X-actly

Phil Jimenez, 2003. Via Wikipedia.

Old Brooksie has been too much for me of late, almost epically frolicsome, if you can say such a thing, as he attempts to display his indifference to President Obama and current events in general.

Last Friday he decided to enumerate rising stars of the right-wing literary legions, listing a total of 20 writers and bloggers from (Mc)Ardle to Zingales, including some South Asian and other exotic names. There were some precious Brooksisms; of Rod Dreher and Daniel Larison he wrote one of his most hilariously sub-meaningful lines ever,

Dispositionally, they are more Walker Percy than Pat Robertson.

(Googling around to get an idea what it might mean, I learn that Percy was a lay Benedictine brother, whereas Dreher has left the church of Rome for Eastern Orthodoxy after concluding that the pedophiles problem in Catholicism was caused not by pedophiles but by a Lavender Mafia of gay priests. No, that doesn't explain anything about what Brooks said, at least I don't think it does, but it's sort of fascinating.)

But I felt it would take me 20 posts to get through the column in all its glory.

Planet X Forecast.

Then on Tuesday he tried out for domestic advice columnist, taking his text from the Crews Missile, a recently surfaced document of English decadence in which a crusty dad (Royal Navy, Ret.) berates the children he has neglected for 40 years, by email, for neglecting their own children in turn. Suffice it to say that the email is much more interesting than anything Brooks has to say about it (which consists of nostrums of the catch more flies with honey than vinegar variety).

Today he is offering himself up to the ranks of Jack Kemp and Malcolm Forbes, Jr., as an advocate of one of those tax systems that proposes to be progressive and regressive at the same time. This one is the Mysterious X Tax devised by the late David Bradford in 1986 and recently championed in a book by Robert Carroll and Alan Viard. (They also produced a little Readers Digest version for the Atlantic, last July, which is where I got all my information on it, and presumably also where Brooks got his.)

On Planet X, you pay your income tax at a progressive sequence of marginal rates, just like here, but only on what your boss gives you; any income from what you have squirreled away, in the bank or on the equities market, is tax free. There is also a direct consumption tax, but you don't pay that—the store does. It's their income tax, also at progressive rates, which every business pays on their receipts, except again for savings, and also for capital investments, which the business deducts in total the year that they are made instead of as a series of depreciation deductions.

So it's a moral hazardist's wet dream of a tax system that taxes only the rude, sweaty money of hunger and desire, wages and goods, and none of the sweet parthenogenous money of compound interest. And then at the same time it's "progressive"! As long as we leave out the fact that since you and I can't save a dime, while Willard Mitt Romney never has to touch his vast principle, we'll be paying taxes on 100% of our income and Romney on 1% of his.

There's more to say about this one: it's going to be instructive to see how Brooks assembles his argument, and I hope to work out some idea of why he's bringing it up just now (it isn't, for a change, something that could have just slipped into the Kindle). But not tonight...

Man from Planet X, dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1951. From mubi.com.

The Blind Leading the Blinkered

Sing it Brent:

“Reince, it pains me to say this, but if the Republican Party breaks its word to the American people and goes along with President Obama with tax increases, it will have betrayed conservatives for the final time,” Bozell wrote.

“I will make it my mission to ensure that every conservative donor to the Republican Party that I have worked with for the last three decades — and there are many and they have given tens of millions to Republican causes — gives not one penny more to the Republican Party or any member of Congress that votes for tax increases,” he warned.

Boy, if there's anything that makes the opposition mad it's conservatives staying true to their principles. So look to the example of Samson, my friends, and tear that temple down.

With a capital T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for Politics

1924 sheet music. From Wikipedia.

Collins said she was “very troubled by the fact that we seem not to have learned from the 1998 bombings of two of our embassies in Africa at the time when Ambassador Rice was the assistant secretary for African affairs. Those bombings in 1998 resulted in the loss of life of 12 Americans as well as many other foreign nationals.” 

She said, “What troubles me so much is the Benghazi attack in many ways echoes the attacks on those embassies in 1998, when Susan Rice was head of the African region for our State Department. In both cases the ambassadors begged for additional security” but she said, as with the Sept. 11 attack on the consulate in Benghazi, those requests were turned down by the State Department. (NBC News, 11/28/12)

In what sense, exactly, "troubled"? Is she blue?* Would she be in distress, affliction, difficulty, or need? Would she be exhibiting emotional or behavioral problems? Cold sweats, night fright, apparently unmotivated panic? Somehow I doubt it. Maybe troubled like a teenager, infected by all the bad faith around her and acting out.

