How they must have laughed as they watched Susan Rice go on all the talk shows blaming it on some Los Angeles film-maker. They were probably in stitches while viewing the paid advertisements shown in Pakistan blaming the whole thing on amateurs posting on YouTube. It must have opened their eyes to see how the Washington press corps swallowed it hook, line and sinker, like hayseeds from the sticks. That forced a re-evaluation of everything.
And then they knew: they had his number. They had the administration dialed in. They understood exactly what they were dealing with. The Iranians too must have been watching from the sidelines and concluded what Nemetsov understood. As did Putin. Here was a man with no core; whose only value was to protect the precious image of himself, because image was all there was.
And at that moment the wolves, heretofore only circling on the periphery, as if by mutual consent advanced. They understood. They knew. And the man at the center of the closing circle has been busy throwing ever larger pieces of raw meat them to keep them away. But the wolves are no longer to be denied and the circle is tightening.
Month: March 2015
Keep Those Kids at Home and In Front of a Screen!
Here’s a Maryland couple who got in trouble with the Government because they let their children–a 10-year-old and a 6-year-old–walk home from the park by themselves. They (the parents) were found responsible for “unsubstantiated child neglect”–whatever that means….it sounds pretty Kafkaesque.
There are at least two issues here: out-of-control discretion by an administrative agency, whether granted to them by bad legislative drafting, or simply grabbed…and, even more fundamentally, a society which has responded to one of the safest environments in human history by becoming fear-ridden and safety-obsessed.
I am reminded, and not for the first time, of a passage in Walter Miller’s great novel A Canticle for Leibowitz:
To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.
The End of the World?
Sarah Hoyt thinks not.
When I was thirty one, I sat on my back porch on a lovely summer day, reading Reason magazine. The issue was devoted to debunking global warming. And suddenly, like a weight lifting, I realized there really wasn’t proof. That it wasn’t preordained that my generation would be the last to have a decent life on Earth. That my kids and grandkids (I only had one kid at the time, and he was still nursing) wouldn’t necessarily be doomed. That the future wasn’t all doom and gloom.
And I realized my entire life I’d lived in the shadow of the fear of decay and death. First there was the cold war, and sooner or later, the bombs would fly. We’d die screaming. Then there was overpopulation. If we escaped the bomb, we’d all starve to death. Or thirst to death (thank you, Paul Ehrlich!) Then there was global cooling. We were all going to freeze in the ice age. Then there was global warming. Amid all these threats, how could we escape. To watch the thing debunked and to see it pointed out that even the proponents of AGW don’t live like they believe in it lifted a weight from my heart.
Since then I’ve been skeptical of the end of the world prophecies.
RTWT
The Question at Hand
I read of this particular school-administered survey the other morning on one of the news websites which form my morning reading, in lieu of the local newspaper – which I gave up some years ago upon realizing two things; practically every non-local story they printed I had already read on-line through various sources some days before appearing on the (rapidly diminishing) pages of the San Antonio Express News, and when it came to opinion columnists and cartoonists, most of the local offerings were … pathetic. Seriously – when I could read the best and most incisive opinion bloggers like Wretchard at Belmont Club and Victor Davis Hanson – why would I bother to read a dead-tree version of whatever lame establishment national columnist had offered a cheap rate to the SA Express-News?
Movie Review: Above and Beyond
This entertaining 90-minute documentary tells the story of a group of idealistic war veterans, mostly but not all Jews, mostly from the USA and other English-speaking countries, who volunteered on the Jewish side during the Israeli war of independence in 1948 and helped to form the nucleus of what became the Israeli Air Force.