"It’s all very well hosting the Winter Olympics, having a leader who likes to swim topless in icy waters, and having NASA pay you to take US astronauts into space, but it all seems rather meaningless when your country is simply not as free and open as it could be. This is not a feeling exclusive from pride and shame at one’s own country. It’s dangerous when people forget, that to honour and respect, one mustn’t invest in the object of affection a simple faith alone.
…When one sees people posing next to a Stalin look-a-like in a subway tunnel, it does make one pause to wonder what the hell is going on.
As I walk through another station later on, I see two haggard men with bruised and cut faces, begging. An old man meets a woman nearby, touching his hat and smiling. He takes her trolley, and they walk off, chatting amiably. Just like any other metro station in many other countries. But here it feels indicative of something more, of both a struggling alienation and a harsh world, and yet also a warm heart that will always live beyond the reach of the system it lives under." >continue<
"Critics warned from the beginning that austerity in the face of depression would only make that depression worse. But the “austerians” insisted that the reverse would happen. Why? Confidence! “Confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery,” declared Jean-Claude Trichet, the former president of the European Central Bank — a claim echoed by Republicans in Congress here. Or as I put it way back when, the idea was that the confidence fairy would come in and reward policy makers for their fiscal virtue.
The good news is that many influential people are finally admitting that the confidence fairy was a myth. The bad news is that despite this admission there seems to be little prospect of a near-term course change either in Europe or here in America, where we never fully embraced the doctrine, but have, nonetheless, had de facto austerity in the form of huge spending and employment cuts at the state and local level....
So we’re now living in a world of zombie economic policies — policies that should have been killed by the evidence that all of their premises are wrong, but which keep shambling along nonetheless. And it’s anyone’s guess when this reign of error will end." >continue<
"I am – how do you say it? – persona non grata," said Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Davis, as he sat sipping a coffee and eating a chocolate sundae in a shopping mall, just a subway stop from the Pentagon.
Davis, 48, drew up two reports containing research and observations garnered from his last tour. He was not short of material. As part of his job he had criss-crossed the country, travelling 9,000 miles and talking to more than 250 people. He had built up a picture of a hopeless cause; a country where Afghan soldiers were incapable of holding on to American gains. US soldiers would fight and die for territory and then see Afghan troops let it fall to the Taliban. Often the Afghans actively worked with the Taliban or simply refused to fight. One Afghan police officer laughed in Davis's face when asked if he ever tried to fight the enemy. "That would be dangerous!" the man said. >continue<
I remember Christmas Eve with Apollo 8, being upset that Apollo 10 would not land, and seeing grainy images of a giant leap. And this… this makes me swallow hard with watering eyes.
“I will not accept a statement that says we can’t afford it”
"I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.
When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival."
Fears of a bomb in Tehran’s hands are overhyped, and a war to prevent it would be a disaster
…Thus we find ourselves at a strange pass. Those in the United States who genuinely yearn for war are still a neoconservative minority. But the danger that war might break out—and that the hawks will get their way—has nonetheless become substantial. The U.S. has just withdrawn the last troops from one Middle Eastern country where it fought a highly costly war of choice with a rationale involving weapons of mass destruction. Now we find ourselves on the precipice of yet another such war—almost purely because the acceptable range of opinion on Iran has narrowed and ossified around the “sensible” idea that all options must be pursued to prevent the country from acquiring nuclear weapons. >continue<
A scholarly long read well worth attention. The dangerously unexamined notion that Iran cannot be allowed to possess nuclear weapons continually reasserts itself in a building siren song. An 'existential threat to Israel' gets assumed as a given in what looks like a charade to deflect attention from the real worry, potential threats to Western influence and de facto control over the Persian Gulf. And as this dubious line falls into the trap of taking itself too seriously, feverishly pressing Iran on all fronts, ironically it becomes harder to imagine any Iranian's capacity to ascertain a rational argument for not acquiring nuclear weapons.
The present amplitude and velocity of war talk enjoins the highest duty to vigorously question whole networks of assumptions.
"Marie was living dangerously. Of course she was in Homs. Where else would she have been?
As I drove to the ice rink with my wife and kids up here in Vermont, where we are spending a few days’ vacation, I thought about the choices we all make. Marie made hers many years ago, devoting her life to being a war correspondent. Everything else—her health, her family, her personal life—came second. Naturally, she sometimes thought of doing something else, something less crazy. At our last lunch, she spoke in her throaty-voiced way about the possibility of writing a book and dialing it back—maybe getting a gig at a think tank or a journalism school. I think we both knew she’d never do it. Many moons ago, she quit reporting for a while and spent a couple of years on the Sunday Times foreign desk, rewriting copy and managing other reporters. She nearly died of boredom.
