Category: The Dish

"What shocked me the most in this trip was how the city looked like Baghdad. New Orleans looked like Baghdad after the war in 1991; I swear I kid you not. The devastation, empty houses, the people returning to their life in the city, the "rituals" people practice before they completely come back, the bumps in the streets and the smell of destruction.

I arrived to New Orleans Thursday. On the way to the hotel, I saw the same thing I saw on tv two years ago, destroyed buildings. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Two years later and the scene is the same? Where are we? A government that spent hundreds of billions of dollars on wars overseas is not capable of dealing with a crisis on its own soil! A crisis that all what it needed was money!" – an Iraqi blogger, visiting the US. Hey: stuff happens. The government has no responsibility in wartime or natural disasters. Not under this president, anyway.

(Hat tip: Cunning Realist.)

A reader writes:

The response you received about the Bayeux Tapestry from the "historian" strikes me as particularly ignorant.

My wife (art historian) and I (artist) had the incredible good fortune of finding ourselves in Bayeux, Normandy, France last year where we saw the actual tapestry. Briefly, the tapestry is a 70m long (230 ft) embroidered (stitched) cloth depicting the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings in 1066.  While we do not know the exact origins of the tapestry (who comissioned it) or where it was created (in France or England), there is absolutely no doubt that it is one-sided Norman (William the Conquerer) political propaganda.  The Anglo-Saxon (King Harold) point of view is not portrayed at all.

There is also no doubt that the tapestry depicts a "continuous narrative". Anyone who has actually walked around the 230 ft tapestry can see the story unfold from one end to the other.  This "both ends to the middle" nonsense causes me to believe this "scholar" has never seen the tapestry in person.

Lastly, there is no raunchy porn. "Porn" is a very loaded and misleading word and it is a particularly poor choice of word to describe the so-called "naughty bits" found in the tapestry. The tapestry contains many instances of humor as well as scenes depicting nudes in the margins. There are no scenes of sexual adventure or prostitution (as one would likely find in a war story). This is not Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.  The only nudes to be found in the tapestry are dead soldiers stripped of their chain mail.  The only "naughtiness" one will find is an occasional erect penis on a dead soldier … which is why, along with many other oddities, it is also believed that the tapestry was stitched by women … who were ridiculing the men for their need to prove their manliness through warfare.

A reader writes:

If we had focused on why Al Qaeda thought that 9/11 would be good tactic, we might have discerned their larger strategy. They saw religious imperialism and disrespect for Islam as implicit in the US actions in the Middle East, and they want to create a situation in which that would be made clear. And like the Chinese Communist Party vis a vis the Japanese, they seek to take power in the Middle East by being the most militant and resolute fighters against the foreign invaders. 

Of course, our invasion of Iraq (which I supported) validated AQ’s line of analysis and furthered their strategy. We proved that we seemingly couldn’t tell one Arab from another, but seemed to hate them all. We propagandized their most crucial proposition: that this was the US vs Islam, in general. And we continue to do so whenever we lump together Al Qaeda, the Sadrists, the Baathists, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Fatah, the MBB, and Muslim immigrants in Britain, France and Denmark into one undifferentiated stew.

Our knowledge task is to understand all of the different conflicts in their uniqueness before we draw some vast conclusion. It is most important to break with the vast generalizations that lie under the current strategic thinking.

(Photo: The "Tribute in Light" illuminates the sky over the World Trade Center site September 11, 2006 in New York City. The temporary memorial to those lost on September 11, 2001, returned to mark the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks. By Chris Hondros/Getty Images.)

A report on the National Guard’s strains in fighting two wars and dealing with natural disasters at home. A serious expansion of the military – what Gore proposed in 2000 and Bush strongly opposed – now seems a matter of urgency.

Rudy? Or Maggie?

(Hat tip: The Plank.)

That’s MI5’s estimate of the number of Islamist terror suspects now operating in Britain. It’s up from the 2,000 reported only a short while ago. I wonder how many were inspired by the Iraq war.

A reader who works for New York State’s government got the following email message this morning:

Effective May 1, 2007, the New York State Department of Civil Service has altered its prior policy and afforded recognition to any same-sex marriage that is legal in the jurisdiction where it was performed. This recognition is for purposes of providing spousal benefits eligibility in the New York State Health Insurance Program (NYSHIP) and for all other benefit programs administered by the Department’s Employee Benefits Division.  This would include:

The New York State Vision Program
The Management Confidential Life Insurance Program
The New York Public Employee and Retiree Long Term Care Program (NYPERL)
The New York State Dental Insurance Program (including the Retiree Dental Plan administered by GHI)

To implement this change, there will be a special enrollment period, from May 1, 2007 through May 31, 2007 for changes in health insurance, and dental and vision coverage.

In the light of this post, a reader recommends Bob Wright’s 2002 series of articles here.

The cheek.

Sectarian pressures rise.