"The reality, Mr. President, is that change – thanks to which you were elected, and in which you believe – is the thing that Israel in general and Netanyahu in particular fear most. The reality is that the State of Israel has become accustomed to the present situation and does not recognize itself without it. Israel has existed longer with the occupation than without it; it has existed for most of its years with no border and is deathly afraid of change," – Merav Michaeli.
Month: May 2011
Israel’s Cheney
Fallows nails Netanyahu's disastrous course for Israel. But isn't it pretty obvious that Bibi and Dick coordinate a little? Money quote:
Think of this contrast: when China's Hu Jintao came to Washington for a state visit, each of the countries had profound disagreements with the other. (Chinese leaders hate the U.S. policy of continued arms sales to Taiwan, much more so than Netanyahu could sanely disagree with any part of Obama's speech.) Neither China nor America is remotely as dependent on the other as Israel is on the United States. Yet Obama and Hu were careful to be as respectful as possible, especially in public, while addressing the disagreements. High-handed and openly contemptuous behavior like Netanyahu's would have seemed hostile and idiotic from either side. As it is from him.
Since when does a close ally treat the US president more contemptuously than the Chinese?
Mental Health Break
JELLYFISH LAKE, PALAU from Sarosh Jacob on Vimeo.
Jellyfish Lake is located on Eli Malk island in the Republic of Palau. Twelve thousand years ago these jellyfish became trapped in a natural basin on the island when the ocean receded. With no predators amongst them for thousands of years, they evolved into a new species that lost most of their stinging ability as they no longer had to protect themselves. They are pretty much harmless to humans
Goldblog Gets The Dish Treatment
Well, it seems that if you state that Barack Obama might be correct in his analysis of Israel's essential national security conundrum, and that Benjamin Netanyahu ought to think a bit more strategically about his relationship with the U.S., you're a self-hating Jew, a kapo, a Nazi, and also, for some reason, gay.
Or a gay Nazi, in Leon Wieseltier's formulation. The word JINO is a new one to me.
Poseur Alert
A poem picked from the da-da minimalist stream of consciousness that is now Jon Huntsman's campaign website:
The Politician.
It's an unusual animal.
The firm handshake. The frosty smile. So often driven by ego alone.
They stand in a line and few stand out. They read the same written words. Words that have been repetitively spoken for decades.
They tell us they love us. Respect our families.
That all will be well. But, nothing is ever well.
We forget we elect them to represent us.
America can do so much better.
Maybe someday.
1992 All Over Again?
Many pundits have compared the weak 2012 GOP presidential field to the infamously weak 1992 Democratic field. Steven Taylor rejects this:
Who are the Republican heavy-hitters who are sitting out this race? … If it appears that the current GOP field looks like the 1992 Democratic field (i.e., like a bunch of second stringers) that is a comment on the current quality of the GOP, not that 2012 is a Republican version of 1992. This is important to note because I think that it speaks to the overall weakness of the Republican field at the moment, and also underscores that the party is currently going through something of an identity crisis.
The Dull Blade Of Occam’s Razor, Ctd
That post stirred up an in-tray tsunami. A reader writes:
Red herring: “…there doesn’t seem to be any particular logical or metaphysical reason to believe that the universe is as simple as it could be.” I don’t think William of Occam or anybody else says that. For science, the simplest explanation that accounts for all the available data is the best working hypothesis going forward, because it doesn’t clutter the model.
Additional experiments and observations may require an expansion or correction to account for new data, which will then become the new working hypothesis, or they may falsify the old one and require starting over. If you are trying to determine why it grows dark at night, there is no need to bring in a light-dimming sky fairy when the bulk of the earth coming between us and the sun answers the question very well, no matter which is moving.
Copernicus started a scientific revolution by placing the sun at the center of things, thus eliminating the need for deferents and epicycles and all the complicated calculations required by the Ptolemaic system. No one today computes planetary positions and motions by the old methods, except perhaps as an historical exercise, because something new, better, and easier has replaced them.
