Month: May 2013

Hoarders As Artists?

It’s one theory at least:

The physical world of hoarders, [Psychology professor Randy] Frost has observed, is much more expansive than what the rest of us perceive, and is often free of the rules that we are wont to impose. Even more intriguing, Frost told me that some of the neurological hallmarks of hoarding might indicate a giftedness in the aesthetic appreciation of the physical world, rather than pure illness. One of his patients had a pile that built up in the middle of her dorm room over the course of a week; she started perceiving shapes, colors, and textures, and it became a work of art—something with aesthetic value. “She couldn’t dismantle it, because that would destroy it,” Frost said.

In Search of Activist Architects

Noting that Thomas Jefferson “believed that architecture embodied the soul of his new country,” Doug Wignall urges today’s architects to be more assertive in their social roles:

[T]he profession of architect has lost its way in mainstream consciousness. We have become less relevant, we have become more commoditized—largely because we are not inserting ourselves into public dialogue as leaders of the discussion and instruments of change. Young people want to enter a profession where they feel they can make a difference, and while architecture certainly is a vehicle to do that, we have fallen off in our determination to execute it properly…

I wonder about the concept of architect as political hero. I believe that if we don’t go forward with that idea in mind, then we will never fulfill our true potential, that our profession will languish in obscurity. As architects, we are the builders of dreams. I propose that we can and should build dreams beyond the tangible world of the built environment. We have much to contribute to the shaping of public policy that can improve the world. And I argue that there has never been a better time for us to begin.

Battling Over Burials

Yvonne Abraham is “sickened” by Cambridge’s refusal to allow Tamerlan Tsarnaev to be interred in the city:

If we begin to judge who is worthy of burial, and who is not – which, make no mistake, is the precedent being set here – where does it end? Plenty of others have been controlled by irrational thoughts the way the Tsarnaevs were. Many are broken, as Adam Lanza and Seung-Hui Cho demonstrate all too well. As much as we’d like to fully dissociate ourselves from that evil, we can’t. They’re human, like us. We have buried men like this. We have also buried Mafia bosses, some of them mass murderers, sometimes with grand funerals. Do their bodies better deserve to be treated as human, their relatives’ wishes better deserve honoring, because they were motivated by greed and sadism, rather than a twisted, hateful sense of injustice?

Me too. In fact, as a Catholic, I find it disgusting. Even mass murdering Jihadists are human beings. When dead, judgment is between them and their God. It is a core aspect of a humane society to respect the humanity even of the most evil and reprehensible. And this bizarre aversion to burying Tsarnaev in Massachusetts also places the terrorist in a special category of dehumanization. We must resist this if we are to remain a civilized country.We can fight an enemy without dehumanizing them. As soon as you do that, you end up in Donald Rumsfeld’s Abu Ghraib.

Tim Murphy, noting that Tsarnaev’s case is “complicated by the fact that the remains of a Muslim cannot be cremated,” finds other examples of bodies that were kept from burial:

One of the most high-profile cases of domestic terrorism prompted an anti-burial backlash.

After Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was sentenced to death in 1997, Congress moved quickly to pass legislation preventing anyone who had been convicted of a federal capital crime from being interred in a veterans’ cemetery. McVeigh’s ashes were scattered.

No cemetery in the city of Chicago would allow the four men hanged for their role in the 1886 Haymarket Riot, in which seven police officers and four civilians were killed in a bombing, to be buried within the city limits. Instead, they were relegated to a plot in the suburb of Forest Park. Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who assassinated President William McKinley, was dissolved in sulfuric acid, Breaking Bad-style, to prevent admirers from visiting his grave. Lee Harvey Oswald’s corpse was flipped from Dallas cemeteries like a hot potato before finally finding a resting place in Fort Worth.

Perhaps the most heated and prolonged burial battle involved the bodies of American cult members who died at Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978. As historian David Chidester explained in Salvation and Suicide, “Public officials had vehemently resisted any mass burial of the Jonestown dead for fear that such a burial site would become a cultic shrine.” Instead, the bodies languished at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware before arrangements were finally made for a group burial in Oakland, California.

Officials have since announced they have found an undisclosed burial place for Tsarnaev.

Sanford, The GOP, And The Sanctity Of Marriage

Mark Sanford And Elizabeth Colbert Busch Attend Pork & Politics Event

Douthat isn’t surprised by the outcome in South Carolina:

One could imagine a world where the advance of gay marriage, and the apparent failure of traditionalist arguments on the issue, inspired social conservatives to seek both a more comprehensive pro-marriage agenda and less compromised standard bearers for that cause. But for now that doesn’t seem to be happening: Instead we live in a world where the same South Carolina voters who handed their primary to the thrice-married Newt Gingrich just held their noses and voted for Sanford, who famously ditched not only his wife but also his gubernatorial duties while pursuing an adulterous affair. …

For now, at least, I don’t look at left and right and see the beginnings of a neo-Victorian moment. I see a liberalism that feels triumphant about gay marriage and complacent about the institution’s overall decline, and a conservatism that, lacking an obvious way forward, seems half-inclined to just give up the fight.

