Make Up Your Mind, Joe

Joe Klein, Friday:

If the Democratic Party truly wants to be a party of inclusion, it must reach out to those who are currently excluded from its identity politics. It needs to disband its caucuses.

Joe Klein, Yesterday.

It's possible that this is more a critique of television than it is of Mr. Klein. If he'd been given longer to make his point, perhaps he'd have brought it around to the same place. Clearly he feels the need to preface this point (as he did in print) with a long preamble about how much he supports and approves of everything the caucus-based system has built; as well as a plain expression of support for the members and goals of each of the various caucuses he wants disbanded.

Perhaps you just can't say something that delicate on television.

The Wife Brings Home a Pet

So tonight the wife came in carrying one of her socks in her hand, instead of wearing it on her foot as you might expect. One end was tied off.

"Look what I found at work!" she said. "It's just the cutest little thing!"

Her plan had been to raise this one up until its big enough to compete with the big female rat snake who lives in the garden. Then I meant to let him be the basement dragon. I prefer a snake to the other means of rodent control.

However, within five minutes he had escaped the bath tub and down the heating/air vent, which means he's probably hunting mice (or at least spiders) in the basement even now.

I'm trying to think of a good name for a basement dragon.

POTUS Pizza

Today we have an article explaining that the President is pandering especially hard to young people right now, because they are strangely un-energetic about supporting him this year.  Having just given out White House beer recipes yesterday, today he is trumpeting a local college pizzeria that has a pie called "the POTUS."  Apparently it has pepperoni, sausage, green peppers, black olives, and onion -- the latter few so 'you can tell Michelle' that you had some vegetables on your pizza.

I cite this article not for the news content, nor for analysis on what if anything it means about the race.  No, I cite it simply for the first entry in the comments section:

Wingnut • 21 mins ago

They also have a Biden pizza which is basically tomato sauce and parmesan served on your foot.

Bacon, Bread, and Fowl

It's a fine fowl that comes wrapped in bacon.



This one was cooked at five hundred degrees in black iron, for about an hour, and then broiled a bit to crisp the bacon. The bread was fresh-made from King Arthur flour, and the gravy was vibrant with pepper.

Mind fun

I've been treating myself lately to a set of lectures on tape.  At first I stuck with pure audio tapes, because they're so much faster to download, and until a few weeks ago, we were stuck with a HughesNet account that was subject to severe daily download limits.  Thirty-minute lectures are about 20MB, but a 30-video is more like 300MB.  Also, I wanted something to listen to while I did handwork, either crochet or painting a series of large signs I've taken on.

(Here's the picture part of the sign I've just done for the State Park, by the way.  That's what we call locally "The Big Tree," and a whooping crane.  You can listen to a lot of lectures while you paint all that detail, but of course long car trips are a good opportunity for listening, too.)

Anyway, how that we finally have a better internet connection, I broke down a ordered a handful of lectures that were available only in the video format.  The really critical images are few and far between, so I can still get my crochet work done, just stopping now and then to stare at the screen.  These are courses from "The Great Courses," and they're uniformly wonderful.  This week, though, I've stumbled on my favorite so far:  a series on how to solve mathematical puzzles.  The lecturer gives me the leap of joy I used to feel only in talking to my father.  He talks about an article  he read in an educational journal, which he admits is the only article in such a publication he ever managed to read from beginning to end (so right away he won my heart).  It described the experience of posing the same problem to a set of gifted kids and a bunch of kids on the vocational track:  how do you weigh a giraffe?

The gifted kids, the article said, were used to looking the answers up and pleasing their teacher.  They couldn't come up with an approach and quickly became anxious and discouraged.  One of the vocational kids suggested, "Let's get a chain saw and cut the giraffe up, then weigh the chunks."  The approach appealed to him, the lecturer said, because it's wrong, it's criminal, it's breaking all the rules.  The good news is, it's a metaphor for math puzzles, where there's nothing really wrong or criminal about breaking the rules.  In fact, "chainsawing the giraffe" is his new expression for the humdrum "thinking outside the box."  He lays great stress on mental tricks to avoid discouragement or anxiety, which will only tend to keep us in a mental rut.  Remember, he advises, that all of us are relatively stupid individually, because we weren't evolved to solve difficult mathematical problems.  Luckily, we're part of a civilization that can amass and transmit an enormous body of knowledge and technical skill, and we should steal ideas whenever possible -- giving credit where due, of course; he's not advocating plagiarism.