I mean, I'm not saying she's a liar or anything like that, just that it's really interesting, if you will, how all the words that spill out of her mouth, one or two syllables at a time, in that des-olate croak, seem to be sug-gesting this re-mark-able story about how every time you give Susan Rice a job, someone seems to blow up the em-bassy or murder the am-bass-ador. Doesn't it look, on the face of it, a little careless? I mean, nothing like that ever happens in the Collins family.

She's that girl, in seventh grade, who likes to see a fight. She's poison.

*But she won't be blue always, 'cause that sun gonna shine in her back door one day, eh, Suse?

Catching up

I know. It's been a while. I'm sorry! But between Thanksgiving and a bridal shower and family being in town and spending time with my husband, blogging was kind of the last thing on my mind! But thanks to my shiny new IPhone....I have plenty of pictures from the last week to catch you up!

My new wall art (our first dance song lyrics on canvas squares)
A mini Christmas tree and our framed "Ohio- Fall in Love" with a heart over Athens

Ready for the OU-Kent game...even my niece had her OU gear on!

Riding Dudley. Caroline's new favorite past time.

Best seat in the house. This is how she watched 30-45 minutes of Ratatouille.

Low riding pants!

Trip to the park on a gorgeous Thanksgiving day

New Christmas table runner that my mom made for us

Thanksgiving campfire=perfect

Gold, sparkly bottles that were used for centerpieces at my cousin's bridal shower

Ohio University- Kent State game...beautiful day for a football game.
Not that it helped the Bobcats play well...don't even want to talk about it.

Taking the Train to Go the Distance to the Farthest Corner We Must Not Be Pressed Into

Marielena Montesino de Stuart:

The last train to save America has not left the station yet. We must not allow America to fade into the distance — and I insist that as conservatives we must not be pressed into the farthest corner. We have the power to benefit society, as we ought — by teaching that the basis for all public policies should not rest on ambiguous catch phrases or socialist ideology, but rather on the Commandments of God and on the Natural Law — which binds all men, for all times and in all circumstances.

I have boarded the last train to save America. Have you?

Marielena Montesino de Stuart lost in the primary for the 2012 Florida US senate race with 7.3% of the votes, which might say something good or might say something bad. That's almost 82000 votes to battle Agenda 21.

Graphic language

In breaking news, it turns out there are people, possibly in Iran itself, in any case people who can type in Persian, who have inexplicably acquired the capacity to draw graphs.

The undated diagram that was given to the AP by officials of a country critical of Iran's atomic program allegedly calculating the explosive force of a nuclear weapon _ a key step in developing such arms. The diagram shows a bell curve and has variables of time in micro-seconds and power and energy, both in kilotons _ the traditional measurement of the energy output, and hence the destructive power of nuclear weapons. The curve peaks at just above 50 kilotons at around 2 microseconds, reflecting the full force of the weapon being modeled. The Farsi writing at the bottom translates "changes in output and in energy released as a function of time through power pulse" (AP Photo)

And not just any kind of graphs, either—graphs that apparently describe things that occur in time and involve energy: things like turning on the television, opening a can of Diet Pepsi, and nuclear explosions, to name only a few.

In a story datelined from spooky Vienna (remember Harry Lime?), George Jahn writes,

Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, according to a diagram obtained by The Associated Press.

You can see for yourself! (Except for the Iranian, scientist, computer simulations, and nuclear weapons parts. But that number at the top of the bell curve, 50 kilotons, is totally three times the explosive force of Little Boy! Approximately.) And what do you suppose that country critical of Iran's atomic program is? Obviously somebody who knows a nuclear weapon when they see one.

Do not trust this man.

For further information see Wide Asleep in America and Tikun Olam.

Cabinet of curiosities

"I would dearly love to see Arne Duncan explain to Bibi Netanyahu that Israel's foreign aid is now cut off because they filled out the forms incorrectly". (Jersey Jazzman)

Madame Tussaud's spare heads. From nationalgeographicscans.tumblr.com.