I don’t disagree with Ross on much of this – but have to add that surely this means – must mean – that the current GOP’s hostility to marriage equality is not really about the state of marriage, but about their fundamentalist inability to see gay people in relationships as equals. How can you write a column about the lack of passion behind social conservatism without noting the real passion that drives the GOP to adopt a position that would deny gay couples any structured legal rights at all?

Dreher looks to the life of John Profumo, a British cabinet minister whose career was ended by a sex scandal, as an alternative to the Sanford comeback. It would certainly make sense of today’s GOP base voters were genuinely concerned about marriage and the family, rather than convulsed with fear and loathing of gays.

(Photo: Former South Carolina Governor and U.S. House of Representatives Republican candidate Mark Sanford talks with supporters during the Charleston Area Chamber of Commerce’s Pork and Politics on April 30, 2013 in Charleston, South Carolina. Republican Mark Sanford is challenging Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch in a special election for the House seat vacated by current U.S. Sen. Tim Scott. By Richard Ellis/Getty Images)

Is House Of Cards Too Cynical?

Kevin Spacey and Steny Hoyer recently discussed the question:

“One of the phrases that I hate the most is when people say ‘well, that’s politics,’” Hoyer said, “and your show is a lot about, ‘well, that’s politics.’” People already have an unfairly negative view of politics, Hoyer explained, and “House of Cards” plays into a nihilistic and venal portrait of politics that goes farther than reality.

Spacey acknowledged the point, but chalked it up to the medium, noting that Hollywood makes plenty of movies about the film business than are grimmer than Hollywood really is. That’s drama. And despite Underwood’s tremendous faults, Spacey said he’s found that people appreciate the conniving fictional politician, “because he gets shit done.” The Washington in “House of Cards” may be more morally bankrupt and soulless in the way it does things than the one that exists in reality, but at least it does things — that’s appealing when nothing’s happening in real Washington, he noted. Those are the kinds of roles that appeal to Spacey, he said, noting that he loved “Lincoln” because it grappled with “Lincoln the politician,” as opposed to the saintly figure we usually think.

Yes, Of Course It Was Jihad, Ctd

Simon Shuster has the latest scoop on the bombers’ ties to radical Islam:

Last year, when Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent six months in the Russian region of Dagestan, he had a guide with an unusually deep knowledge of the local Islamist community: a distant cousin named Magomed Kartashov. Six years older than Tsarnaev, Kartashov is a former police officer and freestyle wrestler—and one of the region’s most prominent Islamists.

In 2011 Kartashov founded and became the leader of an organization called the Union of the Just, whose members campaign for sharia law and pan-Islamic unity in Dagestan, often speaking out against U.S. policies across the Muslim world. The group publicly renounces violence. But some of its members have close links to militants; others have served time in prison for weapons possession and abetting terrorism—charges they say were based on fabricated evidence. For Tsarnaev, these men formed a community of pious young Muslims with whom he could discuss his ideas of jihad. Tsarnaev’s mother, Zubeidat, confirmed that her son is Kartashov’s third cousin. The two met for the first time in Dagestan, she said, and “became very close.”

Clinton’s 3am Call

Well, technically 2 am:

[Gregory Hicks] testified that, from on the ground in Libya where he had been among the last people to speak to Ambassador Stevens before he was killed, he spoke with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton directly by phone at 2 a.m. Benghazi time. He briefed her on the terrorist attack — it was never regarded as anything but a terrorist attack — and on the then-ongoing search for Ambassador Stevens, who was feared to be at a hospital controlled by terrorists (to whom Hicks referred, in his testimony, as “the enemy”).

It’s pretty clear to me that by now this is all about wounding Clinton for 2016, when she would be a formidable opponent for the GOP, which lacks anyone close to her stature or popularity, except for Christie, who is now being purged. But it seems to me the kind of wound designed to rile up Hillary-haters in the base rather than moderates in the middle. And make no mistake: Fox’s new-found love for Hillary was all about stopping Obama. Ailes will turn on a dime and demonize her as effectively as the campaign against her in the 1990s. Mike Crowley sizes up the stakes for Clinton:

Whether or not Republicans intended it, the shadow of national politics loomed over Wednesday’s hearing. Hillary Clinton completed a generally well-reviewed tenure of Secretary of State, as evidenced by her sky-high public approval ratings. But Benghazi is a clear black mark on her Foggy Bottom record, one that could haunt Clinton if she runs for president in 2016. Conservatives seized on Hicks’s testimony that, in a call with Clinton on the fateful night, he told her that a terrorist attack was underway–a fact that was slow to appear in the administration’s public rhetoric. Still, despite repeated discussion about what Clinton knew and when she knew it, no smoking gun emerged from Wednesday’s hearing, leading one Congressional Democrat to dismiss questions about her role as a “witch hunt.”

