The Enlightened Despot

Meiji told me the other day that the Marines were buzzing with a rumor that Obama had banned the use of the phrase ‘Global War on Terror’ in favor of the clumsier ‘Overseas Contingency Operations’. That would be a problem because all the Marines are allowed to wear the ribbon shown above, the GWOT ribbon. Would the ribbon be replaced? Renamed? Neither: Pentagon Press Spokesman Geoff Morrell explained that it was just another case of ‘overexuberance’:

MR. MORRELL: I’ve never received such a directive. I think the White House and OMB for that matter have been very clear about this as well, that they have never issued such a directive.

I think they’ve explained that perhaps somebody within OMB may have been a little overexuberant and done so. But I can just tell you, I’m the one who speaks publicly about these matters. And I have never been told which words to use or not to use. So I don’t think there’s anything to the story.

I wish I could remember all the overexuberance we’ve had. It often occurs during campaigns: I believe overexuberance caused the unfortunate Obama faux presidential seal.

(h/t Ben Smith)

Here is Shelby Steele writing in the WSJ about the conservative movement’s failure to appeal to blacks:

And here is conservatism’s great problem with minorities. In an era when even failed moral activism is redemptive — and thus a source of moral authority and power — conservatism stands flat-footed with only discipline to offer. It has only an invisible hand to compete with the activism of the left. So conservatism has no way to show itself redeemed of America’s bigoted past, no way like the Great Society to engineer a grand display of its innocence, and no way to show deference to minorities for the oppression they endured. Thus it seems to be in league with that oppression.

And here is Ross Douthat in broad agreement:

Treated as a view from 30,000 feet, I basically agree with this argument. You cannot expect the descendants of slaves and the heirs of segregation to embrace a conservative politics en masse until we’re much, much further out of those institutions’ shadow than we are today; by the same token, it would be bad for conservatism, and for America, if the Right were to seek black votes by jettisoning its core premises, and simply giving up (as the Bush Administration sometimes seemed eager to do) on its long-running critique of the diversity-and-dependency two-step that undergirds modern liberalism’s approach to racial issues. Given where the two groups are starting from, in other words, conservatives shouldn’t hope for more from African-Americans, and African-Americans more from conservatives, than either group is likely to deliver.

Baloney. The part of conservativism that’s unappealing to blacks isn’t the philosophical underpinnings - it’s the racists. To be clear: Douthat’s not a racist; Steele’s not a racist; McCain’s not a racist; most Republicans and most conservatives aren’t racists; but a large enough minority of Republicans are racist to stain the whole party in the eyes of blacks. (And others.)

If you would deny that there remains a racist element in the Republican party - well, then I don’t know what to say to you. Consider the following: Barrack the Magic Negro, watermelon ‘humor’, Strom Thurmond, the Southern strategy that was first Nixon’s and still the party’s. Remember Colin Powell’s speech at the Republican National Convention in 2000, when in a tone of chastisement or maybe desperation he urged his party to take race seriously:

The party must follow Governor Bush’s lead and reach out to minority communities and particularly the African-American community - and not just during an election year campaign. It must be a sustained effort. It must be every day. It must be for real.

The party must listen to and speak with all leaders of the black community, regardless of political affiliation or philosophy. We must understand the cynicism that exists in the black community. The kind of cynicism that is created when, for example, some in our party miss no opportunity to roundly and loudly condemn affirmative action that helped a few thousand Black kids get an education, but hardly a whimper is heard from them over affirmative action for lobbyists who load our federal tax codes with preferences for special interests.

Overcoming the cynicism and mistrust that exist and raising up that mantle of Lincoln is about more than just winning votes. It is about giving all minorities a competitive choice. We deserve one! It will be good for our party and it will be good for America.

A challenge to Steele, Douthat, and Republicans: get rid of the racist elements of your party. Ostracize them. Wait a few years. My guess is that the blacks will then start voting for your candidates without you having to “show deference to minorities for the oppression they endured.”

P.S. Akhbar: my internets are slow. Can you put up a clip of “I Know Black People”? The Reagan question is relevant to this post.

P.P.S. G W Bush was genuinely not a racist, a truly color blind man. He should be given credit for that.

Last week a German scientist accidentally pricked herself with a needle containing the Ebola virus. This week, the community of Ebola scientists waits anxiously to see if she falls ill after receiving an experimental vaccine. I guarantee this will be made into a movie. Full story here.

