I recommended some excerpts from Christopher Hitchens a short while ago. Here are a couple more that you might like.
First, an interview in New York magazine, in which he reveals (surprise, surprise) that Karl Rove is an atheist. I don't agree with him about Iraq, but don't miss his explanation for the sole reason for prayer.
Second, his Slate commentary on the VPI shootings.
Good stuff.
Hat tip for the first link: The Scientific Activist.
ABC News released a statement last night saying Tobias acknowledged Thursday that he had used the service to provide massages, not sex.
- -- WaPo
In case you haven't heard, deputy secretary of state Randall Tobias "abruptly resigned yesterday [Friday 4/27] after he was asked about an upscale escort service …"
I heard about this from MK, a determined non-participant in the blogosphere, Saturday night, so I'm a little late to the game on this one. But I couldn't resist.
The official press release on the State Department's web site says:
He is returning to private life for personal reasons.
Not, presumably, to spend more time with his family.
Melamine will cost you about $1.20 for each protein count per ton whereas real protein costs you about $6, so you can see the difference.
- -- an animal feed seller in Zhangqiu, China
Actually, I can't. I don't buy cat food by the ton. I buy it four pounds at a time. I have to say, I'm not getting rich on the 76 hundredths of a cent per bag savings.
The NY Times's lead story today is about melamine as a pet food filler being an "open secret" in China. Apparently, melamine can fool the tests run to determine the protein content of a sample.
I'm not usually aligned with the isolationist point of view. But ever since the poisoned pet food story first broke, the lizard part of my brain has been clamoring for attention. And it's not just my cats that I worry about. It's clear, although the story doesn't say so explicitly, that there's every reason to worry about human food products being treated in the same cavalier fashion. And (wild guess here) this so-what attitude is probably not limited to China.
I like the option to be able to buy fresh produce from other countries when it's out of season locally, and I love imported delicacies. (And, okay, even some "necessities" -- apart from Hawaii, we don't grow too much coffee in the US, do we?) But I strongly believe that the first thing that any nation must do is guarantee its own food supply.
This is a hard problem. It's all good to preach "buy local" and to prefer "organic" and "free range," and I make an effort to support all of these philosophies. But the fact is, virtually all of us opt for convenience foods at least some of the time, and we all like to save money. It's also a fact of life that to satisfy these two consumer demands, food production is ever-increasingly viewed as a manufacturing task, which means that the producers will of course focus on saving systematic pennies.
In all the yammering about homeland security, though, I know how I'd like to reallocate some funds.
Update
2007-05-01 06:04 EDT
I guess I'm not the only one worried about this. The NY Times is soliciting reader input, too.
Update
2007-05-01 07:24 EDT
And they have a follow-up article.
Via email:
How about that new Tenet book about Iraq! Who was it who said the older I get the more cynical I get, but it's getting hard to keep up.
- -- TC
Update
2007-05-01 06:11 EDT
Clyde Haberman has a nice column on this: "A Slam-Dunk of a Book Tour Comes to Town." [T$]
… (as I was in the comments for the previous post), here's a story that I'd love to watch the young Earth creationists read. Out loud.
Update
2007-05-01 21:30 EDT
Maybe my mind is moving out of the gutter, or maybe it's just calcifying. I don't know how I didn't think of the title that William Saletan did, but let's steal it give him a shout-out: Ten-Inch Duck.
Nice.
This story is all over the place by now, and it seems that one of the big reasons is one I read right over in my haste to poke fun at the wingnuts: It took a look at the female ducks to understand what was going on here, and it took a female scientist to think of looking at the female ducks. Another bad day for my gender.
The weird thing is, given well-known behavior patterns like "eyes front while peeing!" and general public shower shyness, you'd think all the guy scientists would be more interested in looking at … nah, let's not go there.
