Month: June 2011

She may be remarkably uninformed, poorly educated and and the purveyor of so many obvious untruths – but one thing Sarah Palin cannot be, in what passes for her own mind, is wrong. And so if she bollixed up the account of Paul Revere in such an obvious and excruciating fashion … she has to insist she didn’t. Here’s her latest piece of nuttery:

Even Chris Wallace cannot help laughing at this preposterous grifter. But creepier still is the fact that her cult followers responded to this perfectly predictable gaffe by trying to edit the Wikipedia entry on Revere to align it with Palin’s ramblings about his “warning the British” that … oh, let’s not even bother.

Check out this surreal Wiki page in which the cultists are trying to insist that Revere did indeed warn the British, and use Palin’s own quote as a source! I love this succinct response from a Wiki editor:

In the article on Paul Revere, someone has added false information in an effort to support Sarah Palin’s FALSE claims about Paul Revere. “Accounts differ regarding the method of alerting the colonists; the generally accepted position is that the warnings were verbal in nature, although one disputed account suggested that Revere rang bells during his ride.[8][9]” This must be removed as it is a LIE designed to mislead. dj

One of the most pernicious and dangerous features of Palin is her clinical refusal to understand reality, to accept error, to acknowledge when the facts she has cited are not actually facts, but delusions. And her vanity and pathologies are so deep she will insist that black is white until her minions actually find a source to prove it.

She’s dangerous; she’s shrewd; she’s an exhibitionist. But she is also, we must keep reminding ourselves, a farce. What worries me about this political leader incapable of telling fantasy apart from fact is that, in a long and deep recession, someone who can lie that readily and manipulate religious and cultural resentment as well as she does is a danger. Not just to America, but to the world.

No, not Syria, and not Yemen. It's Israel's turn now to fire live ammunition at protesters swarming the Syrian border on the Golan Heights. It's pretty clear that much of this was provoked by the desperate regime in Damascus, but nonetheless the sight of unarmed Arabs attempting to reclaim land occupied by Israel and being gunned down may be one we will become more accustomed to:

The army spokesman said that troops had fired warning shots before shooting at the legs of the demonstrators. The gunfire was accompanied by loudspeaker warnings in Arabic that anyone who approached the border fence was “endangering himself.” Despite the intermittent gunfire, scores of protesters continued to stream toward the border, planting flags and holding a mass prayer behind the earth berms. Other groups of protesters carried off casualties, struggling back up the hillside in Syrian territory.

Alas, not all the protests were nonviolent.

Another confrontation developed near the abandoned Syrian border town of Quneitra, where scores of protesters gathered on rooftops and near the fence with the Golan Heights, some hurling stones at Israeli soldiers, who responded with tear gas, stun grenades and warnings delivered via loudspeaker that “anyone who tries to cross the border will be killed.” Troops later opened fire when the crowd surged toward the border. SANA, the official Syrian news agency, said that a local hospital had received the bodies of 22 dead, and that more than 350 were injured, some critically. The Israeli army said earlier in the day that it knew of 12 casualties.

No doubt Netanyahu will see this as yet another reason to accelerate the settling and occupation of the West Bank, and more grist for his skepticism of anything close to a peace process. But the logic of the Arab Awakening is at Israel's borders now and on the West Bank. If the Palestinians are capable of non-violence, and if Israel continues to kill unarmed protesters, then the isolation Israel may feel at the UN this September could become even more profound.

(Photo: Demonstrators flee Israeli fired tear gas as they gather along Syria's border with Israel while trying to cut through a line of barbed wire and head into the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights, as seen from the Druze village of Majdal Shams, on June 5, 2011 in Israel. Israeli troops opened fire on protestors from Syria who tried to cross a cease fire line in the occupied Golan Heights. The conflict comes on the 44th Anniversary of the 1967 Six Day War. By Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images.)

By Idan Friedman. Kottke editorializes:

Royals and world leaders are forever immortalized on coins and normal people get disposable pie tins. Makes sense.