Here's one of his first puzzles.  A patient has to take one pill from Bottle A and another pill, identical in appearance, from Bottle B, every day.  Failure to take both pills is fatal, as is doubling up on either pill. The patient pours one pill out of Bottle A, but then carelessly pours two pills out of Bottle B while looking away for a moment.  Now he has three pills in his hand.  He knows that one is an A pill and two are B pills, but he can't tell by looking at them which is which.  How does he take the right dose for that day?  (Update:  And to make the problem harder for Grim:  if you don't take the entire course you'll die, and the pills aren't being made any more, so you can't just throw the three you've got away.)

A Good Translation

Thanks to Dad29's pointer, this feels right to me.

I have great wealth—a spear and a sword
and the good shield of animal hide, skin's protector;
for with this I plough, with this I reap,
with this I tread the sweet wine from the grape-vine,
with this I am named master of vassals.

Those who dare not wield a spear and a sword
and the good shield of animal hide, skin's protector:
all these men, falling around my knee,
worship me, calling me
master and great king.

He offers several other translations that have been given over the years, as well as the original Greek to compare, if you have the tongue yourself. 'Yeoman,' one says! Well, Sam Aylward, perhaps; but I think the concept is out of place even there.

"Vassal" is a little out of place, too, though there is a predecessor concept that is more applicable. Witness Homer, speaking of the warriors who were sworn to Achilles (from the Fitzgerald):

...Like wolves,
Carnivorous and fierce and tireless,
who rend a great stag on a mountainside,
and feed on him, their jaws reddened with blood,
loping in a pack to drink springwater,
their chops a-drip with fresh blood, their hearts
unshaken ever, and their bellies glutted:
such were the Myrmidons and their officers,
running to form up round Akhilleus' brave
companion-in-arms.

And like the god of war
among them was Akhilleus: he stood tall
and sped the chariots and shieldmen onward.

Even Fitzgerald is not quite right here. Ares is not properly "the god of war." He is rightly named: 'The god, War.'

I Did Not Know That

It is highly likely that, had the President not visited Iowa today, I would never have known that the airport code for Sioux City is SUX.

The FedEx lady brought us a new Hav-a-Hart trap just now in the supermegagigantanormous size.  The regular size worked for the first three days, yielding a small possum and two medium-sized raccoons.  Clearly, however, the mother-ship raccoon is big and smart enough to leave her butt in the door while grabbing the apples at the far end, then backing out, because we kept finding the trap in the morning with the bait gone and the trapdoor sprung, but no raccoon.  The new, longer trap should ensure that she goes all the way in before the door springs shut on her.

No raccoons are being harmed in the crafting of this weeklong drama.  We turn them loose in the state park, where they can torment campers.  We wouldn't even bother doing that if they'd learn some restraint:  they could wait until the fruit trees get fairly large, for instance, and then take some of the fruit, instead of climbing in the little saplings and breaking of all their branches, if not outright killing the trees.  They're cold, fish-eyed chicken murderers, too, showing no moderation in their destruction of the entire flock.

Raccoons are fiendishly smart.  Tonight we'll find out if Big-Butt Mama can say, "Hey, you hold the door open while I grab the apples."  Clever girl.

We're also ramping up into hummingbird season, with eight feeders that have to be changed more than once a day.  Soon we'll have 24 feeders up and still have to change them every few hours.  See, you can safely feed hummingbirds without their destroying anything.  They've got this human-interaction thing down.

Mr. Mazetti and the CIA

Just for the record, on the subject of the paper of record.

The so-called thought process

The Guardian is running a piece suggesting that the improved federal levee system protecting the city of New Orleans may have exacerbated problems downstream in Plaquemines Parish.  No one seems to have any data, so the story mostly quotes people speculating according to their own predilections:  the problem is those rich people upstream, who don't care about us down here, or the problem is that city folks are doing the usual dirty on the rurals, or the problem is that those uncoordinated local hicks refuse to get with the centrally planned federal system.