Like that middle aged Asian woman, I heart Bunny Colvin. At the American Scene, Matt Feeney has more nuanced things to say about Bunny’s drug legalization experiment:

But of course ending prohibition would have its substantial costs. The uptick in the direct effects – addiction etc. – is a matter of debate, but one thing The Wire shows pretty convincingly is that an end to drug prohibition would almost certainly lead to a huge expansion what James likes to call the pink police state. The Wire shows teams of public health types moving in to Hamsterdam to distribute needles and condoms and find as many takers for rehab as they can. What starts out as a threat to the experiment – people, inconveniently, pointing out how appalling are its tableaux – becomes the suggestion of a therapeutic utopia: The pleasure and the treatment and the policing of pleasure and treatment are all in one place, happening simultaneously. In real life, these public health types would be agents of the state. Drug legalization surely would lead to a spreading police power attached to the state’s therapeutic capacities.

I was watching ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’ a couple of days ago and saw this, which clearly depicts A-Rod discussing torture with then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. I repeat, this is a genuine screenshot from ‘Taxi to the Dark Side.’

Another tough revelation for A-Rod and the Yankees.

Eigenfactor, a service that ranks scientific journals, has a spectacular interactive vizualization of the scientific community. Click on any field of science and see threads (each one a journal citation) between it and other fields.

via a bunch of people, Bloomberg has this graph:

The chart compares two investment strategies both starting with the same amount of money in 1978. The red line shows how you’d have done if you’d invested your money in stocks and reinvested any dividends in more stocks. The blue line is how you’d have done if you invested your money in 30-year treasury bonds, continually selling and buying to make sure you have the newest bonds available.

The point of the chart is that stocks (red) are usually above bonds (blue), but now suddenly that’s reversed. But it’s less than ‘earth shattering’, unless you think that stocks are never going to recover. This is only slightly more profound than saying that bonds are a better buy than stocks when the stock market is crashing.

via Ben Smith, the Detroit Free Press has made available the transcripts of Kwame Kilpatrick’s incriminating text messages. I worked through 97 pages of the 600+ to find you these comic gems:

…

CHRISTINE: No response huh? Can we meet at 10:30?

KWAME: LOL! So you were thinking 11 or 12 tonight? That’s too late!

KWAME: I’m here at your will!

CHRISTINE: NO NIGGA! I WASN’T! BUT WHATEVER1 ALWAYS THINKING THE WORST AND THEN SAYING AT MY WILL! IF THAT’S THE CASE IF 11:00 WAS MY WILL THEN IT WOULDN’T BE TOO LATE!

KWAME: Yes it would. It would just be your late ass will. I don’t “always” do shit.

…

REDACTED: Congratulations Mr. Mayor, I knew everything would be fine, the lord looks out for the righteous. The citizens of Detroit are the big winners. We will continue to stand with you and be proud of you.

…

JAMAINE DICKENS: Did you see the cartoon on freep ed page?

KWAME: LOLOLOLOL!!! I like that shit!

…

KWAME (to Christine): I WANT WHATEVER YOU HAVE FOR ME. I’m GIDDY ABOUT IT. Don’t KNOW WHY, JUST BE HAT WAY. SWEET DREAMS! GOODNIGHT G!

KWAME: P.S. KEEP WATCHING “REAL SEX!” DAAAAAMN!

…

BONUS: Kwame is suing SkyTel over the release of the text messages. “Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick rightfully expected that any text messages written on city-leased paging devices would remain private, according to a lawsuit he filed Tuesday in Mississippi.”

To wit, he recently wrote this sentence:

Of late, I’ve also taken a dim view of symbolism as a substitute for policy.

Here are some more things I’d like to hear from him and his crowd:

- You know, I’ve kind of been thinking that maybe substance is more important than rhetoric. Just a thought, though.

- Bear with me here, but what if perception is actually less important than reality?

- I was going to tell you about a vacuous gimmick the GOP could use to make noise and get on cable news outlets, but then I thought this is just more of my cynical bullshit!, so I won’t.

Note also that from certain angles Ruffini looks like C. Montgomery Burns’s sleazy campaign manager during his race for governor (if you have forgotten, this seminal character, enjoy a clip from the YouTube):

(On the other hand, Jon Henke is a very bright guy who makes The Next Right worth reading.)

This fantastic little data visualization app lets you explore American immigration patterns through the 20th century.

