Month: May 2013

The Caged Bird Sings, Ctd

A reader writes:

The video and story of Mohamed Assaf reminded of something I’ve been meaning to send you. It’s a music video by activist Israeli-Palestinian hip-hop group DAM, for a song called”If I Could Go Back in Time.” DAM is Tamer Nafar, Suhell Nafar and Mahmoud Jreri, who are from the wrong side of the wall in Lod, a town southeast of Tel Aviv where most of the Palestinians were expelled in 1948. (Yes, there’s an actual wall now separating Arabic and Jewish neighborhoods in Lod, although it was built just a few years ago.) For more than a decade they’ve been rapping about Israel-Palestine issues – home demolitions, discrimination, being painted with the terrorist brush – about drugs and violence in their community and more.

“If I Could Go Back in Time” is beautiful and heartbreaking protest song about a girl who is honor-killed by her father and brother for refusing to marry the man chosen for her. The chorus is sung by the wonderful Amal Murkus, a Christian Israeli-Palestinian who has long been a highly vocal advocate for women’s rights, thereby pissing off both extremist Muslims and extremist Jews.

It’s in Arabic, so be sure to turn on the closed captioning. Know tissues.

Lyrics after the jump:

Suhel Nafar:
‏Before she was murdered, she wasn’t alive
‏We’ll tell her story backwards from her murder to her birth
‏Her body rises from the grave to the ground
‏The bullet flies out of her forehead and swallowed into the gun
‏The sound of her echo screams, she screams back
‏Tears rise up from her cheeks to her eyes
‏Behind the clouds of smoke, faces of her family appear
‏Without shame, her brother puts the gun in his pocket
‏Her father throws down the shovel and wipes the sweat off his forehead
‏He shakes his head, satisfied from the size of the grave
‏They pull her back to the car, her legs kicking
‏Like a sand storm, she’s erasing her own tracks
‏They throw her in the trunk, she doesn’t know where she is
‏But she knows that three left the house and only two will return
‏They reach the house; throw her to the bed in violence
‏”So you want run away huh?” they wake her with violence

‏Amal Murkus (Chorus)
‏If I could go back in time
‏I would smile
‏Fall in love
‏Sing
‏If I could go back in time
‏I would draw
‏Write
‏Sing

‏Mahmood Jrere:
‏She dreams before falling asleep
‏We’ll tell her story backwards, maybe understand
‏The clock hands move right to left
‏She reconstructs her steps as if she were lost
‏She sleeps prepared, money for the taxi
‏Plane ticket and passport under her pillow
‏Answer: leave the clothes in the close; she plans to wear a new life
‏Question: what if they ask what the suitcase is for?
‏She went to bed, leaves table
‏Eats well, she must act today
‏Her nose stops bleeding, that’s what they see
‏But it’s a fresh wound; before they will beat her she will beat them
‏Her mom says “your life is like heaven”
‏She’s right, if you taste the forbidden you better know someone is watching
‏Two hours before dinner, the phone hangs up
‏Her mom is shocked “the flight is delayed”
‏Phone rings

‏Amal Murkus (Chorus)

‏Tamer Nafar:
‏Before she answers, she isn’t even asked
‏The story is like the logic in her life, all backwards
‏Her hands up in the sky, begging for help
‏Their hands up in the sky reciting the Fatiha (ceremony before marriage)
‏The calendar page moves one day back, the time is
‏Afternoon, the argument is over, her brother commands her
‏Blood flows from her lips to her nose
‏A sound of a fist, his hand jumps from her face
‏It’s the first time in her life that she says “NO!”
‏Her mom announces happily “tomorrow you will marry your cousin”
‏If I look through the album of her life
‏I won’t see a photo of her standing up for her rights
‏It’s hard, the pages are stuck to my hand
‏Her past full of blood and tears
‏But we promise you, from her murder to her birth
‏Their expressions filled with anger as if someone announced a crime
‏”Congratulations, it’s a girl”
‏The beginning.