A while back, I fretted about the state of mind of America's young adults. I am especially concerned that the 18-29 year-old group is the most supportive of Bush of all age groups, because I am afraid that this is a measurement of how many of them are being brainwashed by buying into various fundamentalist Christianist sects.
Turns out there's probably at least one other contributing factor.
Comparing one six-year span to another …
Number of subpoenas issued to the executive branch by the House Oversight Committee when Republicans controlled the House and George Bush was president: 4
Number of subpoenas issued to the executive branch by the House Oversight Committee when Republicans controlled the House and Bill Clinton was president: 1000+
(source)
The record of facing reality is not a good one for the current administration. Ditto planning ahead. But given the recent rash of subpoenas, let me make a humble suggestion: I hear California is nice.
Your president has chanted the "progress" mantra so often that you'll no doubt be shocked, shocked to hear that:
In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.
Well … is this a legitimate statistical sample?
Officials at the oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, said they had made an effort to sample different regions and various types of projects, but that they were constrained from taking a true random sample in part because many projects were in areas too unsafe to visit.
Apart from noting the obvious, that Inspectors General have a well-known liberal bias, never report the good news, and want the terrorists to win, let's pay attention to something else: We're batting .125 in the safe areas. Care to bet what the average is in the dangerous areas?
Not to worry, though. I'm sure Halliburton will be honoring all warranties, and will be right in to fix things up.
Heckuva job all around, Bushies.
Is your stomach still roiling from the reactions of the rightosphere to the Va. Tech. shootings? Here's a great remedy: Brando.
Even if your stomach has since calmed, go over there anyway, and get a good belly laugh.
I once heard somebody on BloggingHeads.tv, probably Mickey Kaus, attribute to Christopher Hitchens the following aphorism: "If you never go too far, you risk not going far enough."
Slate has posted three excerpts from Hitchens's new book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and depending on your mindset and your religious beliefs, you might keep the aphorism in mind.
If you're less of an atheist/agnostic than I am, you'll probably find some or lots that makes you uncomfortable in Hitchens's words. So be it. I challenge you to read them anyway.
If you consider yourself a Christian, I suggest you read them in the reverse order listed below. I suspect it might be easier to start by analyzing Hitchens's take on particular religions that aren't yours, and maybe you'll be in a more receptive frame of mind for what is really the first excerpt.
After the interview with Jon Stewart on last night's Bill Moyers Journal, Moyers led into the next segment, an interview with Josh Marshall, by saying:
For six years, Democrats have suffered what Jon Stewart might call subpoena envy …
If you missed the show, you missed a good one. (Despite the frequent mention of the Vice President in both the Stewart and Marshall interviews, there were no other dick jokes.) Check the site in a day or two; I'll bet they post it.
As further proof of its liberal bias, the LA Times has evidently retained Jonah Goldberg as a regular columnist.
No, seriously, it has. And that's fine. I think he's a wingnut's wingnut who will cling to his creed no matter what, but he'd undoubtedly say the same about me. And, I'll admit, he occasionally makes a good point.
One thing he has never struck me as possessing, however, is a sense of humor. But in a column he wrote a couple of weeks ago about political correctness gone wild, I wondered whether he had actually made a joke.
I'd heard of the term herstory, which some feminists use in place of history, for obvious, if dubious*, reasons. Goldberg cites this, but further complains that there are also those who replace seminar with ovular.
The etymological reasoning for being irritated by the implied sexism of seminar is stronger than it is for history, as it does stem from words having to do with "seed."
However, although it's been a while since I've been on a college campus, I did recently live for five years in Northampton, MA -- which has to be on anybody's short list for the center of the politically correct universe -- but I've never heard ovular. At least in this sense.
Have you? [Added 2008-09-27: kyklops has.]