The project of shuffling Obama's cabinet around just got a lot easier, now that Thomas P. Friedman, also known as Thomas L. Friedman, or by the Linnaean handle of Moustaccium intellectionis, has laid down the criteria for doing it well: you just have to pick people Friedman knows, not that he knows all the best people for all the jobs, though that is probably also true, but because only if he knows them can we be sure that they'll work out:

Kerry is an excellent choice for defense. I don’t know Rice at all, so I have no opinion on her fitness for the job, but I think the contrived flap over her Libya comments certainly shouldn’t disqualify her. That said, my own nominee for secretary of state would be the current education secretary, Arne Duncan.... because I think this is an important time to ask the question of not just who should be secretary of state, but what should the secretary of state be in the 21st century?

This is not the first time Friedman has proposed Arne Duncan as diplomat; my response is here. What I'd like to do now is look at some possibilities for filling out the rest of the cabinet by Friedmannian rules.

For instance, the Secretary of Energy should be Michael Mandelbaum, not just because of who he is (a political scientist and Friedman's co-author for That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, 2011), but because of what he is, capable of duplicating Friedman's literary style to the comma:

“The biggest issue in the world today is growth, and the world is divided into two groups — those who get it and those who don’t,” said Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert. “If you’re dealing with the Middle East, it might actually be helpful to have someone who can tell some of the parties why they are going in the wrong direction and how their problems are not what they think they are, nor are their solutions.”

As such, Mandelbaum would undoubtedly be able to convince Congress to increase the gas tax. The current incumbent, Steven Chu, certainly knows that the gas tax ought to be increased, but he carries baggage—notably that Nobel Prize—that makes him seem rabidly partisan. Whereas Mandelbaum can make it sound stupid enough to be non-threatening:

A gasoline tax “is not just win-win; it’s win, win, win, win, win,” says the Johns Hopkins author and foreign policy specialist Michael Mandelbaum. “A gasoline tax would do more for American prosperity and strength than any other measure Obama could propose.”

You can practically hear Eric Cantor leaping on that and agreeing to pass it right away.

Similarly, to replace Duncan at Education you could do worse than picking Bevil Hogg, South African CEO of EndoStim, a company making a kind of pacemaker for your esophagus, which is supposed to regulate acid reflux,

inspired by Cuban and Indian immigrants to America and funded by St. Louis venture capitalists. Its prototype is being manufactured in Uruguay, with the help of Israeli engineers and constant feedback from doctors in India and Chile.

Hogg may not know much about education specifically, but what he knows in general is what he needs to know, which is that everything from now on has to be cheaper, flatter, and run out of a Blackberry:

“In the aftermath of the banking crisis, access to public markets is off-limits to start-ups,” explained Hogg, so start-ups now have to be “much leaner, much more capital-efficient, much smarter in accessing worldwide talent and quicker to market in order to do more with less.” He added, “$20 million is the new $100 million.”

Finally, for secretary of the Treasury why not go for Friedman's multitasking Paris taxi driver of 2006?

After the car started to roll, I saw he had a movie playing on the screen in the dashboard -- on the flat panel that usually displays the G.P.S. road map. I noticed this because between his talking on the phone and the movie, I could barely concentrate. I, alas, was in the back seat trying to finish a column on my laptop. When I wrote all that I could, I got out my iPod and listened to a Stevie Nicks album, while he went on talking, driving and watching the movie.

No special reason, except that this is the only Friedman column I can find in which a taxi driver plays a prominent role, and he doesn't even say anything! As far as I can tell from the research (as David Brooks would call it) for this post, Friedman never talks to taxi drivers at all; we've been lying about him all this time. Who knew?

From Lianhe Wanbao, Singapore, via Sammy Boy.

Liquor Pig Meat Pieces

That is all.

Oh wait, pickled smelt barbarian.

Women aren't women any more?

Any more than what? Haha.

From Beirut Yacht Charter.

Statistics

Suzanne Venker writes,

According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997 – from 28 percent to 37 percent. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent.

These numbers suggest to her that women nowadays want to get married and men don't, evidently because of their impression, discussed late on in the essay, that women are no longer women, i.e., if women were clearly women from this standpoint men would definitely want to marry them but not otherwise.

But it all depends where your head is at in relation to the yoga mat. To me, these numbers say that most people ages 18 to 34 really don't think a successful marriage is among the most important things in their lives, and they didn't in 1997 either: 63% of women to 71% of men, versus 72% to 65% 15 years ago.

Ideally, one would like to know what question Pew was asking, an open-ended one, a yes-or-no, or a multiple-choice list, or ranking a long list; and whether "one of the most important" means one of the two top factors, or five top factors, or whatever; and how many of the people in the sample were married themselves. It is however clear what these data do not show:

Believe it or not, modern women want to get married. Trouble is, men don’t.