...We all have to die sometime. Marie died doing what she loved, what made her feel most alive, what turns journalism from a job into something bigger and more noble: a mission. It’s perhaps not much of a consolation to her many friends and her family, but it’s what happened."
"Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a list of words that most commonly follow the adverb “severely”; the top five, in frequency of use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured.
That’s clearly not what Mr. Romney meant to convey. Yet if you look at the race for the G.O.P. presidential nomination, you have to wonder whether it was a Freudian slip.
...How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation!
My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security."
Karl Rove pranced onto Fox "news" to announce his displeasure [with the Chrysler Superbowl ad], saying that the ad was "a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics, and the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising." The man who helped demonize a legless Vietnam vet said he was "offended."
What this reaction says is something deeper. See, Clint Eastwood, who voted for John McCain and opposed the bank and car bailouts, thinks the whole controversy is bullshit. He rewrote the script, and he’s donating his pay to charity. What Rove and the rest of the right’s negative reaction really means is that they are divorced from the nation as a whole. In the ad, Eastwood says that, during tough times, "we all rallied around what was right, and acted as one." We acted, in essence, like Americans.
Conservatives are saying that it’s offensive to expect them to do so. And if Dirty Harry wants to wallow around with the dirty hippies, then fuck him, too.
"Romney has got into Gingrich’s head, under his skin and very possibly into other parts of his anatomy. The former Speaker appears intent on destroying Romney but seems not to care that he will almost certainly fail - and probably destroy himself in the process."
"Newt Gingrich says that he wants to develop a robust commercial space industry in line with the airline boom of the 1930s. He also wants to expand exploration of Mars."
In which a great idea finds a lunatic spokesman. A permanent lunar colony, eventually with a goal of becoming self-sustaining, should not suffer derision merely because it is associated with Newt Gingrich. The former would be a fecund expression of evolution - and arguably necessary. The latter, a pathogenic affront to sentience and politics.
Is something going on under the surface here with Joe Scarborough? His argument with Mike Murphy on Meet The Press raises the ever so slight suspicion that Joe may be more invested in his line than your normal talking head.
Granted, it's likely fodder for the Annals of Pure Speculation - but damned if I'm finding the intuition hard to shake. Scarborough may fancy himself as the choice of a brokered convention.
Bracket everything you know or think about the candidates and the winner of Thursday's debate in Charleston is clear: Santorum totally owned it. He stood way above the others in the logical play of assertion, response, evisceration, and focus.
...When Santorum zinged the line of the night - "Newt has never had a problem with grandiosity" - Newt played right into Rick's attack vector and proudly identified himself as grandiose! Santorum lowers the scythe masterfully with a perfectly apt distinction between someone possessed of an effusive cauldron of ideas and an effective political agency. It was brutal - and it wouldn't be the only time Newt's body language showed the score. Justice requires that Ned Beatty host SNL and spoof this encounter.
Romney's smiley sheen and obnoxious avoidance of any real questions, punctuated by the "Maybe" quip over his taxes, snaps into gear just long enough to pop Newt over his legacy and the Reagan diary, brush off Gingrich's ad hoc reply over how Mitt should be thankful, and effectively nail his tendency to sound like a name dropper and a credit hog. Zinger sparks aside, Romney can't or won't gear beyond superficiality now that the polls are tight, staying in a formulaic "safe zone", talking a lot and saying nothing. If he only had as many clues as grandchildren.
...“Journalists” covering politics now appear to be in the same boat as sports broadcasters, having to insert ‘Mercedes Benz’ before ‘Super Dome’… and “Dr. Pepper” before ‘BCS National Champion’. There’s something eerily similar going on, where the cunning manipulation of language is allowed a free ride - and “analysis” turns on how different demographics will consume the message (or the gaffe). The truth of the matter is less important (assuming any importance) than what people want to believe - and how they will react based on given assumptions...
It looks like a concession speech; but look out Mitt, it's a trap! You could tell Newt's midichlorian count was high. Right after saying he wouldn't go negative in response to the Romney PAC's Iowa carpet bombing, he hedges with the "right to tell the truth", and then proceeds to suggest that Romney’s behavior is unworthy of the American lives sacrificed for our way of life. Somebody tell him George Lucas hasn't issued a casting call for a new Sith Lord...
Ron Paul takes it. Chalk it up to a combination of superior organization, quasi-endearing crankiness, a youth component - and primarily a hyper-critique of foreign policy. It won't matter that the libertarian schtick is a combination of irrationality and potential economic catastrophe. His support may be faulted for naivete and a lack of philosophical sophistication; and yet, it is difficult to question the cogency of a building distaste for America's overwrought military/foreign policy footprint.