The Paranoid Style

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Let me explain why I remain genuinely baffled by the framework of the current discussion of the IRS scandal. There is little doubt, after the Inspector General’s report, that the Cincinnati office in charge of 501 (c) 4 scrutiny unfairly and unreasonably – even outrageously – seemed to apply political criteria for screening such groups. The question remains why they did this, what their motivations were, to what extent scrutiny of such groups was actually an important task to accomplish, how far that got distorted, and how far up the chain this decision went. These are very important questions, which is why I hope hearings can uncover more evidence than the actual report – and hold specific people accountable, apart from the resignation of the acting head of the IRS (which nonetheless has occurred).

But here’s where I do a double-take, which is roughly what happened as I was curled up on the couch last night watching Bill O’Reilly argue – with no evidence whatsoever – that the Obama administration had decided after the 2010 mid-terms to target Tea Party groups by using the IRS as a politicized bludgeon. This utterly unsubstantiated claim (see above) is now the dominant meme, the working assumption of the propagandists at Fox News. When pressed to defend this extraordinary reach, O’Reilly admitted he was purely speculating – or in his weasel words, “educated speculation.”

Then I read Mitch McConnell arguing that the GOP and its donors are “intimidated” by the Obama administration – because of its desire to see that those exercizing explicitly political speech after the Citizens United decision actually be identified by name. It’s funny, but “intimidated” is not the first adjective that springs to mind when contemplating the Senate Minority Leader. For McConnell, the First Amendment includes protection for extremely wealthy people’s total anonymity even as they funnel unlimited funds toward a political campaign. And the idea that the House Republicans or the Tea Party or the 501 (c) 4s or Karl Rove were in any way seriously intimidated does not seem, shall we say, to be reflected in their extravagant expenditures in 2012 and their evident joy in attacking their sinister, coffee-colored pinata one more time right now. And it’s worth pointing out that getting that 501 (c) 4 approval was not necessary for the entities to spend their money from the get-go. Which they did. To little avail.

Then we hear pundits like George Will and Peggy Noonan actually bring up Watergate as the closest historical analogy – which is, to put it bluntly, deranged. Remember, for example, that this scandal was not exposed by Woodward and Bernstein (although anecdotal complaints were aired in the press at the time) – but was exposed by the IRS itself. The IRS moreover also attempted to end this practice, and when that failed, set up an Inspector General report into the outrageous screening. In such an investigation, the Obama administration properly maintained an ethical distance for fear of seeming to affect the investigation’s findings. Watergate? Are they out of their fricking minds? Or cynics trying to gin up a story in a not-so-great season for ratings?

Then comes the Wall Street Journal with the coup de grace: because the White House kept itself scrupulously distant from the IG report, there is, apparently, no accountability in government:

Alexander Hamilton and America’s Founders designed the unitary executive for the purpose of political accountability. It is one of the Constitution’s main virtues. Unlike grunts in Cincinnati, Presidents must face the voters. That accountability was designed to extend not only to the President’s inner circle but over the entire branch of government whose leaders he chooses and whose policies bear his signature.

What you immediately notice is that under this scenario, Obama cannot win.

If he had interfered with the IG investigation, we would have a shit-storm of major proportions as he would be accused of unethically and improperly meddling in an investigation designed to be independent. Yes, the president runs the executive branch including, say, the Justice Department and the IRS. But his political relationship to those ideally neutral bodies is rightly constrained. And how could the president have intervened before the facts were fully known and weighed by an independent investigation anyway? He’s damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. Which is why his legal counsel was well advised to maintain that wall before the evidence was fully known.

This then becomes, in the eyes of the Washington Post, “shielding” Obama, as if this affair were about plausible deniability, as opposed to ethical government. The very attempt not to interfere is described as some kind of illicit political interference. In the pincer movement from Fox and the WaPo, there is no way Obama himself can come out shining.

