One of Those Questions I Probably Shouldn’t Ask

It is true, I know a bad idea when it occurs to me. But …

… I’m sorry, I just don’t get it. That is to say, sure, right, yes, I get the first part. However … well, you know: Really?

Body image? Really? That’s the smug fallback?

So, yes, I will go ahead and ask: Is this really the best way to go about it?

What am I missing?

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Image Note: Via Facebook, 30 May 2015. Transcript of image: “Every guy thinks that every girl’s dream is to find the perfect guy … Please. Every girl’s dream is to eat without getting fat.” With Facebook user note: “Just a reminder, gents, it’s not always about you ;)”

Your Morning Misty Memory

This is just for the hell of it, because I had cause to think of it the other day. Never mind.

Hart Seely for Slate, circa 2003:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is an accomplished man. Not only is he guiding the war in Iraq, he has been a pilot, a congressman, an ambassador, a businessman, and a civil servant. But few Americans know that he is also a poet.

Until now, the secretary’s poetry has found only a small and skeptical audience: the Pentagon press corps. Every day, Rumsfeld regales reporters with his jazzy, impromptu riffs. Few of them seem to appreciate it.

But we should all be listening. Rumsfeld’s poetry is paradoxical: It uses playful language to address the most somber subjects: war, terrorism, mortality. Much of it is about indirection and evasion: He never faces his subjects head on but weaves away, letting inversions and repetitions confuse and beguile. His work, with its dedication to the fractured rhythms of the plainspoken vernacular, is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’. Some readers may find that Rumsfeld’s gift for offhand, quotidian pronouncements is as entrancing as Frank O’Hara’s.

Your Morning Metal (The Lonely Ones)

Rally up! There’s a lot goin’ on.

Pain is the cross we bear, sentenced to life because we dare to ask why things ain’t fair. We’ll take our share of pain, hide our scars, pretend we’re sane. ‘Cause ain’t it all a game? And in the end it’s the memories that remain. Out in the wild we’re stronger. The more they’re right we’re wronger. There comes a time to walk away, when our night becomes your day. We are the lonely ones, lost alone and gone astray. We are the guilty ones, exiled, and sentenced far away. So, since we have the name, maybe we’ll play this little game. But we won’t feel no shame; we’ll fight this fight alone as our feelings turn to stone. We’re callous to the bone; it’s the only way to survive this danger zone. Out here you got to be stronger. Out here you’re right when you’re wronger. And if you fight and live to tell, you’ll fight again this life in Hell. We are the lonely ones, lost alone and gone astray. We are the guilty ones, exiled, and sentenced far away.

―Widowmaker, “The Lonely Ones” (1992)

Madness for a New American Century

Trevor Timm for The Guardian:

The New York Times detailed many of the Republican candidates’ nebulous “criticisms” of the Obama administration, most of which assume a fantasy world in which Obama is not sending the US military to fight Isis at all, even though he’s authorized thousands of airstrikes per month in both Iraq and Syria. Most of the candidates, while competing with each other over who can sound more “muscular” and “tough”, are too cowardly to overtly call for what they likely actually want: another ground war in the Middle East involving tens of thousands of US troops.

The vague, bullshitt-y statements made by Republican candidates would be hilarious if it wasn’t possible that they’ll lead to more American soldiers dying in the coming years. “Restrain them, tighten the noose, and then taking them out is the strategy” is Jeb Bush’s hot take on Isis. Thanks, Jeb – I can’t believe the Obama administration hasn’t thought of that! Marco Rubio’s “solution” is even more embarrassing: according to The Times, he responded to a question about what he would do differently – and this is real – by quoting from the movie Taken: “We will look for you, we will find you and we will kill you.”

Rubio has also called for “strategic overhaul”, but his radical plan seems to be virtually indistinguishable from what the Obama administration is actually doing – yet another sign that Republicans tend to live in a fantasy land where Obama is an anti-war president rather than someone who has bombed more countries than his Republican predecessor. (That is not a compliment, by the way.)

This is one of those things where we won’t be able to say we weren’t warned. Consider that Mr. Rubio’s campaign slogan is “A New American Century”.

Just think about that for a moment.

They really are promising us a war.

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Image Note: Top ― Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) announces his candidacy for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination on 13 April 2015. (AP Photo) Right ― Logo of the Project for the New American Century.

Timm, Trevor. “Republicans’ ‘plans’ for Isis would drag us into Iraq for another ground war”. The Guardian. 27 May 2015.

SourceWatch. “Project for the New American Century”. 19 February 2012.

Required Nightmare

And then there is this:

