Obsidian Wings

Eating My Way to the Top

My local news anchors mocked it mercilessly last night. The Chicago Sun-Times notes that critics are comparing it to abstract art.  And Wonkette suggests it's just the latest clandestine effort to spread the "gay agenda." For me it's just too plain hideous to bother trying to work out what it means.

I'm talking, of course, of the Department of Agriculture's new "food pyramid" (there are 12 actually, but do I really have to not care 12 times? that's too much work). Here's what they're offering

And apparently you're meant to find the pyramid that's right for you. OK, to be fair, there is a handy online "My Pyramid" selector tool. Enter your age, sex, and physical activity level and you'll get a personalized chart (eventually...apparently that website is receiving high volumes of traffic, because it took 15 minutes for my info to show up). You won't be able to make any better sense of it than any of the others, but it feels nice to know you're special.

The figure walking up the side of the Pyramid (the one with no torso, taking the steps two at a time, and apparently unaffected by gravity or the slant of the incline) is there to remind you to get your exercise. (Note to Department of Agriculture: You want to motivate me? Appeal to my vanity. Replace that stick cartoon with a good-looking, shirtless 20-something with abs of steel. [just kidding honey ;-) ].)

Here's what I'm supposed to be eating:

Dark Green Vegetables = 3 cups weekly
Orange Vegetables = 2 cups weekly
Dry Beans & Peas = 3 cups weekly
Starchy Vegetables = 6 cups weekly
Other Vegetables = 7 cups weekly

Here's what I'll actually be eating:

Coffee with three spoons of sugar and milk = 7-9 cups weekly
Beer, whiskey, wine = countless cups weekly
Nachos and quesadillas = countless cups weekly
Plov, Laghman, other delicious, but fattening Kyrgyz dishes = 7 cups weekly (that is, so long as my partner doesn't see my suggestion for the pyramid climber)
Assorted junk food = 6 cups weekly

Elephants Rampage Through Seoul

by hilzoy

That's the headline on a BBC story today:

"South Korea's busy capital Seoul faced an added complication on Wednesday when six elephants escaped from an amusement park, causing chaos.
The elephants broke into a restaurant in the east of the city, and tore through the garden of a private home.

Officials said one elephant was briefly detained at a police station, before all were returned to their park.

"It seems one of them panicked, causing the others to also panic and flee the grounds," one official said."

I am reminded of one of the odder wartime stories I have heard: I once knew someone who was the head of a Jerusalem zoo during the 1967 war. Apparently the zoo was near an army base of some sort, and the Jordanian army's shells all hit the zoo instead of the base. As my friend was dealing with the various problems caused by a zoo's taking serious fire, she got a phone call from Me'a She'arim, an orthodox neighborhood, saying that a rhinoceros had been seen ambling down the streets there. So my friend hopped into her jeep and drove off to find it, and the only way she could think of to induce it to return to the zoo was to attach a bucket full of lettuce to the back of the jeep and drive very slowly back. (You will recall that there was a war on, and she was driving slowly through shelling and gunfire.)

Some weeks later, after the war was over, she was at a party, and was introduced to someone, who looked at her and said: you don't know me, but I will never forget you. I was sitting in a foxhole with my unit, hardly daring to move, when all of a sudden, in the midst of all this shelling, what should I see but a blonde valkyrie in a jeep driving slowly though the middle of a war zone, followed by a rhinoceros. -- Apparently he had had to ask the rest of his unit to look, to make sure he hadn't cracked under fire and begun to hallucinate.

The Things We Do For Love

The vote on John Bolton's nomination to UN Ambassador, a nomination that I've gradually come to oppose, has been postponed in light of louder rumblings from centrist Republicans:

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday unexpectedly postponed a vote on the nomination of John Bolton to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations after a bitterly contentious meeting in which Democrats and even a few Republicans expressed reservations about the nominee.

The meeting came to a surprising halt when Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, suggested he wasn't "comfortable" voting on Bolton's nomination in light of new allegations leveled against Bolton that some members claim they have not had time to investigate.

Sen Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I., who along with Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., said he was inclined to support Bolton unless any significant "disqualifying" evidence surfaced, asked Chairman Richard Lugar, if he might reconsider holding the committee vote in light of Voinovich's comments.

Lugar suggested he wanted to move ahead with the vote anyway, but Hagel later added his voice to the pitch, saying that he suspected if the committee moved ahead to a vote, "the Bolton nomination will not come out of this committee."

If Bolton's nomination goes down, it will be for the right reasons.  There is decent evidence that Bolton has engaged in a pattern of bullying subordinates who give the wrong answers on intelligence matters.  Being an occasional bully probably isn't enough to deny Bolton the job (though recent allegations regarding Bolton's mistreatment of a Hagel staffer may explain why Sen. Hagel is wavering).  Nor is being a consistent critic of the UN.  But being a bully who allegedly tried to twist intelligence is simply indefensible in the post-Iraq world. 