But a member of Hillaryland has suddenly entered the spotlight:

[Hicks] charged that Clinton’s key State Department lieutenant and longtime family retainer, Cheryl Mills, made a concerted effort to block him from meeting with a Congressional delegation and that he had never been interviewed by the FBI in connection to the attack. Hicks said that he had been demoted after asking too many questions of his superiors about their response to Benghazi.

Republicans repeatedly raised the fact that Mills, a former deputy White House counsel and Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, personally called Hicks to express that she was upset that he had met with Rep. Jason Chaffetz without a lawyer present. So was the fact that administration lawyers had told Hicks and the Regional Security Officer not to speak with congressional investigators, as well as Hicks’ claim that he briefed Clinton the night of the attack and characterized it as an act of terror. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio referred to Mills’ as Clinton’s “fixer” and “as close as you can get to Secretary Clinton.”

The above video shows an interview with Pat Smith, the mother of one of the four consulate victims. The father of the slain Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods is also making the rounds:

When I was approached by Hillary Clinton at the coming home ceremony of the bodies at Andrews Air Force base and she said we are going to go out and we are going to prosecute that person who made the video, I knew that she wasn’t telling the truth, and I think the whole world knows that now.

The Power Of Good Journalism

Steve Brill’s piece on healthcare costs in America is getting results:

Acting on the suggestion of her top data crunchers at the department’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Sebelius will release a data file that shows the list — or “chargemaster” — prices by all hospitals across the U.S. for the 100 most common inpatient treatment services in 2011. It then compares those prices with what Medicare actually paid hospitals for the same treatments — which was typically a fraction of the chargemaster prices. CMS public-affairs director Brian Cook told me that Sebelius’ action today comes in part in response to TIME’s special report on health-care-pricing practices in the March 4 issue, “Bitter Pill.”

Brill’s advice on the next steps the administration should take:

The feds need to publish chargemaster and Medicare pricing for the most frequent outpatient procedures and diagnostic tests at clinics — two huge profit venues in the medical world. This will be harder — the government doesn’t collect that data as comprehensively — but those outpatient centers and clinics provide a huge portion of American medical care.

But an even bigger step in transparency would be collecting data that Medicare doesn’t have: exactly what insurance companies pay to the various hospitals, testing clinics and other providers for various treatments and services. After all, as the hospitals themselves concede in downplaying their chargemasters, these insurance prices are the ones that affect most patients. But it’s also where there is close to zero transparency.

Previous Dish on Brill’s piece here, here and here. His recent Ask Anything series here.

Blessed Be The Time Lord

Liel Leibovitz senses religious and distinctly Talmudic themes in the rebooted series of Doctor Who:

Without getting too theological—although the show has, casting [villainous species] The Silence as a religious order devoted to ancient prophecies—it is hard not to think of the whole affair as a meditation on God, a riff on that old Exodus chestnut in which the Creator insists that no man shall see his face and live. Learning the Doctor’s name—in 796 episodes, it is not mentioned once, and it is strongly suggested that he himself neither knows it nor wishes to know it—means unlocking all of the universe’s secrets, shedding light on its mysteries, closing the distance between mere mortals and other, higher beings whose job it is to watch over us humans and shower us with kindness and light.

And yet this is precisely what is going to happen next week. Steven Moffat, the creative force behind the series’ current reincarnation, has promised that the revelation will shake the show to its core, sending fans into fits of speculation: Once we know the Doctor’s name, does he cease to be the wondrous being that he is?

They’re naming the Doctor! Noooo!!! It ruins the irony of the very title of the show. I was almost going to say blasphemy, but that might have only proved Leibovitz’s point.

Leibovitz’s point is that Doctor Who is actually Doctor Jew – a wanderer, beset by enemies, with a strong dose of ethics. The Doctor is indeed a form of god – he is close to immortal – and he does adhere to some core ethics. But, although I can see Leibovitz’s point, he is essentially English, not Jewish. He is very far from devout, and always traveling (as the English always have done). He’s a passionate supporter of intelligence over superstition, of nonviolence over violence, and of doubt over faith. In his post-Tom-Baker incarnation (there I go again), he also has an almost unbearable lightness of spirit, capable of looking at pure evil in the eye … and chuckling. He disarms his foes; and outwits them; while remaining aloof from everyone. He is, after all, a non-human for whom the entire past and future is always present. And he has a sense of humor.

Such a god has no name. Just a scarf and a screwdriver and a police box. I can’t believe they’re going to mess with this. For some of us who are Whovians – the show was born the year I was – he will always be the hidden god, the Jesus of the Home Counties.