Author: Andrew Sullivan

My feelings entirely (including "I told ya").

An exchange. Money quote from Peter:

To suggest that Palestinian and Arab behavior fully explains the growing authoritarian, even racist, tendencies in Israeli politics is to don a moral blindfold, a blindfold that most young American Jews, to their credit, will not wear.

This video of a hearing impaired infant hearing his mother's voice for the first time after a cochlear implant is about as tender a thing as you'll see in a while. If you ever despair of modernity, it's worth remembering that in previous eras, not only would this baby never hear but we would never see him hear. And then there's simply a trapped dog and a great cop – another moment once captured only for one man, and now viewable by millions. Seriously, this is worth watching through to the very end:

The ancient religion of Mexico's drug cartels.

A reader writes:

Having never missed an episode of 24, I agree with the earlier writer that the normalization of more and more extreme acts of violence is part of the show’s legacy.  But what really struck me about the show was an outgrowth of a world, created by the 24 writers, where extreme institutional incompetence was the norm.

When Jack is “forced” to torture, it is because CTU, in spite of technology and extralegal authority beyond the wettest Cheney dream, never has more than one active lead. Add to this that they are staffed in every department with treasonous moles and ass-covering bureaucrats, and supported by field agents and cops who cannot even successfully set a perimeter around a suspect. For instance, the mastermind of Season Four, upon that a colleague had been captured, stalled his pursuers by calling in a lawyer from the snottily-named “Amnesty Global” to advocate for his civil rights.

The writers performed acts of superhuman gymnastics over the years in order to make Jack, week after week, the ONLY man who can be trusted, in the ONLY place where there is hope of stopping the attack, with ONLY minutes to work. The disaster MUST be of unimaginable scale and scheduled for only hours (or minutes) into the future. The villains MUST be so steely and self-assured as to laugh at the possibility of life in prison, or even a painless execution.  Our normal institutions MUST fail.

That cocktail is effectively never replicated in the real world, where investigations unfold over months and years and involve so many puzzle pieces of information. And no one has perfect situational judgment here on Earth, where we have things like ambiguity.  But it was the only fuel the 24 engine could accept once the producers elected to ride its formula as far as it would take them.

The show truly was the dramatization of Cheney’s infamous One-Percent Doctrine.

Friedersdorf compares the actual ACLU with the conservative caricature of it.

Crowley lambastes McGinniss:

McGinniss's gimmick … is bad for journalism. It plays right into the hands of the many people—including Sarah Palin, who is shrewdly ridiculing McGinniss—with an interest in portraying reporters as creeps with no sense of decency.

Bad for journalism? What journalism? The MSM let this farce of a politician go an entire campaign without a single real press conference. Where was Crowley then? Waiting for a returned phone call from Goldfarb? Exercizing sufficient "deference"? The key point is that McGinniss has gone to Alaska and will stay there a while. That's how you find out who this delusional phony truly is. And that's why Palin may be a little rattled. She knows this won't be another bullshit profile from Time. I think the press should be right in front of powerful people's faces. Right there. Unblinking, so to speak.

LikeCool explains:

The Museum of London has launched a free iPhone app which brings its extensive art and photographic collections as well as geo tagging and Google Maps to guide users around London where, via the iPhone screen, various historical images of the city appear – just like in the image above. You can look into the past of the London, and explore the hidden history of London that surrounds you. This idea may have been inspired by the Flickr group, Looking into the Past.

You can download it from iTunes here.

“This world is a strange madhouse. Currently, every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation,” – Albert Einstein, 1920.

Joss Garman has an excellent post comparing the campaign against relativity a century ago with the campaign against the science of climate change today.