It isn't personal.  The issue isn't whether Bolton is an honest man; it's whether he is credible representative of the US's interests.  In the current climate, it's increasingly clear that he's not.  The President's choice doesn't trump the national interest; being the Executive is not the same as being inerrant.  It's time for Bolton to step aside, and serve his country in another way.

Ten Years Ago Today

by hilzoy

Timothy McVeigh called the children he murdered "collateral damage". Here are some of the ones he missed, ten years later:

There should be nineteen more, and a lot of adults with them. You can read about them here.

I want to repost something I wrote earlier:

One of my favorite passages from C.S. Lewis is this one, which I've quoted before:

"The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything—God and our friends and ourselves included—as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred." (Mere Christianity)" (...)

I think the effects of hatred are like (what I've seen of) cocaine. At first, it's exhilarating. It's fun to see other people being vile and to set yourself in opposition to them. It's inspiring to go on a crusade. Of course, there is always a crusade at hand and an enemy to be fought, if your tastes run that way: the struggle to be a genuinely decent person, and the fight against your own worst self. But that requires that you actually give up your vices, which can be tiresome. A crusade against other people, like most of the pleasures of fantasy, has none of these drawbacks: it's all exhilaration, and none of that tedious business of recognizing your own faults and trying to correct them.

As with cocaine, if you stop at this point, not much has been lost. And some people do stop here. But if you don't keep hatred in check, you come to rely on it more and more, the fun fades, and it corrodes you from within. The more you nurse your hatred, the larger a part of your identity it becomes. But hatred is a poor substitute for a genuine self, and the more you come to depend on it, the hollower you become, and the harder it is to let it go. It eats away at your values: morality, which we ought to use to make ourselves better people and only secondarily to judge others, turns into a tool we use to excoriate those we hate, and to demonstrate, to ourselves and to others, how very, very different we are from them. Crusades are fought by the righteous, and if you need to believe that you are on a righteous crusade, you will of course need to conscript morality to the cause of maintaining your belief that you are on the side of the angels.

At this point, as Lewis said, your view of your opponents is driven by your hatred, rather than the other way around. You need "to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black", and your needs drive your beliefs. Your intellectual integrity is sacrificed to your psychological needs, your hatred loses any honesty it might once have had, and you surrender to fantasy. This can be hard to undo: once you give up your hold on reality, it's hard to find your way back. And if you can't, then you are surrounded by malevolent enemies of your own creation, enemies that can do you real damage even though they are purely imaginary. You are "fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred" which you created in your own image, and which has trapped you.

This is dangerous. I have watched people get into real moral trouble this way. I have no wish to join them. And the only way I know to prevent it is to be absolutely scrupulous about thinking ill of people. If the facts warrant my dislike, so be it. But the moment I find myself wanting to see grey as black, then I know that I'm going wrong. And as C.S. Lewis said, whenever this impulse "bobs its head up, day after day, year after year, all our lives long, we must hit it on the head." As I said, not just because it's unjust to think ill of others when they don't deserve it, or because it's ignoble, but because it's poison.

Ratzinger's the Pope

The white smoke rose. There's a new pope.

Pope "Benedict XVI" is due to address the faithful shortly.

Nuclear Hypocrisy

Via Kos

The tactics Republicans used during the Clinton years to block judicial nominees are coming back to haunt them.

The Republicans used committees and a host of since-discarded rules (like one requiring both home state senators to sign off on any judicial nominees) to hold up a large slate of Clinton judicial nominees. It was their preferred method of obstruction, which they gleefully wielded. Jesse Helms alone was a one-man obstruction machine.

And yes, they even used the now-maligned filibuster to try and stop Richard Paez from the 9th Circuit. Sen. Smith, Republican of NH, even said on the floor of the Senate:

But don't pontificate on the floor of the Senate and tell me that somehow I am violating the Constitution of the United States of America by blocking a judge or filibustering a judge that I don't think deserves to be on the circuit court because I am going to continue to do it at every opportunity I believe a judge should not be on that court. That is my responsibility. That is my advise and consent role, and I intend to exercise it. I don't appreciate being told that somehow I am violating the Constitution of the United States. I swore to uphold that Constitution, and I am doing it now by standing up and saying what I am saying." (March 7, 2000)

Frist voted with Smith on his filibuster.

Someone needs to remind Frist of this when he makes his speech this Sunday.

I'll note again that Democrats have blocked only 10 of 229 nominees Bush put forward. Surely that does not represent an abuse of their Constitutional role in the process. There is no justification for changing the rules here.

A Few Morsels

by Charles

While working on a longer and most likely controversial piece, several articles caught my attention in the margins, so here goes...

Since my last post on the subject, I've read little on the travails of Ward Churchill, figuring nothing really important will happen until the committee investigating his work concludes its task.  But Matt Labash is one of my favorite writers, combining piercing perceptiveness with a wicked sense of humor, so I settled in.  His latest doesn't disappoint.  In his own rendition of gonzo journalism, Labash spent four off and on days with Churchill while he was visiting the Bay Area, documenting the human comedy swirling around the beleaguered professor.  Saving one of his best lines for the finale, Labash describes an encounter with Bay Area Indian activist:

I ask Neconie what his Indian name is. "Just Neconie," he responds. "It's an old Kiowa name. I don't have one like Standing Water, or Leaky Faucet, or anything like that." I ask him what he thinks of Churchill's Indian name, which is "Keezjunnahbeh," meaning "kind-hearted man."

