Category: The Dish

Wilmington, Delaware, 2.45 pm.

The Dish has it covered. Posts here, here, and here.

Some very cool links from Chris Chatham.

A reader writes:

I’m sure that your post will generate its share of outrage from southerners who feel unfairly singled out for blame for the cultural roots of torture in America, so I commend you to a book called "The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity" by Jill Lepore (now a professor of history at Harvard).  Professor Lepore describes a conflict with some eerie similarities to the post-9/11 "war on terror."  After a period of engagement, in which the British settlers of New England tried to engage and "civilize" the native population, the Wampanoags turned on the settlers in a series of brutal attacks (including the murder and kidnap of women and children on isolated farms).

In their resulting terror, the settlers retaliated with an extraordinary level of brutality, nearly exterminating the native population in southeastern New England.  The specific accounts of torture are sparse because, as Professor Lepore relates, subsequent written accounts seem to gloss over the specifics of how the campaign was conducted — the intellectuals who came to build a "city on a hill" were clearly ashamed of what (they agreed) had to be done.  Indeed, the very existence of the Wampanoag was glossed over, as Indian place names were systematically changed to familiar English ones.  But Lepore’s excellent book shows that it’s not only American southerners who have perceived attacks by dark-skinned people as an existential threat, and have jettisoned their principles regarding human rights in response.

The online pro-follicle community continues to grow. Here’s a hot-or-not beard page; a blog dedicated to growing beards to help battered women; and a no-shave November round-up.

Now we begin to understand why Romney struggled so much with that question in the YouTube debate about Biblical literalism. The question itself may have been a code attack on Mormonism itself. This LDS official statement is pretty clear:

"Latter-day Saints revere the Bible. They study it and believe it to be the word of God. However, they do not believe the Bible, as it is currently available, is without error… As the Bible was compiled, organized, translated and transcribed, many errors entered the text."

I have a feeling a lot of evangelicals may be getting those sentences by email in the next few weeks. Now, of course, the imperfection of the Bible seems self-evident to me. It contradicts itself many times. But it sure doesn’t look that way to fundamentalists and many evangelicals. And the question is broad enough to make it into legitimate mainstream discourse. So the evangelicals don’t have to "go there" in attacking Romney’s Mormonism directly, or raising some of its more eccentric doctrines; they can simply challenge Romney on Biblical literalism and tell their followers why a Mormon can’t answer the question as well as Huckabee can. And it becomes very hard to tell them to knock it off: all they’re doing is defending their own approach to Scripture.

Macaque apes turn out to be like humans:

Platt found that male macaques strongly preferred to look at pictures of females’ rear ends and dominant males’ faces. They liked them enough to pay, by sacrificing a chance to get a treat. But you had to bribe those same monkeys with treats to persuade them to look at female macaque faces or the faces of subordinate males.

A child plays as he looks for fish in Southkali, 01 December 2007. More than 3,400 people are confirmed dead after the powerful storm ripped through Bangladesh’s southern and central districts on November 15. Thousands more are missing feared dead and an estimated 280,000 without shelter. By Mehdi Fedouach/AFP/Getty Images.

Well, let’s look on the bright side, shall we? From The American:

It is tempting to compare this growth to the rise of the American wine industry over the past two decades. And not just because cheese and wine are so tasty together. They are similar foods. Both harness the miracle of fermentation, the activity of bacteria on a simple commodity (milk or grape juice). Both are as much art as science, cherished for their unique capacity to speak of the land and the tradition in which they are born—what the cognoscenti call terroir.

Cheese and wine have traced similar paths to success. Both came to America with European immigrants seeking to recreate the traditional staples of their homelands. Both entered a long dark age of industrialization and standardization, and have spent decades repairing a devastated brand and fighting to capture a suspicious market against an overwhelming tide of high-quality European competition. To this day, the very expression “American cheese” elicits chuckles and images of convenient, individually wrapped slices and aerosolized whizzes.

Cheese 4What has been good for wine has been good for cheese. The rising wealth and strong dollar of the 1990s sent Americans flocking to Europe, returning with a new understanding and appreciation of continental eating.

Not exactly encouraging:

We legislated against natural gas after the OPEC embargoes. Then we pinned all our hopes on natural gas and built capacity like crazy people. Then all the nukes were canceled based on one accident, during which, by all accounts, the safety systems actually behaved the way they were supposed to, avoiding a truly calamitous event. Now sequestration is the answer. We keep regulating, legislating, and reacting to one-time events or one type of pollutant with short-term measures.