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the concept of building at or below sea level in one of the world's great deltas without going up on stilts, and then deciding to ride out a direct hit by a hurricane.  On the news they were reporting that after landfall the authorities were just getting around to issuing a mandatory evacuation in affected areas.  That included the evacuation of a nursing home, if you can believe it.  Can you imagine waiting around for local officials to tell you to get out?  When you've got bedridden patients on your hands?  The ambulances couldn't even get in there by the time someone hit the panic button.  There were people interviewed on camera who couldn't swim.

A man, a plan

The five-point plan featured in Mr. Romney's acceptance speech tonight has one point I'm fuzzy about (the trade agreements) and four that are persuasive.  That is, they are within the reasonable competency of a Congress working with a White House, unlike, say, a plan to lower the oceans.  They are likely to produce the results claimed, unlike, say, quantitative easement and stimulus spending on public projects.  And they are unlikely to be attempted by the present administration.  i score that a win:

And unlike the president, I have a plan to create 12 million new jobs. It has 5 steps. 

First, by 2020, North America will be energy independent by taking full advantage of our oil and coal and gas and nuclear and renewables. 

Second, we will give our fellow citizens the skills they need for the jobs of today and the careers of tomorrow. When it comes to the school your child will attend, every parent should have a choice, and every child should have a chance. 

Third, we will make trade work for America by forging new trade agreements. And when nations cheat in trade, there will be unmistakable consequences. 

Fourth, to assure every entrepreneur and every job creator that their investments in America will not vanish as have those in Greece, we will cut the deficit and put America on track to a balanced budget. 

And fifth, we will champion small businesses, America’s engine of job growth. That means reducing taxes on business, not raising them. It means simplifying and modernizing the regulations that hurt small business the most. And it means that we must rein in the skyrocketing cost of healthcare by repealing and replacing Obamacare.

Clerics v. Tories

There are some competing historical analogies for the position of Democratic leaders today. Dr. Mead and Mr. Sullivan think that Obama is a Tory.

Meanwhile, another analogy is a bit more medieval: it sees the struggle as a fight between the clerics and the yeomen.

The latter opinion makes a little more sense to me. I always thought that the new Robin Hood was the most politically relevant movie of recent years.



If you haven't watched it in a while, now's a good time.

Cryptology

So, just for fun, give your best deciphering of the following sentence. Yes, it's one sentence.

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

--Judith Butler, a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley

Via D29. If you want to check your answer against mine, read the comments there.

Equal Pay for Monkeys

Apparently this works with dogs, too.

Sleipnir

Not a bad bit of work, and they even got the color right.  It's an amusing story, how Sleipnir came to be born; Njörðr mocks Loki over it in the Lokasenna.

News you can use

Unless you speak Japanese (and perhaps even if you do), you can just skip to 0:50 on this video, since it's hard to imagine the narration is adding anything.

Muad'dib

Headline:  "School asks deaf preschooler to change his sign language name."

Why?  Because weapons are forbidden at school.

US Special Forces Unhappy with CJSOTF CONOP Process

There's a lot of cursing in this one, even for a Hitler Downfall video.

If it is in fact true that an ODA -- that is, a Special Forces A-team -- cannot leave the wire without filing a 45-slide Powerpoint presentation explaining their mission.... I don't even know how to finish that sentence.  The first part of the sentence is so unbelievable that no concluding remarks really make sense.

It's as if I were trying to finish a sentence that began, "If it is in fact true that monkey-shaped leprechauns have begun to sprout from the acorns of hickory trees..."  Yes, I could append some more words, but no set of words can repair the nonsense embedded in the opening assumption.  Hickory trees don't have acorns, and ODAs don't have to file lengthy permission slips with a Combined-Joint-level headquarters in order to go outside the wire.  The monkey-shaped leprechauns, however, may be real.

Thunder, to Honor the Storm

Regulars

The most disturbing part of this story is the unit the men came from:  4/3 BCT.  It's a relatively new Brigade Combat Team, stood up to help handle the rotation issues of the recent war, but that's a minor point.  The main point is that this is a unit of regulars, part of a division that is as regular as any in the Army.

Hopefully the future reporting on this issue, and the trial itself, will reveal details that make this less damning than it initially appears.  Bombing the fountain at Forsyth Park?  There's no political purpose to such a thing; almost all you'd be killing is innocent children.