Year: 2013

Ackerman wonders about them:

“I’ve disassembled mines in the Falklands islands, a very harsh climate,” says Colin King, a former British Army bomb-disposal officer, “and the last ones I did were more than 30 years [older] than the event, and some of those were in perfect condition 30 years on. I’ve seen some in Cambodia and in Jordan, particularly in Cambodia where you’ve got a wet climate and poor quality mines, which were nonfunctional very, very quickly. But there are very few IEDs that are going to last for years.”

Science and experience indicates as much. But the data, alas, is lacking.

Assuring his readers that he’s not “one of 127 sheriffs across the country whose ‘swelling ranks…lead the charge against fascism'”, Ed Kilgore defines the term:

[S]omeone with your name whose writings, life-events, legal activities or friends/enemies pop up when you enter your own self.

My most famous one is a veteran Buffalo sportscaster who for obvious reasons dominates the Google Image Search of our common name. There are various and sundry other Ed Kilgores out there, my name being more common in the Scots-Irish Diaspora than you might think.

(Photo: British forward Andrew Sullivan (L) jumps to score during the men’s basketball preliminary round match Great Britain vs China as part of the London 2012 Olympic Games at the Basketball Arena on August 6, 2012 in London. Great Britain won 90-58. By Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)

How Drum understands Obama’s recent comments about the limits of American power:

No matter what motivates you—realpolitik, humanitarianism, nationalism, whatever—interventionism doesn’t make sense if it doesn’t work. And the lesson of the past decade, at the very least, is that interventionism is really, really hard to do well, even if your bar for “well” is really, really low.

The first question for any kind of action in any sphere of human behavior is, will it work? If the answer is yes, then you can move on to arguments about when, whether, and what kind of action might be appropriate. But if the answer is no, all those arguments are moot. In the case of U.S. military interventions, the answer might not quite be an unqualified no, but it sure seems to be pretty damn close. This makes the rest of the argument futile.

Seth Fischer narrates his unsparing experience with PTSD:

I’m spending days in bed, even though I can’t, even though I am working 50 to 80 hours a week, doing a damn good job when I’m there. But still, somehow, I manage to spend entire days in bed, in silence, staring at the ceiling, not listening to music, not cruising the Internet, just staring, cursing every time the ice cream truck drives by my window because of that God damned song. It’s not even that it drives by; it actually parks in front of my fucking house just to make me crazy. My therapist calls what I’m doing “dissociating.”

I want to pour a coke in the engine of the ice cream truck. I want to take a sledgehammer to its speakers. For a moment, I want to be cruel. It is ruining everything. I don’t know what this is. I just know I can’t control it.

His perceives the elements of his own illness in the country’s troubles at large:

Pareene finds reason to think so:

While some elite-backed elements of the right-wing press will fall in line — Murdoch will keep his media organs on his side of the immigration debate — the “grass-roots” conservative press is going to react the same way it did in 2006, when they helped kill their own president’s immigration reform plan. National Review’s The Corner is currently like 75 percent hysterical accusations of betrayal from anti-immigration zealots like Mark Krikorian, who has written four separate lengthy posts decrying “amnesty”  [yesterday] alone. Michelle Malkin’s headline is “Suicidal GOP senators join open-borders Dems for Shamnesty Redux.“

Naomi Rovnick exposes the less-than-rigorous auditing practices of Chinese companies:

[Apple’s] worst finding was that one of its manufacturers—which supplies other companies too—was employing 74 children. In total, it found 106 cases of child labor across its factories. Apple also reported that 158 of the factories it uses were not auditing their own suppliers. We italicize the last part of that sentence because failing to probe Chinese suppliers’ subcontractors is something labor activists and manufacturing experts have long suspected multinationals do. …

TNC gives a helpful timeline on the NFL’s awareness and action/inaction on the brain trauma it inflicts on so many of its players. Big Football’s similarity to Big Tobacco begins to look somewhat ominous.

John H. Richardson rails against cultural prudishness:

I want to suggest that sex, be it adulterous or premarital or deviant or polyamorous, is a good thing, not a bad thing, and that sex itself is the moment of grace. And that our sterile idea of perfection is the actual sin.

To start with the subject on the table, adultery is a brave rebellion against the invisible prison we build for ourselves. When the sad little man Larry Craig widened his stance in that airport bathroom, it was probably the most honest and courageous act of his life. When Clinton got that blowjob in the White House, he wasn’t indulging a weakness (and an eager intern) but enacting the hero’s journey of reconciling inner and outer, risking all to break through the wall of hypocritical purity he had spent years building and projecting to the world in the effort to get elected. By risking martyrdom, in fact, he lifted himself up into an exaltation we still refuse to understand.

He concludes:

By declaring that which is most beautiful to be filthy, that which is most natural to be unnatural, by always making laws against and never for, we ensure that laws will continue to be broken and we will always have spouses to scorn and a Christ to crucify.

I’ll let readers have a first crack at this argument; but stay tuned …

James Alan Fox believes that the “key to freedom should rarely, if ever, be discarded when it comes to juveniles”:

The most sensible approach would be to make all juvenile offenders eligible for parole. Eligibility for release is far from a guarantee. Any changes in punishment should be judged by a parole board or other resentencing authority after the perpetrator has served many long years behind bars, rather than being anticipated by a judge or jury at trial when emotions are high and political pressure is intense. Punishments should fit the criminal, not just the crime.

Below is the disturbing story of the two kids seen above:

James Bulger’s mother left her two-year-old son at the butcher shop’s door thinking that it would not take her long to return, since there was no queue in the store. Little did she know that it would be her last time she would see her son alive.

Now that women are eligible to serve in combat roles, Kate Brannen wonders if they’ll be required to register for the draft:

Although the Selective Service law is inherently discriminatory — requiring something of men that it doesn’t require of women — it was considered constitutional because women were excluded from combat. Since women wouldn’t be conscripted, they didn’t need to register. Now that women will be joining at least some combat units, Congress eventually must determine how to handle that new reality.

One of Justin Green’s commenters tackles the question:

I’m not sure why we continue to require men to register with selective service. We haven’t had a draft in over 35 years. It’s a lot of paperwork and must be expensive maintaining a system we don’t intend to use. If we want to reinstate the draft, then we can address that at such a time. I suppose it makes sense for women to register as well as men if we are going to continue to require men to participate in this charade.