* The claim that history comes from "his story" is undermined, for example, by my American Heritage dictionary, which says it comes from the Latin historia, which itself comes from a Greek word meaning "inquiry" or "observation." My OED confirms this, and gives a long list of Greek words, but I'm too lazy to look up the HTML character codes to reproduce them all. The Online Etymology Dictionary also pretty much agrees, saying:
… from O.Fr. historie, from L. historia "narrative, account, tale, story," from Gk. historia "a learning or knowing by inquiry, history, record, narrative" …
Granted, all three sources trace the word back further, to the Greek word histor, one meaning of which is "wise man." So, maybe there's sexism way in history's past, but the word did not form from "his story." You might as well argue that the proper term for a woman who hates men is a misterogynist.
So, I turn on my TV, to see if I can get a PBS station to catch tonight's Bill Moyers Journal -- I'm cable-free, meaning I was testing the rabbit ears -- and what do I see?
A baseball game! Red Sox-Yankees no less! On free TV! In April! On a Friday night! What's up with that?
It's on Channel 13, which is evidently called "my 9," if all the on-screen logos are to be believed. I'm so confused.
BTW: The announcers are doing a split-screen of A-Rod batting from last year and this year, and are attempting to make a big deal out of a subtle change in stride to explain his torrid April this year. Me, I'm convinced it's because he switched back to the classic knickers, and away from the current fashion horror -- draggy pants legs. I bet Manny Ramirez could hit .400 if he'd get his cuffs off his heels.
Right now, Daisuke Matsuzaka is facing Hideki Matsui, and they're showing a split-screen close-up on both faces. I'll resist the temptation to make an allusion to a karate movie. This is definitely a good part of globalization.
2-0, Sox. Bases loaded for the Yanks, no out. Gotta go.
Update
2007-04-27 20:40 EDT
Thought the Yanks were gonna blow that chance, but with two outs and only one run in, both Johnny Damon and Derek Jeter showed just how important bat control -- and not swinging for the fences -- can be. Protect the plate half-swing on a 3-2 count by Damon: soft single, 2 RBIs. Going with the pitch, hit it the other way by Jeter. Another RBI.
I miss baseball on TV. Can you tell?
The president has resumed harping on those who "think they know more than the generals." O, for a member of the press with the fortitude to shout, "Like General Shinseki, sir?"
- -- Dick Cavett [T$]
Fringe benefit for TimesSelect subscribers (and pity for the other 99.99% of Webizens): Dick Cavett has a blog behind the wall, and it's quite good. The latest post talks about the Bill Moyers show that I mentioned yesterday, in even more glowing terms.
You probably remember Bill Moyers, who got the bum's rush from PBS after Bush crony Ken Tomlinson was installed as chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I don't know where Tomlinson is these days (does he still have that cushy job running Voice of America?), but Moyers is back! He has just launched a new show, called Bill Moyers Journal [sic -- no apostrophe].
The first episode, "Buying the War," is a documentary largely concentrating on the packaging of George and Dick's excellent adventure in Iraq, and focuses especially on the compliance of the mainstream media. Here's Moyers's own pitch for the show:
What the conservative media did was easy to fathom; they had been cheerleaders for the White House from the beginning and were simply continuing to rally the public behind the President -- no questions asked. How mainstream journalists suspended skepticism and scrutiny remains an issue of significance that the media has not satisfactorily explored. How the administration marketed the war to the American people has been well covered, but critical questions remain: How and why did the press buy it, and what does it say about the role of journalists in helping the public sort out fact from propaganda?
The show starts a little slowly, and if you've been getting your news from anywhere other than Fox over the past few years, it'll probably seem like old hat. Nice effort to document it all, I thought initially, but really, nothing too groundbreaking. After a few minutes, though, the show starts getting into a level of detail beyond what I had known.
You'll have to put up with the insufferable pontifications of Dan Rather from time to time, and nauseating archived clips of Bush, et al, doing their "let's do war!" soundbites, but other than that, it's quite good. Moyers makes Tim Russert and Peter Beinart spill a little flop sweat, and spotlights some of the few reporters who did get the story right, long, long ago. There's a surprising amount of evidence presented of suppression of reporters' findings by their bosses. All in all, it's well worth watching, although I suspect that no one who should watch it will.