While the remainder of the GOP engages in stupefying advocacy of war with Iran (arguably violating the Nuremberg Principles) - and Democratic apparatchiki either embrace or fear the sacred military cow, the space of out front, unapologetic critique is left to - well - this crazy libertarian dude. Problem is, though he elaborates his stance on the basis of "consistency and principle" in a mechanized libertarian calculus, the dubious, paint-by-numbers means is less important than the end...
"Blessed be the womb that bore thee and the paps that gave thee suck." The rogue Fyodor Karamazov would surely admire Newt. So courageously does he suck the speaker's fees and undergo faux martyrdom for the sake of his visions of fundamental change.
"Democracy in both America and Britain is coming under scrutiny these days. Quite apart from the antics of MPs and congressmen, it is said to be sliding towards oligarchy, with increasing overtones of autocracy. Money and its power over technology are making elections unfair. The military-industrial complex is as powerful as ever, having adopted “the menace of global terrorism” as its casus belli. Lobbying and corruption are polluting the government process. In a nutshell, democracy is not in good shape.How strange to choose this moment to export it, least of all to countries that have never experienced it in their history. The West not only exports the stuff, it does so with massive, thuggish violence, the antithesis of how self-government should mature in any polity. The tortured justification in Iraq and Afghanistan is that elections will somehow sanctify a “war against terrorism” waged on someone else’s soil. The resulting death and destruction have been appalling. Never can an end, however noble, have so failed to justify the means of achieving it."
The dissolution of Iraq into chaos, perhaps alongside and in sync with Syria, threatens to plunge the Middle East into a humanitarian and political nightmare. If a fear of this fate conjured prudence for the first Bush Administration in its decision not to advance on Baghdad, serious labours for the sake of a viable government in Iraq seemed oddly absent in the minds of the invaders of 2003. This lapse, more than anything else, best underscores the contempt observers felt upon witnessing George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" theatre.
Rather than seriously confront the fears of 1991, the younger Bush went into Iraq stoked with a contempt for nation building. The State Department was marginalized as appointments and duties, ostensibly for the sake of rebuilding Iraq, were made on the basis of loyalty and graft. A government, as in Afghanistan, was allowed to come to be on the basis of religious and ethnic fault lines, motivated seemingly by the dreamy notion that stable democracy is a phenomenon that jumps fully fledged like a rabbit out of history's magic hat.
Once you've suspended everything else, bracketing principle and established international norms which should have prevented war in the first place, forgetting the one thing that might conceivably justify means on the merits of praxis or the shoulders of "can do" indicates an astonishing insobriety. Neocon imagination must reel...
"So long as Hitch can learn to keep his mouth shut about Christianity being symptomatic of the ‘savage and ignorant prehistory of our species’ and whatnot, I’m sure he’ll cause no trouble that a few cups of black coffee and a night in the drunk tank can’t solve."
Another GOP debate? More of the interminable circus? Weariness prompts a motivation check. Oh yeah, only long cultivated and insurmountable disgust over Newt Gingrich. The Pied Piper of Political Pathology has to swim in chum filled waters, likely a bloated target for too many opportunistic jaws. Thrown into this scenario, Newt's well honed stage presencing may lack sufficient gas. And the chance to witness the tell tale signs of squirming is just too much to pass up.
He may even be goaded into leveraging certain habits and erstwhile strengths. Take the recent, sharp exchange between Romney & Gingrich where Mitt worked in 'bomb thrower' and Newt parried with 'courage' and 'timid'. Such farcical spats, so lamely sculpted by an aspiration to jedi mind trickery that the other words can be crossed out, place Gingrich on dangerous terrain. More than any other candidate, he's likely to win the battle but lose the war.
Behind that expansive visage lurks an ego ripe with a sense of ownership, even entitlement, to the genius of word play and insult. And it shows when he chafes at being subjected to it, almost as if he's trying to restrain a smirk at his imminent shot at showing up his poor attacker with a masterful, wizardly counterstroke. But he's apt to go too far, to be too mean...
"Gingrich’s remarks were headlined at Aljazeera and even as we speak have stirred a wave of anger at the United States. But it is not because he has put forward a new American position. It is because he has confirmed what the Arab public had perceived as US policy all along. The US is an accomplice in the erasure of a whole people, in keeping them in an estate of statelessness, only a little elevated from that of slavery, and in helping further expropriate them on a daily basis."
correspondent. Everything else—her health, her family, her personal life—came second. Naturally, she sometimes thought of doing something else, something less crazy. At our last lunch, she spoke in her throaty-voiced way about the possibility of writing a book and dialing it back—maybe getting a gig at a think tank or a journalism school. I think we both knew she’d never do it. Many moons ago, she quit reporting for a while and spent a couple of years on the Sunday Times foreign desk, rewriting copy and managing other reporters. She nearly died of boredom.