I don’t get it. But then I am not working from a conclusion to a premise. I do not believe that the Obama administration is some kind of terrifying left-wing tyranny, exercising lethal political powers to punish its opponents, rifle through their tax returns, and take away everyone’s guns. But for some, all this is a given. Michelle Malkin knew all of this as far back as 2010, when she published her tract, “Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies.” If you point out that the first Obama term had a historically minuscule numbers of “scandals”, they will presumably just reply that it’s because they are so brilliant at never getting caught.

The paranoid style is not new in America. But it finds its locus in exactly those populations who feel marginalized by the tectonic cultural and social and economic shifts in the Obama era. And the syndrome is not new. Here’s a passage from Richard Hofstadter’s classic definition of the pseudo-conservative in America:

The restlessness, suspicion and fear manifested in various phases of the pseudo-conservative revolt give evidence of the real suffering which the pseudo-conservative experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics for the past twenty years. He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is disturbed deeply by American participation in the United Nations, which he can see only as a sinister organization. He sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world — for instance, in the Orient — cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.

Fox News has made pseudo-conservatism very lucrative, and as I watched the pure cynicism of Bill O’Reilly, making even more millions from yet another “book”, and wrily winking that he knows this is all paranoid bullshit, but, hey, it’s what he gets paid for, I felt little but nausea.

Let’s keep the government honest. Let’s get to the bottom of it. But let us not descend into the pseudo-conservative mindset that assumes Watergate-style malevolence purely because it feels good and makes money.

Update from a reader:

I agree 100% with your post. I’ve made the same general argument about Malkin with friends. However, your 2010 date for her book was the paperback edition. The original came out in July 2009, SIX MONTHS AFTER HE TOOK OFFICE. A minor point, perhaps, but it remains stunning to me.

Cicada, It’s What’s For Dinner

Brian Reis spoke with entomologist Louis Sorkin about how to eat cicadas:

Hors d’oeuvres! I’ve seen much worse. But James Hamblin gets queasy:

Some will mention that cicadas are arthropods, like shrimp and lobster. Eating them is just a step away. Just like how cats and cows are both mammals, so it’s okay that you eat cats. Cats that have been living underground for 17 years. And that really is the thing. I’m sure I’ve eaten things that have been underground for 17 years, but not knowingly, not happily.

Cultural differences and social etiquette aside, are they safe to eat?

How many chemicals do they absorb underground? Entomologist Jenna Jadin, a fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, wrote a book of cicada recipes, so she’s not impartial, but she says they’re probably fine in small doses. Still the first page of her book reads: “The University of Maryland and the [cicada interest group] Cicadamaniacs do not advocate eating cicadas without first consulting your doctor.” That caveat seems extreme, but, their words, not mine. It may refer to the possibility of a shellfish allergy. If you have a shellfish allergy, cicadas may not be for you. Meanwhile the site Cicada Mania warns that even dogs should be wary: “Pets can choke on the rigid wings and other hard body parts of the cicadas; pets will gorge themselves on cicadas, and possibly become ill and vomit; pets who consume cicadas sprayed with copious amounts of pesticide can and will die.”

Ending The Perpetual Emergency, Ctd

Rosa Brooks asks Obama to channel his inner law professor and offer a concretely legal defense of his war powers during his speech this afternoon:

Speaking not just as a law professor but as a citizen: It would be nice to know if President Obama thinks the [Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF)] authorizes him to use military force in Boston, wouldn’t it? Not whether he would as a matter of policy refrain from using military force in Boston, but whether as a matter of law he believes that Congress has authorized him to use military force in Boston if “the enemy” turns up there. … President Obama should tell us if he agrees that the 2001 AUMF gives him open-ended authorization to send U.S. troops into combat anywhere on Earth, as long as he asserts that their mission is to fight al Qaeda or “its associates.” Or does he think there is some limit — geographical, functional, or temporal — on the scope of his authority under the AUMF? And: If there are some limits, how can Congress and the American public be sure his administration is abiding by those limits?

And, Mr. President? “Trust us, we have very careful procedures” is not the right answer here. Convince me that “checks and balances” refers to something other than the federal budget.

Stay tuned. I’ll be listening closely.