On the other hand, Kepler’s work was a refinement, not an overthrow, of the Copernican system, based on new data drawn largely from Tycho Brahe’s detailed observations. The long-held Aristotelian idea that heavenly bodies moved in circular orbits because circles represent perfection was discarded in favor of data-imposed ellipses. That became the new simplest hypothesis, and in its turn was further refined to account for perturbations of one planet’s orbit by another’s gravitational field.
Another writes:
In order to explain planetary orbits while clinging to geocentrism, astronomical models showed celestial bodies orbiting in a circle around earth. But in order to account for their places in our sky, there had to be added little orbital semi-circles branching off from the main circular orbit, with orbital semi-circles branching off from the first set of semi-circles, and so on and so on: the end model looked like a big circle surrounded by hundreds of smaller circles surrounded by thousands of even smaller circles surrounded by millions of the tiniest circles. This is where Occam’s Razor was best applied. Do planets really orbit in a ridiculous manner like this, as predicted by geocentrism? Or was it perhaps time to embrace heliocentrism, which did away with the absurd branches of semi-circle orbits.
Another:
Occam’s Razor says is that that in our search for answers, we should pursue the simpler hypotheses first, and only complicate them – “multiply entities” – when necessity arises. It’s a methodological statement, not a veridical one; a statement about how inquiry ought to be conducted, not about the truth-value of its results. Unfortunately, surprising number of people misunderstand what Ockham’s Razor is.
Even Torture Can Be Funny
A reader forwards "a little bit of Russian political humor":
The KGB, the FBI and the CIA are all trying to prove that they are the best at catching criminals. The Secretary General of the UN decides to give them a test. He releases a rabbit into a forest and each of them has to catch it. The CIA goes in. They place animal informants throughout the forest. They question all plant and mineral witnesses. After three months of extensive investigations they conclude that the rabbit does not exist. The FBI goes in. After two weeks with no leads they burn the forest, killing everything in it, including the rabbit, and make no apologies: the rabbit had it coming. The KGB goes in. They come out two hours later with a badly beaten bear. The bear is yelling: "Okay! Okay! I'm a rabbit! I'm a rabbit!"
Sadly, the joke is outdated.
Cool Ad Watch
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“The Sooner You Advertise Here, The Better,” reads this award-winning ad from The Netherlands. Copyranter reassures us: “Yes, the space was bought before locals got the Full Monty.”
Bronski’s Beat
Johann Hari examines the gay left's version of American history. In this narrative, there's much to be admired by gay Americans' resistance to brutal oppression from the very get-go … until it comes to the last fifty years, and especially the last twenty (those dreadful years in which gays finally made legal and political progress):
This is the best I can figure out his position. He does finally explicitly say that the gay movement should have fought instead to "eliminate" all concept of marriage under the law, a cause that would have kept gay people marginalized for centuries, if not forever. Of course some gay people hold revolutionary views against the social structures of marriage and the family—and so do some straight people. But they are small minorities in both groups. If you want to set yourself against these trends in the culture, that's fine. Just don't equate it with your homosexuality. When Bronski suggests gay marriage "works against another unrealized American ideal: individual freedom and autonomy," he is bizarrely missing the point. Nobody is saying gay people have to get married—only that it should be a legal option if they want it. If you disagree with marriage, don't get married. Whose freedom does that restrict?
It has always seemed chilling to me that gay leftists – when pushed to say what they really believe - want to keep gays in some sort of glorious, oppressed, marginalized position, until the majority agrees with the gay left's view of human nature, and revolutionizes straight society as well. This will never happen (and in my view, shouldn't).
Until then, the gay left focuses on demonizing those gays who argue for those who want to belong to their own families as equals, serve their country or commit to one another for life. In this, in my view, the gay left mirrors the Christianist right: they insist that otherness define the minority, even though most members of that minority are born and grow up in the heart of the American family, in all its variations, and of American culture, in all its permutations. No one should be marginalized for seeking otherness. But we are fighting for it to be a choice, not a fate.
The Dish 