They do not show any strong feelings either way, or any significant differences between the genders, or anything particularly interesting at all, except maybe that there is a turbulent minority that thinks about it more than the rest do. Those probably are less in need of marriage itself than they are of Lexapro.

Subculture

I’ve spent thirteen years examining social agendas as they pertain to sex, parenting, and gender roles. During this time, I’ve spoken with hundreds, if not thousands, of men and women. And in doing so, I’ve accidentally stumbled upon a subculture of men who’ve told me, in no uncertain terms, that they’re never getting married. When I ask them why, the answer is always the same.
Women aren’t women anymore.

If her website didn't classify her as "author. speaker. wife. mother." I'd suspect her of referring here to a subculture of men she dated over that 13-year period. But something tells me in any case that we're not talking about the young fellows whose intentions to marry or not are at issue—that "anymore" pointing to a time when women used to be women and so on. Men, in fact, who have been married before, and who associate feminism with that damned child support, which they wouldn't of had to pay if she hadn't of walked out on them even though they practically went down on their knees. I'm talking about you, Smitty, you lousy Republican. And no, in real life it is not actually cheaper to stay married.

Grammar

But after decades of browbeating the American male, men are tired.

It’s the women who lose. Not only are they saddled with the consequences of sex, by dismissing male nature they’re forever seeking a balanced life.

The fact is, women need men’s linear career goals – they need men to pick up the slack at the office – in order to live the balanced life they seek.

The first of those is just a garden variety dangled participle. No allegation is intended that the men are really browbeating themselves, tiring as that might be.

The second is kind of mysterious. What is dismissing male nature? ("At ease, male nature, I won't be needing you any further tonight.") Apparently it's refusing to let them "provide for and protect their families", which is "in their DNA" (And I thought I was supposed to be beating back my DNA and its will to impregnate everything within 30 feet!). Saddling them with the consequences of sex may be an elegant circumlocution for knocking them up without that all-important child support check. Is it a bad thing to be forever seeking a balanced life? Or is the implication that you could get the balanced life right away if you would only stop dismissing that male nature?

The third is really hard. I think she's trying to say that women don't need to have men's linear career goals but need men to have them, "linear" meaning with their minds fixed on the idea of a properly funded retirement and that final three-week cruise to Jordan and the Holy Land, after which they can at last just crack a beer, sit down, and spend the rest of their lives with ESPN and the wide-screen. But do they have to pick up the slack at the office because the women are slacking at home, with their girlfriends and pitchers of iced tea and vodka while the little ones toddle with their little trucks and Happy toys among the unshaven ankles? And are you saying in the end that women can have that balanced life because men don't?

All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs. 

If they do, marriageable men will come out of the woodwork.

And you'll be able to take the vacuum cleaner to them. Or just swiff them up. 

Cruise wedding dress, from Lanvin Cruise Collection 2010.

Argument

There's definitely an argument, but trust me, you've heard it before. Suzanne Venker is the niece of Phyllis Schlafly, and it hasn't really changed in 50 years, except for the economics getting more and more improbable.

Alan Keyes Reviews Windows 8

It starts here:

These days, managing constant change is a challenge that faces anyone whose life and livelihood involves the use of intelligent electronic devices. The conflicting headlines from two stories I read this week exemplify the situation. One reported: “Designer guru Nielsen: Windows 8 UI ‘smothers usability.’” The other protested: “Why Jakob Nielsen’s Windows 8 critique is old school thinking.” The latter began with the following trenchant observation “Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was once asked what market research went into the creation of the iPad. ‘None,’ Jobs replied, in one of his most celebrated quotes. ‘It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.’”

and ends here:

Do we have no choice but to support these self-serving elitists as they abandon America’s founding creed? In the series of essays I am now sharing on Loyal to Liberty, I am trying to think through the reasons for withdrawing our support from them. I hope by doing so to encourage people still loyal to the nation’s founding principles to rediscover and further explore the understanding that animated the Christian Federalists prevalent when America began. Perhaps, by doing so, we can act as they did, not just for ourselves but on behalf of all humanity – to renew America’s window for the world on the foundations of decent liberty and true human greatness.

Like Alan Keyes, I am likely to avoid Windows 8 (if possible) without ever having used it, but my reasoning is in deference to SATAN.

