Dreams Into Lightning 2

Veritas?

Sissy Willis:

We've been there forever, of course. As we wrote a few years back in "Bloggers are 'cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open'":

Leftists have become soft and flabby in their thinking over the last 20, 30 or more years because their fellow travelers in the mainstream media — supposed to be keeping them honest — have been giving them a free ride, even as thinkers of the right, not enjoying such reflexive support, have been honing our debating and intellectual survival skills. That leaves the left soft and lazy and the right battle ready. Enter the bloggers, stage right. ...

Steyn: Free the Preening Metrosexual Slug John Edwards

The only thing more disgusting than John Edwards is what's being done to him.

And that's before we get to the affair, and the denial, followed by the admission of adultery but only while his wife's cancer was in remission, and then the admission of non-remission adultery but certainly not leading to any love child, and finally the admission of a non-remission adulterous love child, and the realization that the sainted, stricken Elizabeth was less the victim than a co-strategist in the massive Edwardsian fraud that was his 2008 presidential campaign, and a full participating partner in an even creepier political marriage than the Clintons'.

Oh, and while we're at it, I loathe the American media, whose peculiarly contemptible combination of partisanship, snobbery, and self-neutering of any basic journalistic instinct might easily have led (were it not for the candidacy of Barack Obama) to this preening metrosexual slug's becoming president of the United States.

All that said, his trial is a disgrace.

It should be a national scandal, except that no one this side of the old Politburo is as ruthless as the Democrats at airbrushing former eminences out of the group shot. So, in a critical election season, the Edwards prosecution will be buried at the foot of page 43, and never make the network news.

What's wrong with it? First, there is no crime, if that term is to have any agreed meaning. In Malaysia, the longtime prime minister Dr. Mahathir spent much of the last 15 years battering his political rival, Anwar Ibrahim, with one sodomy trial after another. We're subtler about these things here. ...

Totten: Fake Terrorism in Syria

'No one who follows Middle East conflicts should be shocked to discover that the Syrian government is staging terrorist attacks against itself. ...'

Who is ...

... the hottest lesbian ever?

Mistakes ...

... were made. And somehow got past all those layers and layers of fact-checkers.

CNN on Iranian Plot

Shireen Hunter: Nothing's certain about Iranian plot. 'The United States announced a plot was foiled to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, which it linked to Iran. But before passing final judgment and acting upon this information, it would be prudent to ask cui bono -- who profits from this affair? In this sense, Iran has everything to lose and its regional rivals everything to win. ...'

Jeffrey Toobin: How strong is the case against Iran plot suspect? 'In all, then, the case against Arbabsiar may well be airtight. Certainly, this fellow is in a world of trouble, and in the end, he may even decide to plead guilty and become an informant himself. But Arbabsiar may well fight to the end. Cases only become more complicated over time, and there's every reason to think that this one will, too. The case arrived with great and surprising suddenness, but it may now be a long slog to a jury verdict and beyond.'

Reza Sayah: Some analysts skeptical of alleged Iranian plot.

Did an elite branch of Iran's military handpick a divorced, 56-year Iranian-American used-car salesman from Texas to hire a hitman from a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the ambassador to Saudi Arabia by blowing up a bomb in a crowded restaurant in Washington?

U.S. officials say they are certain the bizarre plot against Ambassador Adel Jubeir was real.

But some analysts say they are not. They find it unlikely that the Iranian government, or legitimate factions within, would be involved in such a tangled plot. ...

Remarks. Should I start with Sayah's unnamed, omniscient "analysts"? Or perhaps with Toobin's penetrating conclusion that "the case against Arbabsiar may well be airtight ... he may even decide to plead guilty and become an informant himself. But Arbabsiar may well fight to the end." May he really? Never mind, we'll just have to wait and see how it plays out.

Berlinski on Turkey

A fed-up Claire Berlinski is tired of playing Cassandra for free.

Hey, what you're reading in the American news about this region, as far as I can see, is hogwash. And I don't know what the Israelis are thinking; they seem to be working themselves into a lather because Erdogan delivered some tub-thumping speech in Cairo (toward which the Muslim Brotherhood was distinctly cool: Welcome to the real world, Tayyip. Didn't do much good for Obama, either, and remember how I warned you: Turks aren't Arabs?) And Israelis, chill! That's just Tayyip. He flies in, makes a lot of noise, the ladies faint; he flies out, nothing changes. I promise. Just ask the Somalians. Or the Syrians. Or the Turks, for that matter.

The most astonishing thing of all is that everyone in the West--and Israel!--suddenly seems happy to accept two incompatible propositions simultaneously: 1) Erdogan defanged the military and 2) Turkey is a threat to Israel. No recognition that to the extent the former is true, the latter must be less true, so maybe it would be worth asking--which, exactly, is more true? ...

Go read the rest.

Sarah Palin: Three Ideas

Anand Ghiridardas at NYT:

She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private). ...

Read the rest at the link.

Remarks. The column opens with the observation, "Let us begin by confessing that, if Sarah Palin surfaced to say something intelligent and wise and fresh about the present American condition, many of us would fail to hear it. ..." No kidding. So if

The next day, the “lamestream” media, as she calls it, played into her fantasy of it by ignoring the ideas she unfurled ...

then maybe it's not a "fantasy" on Palin's part after all?

(HT Marc Danziger, via FB.)

Psychology Today's Ben Hayden: Reject Neruopolitics

Psychology Today does the right thing with this blog post by neuroscientist Ben Hayden:

Political season is here again, and it's time for the quadrennial re-emergence of the neuropundits. It starts earlier every time, and this time it started in April of this year, with a new paper in Current Biology by Ryoto Kanai and colleagues.

The paper received attention because its third author is a movie star, Colin Firth, who played the King of England, won an Academy Award AND had a paper published in Current Biology. So he's having a good year.

But the content of the paper is interesting too. The authors compared the sizes of several brain structures in liberal and conservative students (in the UK, so we still have to wait for the most interesting results: brain size in tea party members). ...

Anyhow, the authors learned that liberals have larger anterior cingulate cortex than conservatives and that conservatives have a larger amygdala.

I have big no gripes with this paper, which is quite judicious in its conclusions. But I do have a gripe with the media coverage of the study, and with other neuropolitics studies more generally. The media like to pretend that we know what these effects mean. But neuroscience just doesn't really know.

Please go to the link and read the whole thing.

FCC Drops Fairness Doctrine

Fox:
The Fairness Doctrine and 83 other "outdated and obsolete media-related rules" were tossed Monday into the regulatory dust bin of the Federal Communications Commission, in a move that the agency said helps it achieve the FCC's "reform agenda."

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said that the decision to eliminate the Fairness Doctrine was part of a larger mandate proposed by the Obama administration to ease regulatory burdens by getting rid of duplicative or outdated measures. Genachowski informed Congress in June of the pending action. ...'

Well, good. Read more at the link.