I noticed unrelated activity on the net re: breastfeeding today. First, ‘Hanna Rosin’ wrote a little article in the Atlantic against breastfeeding. A key graf:

One day, while nursing my baby in my pediatrician’s office, I noticed a 2001 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association open to an article about breast-feeding: “Conclusions: There are inconsistent associations among breastfeeding, its duration, and the risk of being overweight in young children.” Inconsistent? There I was, sitting half-naked in public for the tenth time that day, the hundredth time that month, the millionth time in my life—and the associations were inconsistent? The seed was planted. That night, I did what any sleep-deprived, slightly paranoid mother of a newborn would do. I called my doctor friend for her password to an online medical library, and then sat up and read dozens of studies examining breast-feeding’s association with allergies, obesity, leukemia, mother-infant bonding, intelligence, and all the Dr. Sears highlights.

And Harry from Crooked Timber agrees. But on the exact same day (!) we have this from War and Health. They have reproduced an unpublished study on the health effects of the 1998-9 civil war in Guinea-Bissau (who could forget?):

The BHP study on breastfeeding during the civil war in Guinea-Bissau reveals how a commonly recommended practice can have profound affects on protecting the health of infants in a complex humanitarian emergency (CHE). Focusing on the first three months of the year-long war, Jakobsen et al compared mortality rates of breastfed children between the ages of 9 to 20 months with weaned children of the same age. The researchers determined that the mortality rate for the weaned children was six times that of the breastfed children; however, prior to the war, their was little difference in mortality levels among breastfed and weaned children. The increase in mortality for weaned children is “most likely because of higher infection pressure during the war when people lived in overcrowded houses in the rural area with less access to care.” According to Jakobsen at al, diarrhea, lower respiratory infections, and malnutrition frequently cause death in CHEs and breastfeeding is believed to help prevent or mitigate the severity of each of these conditions. The BHP study concludes that “in emergency situations with increased risk of infections, maintaining breastfeeding is even more critical than under normal conditions.” Moreover, the researchers identify weaned children under 21 months as a particular risk group that humanitarian actors should focus on during relief efforts.

So I think the moral of all this is that ‘Hanna Rosin’ can safely spoonfeed her baby unless the Second War of Northern Aggression breaks out.

Also: Xena, Warrior Princess supports breastfeeding:

This is more than a day old and so nearly unbloggable, but I cannot resist describing it. David Frum had the gall to tell Chris Matthews that Rush has a ‘race problem’; this made Andy McCarthy very, very angry:

Anyone who actually listens to Rush’s show knows he’s the anti-racist. He wants a color-blind society where everyone is on the level playing-field of merit and your dignity is a function of your humanity, not your race. Martin Luther King spoke of being judged by the content of our character rather than the color of our skin. How appalling that, 40 years later, a guy who heeds that message is deemed by the media and the rest of the Left to have a “race problem.” But in those circles, Frum now has no problem. The ring-master cracked his whip, the sea lion flopped around with the race-ball on his nose, and everyone oohed and ahhed.

I mean fuck me! Rush is carrying the banner of Martin Luther King Jr.?

But there’s no time to dwell on that, because fair being fair we have to acknowledge Fox News’s report that on September 11th, just before the attacks, James Carville said this about George W. Bush: “I certainly hope he doesn’t succeed.” You might argue that Fox gives us no context for this remark, but who cares? The GOP’s problem isn’t that Limbaugh says ugly, uncharitable things - it’s that his party won’t rebuke him for saying them.

Finally, an excellent piece on Limbaugh and other topics by David Frum.

Below the fold, some spectacular hubris from Rush:

(more…)

Scholars in London claim to have discovered what would be the only known portrait of Shakespeare, in the sense of a painting the bard sat down for:

But the evidence that this is indeed an original portrait is circumstantial: the age of the wood in the frame, the detail on his ridiculous lace collar - that sort of thing.

Wheat/chaff, diamond/rough, needle/haystack. Whatever your fancy, an excellent tip via Daily Kos. Read this article about good parents who accidentally kill their infants by leaving them in the car on a hot day. I was literally crying in the back of a meeting full of adults in business suits, trying to pretend I had some weird allergy.

This poor, cursed fellow lost a son this way. He talks in the article about how his wife has forgiven him but it only makes his life harder because he still cannot forgive himself. Here’s hoping that one day he does.

At Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson asks an excellent question:

Smiling politely through yet another performance by my son’s school band tonight, I wondered: why do school bands play music so different from what the kids, or even their parents, choose in their free time?  Music at parties, movies, etc. is pretty different.  The novels kids read in English class differ from the novels they or their parents read in their free time, but most people accept that school novels are deeper, subtler, etc., so that kids learn more by studying them.  But do most people really accept a similar claim about band music?  What gives?

To which I say: yeah! And add: why was a capella routinely inflicted on me in college?