Imagine joining an engineering team. You’re excited and full of ideas, probably just out of school and a world of clean, beautiful designs, awe-inspiring in their aesthetic unity of purpose, economy, and strength. You start by meeting Mary, project leader for a bridge in a major metropolitan area. Mary introduces you to Fred, after you get through the fifteen security checks installed by Dave because Dave had his sweater stolen off his desk once and Never Again. Fred only works with wood, so you ask why he’s involved because this bridge is supposed to allow rush-hour traffic full of cars full of mortal humans to cross a 200-foot drop over rapids. Don’t worry, says Mary, Fred’s going to handle the walkways. What walkways? Well Fred made a good case for walkways and they’re going to add to the bridge’s appeal. Of course, they’ll have to be built without railings, because there’s a strict no railings rule enforced by Phil, who’s not an engineer. Nobody’s sure what Phil does, but it’s definitely full of synergy and has to do with upper management, whom none of the engineers want to deal with so they just let Phil do what he wants. Sara, meanwhile, has found several hemorrhaging-edge paving techniques, and worked them all into the bridge design, so you’ll have to build around each one as the bridge progresses, since each one means different underlying support and safety concerns. Tom and Harry have been working together for years, but have an ongoing feud over whether to use metric or imperial measurements, and it’s become a case of “whoever got to that part of the design first.” This has been such a headache for the people actually screwing things together, they’ve given up and just forced, hammered, or welded their way through the day with whatever parts were handy. Also, the bridge was designed as a suspension bridge, but nobody actually knew how to build a suspension bridge, so they got halfway through it and then just added extra support columns to keep the thing standing, but they left the suspension cables because they’re still sort of holding up parts of the bridge. Nobody knows which parts, but everybody’s pretty sure they’re important parts. After the introductions are made, you are invited to come up with some new ideas, but you don’t have any because you’re a propulsion engineer and don’t know anything about bridges.

Would you drive across this bridge? No. If it somehow got built, everybody involved would be executed. Yet some version of this dynamic wrote every single program you have ever used, banking software, websites, and a ubiquitously used program that was supposed to protect information on the internet but didn’t.

(Hunt Welch)

Click. Read. You know the drill.

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Image Note: Detail of image from Still Drinking, presumably ©2014 Peter Hunt Welch, but we can’t promise that.

Hunt Welch, Peter. “Programming Sucks”. Still Drinking. 27 April 2014.

Sadness

Via Huffington Post:

Joseph “Beau” Biden III, the son of Vice President Joe Biden, has died from brain cancer, the White House announced Saturday evening. He was 46.

There really isn’t much to say; we can only offer our deepest condolences for the Biden family tonight.

I mean, I’m a father. I … no, I just can’t deal with imagining a day like today.

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Image Note: Detail ― “DENVER – AUGUST 27: U.S. Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) (L) hugs his son Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, during day three of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) at the Pepsi Center August 27, 2008 in Denver, Colorado. U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) will be officially nominated as the Democratic candidate for U.S. president on the last day of the four-day convention.” (Photo by Mark Wilson, Getty Images)

Chen, Kelly. “Beau Biden, Joe Biden’s Son, Dead At 46 Of Brain Cancer”. The Huffington Post. 30 May 2015.

Not Actually a Punch Line

Even though it would make for a crass joke, there are days when we find ourselves wishing it was a punch line. The thing is that as setups go, Jen Sorensen’s explanation only goes downhill from there. And no, that’s not a complaint or disdainful critique of the cartoon; it’s a very good cartoon worth the click to read. Truth is stranger than fiction. You can’t make this sort of joke up. And, besides, you know. Americans. Conservatives. Family values. It’s not actually funny. She is describing a disaster; no matter how we tell it, the story only gets worse as it goes along.

This is a matter of priorities. We are the United States of America, and we damn well know what is important to us.

And this is how we show it.

(sigh)

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Sorensen, Jen. “Pro-life, Boko Haram style”. Daily Kos Comics. 26 May 2015.

Governor Scott “Forcible Insertion Is Cool” Walker

This is a basic difference:

Walker told Loesch that criticism he received about the ultrasound bill was merely an attack from the “gotcha” media, and that he was in fact just trying to provide women with “a cool thing.”

“The thing about that, the media tried to make that sound like that was a crazy idea,” he said. “Most people I talked to, whether they’re pro-life or not, I find people all the time that pull out their iPhone and show me a picture of their grandkids’ ultrasound and how excited they are, so that’s a lovely thing. I think about my sons are 19 and 20, we still have their first ultrasounds. It’s just a cool thing out there.”

“We just knew if we signed that law, if we provided the information that more people if they saw that unborn child would make a decision to protect and keep the life of that unborn child,” he said.

(Blue)

The question of how one advocates using force of law to insert foreign objects into a woman’s vagina for no medical purpose is beside the point.

Try that again: Using force of law to insert foreign objects into women’s vaginas. If this notion seems remotely appropriate to you?

Hello?

Governor Rapist Walker?

No, Governor, it is not cool.

This is not one of those things you should need reminding of.

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Blue, Miranda. “Scott Walker: Ultrasounds Should Be Mandatory Since They’re ‘A Cool Thing'”. Right Wing Watch. 26 May 2015.

Not Lame; the Cartoon, I Mean

Okay, so, you know, the big risk about bad puns―or the dangerous art of derivation therefrom―is that they just don’t work. ‘Nuff said.

Meanwhile, I recommend simply reading Adam’s cartoon instead of trying to guess what this particular panel means.

And let me at least make clear that it really doesn’t have anything to do with equine fashion accessories.

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Huber, Adam. “Put the Park Before the Horse”. Bug Martini 26 May 2015.

Reality

“The reality is that there are few if any places in the world where it is better to be Christian than the U.S., so pretending that being forced to abide by the constitution is somehow a “war” comes off a lot like the spoiled rich kid whose parents won’t upgrade the radio on the new BMW I8 they are buying for his birthday. It just makes you look uninformed, selfish and silly.”

―Dale Hansen

Is there really anything we need to add, or is this pretty straightforward?

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Hansen, Dale. “Christian Persecution Is a Problem, Just Not in the U.S.” The Huffington Post. 19 May 2015.