Adam Serwer on how the New Deal is holding Sharia at bay.
Well, on its way out.
The well that tormented the nation has flatlined. Federal officials green-lighted the cementing of the well, already jammed with mud, late Wednesday. Federal waters are reopening gradually to fishing. The oil slick, the once-horrific expanse of red-orange mousse and silver sheen, has largely disappeared, federal scientists said Wednesday, even though the amount of oil left is more than four times that dumped by the Exxon Valdez.
The Obama administration breathed a sigh of relief, holding a midday news conference featuring top officials who claimed credit for guiding BP in getting the well under control. Officials hastened to remind the public that Macondo won’t be incontrovertibly dead until a relief well drills into it near its base and plugs it with cement. But even the cautious retired Adm. Thad Allen, national incident coordinator, called the static kill a “fairly consequential” event and a “very significant step.”
About three-quarters of the nearly 5 million barrels of oil that escaped Macondo has evaporated, dissolved or been dispersed by chemicals, skimmed by boats, burned, weathered and, most important, devoured by the Gulf of Mexico’s permanent oil-eating microbial workforce, according to a study released Wednesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Interior Department.
“Mother Nature is assisting here considerably,” said NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco.
This should terminate, once and for all, the more apocalyptic scenarios for the demise of the gulf and the spread of oil to Atlantic shores. There is no sign that the oil is going to ride the Loop Current onto the beaches of South Florida, the Outer Banks, Bermuda, Ireland and so on.
Please resume your normally scheduled shrimping and drilling.
From my inbox this morning (all-caps in original, emphasis mine):
GREETINGS TO YOU MY NAME IS PAUL GILBERT ANDERSON (PVT) AN AMERICAN SOLDIER SERVING IN THE MILITARY WITH THE USA ARMY 3RD INFANTRY DIVISION OPERATING IN IRAQ. WITH A VERY URGENT NEED OF ASSISTANCE I HAVE SUMMED UP COURAGE TO CONTACT YOU. I FOUND YOUR CONTACT PARTICULARS IN AN ELECTRONIC ADDRESS JOURNAL. I AM SEEKING YOUR KIND ASSISTANCE TO ASSIST ME TO CLAIM THE SUM OF ($28 MILLION USD) TWENTY EIGHT MILLION UNITED STATED DOLLARS THAT I HAVE SUCCESSFULLY AND SAFELY MOVED OUT OF IRAQ TO A SAFE COUNTRY. BEFORE I WILL GIVE YOU DETAILS OF WHERE THE FUND IS, YOU MUST ASSURE ME THAT MY SHARE WILL BE SAFE IN YOUR CARE. AS YOU CAN SEE WE ARE ALREADY PREPARING TO LEAVE IRAQ. I WISH THERE IS RISK INVOLVED I WILL NOT DO IT SO I WANT TO ASSURE YOU THAT THERE IS NO RISK INVOLVED IN THIS PROJECT BECAUSE THE FUND HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFULLY DELIVERED TO THE SAFE DESTINATION WITHOUT TRACE OF THE ORIGIN. LET ME HAVE YOUR FULL NAME, ADDRESS, AND PHONE NUMBER.
Always good to see email scammers keeping up to date on current affairs.
Modern Republicans can’t possibly oppose both the Dred Scott decision and the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, which reverses it.
Will Clayton claimed he did not work harder to thwart the Smoot-Hawley act because he thought the Republicans were “not stupid enough” to pass it.1
1Gregory Fossedal, Our Finest Hour (Hoover Institution Press, 1993), 59.
How would you bomb Japan? Just in time, of course, for the regrettable annual atomic bomb observation, comes an online version of “the straightforward poll of Compton and Daniels which asked 250 scientists at the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory arm of the Manhattan Project in pre-Trinity July, 1945″ how they should use “any new weapons.”
(FWIW, as of this writing the most popular answer among poll respondents was the same as the most popular answer among scientists in July 1945.)