The show aired last night (I missed that), and hopefully, will be re-run at some point in the future. In the meantime, you can watch it online and/or read the transcript.
On that same page, you'll see the announcement that Moyers's show will air regularly on Friday nights, starting tomorrow, 27 April. According to the show's blog, Jon Stewart will be the first guest, and he and Moyers will discuss "how faking the news can reveal more of the truth than all of the Sunday-morning talk shows put together."
Welcome back, Bill.
Hat tip for the link: Joel Achenbach.
Update
2007-04-27 00:15 EDT
Here's a nice excerpt from the show's blog, a reprint of an interview that Moyers gave to The Christian Century:
Q: If the Bush administration were to ask you for your advice, what would you say to them?
A: Well, I did give President Bush advice once: on a broadcast I urged him to make Al Gore head of homeland security -- in other words, turn our response to the terrorist attacks into a bipartisan effort, make the fight against terro[r]ism an American cause, not a partisan battle cry.
What would I say now? Fire the ideologues and assign them to scrub the floors at Guantánamo for penitence. Stop confusing neocon pundits with Old Testament prophets. Read the Bible for humility's sake, but for policy's sake commit to memory the report of the Iraq Study Group. Don't sacrifice any more soldiers to prove you're in charge; get the soldiers out of the line of fire between Sunnis and Shi'ites. And remind your hirelings of Winston Churchill's definition of democracy as the occasional necessity of deferring to the opinions of other people.
The whole interview is really good. Strictly speaking, it appears to be less of a real-time interview than Moyers's written answers to a set of submitted questions, but that doesn't detract from their worth.
First, a close runner-up for the crown of adjectival meaninglessness:
It makes space astronomically more dangerous than it was before.
- -- Air Force chief of staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley
Second, for all my fellow lovers of keyboard shortcuts:
Every time you touch the mouse, God kills a kitten.
- -- Brent Simmons, as noted by Daniel Jalkut
Never mind hot man on beast action. We're now messing with the plant kingdom. From today's NYT:
Prince Charles, whose hobbies have included both polo and … hedge laying …
Oh, wait…
The five justices who turned the Supreme Court around last week and upheld the ban on "partial birth abortion" had much in common.
All are men. All were nominated by conservative Republican presidents. And, it was widely noted, all are Roman Catholics.
(source)
I added the emphasis above, because I wasn't part of that "widely" until now.
I knew about Roberts, Scalia and Scalito Alito, and probably would have guessed as much about Kennedy. But has Clarence Thomas always been a Catholic? Or did Scalia tell him what to do here, too?
Okay, that was uncalled for.
But here's something that is called for, and good on the Times for including the line in the same story:
I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.
- -- John F. Kennedy
(whole speech here)
Those were the days.
Update
2007-04-25 22:25 EDT
And as for the supposed Catholic view on the sanctity of life, would you care to guess the four justices in the minority when the Supreme Court threw out three death penalties today?
(Answer here.)
You had to look?
The headline:
I suppose the paper of record feels it has to note these things, but sheesh. This campaign has been going on ever since McCain backed off on the "torture: bad" meme about, what, three years ago?
One quick sample that I was able to copy from the article before hypocrisy-induced projectile vomiting began:
Americans are acutely aware of our problems and their patience is at end for politicians who value incumbency over principle …
Said the nine-hundred-term senator.
A House committee voted this afternoon to authorize a subpoena of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as it presses an inquiry into the claims, long since discredited, that Iraq sought uranium from Niger.
(source)
We can only hope it is the first of many, many subpoenas.
I've been arguing for a long time that for reasons both idealist and cravenly political, the Democratic Party should make its first priority to bring to light as many of the Bush Administration's lies and dirty tricks as possible. As I mentioned in the last paragraph two posts ago, we're facing a cleaning task that makes a Superfund site look like a job for half a paper towel.