STILL AMUSING UPDATE:

The look of Jakob Nielsen's website.

This remains funny.

Grover forgive me, for I have sinned...

“No pledge-taker has voted for a tax increase,” Norquist explained to CNN’s Soledad O’Brien on Monday. “They’ve had some people discussing impure thoughts on national television.”

Raw Story (http://s.tt/1uQkH)

"When did you first start thinking about tax increases?"

"Oh, I must have been thirteen, fourteen... Physically capable of  legislating, you know, but not at all ready emotionally. Your body's been going through all these changes, and it's hard to concentrate, and these images kind of wander into your head unbidden."

"What kind of images?"

"You know how it it is... you'll be out in the garage with your buddies, and there's a stack of old Congressional Records, harmless stuff mostly, National Accordion Week and the like, and then every once in a while something a little titillating. Like, look at this one, Eddie, voting rights! From the sixties!  And sooner or later you see a revenue bill, and you don't say anything to anybody and shut the volume as quick as you can, but you can't squeeze that stuff back into the tube. You can't unsee it, if you will. You can't stop wondering what it feels like to vote for something like that."

"And how do you cope with it?"

"Well, you pray, naturally. And there's the Bible. 'Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.' Doesn't say anything about giving Caesar your own stuff, does it?"

Reading Playboy South Africa for the articles. From adland.tv.

Are Reaction Shots from Witchfinder General a Good Idea?

World of Dronecraft

Malia Obama, November 2009. From Eclectablog at Kos.

So suddenly last summer it occurred to somebody in the Obama administration that one of the consequences of losing the election would be Willard Mitt Romney's thumbs on the World of Dronecraft console. Which could turn out to be a Bad Thing. So they set to laying down some rules and regulations on the use of this remarkable tool of modern statesmanship, in the hope that Romney (or let us say Mr. Adelson) would at least be somewhat inhibited.

They would have been totally finished with this project, too, by the end of  December, if Romney had won, according to Scott Shane. As it is, they are not in so much of a hurry, but Obama still wants it to get done; in fact he'd like somebody to inhibit him a bit:

“One of the things we’ve got to do is put a legal architecture in place, and we need Congressional help in order to do that, to make sure that not only am I reined in but any president’s reined in terms of some of the decisions that we’re making,” Mr. Obama told Jon Stewart in an appearance on “The Daily Show” on Oct. 18.... 

The president expressed wariness of the powerful temptation drones pose to policy makers. “There’s a remoteness to it that makes it tempting to think that somehow we can, without any mess on our hands, solve vexing security problems,” he said.

There are two ways of looking at this kind of utterance against Obama's record of using those drones so far. You can say that this is somebody working through a set of moral difficulties in much the same way as anybody else, but with a somewhat different value set than yours or mine or Emptywheel's—he sincerely worries about the murderous power he has abrogated to himself, but isn't convinced he's done anything really bad so far; or you can say he's an insane comic book tyrant. But there isn't much ground between the two.

Because why would he keep using this liberal kind of argumentation, unless (a) he meant it, or (b) he was satisfying an irresistible urge to tease Emptywheel and the rest of us into our own fits of psychotic rage? It's not as if it could get him any votes, still less any votes he needs, for an election that has already taken place.

From memegenerator.com.

I'm convinced that he means it—that he's a real liberal himself in the broad sense. He just isn't a hippy. He's never been radicalized into it.

Though publicly the administration presents a united front on the use of drones, behind the scenes there is longstanding tension. The Defense Department and the C.I.A. continue to press for greater latitude to carry out strikes; Justice Department and State Department officials, and the president’s counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, have argued for restraint, officials involved in the discussions say.

Father John there is the left end of the arguments he's hearing; I don't know who's the left of his understanding of banking or housing or health insurance, but it's in a similar position, balanced by a similar right. He's not sufficiently challenged: he really believes that we are at "war" and that wicked bond fairies will punish us if we don't have a plan to balance the budget by 2016, and I read somewhere that one of his concerns about health insurance is the number of people that the industry employs: what would happen to them in a single payer system? (Not to go all Yglesias or anything on you, but it's a legitimate question.)

But it doesn't do us any good to refuse to believe him. If we'd had Carter's back, you know, we might have a sustainable carbon policy by now; if we'd shown Clinton some love in his hour of need, welfare and the banking system might have been a little less "reformed". Go back and read, or reread, this great essay; it's as valid as it was four years ago.

