurity and failure.
A group of researchers is applying a mathematical formula to insurgency attacks. They argue "progress curves are a consequence of people adapting to circumstances and learning to do things better" and that warfare follows the same pattern:
In biology, the Red Queen hypothesis is that predators and prey (or, more often, parasites and hosts) are in a constant competition that leads to stasis, as each adaptation by one is countered by an adaptation by the other. In the case Dr Johnson is examining the co-evolution is between the insurgents and the occupiers, each constantly adjusting to each other’s tactics. The data come from 23 different [Afghan] provinces, each of which is, in effect, a separate theatre of war. In each case, the gap between fatal attacks shrinks, more or less according to Dr Johnson’s model. Eventually, an equilibrium is reached, and the intervals become fairly regular.
The Dish 