Unconscionable
by tristero
What PZ says. This is a situation in which the only hope for a positive resolution hinges upon both sides renouncing and vigorously prosecuting their own propensity for violence and ethnocentric aggression. What Israel is doing is unconscionable and the US should withdraw support. And, as PZ says, that in no way excuses for so much as a micro-second launching rockets into Israeli neighborhoods.
Related: Horrible. Nothing like dehumanizing others to justify murder.
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The Latest Eating Disorder
by tristero
Eating for health can make you sick. It’s helpful to read Jordan’s original post to see how crazy it got for her.
Eating specifically for nutrition strikes me personally as both puritanical and a fools errand. It’s puritanical because eating should be about pleasure, not a demonstration of moral virtue like “you should live a healthy life,” something Jordan has learned the hard way. As for the actual value of “eating for health,” from what I’ve read, the nutrients in food and their interactions are not well understood even by experts. For a layperson like myself, it is absolutely impossible to remember, let alone follow, most of the recommendations, which, anyway, are often contradictory. Instead, simply eating a highly varied diet of real, delicious home-prepared food seems automatically to take care of my “nutrient balance” – whatever the hell that means. (Treats – edibles high in sugar and/or processed with unpronounceable ingredients – are not really “food,” at least as I see it.)
I suspect it’s likely that Michael Pollan’s famous motto – Eat food, not too much. Mostly plants – is about all most of us need to know unless you have specific diet-related health problems. Food should be served and enjoyed, not prescribed and endured.
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Condolences, Cleveland
by tristero
Cleveland’s such a nice city, with a really terrific orchestra. It’s a pity, but somebody has to host those schmucks, I guess.
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QOTD Part II
by tristero
“There really isn’t much better dietary advice than eating your veggies, exercising and limiting calories,” she said. “People just seem to like making eating difficult for themselves.”
Adding: Mark Bittman explains that there is no money to be made in eating well. And also repeats another great Nestle quote:
A slightly-better-for-you junk food is still junk food.
Yep. I can still recall the disbelief on my daughter’s face when I tried to explain that organic lemonade was not health food but merely a treat. Organic added sugar is, first and foremost, added sugar.
Ammosexuals
by tristero
Congratulations to Duncan for coining ammosexuals, ie folks who so fetishize their weapons that they compare them to women. Sheer genius.
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Dear Nino
by tristero
You write, and your pal Clarence concurs:
Some there are—many, perhaps—who are offended by public displays of religion. Religion, they believe, is a personal matter; if it must be given external manifestation, that should not occur in public places where others may be offended. I can understand that attitude: It parallels my own toward the playing in public of rock music or Stravinsky. And I too am especially annoyed when the intrusion upon my inner peace occurs while I am part of a captive audience, as on a municipal bus or in the waiting room of a public agency.
“Some there are?” Are you joking? But I digress.
Point The First: Obviously, the issue is not that the display of religion is offensive but that the establishment of any religion by a government is extremely dangerous (see the Middle East) and that the government sanctioned display of a specific religion strongly implies establishment. But then, you’re the legal genius, Nino, you’re supposed to know this. Now, don’t get me wrong, my friend: I’m not for a moment suggesting that I think you’re no genius at all but rather a genuinely mediocre mind with a taste for glib, obnoxious putdowns. I’d never suggest that.
Point The Second: Your distaste for rock music and Stravinsky speaks directly to your qualifications to remain seated on the Supreme Court. Anyone who can’t understand either has absolutely no business making solemn decisions affecting this nation’s future legal direction.
For no other reason than your godawful musical taste – but indeed, there are many other reasons – you deserve to be impeached, arrested, and subjected to 20 years of Don Ameche and Mitzi Gaynor.
Love,
t
<br>
Judith Miller? Seriously? On Iraq? Seriously?!??!?
by tristero
And for those who are Judy noobies, go ahead and read what Miller did.
During the winter of 2001 and throughout 2002, Miller produced a series of stunning stories about Saddam Hussein’s ambition and capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, based largely on information provided by Chalabi and his allies—almost all of which have turned out to be stunningly inaccurate.