You're a good man, Congressman Waxman.
A few days ago, I called attention to an op-ed by Rosa Brooks. If you're interested in hearing her expand upon her line of thought, check out the "diavlog" between her and Ross Douthat, posted today on BloggingHeads.tv.
Brooks and Douthat also have a fairly long discussion on the recent Supreme Court decision concerning intact dilation and extraction (which the anti-choice crowd calls "partial birth abortion."), as well as a few other topics.
Not all opinions expressed, even by Brooks, are ones that I agree with, but it's an interesting discussion nonetheless.
Here's the link to the video, which will start automatically a few seconds after the page loads. Unfortunately, you'll need at least cheap broadband to watch it.
Since George W. Bush became president, OSHA has issued the fewest significant standards in its history, public health experts say.
Want some more?
It has imposed only one major safety rule. The only significant health standard it issued was ordered by a federal court.
Wait. Could it be another fox guarding the henhouse moment? In this administration? What are the chances?
Mr. Foulke, the OSHA chief, has a history of opposing regulations produced by the agency he now leads. He has described himself as a "true Ronald Reagan Republican" who "firmly believes in limited government." Before coming to Washington last year, Mr. Foulke, a former Republican Party state chairman in South Carolina and top political fund-raiser, worked in Greenville, S.C., for a law firm that advises companies on how to avoid union organizing.
These excerpts are all from a story about workers getting sick from working in a plant that makes microwave popcorn. Apparently, the new "buttery flavor" is toxic. (To breathe, that is -- don't worry, keep eating! Mmmm. Diacetyl tastes gooooood!)
Never mind the Iraq war, global warming, terrorism, and the economy, I don't care who the next president is; it's gonna take him or her two terms of concentrated effort just to clean up our own government.
I'm not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody who has a 9 percent approval rating.
- -- Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), after being asked to respond to comments made by Vice President Dick Cheney (source)
Q: Do you find that having children adds meaning to life?
A: I find that for a left-winger like me, the problem is that either your children out-left you or they become fascists.
(From an interview with Terry Eagleton.)
From today's NY Times Week in Review:
And as if that weren't depressing enough, what the hell is wrong with kids these days?
Here's a bit of news that I hadn't heard, and I'd be willing to bet that you hadn't either: President George W. Bush (aka "The Uniter, Not the Divider") has nominated one Michael Baroody to be the next chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Who?
Oh, just some guy who has spent the last decade and a half whoring for working for the National Association of Manufacturers.
Who?
Oh, just another K Street group, whose mission statement reads like this:
The NAM's mission is to advocate on behalf of its members to enhance the competitiveness of manufacturers by shaping a legislative and regulatory environment conducive to U.S. economic growth and to increase understanding among policymakers, the media and the general public about the vital role of manufacturing in America's economic and national security for today and in the future.
In other words, NAM lobbies Congress to do away with those tiresome regulations that protect consumers and trots out spinmeisters to explain why this is a Good Thing.
StopBaroody.com has a list of some of his "accomplishments" while at NAM.
The most prominent news article I could find concerning the nomination itself is after the jump in a WaPo gossip column, although there has been some reaction since.
Breathe deep. Eat, drink, and be merry. And don't forget to feed the kitty.
Update
2007-04-22 12:43 EDT
On a related note, you might enjoy this short video: "What We Call The News."
Thanks for the link, KK.
I have hesitated to post anything about the VT shootings. Whenever one of these freak things happens, the gun nuts and wing nuts never fail to amaze me with their inane "reasoning," the anti-gun nuts never fail to sadden me with their inability to accept reality, and the photo-op hungry politicos … well, here I go, just adding to the noise.
But Rosa Brooks's op-ed is a rare gem, and no matter how sick you are of the coverage, you should read it. Hers are the thoughts I've been trying to compose.
Hat tip for the referral: Kevin Drum.