Since the beginning:
Since 2008:
Your hating-muslims update for Friday 18 Shaban 1431.
Read the rest of this entry »
To be honest, my iPad has disappointed me in some ways. I was expecting a revolutionary device that would fundamentally change my life, upending my sense of how I get from here to there, of what’s what, and even of who I am. But now, now I think I’ve found the product I’ve been waiting for:
Yes, friends, it’s Perky Jerky. And lest you think it’s just caffeinated beef jerky — that would be pedestrian — please understand that it’s actually “the first performance-enhancing meat snack”. Take that, Steve Jobs.
A public lament about how I wish you were marrying me! Leading to a jab from a colleague and then a bitchy email. Little did you know: your wedding day is all about your weird ex.
The release, by Wikileaks, of tens of thousands of government documents concerning the U.S.-Afghan War gives us a massive and overwhelming quantity of data about the conflict. Most of the documents are ground level reports of encounters, attacks, IEDs, snipings, and so on. These are the daily happenings of a long war, the grunt’s eye view, written up for higher authority in language overwhelmed by acronym.
From 2004:
PROPAGANDA BEING DISTRIBUTED IN LASHKAR GAH, HELMAND PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN: MULLAH FAZUL RAHMAN, LEADER OF THE JAMIAT UL-LAHMAN PARTY IN PAKISTAN, NFI, IS PAYING UNIDENTIFIED INDIVIDUALS IN LASHKAR GAH (313487N 0642175E), HELMAND PROVINCE, AF, TO DISTRIBUTE PROPAGANDA IN A LETTER/NOTE FORM. THE PROPAGANDA MENTIONS HOW HOST NATION COMMANDERS THAT WORK WITH US FORCES, ARE THE SAME AS AMERICANS; THEREFORE, THEY SHOULD DIE. EACH LETTER OFFERS AN UNSPECIFIED AMOUNT OF MONEY FOR THE DEATH OF HOST NATION COMMANDERS AND AMERICANS. THE LETTERS ARE PLACED AT THE HOMES OF INDIVIDUALS WHO ARE KNOWN TO WORK WITH AMERICANS. NFI.
From 2008:
At 1006Z, TF Helmand reported a Mine Find:
FF were conducting a domination patrol when they discovered 3x AP mines in an irrigation ditch.
EOD will exploit as a routine task, No injuries or damages reported.
NFI att.At 1601Z, TF Helmand reported:
The final report will be submitted through the CIED chain.
NFTR. Event closed at 1554Z.
From 2008:
At 1609Z, 2/7 USMC COY reported an IED Strike:
FF were conducting a mounted security patrol when the struck an IED. FF have assessed the BDA: 3x KIA (USA, OEF), 1x WIA (USA, OEF, CAT A). NFI att.
Others have highlighted some of the specific intelligence, and are wading through the reports to look at each individually. I thought I would use a chart to show the progression of the war:
The blue lines chart the number of “Enemy Actions” that coalition soldiers reported. The red line charts the number of IED encounters that coalition forces had.
The intensity of fighting seems to have picked up in 2006-2007, plateaued a bit in 2008, and then jumped again in 2009. I should qualify that by saying that action and IED reports may also track with the number of troops in Afghanistan (more troops may mean more encounters). Nonetheless, “Enemy Action” reports tripled from 2005 to 2006, doubled from 2006 to 2007, and then doubled again from 2008 to 2009. IED encounters followed a roughly similar pattern. Such a massive increase is hard for me to identify as anything other than the most obvious thing: that Afghanistan reignited in 2005-06, and that the U.S. was not, as of the end of 2009, winning the war.
I agree and disagree with Scott; were Inception properly a movie interested in answering “is it a dream within a dream?”, or even a film that tried to get us to guess, I would agree that it fails. But I thought the movie succeeded, though it was good, but not great. There will be spoilers after the jump, though nothing I think that would rob one’s enjoyment of the film. Nor will there be a defense of Nolan himself after the jump; it would not surprise me that the man’s intentions could be defended, but the only other work of his I’ve seen is the Batman reboot, which was notable mostly for Heath Ledger’s performance, the disappearing pencil trick, and Batman flipping the truck.