It's maddening and sickening at the same time. Given these themes behind the movement, despite my conviction that male genital mutilation is a violation of human freedom, I'd vote against it now. The contempt for religious freedom and the use of this kind of anti-Semitic dreck – Monster Mohel anyone? – have pushed me over the edge. One day, a rational, calm and tolerant campaign to prevent the routine mutilation of male infants will emerge. But not this one. It's despicable.

Bill Moyers interviews Jane Goodall:

You know, we can plan a torture, whether it’s physical or mental. We plan it, and in cold blood we can execute it. The chimpanzee’s brutality is always on the spur of the moment. It’s some trigger in the environment that causes this craze, almost, of violence.

Her thoughts on finding meaning in life:

I don’t want to explain this whole life business through science. There’s so much mystery. There’s so much awe. I mean, what is it that makes the chimpanzees do these spectacular displays, “rain dances?” At least that’s what I call them. They dance at the foot of this waterfall and then sit in the spray and watch the water that’s always coming and always going and always here. It’s wonder. It’s awe. And if they had the same kind of language that we have, I suspect that would turn into some kind of animistic religion.

Maggie Hames is taken aback by the Disney classic and the fact that "there is no kid-friendly, understandable context for characters’ evil actions nor is there any justice or comeuppance for the wicked." Here she uses the example of “bad boys” on Pleasure Island (or, as she calls it, Entrapment Island) who are tricked into misbehaving and then punished for it by being turned into donkeys:

As the boys’ crimes were smoking, drinking, and playing billiards, the sarcastic message seems to be, “You REALLY have to wait until you’re twenty-one to do these things or—trust me—you won’t like the consequences.” But in truth, it again feels more like every parent and child’s worst nightmare of abduction and permanent disappearance, the boys literally silenced as they weep for mother and plead for mercy. Once more, the context and circumstances of the abuse are allegorical, deeply cynical, and not easily understood by a child. Even an adult could find these scenes haunting.

Ann E. Tenbrunsel revisits the 1986 Challenger disaster. The night before the launch, engineers recommended postponing it. But the shuttle's contracting firm, whose managers were asked to make a "management decision", decided to go ahead with the launch anyway:

We found that when individuals saw a decision through an ethical frame, more than 94% behaved ethically; when individuals saw the same decision through a business frame, only about 44% did so. Framing the decision as a “management decision” helped ensure that the ethics of the decision—saving lives—were faded from the picture. … There are parallels between the fatal Challenger launch decision and more “ordinary” unethical behavior in corporations, politics and in society. We see them when we look at the way decisions are framed: “No harm intended, it’s just business,” or “That’s the way politics operate.”

The Arctic Light from TSO Photography on Vimeo.

Adam Ozimek quotes from Dale Peterson's The Moral Lives of Animals:

At this point, the figures on chimpanzee cooperative violence suggest that an individual’s yearly risk of death from intercommunity warfare ranges from 0.069 to 0.287 percent. That’s generally higher than the risk of death from war for people living in modern nation-states, but it’s still within the same general range as the risk of death in war for contemporary people living in pre-state hunter and farmer societies

Ray Fisman exposes them:

[A] dirty little secret is that Prada rip-offs can also function as free advertising for real Prada handbags—partly by signaling the brand's popularity, but, less obviously, by creating what MIT marketing professor Renee Richardson Gosline has described as a "gateway" product. For her doctoral thesis, Gosline immersed herself in the counterfeit "purse parties" of upper-middle-class moms. She found that her subjects formed attachments to their phony Vuittons and came to crave the real thing when, inevitably, they found the stitches falling apart on their cheap knockoffs. Within a couple of years, more than half of the women—many of whom had never fancied themselves consumers of $1,300 purses—abandoned their counterfeits for authentic items.

Jenna Sauers rejects the emphasis of the piece:

Counterfeiting is a crime because, yes, theft of intellectual property is actually wrong; but it's also a crime because the production of counterfeit goods generally takes place under atrocious circumstances — even by the standards of the international rag trade, a domain not known for its commitment to worker safety and environmental protection — and because the people who produce, smuggle, and sell counterfeit goods are often the same criminal gangs that control the drug trade and human trafficking.

(Photo from Taryn Simon's project Contraband)