Meat-Cleaving Terror

Anthony Lane focuses on the weapons used in Woolwich:

There is a particular horror associated with low-grade or homemade violence of this kind. The bombs used in the attack on the Boston Marathon were, as has become clear, frighteningly easy to construct; but there remains something hideous about the use of weapons that are, to other people, barely weapons at all, but household or kitchen implements. That was true of the box-cutters used by the hijackers on 9/11, and it is no less true, though of course on a far smaller scale, of the blades employed [yesterday].

He continues:

Cheap weaponry is also likely to cause concern to the security services; you can track the purchase and handling of explosives, but how on earth do you prevent someone from buying a few steak knives at a hardware store or a supermarket? Why should such a purchase even come to your attention?

The ordinariness and randomness of the act – requiring no gun or bomb – is what makes its terror so powerful. But it also, it seems to me, backfires massively against the perpetrators. The barbarism of hacking a human being’s body to pieces in the middle of the street cannot possibly win any converts to the cause, and will not prompt stoic Brits to see the world from the Pakistani Islamist’s point of view.

It’s nihilism. Which will, in due course, annihilate itself – as it has done even in largely Muslim countries like Iraq and Jordan, which saw al Qaeda up close and rightly recoiled. We should not feel fear of these lunatics. We should feel a form of baffled contempt. This is a form of human behavior that belongs in the dark ages.

Regulate The Reefer Already

Despite the fact that “Canadian teens were the most likely to smoke pot of all teens in the developed world,” Soraya Roberts isn’t ready to start toking:

Call it reefer madness, but I don’t trust my already-precarious anxiety-addled brain to survive pot intact. Particularly these days—this ain’t the pot my parent smoked. In the ’60s, you got high off a doobie with a potency of 4 percent. These days a hit peaks at 25 percent; such is the strength of “Dr. Grinspoon,” a strain named after the Harvard psychiatrist who wrote several books on cannabis, including 1970’s Marihuana Reconsidered and Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine.  “If you take hold of Dr. Grinspoon and smoke a lot of it, you could probably have quite a reaction,” its namesake told me. Like insanity?, I didn’t reply. Research shows that people who have predisposition for schizophrenia can experience early onset from smoking marijuana. My genetic loading for mental health isn’t ideal. I wouldn’t want to rock the brain boat.

There is an irony to this thought process, stemming from the fact that I have taken prescription medication for years—for anxiety (peanut gallery: “Of course!”).

I don’t deny the paradox. But there is a certain security to be found in taking a legal drug that the government has tested. Even if the FDA’s methods are not up to snuff, that’s some kind of standard. With pot being illegal, there is no standard. Marijuana may be “healthier than anything you can buy from the pharmaceutical industry,” according to Grinspoon, but how could I ever ensure I was getting the real McCoy? “I’ll try it if you can assure me it will be clean,” I told an acquaintance recently. “Clean? Like, you want it to be washed?” he quipped. Um, no, but I don’t want it to be laced with meth or cut with those synthetic cannabinoids that leave seizures and high blood pressure in their wake. I don’t have any scruples about smoking an illegal joint, but I’m not willing to risk my health for it.

Update from a reader:

Weed laced with meth? Had there been liquid in my mouth when I read that line, I would have done a spit-take. Does she really believe weed dealers put meth in their product so you’ll smoke it and stay up for three days? Clearly Soraya Roberts hasn’t the first clue what she’s talking about when it comes to marijuana. And of course she makes the same old tired objection about today’s cannabis being stronger than ‘my parent’s’ cannabis, with nary a nod toward the dose-response relationship – as though people decide the quantity of weed they will smoke and then do it without regard to the potency and resulting effect.

Quote For The Day

“Austerity has failed in the UK and it has failed in the eurozone. Its failure was predictable and, by some at least, predicted. It turned a nascent recovery into stagnation. That imposes huge and unnecessary costs, not just in the short run, but in the long term, as well: the costs of investments unmade, of businesses not started, of skills atrophied and of hopes destroyed.