What can I say? I enjoyed it, and as a curmudgeon-in-training, I have a low tolerance for entertainment that purports to be about something big and philosophical but is really about the authors putting in random crap/polar bears and hoping that the fans will work it into their mythology and think that it’s deep, so I trust my instinct when I think there is something clever in a film.
Edge of the American West, along with H-War will be hosting the next Military History Carnival, on August 17, 2010. Carnivals are an ancient and hoary Internet tradition, bringing together the best submitted work on a particular topic from around the web:
“A blog carnival is like a roving journal, a rotating showcase of interesting writing from around the blogosphere within a particular discipline. Individual bloggers volunteer to host a carnival on their personal blog, acting as chief editor for that edition. It falls to them to collect noteworthy items, and to sort through suggestions from the community, many of which are direct submissions from authors. On the appointed date (carnivals generally keep to a regular schedule) the carnival gets published and the community is treated to a richly annotated feast of new writing in the field.” [Future of the Book]
My belief is to construe military history as widely as possible: drums and trumpets, surely; the face of battle, most definitely; but also memorialization, gender, and anything else that seems related to war in all its forms.
Send potential entries here with the subject header “Military History Carnival Submission.” The deadline is August 15th.
Daniel Schorr, who died yesterday, is being remembered for his remarkable, decades-long career as a print, radio, and television journalist. I’m familiar with one small slice of this story: I did an intensive study of his coverage of the intelligence beat for CBS News from 1974 to 1976 – coverage that ultimately cost him his job. I came away from my research and from my interview with Schorr profoundly impressed by his commitment to disclosure and democracy. Schorr was true believer in the public’s right to know, and the historical record is richer for it.
It was not easy to get Schorr to talk with me about the most painful incident in his career. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s only Monday morning, but I hope this is the stupidest thing I read all week. Jeffrey Lord: Sherrod’s story about a lynched relative is false– the man was merely beaten to death after being arrested. No, seriously, that’s what it says.
I’ve been enjoying the NYT series The Stone, but not primarily for the quality of its articles, which both have been good introductory nibbles and have in general satisfied my selfish requirement: if my mother reads this, will she be assured that it is still unlikely that my discipline requires hallucinogenic drugs?
Rather, I have enjoyed the comments to the articles, for amidst the gloaming where philosophy and philosophers are condemned as of little interest, reasons glimmer like fireflies. But the writer didn’t think of… What about this?… You’ve overlooked…. Maybe this shows that instead we should…
It makes me smile. Thou art the man, thou art the man.
Not sure what Fred Phelps was doing picketing Comic-Con, but it ended well enough from the standpoint of aggregate utility. Favorite sign: “F&*%#@# magnets, how do they work?” (If you feel like wasting some time, the wiki page on Phelps remains fascinating. Or try Phelps’ own God Hates Sweden [sic].)
Via Leiter, an interesting Academe Online article about BB&T’s gifts-with-strings-attached:
At the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, for example, three years passed before faculty members learned that a million-dollar gift agreement establishing a new course contained language requiring both that Rand’s lengthy paean to laissez-faire capitalism, Atlas Shrugged, be assigned reading and that professors who teach that course “have a positive interest in and be well versed in Objectivism.”
I went to an Ayn Rand Society meeting at an APA once, mostly out of morbid curiosity, and I remember wondering if some of the big-name contributors (people whose philosophical work is pretty well-known) were paid to be on the panel. (The paper that prompted this had the rough form “Here’s my view of concepts. Of course, Rand also had a view of concepts, but I’m not completely sure I understand it, so let’s move on to my stuff.”) Very weird, not as weird as the society for field-being, but definitely out there.
Also, a post from Leiter on the recently-discussed Mark Taylor. He’s agin’em!
Overposting binge hidden below. Updated with a really creepy video.
Read the rest of this entry »
Recent comments