Neconie shrugs. He hadn't heard of it. "But Bay Area Indians, we have our own name for him. We just call him Walking Eagle."

"Why?" I ask.

"Because," says Neconie, gathering up his placards, "a Walking Eagle is so full of s--that it can no longer fly.

Next.  As reported in the Independent, new satellite imaging techniques will open a whole trove of new literary works from Greek and Roman times.

Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

The amount of material is astounding:  "Running to 400,000 fragments, stored in 800 boxes at Oxford's Sackler Library, it is the biggest hoard of classical manuscripts in the world."

Victor Davis Hanson brings up the failed prognostications of so-called foreign policy experts Brent Scowcroft, Madeleine Albright and Zbigniew Brzezinski, in particular their collective wrongness that the "Bush doctrine will not work and that the Arab world is not ready for Western-style democracy, especially when fostered through Western blood and iron."

By way of Publius Pundit, Arthur Edelstein has put together a tyrants gallery of dictators of unfree countries, as identified by Freedom House.  Note that Putin has made the list.  Publius Pundit is a busy website, keeping tabs on revolutionary activity worldwide, including the slow-motion communist revolution in Venezuela.

Combined posts by Pejman and the Volokh Conspiracy thoroughly shred Jeffrey Rosen's faux conspiracy, the Constitution in Exile movement.  When an article tries to pass Cass Sunstein off as a moderate, mental red lights should start flashing.

Finally, Zacarias Moussaoui plans to 'fess up, pleading guilty for his role as 9/11 al Qaeda participant.

Poetry Out Of Season

Daffodils, bees, bats: all things that are currently in my yard. But isn't it unfair that National Poetry Month doesn't extend all year long, so that we would have occasion to produce poems about things that appear in other seasons? Why should cicadas and icicles and geese heading south be excluded, just because they don't show up in April? In an effort to make National Poetry Month more inclusive, and because I like it, I post the following.

The Mower to the Glowworms

Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the summer night
Her matchless songs does meditate,

Ye country comets, that portend
No war nor prince's funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass's fall;

Ye glowworms, whose officious flame
To wand'ring mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim,
And after foolish fires do stray;

Your courteous fires in vain you waste,
Since Juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displaced
That I shall never find my home.

-- Andrew Marvell

On Blackjack

I took a short trip to Las Vegas at the end of last week.  It was a over-needed vacation, and thus a moderate disappointment.  You know what I'm talking about.  You're so desperate to get away, to have a moment to sleep in and drink too much (or, if you already drink too drink much, to feel less guilty about it), that you pour your hopes and dreams and all that good stuff into the idea of a vacation, but which the vacation itself can never match.

The somewhat-highlight of the trip was Zumanity, which was considerably less shocking than it wanted to be.  Or maybe exactly as shocking as it wanted to be.  It's so hard in these days of diminished expectations and quickie transgressions to tell when someone is trying to be shocking (and failing) or trying only to seem shocking, so as not to actually shock.*

In the balance of my time** -- which is to say a whole lot of it -- I played blackjack.  Alone as often as not, because the group we traveled with were primarily Crapheads and my wife got distracted early in the trip by a Monopoly gambling game (it was tremendously fun in her defense).

I like blackjack, because the "right" way to play requires the memorization and consistent application of a set of impossibly complex rules (and exceptions to those rules).  Always hit a soft 17; hit a 12 if the dealer shows a 2-4, and maybe against a 5 (but not a 6); split almost any pair if the dealer shows a 5 or 6 (but never split 10s), etc.  You know the drill -- or, you now know enough that you don't want to know the drill. 

They're comforting, those rules.  They provide a semblance of control -- but only a bare semblance, because I'm never sure if I remembered the rule right  (what do I do with a pair of sixes against an ace, again?).  A game that allows you to enjoy the guilt of failing to live up to its standards:  It's American, just like baseball and apply pie.

(I lost, not a lot, but enough.)

So, I'm back:  A little refreshed, a little poorer, and a little sunburned.  And this is your vacation open thread.  Tell us where you're going next (or just been); give us a recommendation or two.  But tell us, most of all, where you want to go.

Hello Gorgeous!

Via Rightwingstuff

Yes, it's real. And the Bristol Zoo will let you adopt it too, if you like. Because, let's face it, who wouldn't want to wake in the morning to find this little cutie sitting on your chest...

Meet Kintana’ ("star" in Malagasy): the first aye-aye [Daubentonia madagascariensis] born in the UK. Its kin are indigenous to Madagascar...a place I had thought I'd enjoy traveling to until I realized it's crawling with these critters. Despite appearances, the aye-aye is a primate, not a rodent. Score one for the creationists.

UPDATE: Blame Harley at Tacitus for inspiring this childishness...I couldn't help myself.