That rumor is totally fabricated. Get it? Via Wonkette.

Call for signatures

From Avaaz, the people-powered global web movement, this graphically somewhat cleaner version of the map sequence explaining why Palestinians think they want a state, and a call for support for the Palestinian Authority in its campaign for non-voting UN membership.

Also, via a commenter over there, a music video (I bet you didn't know Pat Boone wrote the lyrics to this song).

A Touch of Class

There are some aspects of this that are RONG but I have to set it aside for the moment and do things like sleep.

I guess this might as well show up again since I listen to it pretty regularly:



UPDATE:



Light position, file-size and legibility update and isn't the little curlicue in the R ADORABLE?

It may be that the solution to the shadow problem is simply to pretend the letters glow a bit.

UPDATE ALSO:

Innovation!

!!!!!!:

Any serious attempt by the GOP to win black votes won’t involve Republicans copycatting liberal policies. It will require going over the heads of the black and white liberal slanderers to offer a sincere alternative to failed liberal policies on schools, poverty, crime, etc. The more effective that effort, the more the GOP will be called racist.

There we go. Instead of just complaining about commies Jonah is back with the bold new ideas that will win hearts and minds.

UPDATE REQUESTED:

The Necessities of Life in Other Places

Mine Kafon | Callum Cooper from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

Bibi loser

Dear Prime Minister,

If you had just called off the Gaza blockade and hung a sign labeled "Kick me" on your back, you know, you would have accomplished almost everything worthwhile you got out of this little war, without any war.

Troops spell out Bibi luzr (the second word is a borrowing from American) with their bodies. Viral image via Noam Sheizaf's blog at 972+.

Now you have army boys mocking you for not giving them a chance to get killed, wise old talking heads talking about how President Morsi, formerly of the Muslim Brotherhood, is a true statesman, Morsi getting more phone calls from Obama than you do, the Labor party trying to present itself as Compassionate Warriors (I guess that's good for Likud in the short run, but somebody's going to note sooner or later that all the wars Israel actually won were fought under Labor governments), five Israelis and 150 Gazans dead. And Tzipi Livni, new leader of the Kadima party, is having a victory party as if she were already PM herself.

Oh, but wait—you've made peace in America! At thousands of Thanksgiving tables today, right and left are in agreement for once: Bibi is a turkey!

This was meant as a pro-Netanyahu image in 2010, after Turkey's fiendish attempt to destroy Israel with donated medical supplies aboard the Marmara—our tough guy laying into Anatolia, I guess. But it turns out that bibi بيبي  is the Moroccan Arabic word for the bird (Meleagris).

Albatross!

Jonah Goldberg:

Enter The Hollywood Reporter’s apology for “Hollywood’s Holocaust.” Apparently, The Hollywood Reporter didn’t toe the progressive line during the Red scare and it is now apologizing for it. Howard Kurtz celebrates THR’s better-late-than-never apology for this ”odious” and an “appalling chapter of the publication’s history.”

Well, okay. But “Hollywood’s Holocaust”? Really? That’s a moral and logical perversion. It’s hard enough to get liberals to admit that the Soviet genocide in the Ukraine was a holocaust or to get them to do more than shrug at China’s murder of 65 million people. But when Hollywood studios refrained from hiring people whose political views are out of fashion (they’d never do that today, would they?) that’s a “Holocaust”? Good lord, what is wrong with these people?

What?

Ricist insinuations

At some point early in their lives, white kids often become concerned about racism in ways that don't quite get it:

"Who's your friend?"
"You mean Kyle?"
"No, the black kid."
"Shh, Dad, that's racist!"

Eliana Johnson over at the so-called Corner has gotten herself into that kind of difficulty over Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush's first National Security Advisor and second Secretary of State, and her treatment by "liberals", as in a Ted Rall cartoon of 2004 in which he depicted crime-fitting punishments for George W. Bush and his enablers after they leave office:

From here, via John Mitchell.org. 

Rice's punishment is that she is forced to learn how to be black, and to use such ghastly expressions as "house nigga". Rall explained it pretty carefully—

The broad important point here is that she's an African-American who works for an administration whose policies hurt blacks.

—but it has served conservatives for all these years as an example of how "you guys are the real racists, so nyah nya-nya nyah-nyah!" and now it is back, in the context of the existence of a new African-American female potential secretary of state, U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, whose conservative detractors are being accused of showing racial bias: "At least nobody called her a house nigga!"