This is not, as many seem to believe, a debate about the short term versus the long term. It is a debate about both the short and the long term, because what we do in the short term shapes the long term. What is being done here in the UK and also in much of the eurozone is worse than a crime, it is a blunder,” – Martin Wolf (registration required), Financial Times.

An Islamist Beheading In Britain, Ctd

Investigations Continue Into The Brutal Street Killing Of A British Soldier

A reader balances this reader’s rage:

I am a Muslim and I was never taught that violence is acceptable. I went to a mosque to study Quran between the ages of 7 and 9. All I know about Islam is to forgive, be patient, love your family, friends, neighbor and be good to people. What the pope says is awesome and most Muslims I know are following just that. The prophet taught humility, forgiveness and love. He forgave people who treated him badly and forgave people who killed his family members. There are a lot of “mullahs” who preach jihad (which doesn’t necessary mean kill the infidel, more like that struggle for the better society with your words, your pen and deeds). The violence that is perpetuated is wrong and is not true to the core of Islam.

It seems Islam is going through its Dark Ages, where lack of education and a confusion of tradition with religion in Muslim countries is causing their people to be manipulated by false sermons of violence against the West as some good deed when it’s a sin and a sin alone.

All I know about Islam is that killing a human being is as if killing the whole humanity. The mindless menace of violence has a grip over the Muslim world right now and hopefully with a better-educated younger generation, where people like me can disagree, will help improve this problem. Killing in the name of “the most merciful and benevolent” God (Allah) is not true. The merciful god in Quran says that no human has a right to take another’s life as it is not his to take, even his own. Muslims aren’t even allowed to commit suicide. Combining that with killing innocent people is beyond my capacity to understand.

Islam is not a monolith. Westboro Baptist Church does not represent every Christian. These people who killed an innocent person in Bahrain are no Muslims; they are Muslims in name and have committed a grave sin against their fellow human being and god.

Another:

A reader wrote, “X number of bombs and deaths a year is a normal part of modern life that only unmanly hysterics bother to get upset about. This is something we have never actually experienced in the civilized world.” This is simply not true.  This reader acknowledges that “[p]ast revolutionary groups killed hostages, planted bombs and committed all manner of violent mayhem to try and destabilize the societies they hated.”  There have been bombings and killings going on in the United States – even suicide bombings – throughout the history of this country and unrelated to Islamism.  The killing in London is a terrible tragedy, but so is this one, and this one, and this one, and these two, and all the rest of these.

Those lefty Muslim apologists at Townhall have listed the 10 worst bombings in U.S. history.  Only one of them (1993 WTC bomb, coming in at #10) was committed by Islamists (another remains unsolved). If violent radical Islam magically ceased to exist today, there would still be “X number of bombs and deaths a year.”  That’s not to say that Islamist terror is somehow excusable, just that your reader may in fact be a “hysteric” on the subject.

(Photo: Flowers lay outside Woolwich Barracks on May 23, 2013 in London, England. By Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.)

Primed For The Needle’s Prick

Feeling anxious before a shot can make vaccinations significantly more potent:

From an evolutionary perspective, the fact that short-term stress revs up the immune system makes sense. Consider a gazelle fleeing a lioness. Once the gazelle’s eyes and ears alert its brain to the threat, certain brain regions immediately activate the famous fight-or-flight response, sending electrical signals along the nervous system to the muscles and many other organs, including the endocrine glands—the body’s hormone factories. Levels of cortisol, epinephrine, adrenaline and noradrenaline rapidly increase; the heart beats faster; and enzymes race to convert glucose and fatty acids into energy for cells. All these swift biological changes give the gazelle the best chance of escape. At the same time, [Stanford University’s Firdaus] Dhabhar and others’ research suggests, the brain’s recognition of a threat prompts the immune system to prepare for potential injury. The spleen and other organs release immune cells specialized for identifying and destroying invaders and healing damaged tissues. After all, even if the gazelle escapes with its life, it may need to heal wounds sustained during its flight and prevent them from becoming infected.