For the past year, the Times has done much to correct that coverage, publishing a series of stories calling Chalabi’s credibility into question. But never once in the course of its coverage—or in any public comments from its editors—did the Times acknowledge Chalabi’s central role in some of its biggest scoops, scoops that not only garnered attention but that the administration specifically cited to buttress its case for war.
The longer the Times remained silent on Chalabi’s importance to Judith Miller’s reporting, the louder critics howled. In February, in the New York Review of Books, Michael Massing held up Miller as evidence of the press’s “submissiveness” in covering the war. For more than a year, Slate’s Jack Shafer has demanded the paper come clean.
But finally, with Chalabi’s fall from grace so complete—the Pentagon has cut off his funding, troops smashed his portrait in raids of the INC office—the Times’ refusal to concede its own complicity became untenable. Last week, on page A10, the paper published a note on its coverage, drafted by executive editor Bill Keller himself. The paper singled out pieces that relied on “information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors, and exiles bent on ‘regime change.’ ” The note named Ahmad Chalabi as a central player in this group…
Miller’s many doubters at the Times were effectively silenced. She had emerged as one of the paper’s biggest stars, with the kind of “competitive metabolism” that new editor Howell Raines—he’d taken over from Joseph Lelyveld the week before 9/11—made into a crusade. According to a friend of Raines’s, as well as one of Miller’s colleagues at the paper, the editor pulled her aside after the attacks. “Go win a Pulitzer,” he told her.
For the next two years, she supplied the paper with a string of grim exclusives. There was the defector who described Saddam Hussein’s recent renovation of storage facilities for nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. There was her report that a Russian virologist might have handed the regime a particularly virulent strain of smallpox. To protect themselves against VX and sarin, she further reported, the Iraqis had greatly increased the importation of an antidote to these agents. And, most memorably, she co-wrote a piece in which administration officials suggested that Iraq had attempted to import aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons. Vice-President Dick Cheney trumpeted the story on Meet the Press, closing the circle. Of course, each of the stories contained important caveats. But together they painted a horrifying picture. There was just one problem with them: The vast majority of these blockbusters turned out to be wrong.
A bowl of overcooked penne has more credibility than Judith Miller.
Stay Out
by tristero
Iraq is descending into the chaos that so many of us who opposed the war predicted. The human toll must be horrible, likely beyond the imagining of most living Americans.
This article says the US should go back in and my mind boggles. When will we ever learn? The author’ makes two blatantly ludicrous assumptions:
The first is that the US government could re-intervene with good intentions. Not only is that utterly naive, it’s impossible. For one thing, good intentions aren’t enough. As Bush convincingly demonstrated, you also have to know what you’re doing. Even now, even without right wing ideologues running foreign policy, this country hardly knows enough about Iraq to be effective. Nor does the US have a stable enough political culture to follow through.
Also, who says the US has good intentions? After all, a genuinely serious American solution to Iraq begins by bringing to justice those responsible for the invasion. That would demonstrate actual good intentions by the present American government to the citizens of Iraq. Dream on.
Assumption two is that the US has some kind of fairy dust that can help stave off catastrophe if we can just get a chance to sprinkle it around. There is no such thing. The American military would only make things far worse.
And since we don’t know what we’re doing, since the criminals will get off, and since we have no magic powders, the US must stay out. That doesn’t preclude cooperation with an international coalition; it simply means that further unilateral military involvement is an absolutely terrible idea.
Iraq today is a tragedy, plain and simple. We will only add to the horror Bush perpetrated by unilaterally returning.
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by tristero
“So should there be a minimum wage in your opinion?” Todd pressed.
“Um, I don’t have a well-crafted response on that one,” Brat said, haltingly. “All I know is that if you take the long-run graph over 200 years of the wage rate, it cannot differ from your nation’s productivity. Right? So you can’t make up wage rates.”
Brat found another question, this one about whether the U.S. should arm rebels in Syria, even more troublesome. Instead of answering Todd, he admitted he wasn’t expecting to have to speak to such weighty issues.
“Hey, Chuck, I thought we were just going to chat today about the celebratory aspects,” Brat responded. “I’d love to go through all of this but my mind is — I love all the policy questions but I just wanted to talk about the victory ahead and I wanted to thank everybody that worked so hard on my campaign. I’m happy to take policy issues at any time, I just wanted to call out a thanks to everybody today.”
Crikey.