Johnson argues that C. Rice was the real victim, as in these comments from Democratic senators:

Senator Barbara Boxer charged that Rice “frightened the American people” into supporting the Iraq War; Senator Jim Jeffords accused her of being part of an effort to “distort information” in the service of “political objectives”; and Senator Pat Leahy, who voted in her favor, endorsed her by saying that her tenure as national-security adviser lacked “strong leadership, openness, and sound judgment.”  

Nevertheless, Boxer's and Jeffords's objections are not innuendo but concrete interpretations of historical fact (you can disagree if you want, just bring the evidence), and in any case these criticisms have nothing to do with race—there's no stereotype accusing African-Americans in general of deceptive warmongering or lacking leadership. Contrast what is now being said about S. Rice, as Johnson quotes it:

Senator John McCain described her as “not being very bright,” and stated that, “if she didn’t know better, she’s not qualified” to be secretary of state. Senator Lindsey Graham noted, “I don’t trust her,” and that “if she didn’t know better, she shouldn’t be the voice of America.”...

These allegations are purely subjective, snotty, and larded with innuendo; and the innuendo is certainly that she's not one of Us, inadequately evolved, and unrepresentative.

Much more interesting to my mind is the campaign against S. Rice into which poor Dana Milbank has been inveigled, which says she must not become America's chief diplomat because she isn't diplomatic. That is, nobody (nobody in Cokie's beauty saloon? nobody at Sally Quinn's conversazione?) likes her. She is too rough.

when she was an assistant secretary of state during the Clinton administration, she appalled colleagues by flipping her middle finger at Richard Holbrooke during a meeting with senior staff at the State Department, according to witnesses. 

My stars, Mabel, did you ever hear the like? And poor Mr. Holbrooke (aka "the Bulldozer" and "Raging Bull") such a gentleman, too!

Rice was one of the first former Clinton administration officials to defect to Obama’s primary campaign against Hillary Clinton. Rice condemned Clinton’s Iraq and Iran positions, asking for an “explanation of how and why she got those critical judgments wrong.”

And did she get one? Because I'm still wondering myself.

Rice’s put-down of Clinton was tame compared with her portrayal of McCain during 2008, which no doubt contributes to McCain’s hostility toward her today. She mocked McCain’s trip to Iraq (“strolling around the market in a flak jacket”), called his policies “reckless” and said “his tendency is to shoot first and ask questions later. It’s dangerous.”

Ah, now we're getting somewhere.  Milbank's the self-denominated "original McCainiac" after all, suppose he's still in touch with the old duffer? Or is that a racist question?

From Ask Mr. William T. Collins.

And so, to paraphrase Mr. Bennett, an unhappy alternative is before you, Mr. President; Mr. Milbank will never see you again if you nominate Ms. Rice for secretary of state, and I will never see you again if you don't. Just kidding, it's really up to you, but Milbank makes her sound like a little of what you need. And I'll bet old Holbrooke would have backed me up on that.

Standard Microsoft Failure

Hmm, this template demands a little bit of separation of text from image. Let's go with a bright pee-coloured background.

Okay, here we go.

For impossibly boring and possibly futile reasons, we need a language pack:



Let's see what the drop-down menu has to offer:



That's right, they aren't in any order, and although the page is in English, you need to be able to spell the script you're going to fuck with. Okay then, that's doable. No we don't want Dari, we want Farsi. (And who decided to make Amharic look shaky enough to be forged from the get-go?) Chosen.



As expected, the page is, irritatingly, in Farsi only, and while our talents with Farsi are legendary, pre-school children run rings around us. So where the fuck's the download button?

Wait, what's that field up there? Bing? Maybe Bing has a translator.



It does! And it tells me to enter a URL! I have one of those right here!



Oh dear, the Microsoft-powered Bing translator cannot handle a goddamned ampersand, a quite common feature of Microsoft URLs on Microsoft-powered websites, and as a result it sends me to the Türkmen language pack. Conveniently, the Türkmen language pack is formatted not-at-all like the page on which the Farsi language pack exists, and therefore cannot be used as a guide to the content of its goddamned fucking sibling webpage.

I wonder if there is some competing company out there with some sort of translaty thingamajig? Oh wait, there is!



Wow! It works fine! Can you believe it? So we download and off we go.

Okay then, let's snag us an Arabic language pack!



Just fuck off.