cheese it, the cops!

i kind of love the tea party movement, of course, and extreme suspicion of federal power is massively the right attitude to take to the obama administration, which has nothing to offer on anything but increased spending and bureaucracies growing like planet-sized fungi. that is, the obama administration is a liberal administration. however, if your pac is called "libertyfirst," then i think you'd better get busy defending not only your right to pack heat, but your right to marry whomever you like who likes you back, smoke whatever you want, determine your own reproductive strategies if any, and so on. the position is chimerical: an absolute defense of freedom except where we disagree: i.e. no freedom worth the name.

big news from my neighborhood:

no one was hurt and hain road bridge to close.

life is hard.

it's only sort of surprising that stanley fish loves going rogue. as a literary critic, he's all about fucking you up.

ok there are various problems with this. it's rather odd because friedman appears to be defending the foreign-policy approach of dick cheney...well, that's not so odd, i suppose. but look: there are many, many features of the world that lead to a 1% chance of disaster. you can't totally mobilize in the face of each, and indeed it's impossible to, as they bristle, and as the responses might be mutually incompatible etc. as i walk out into this morning's sleet and drive to work, i'm taking a hundred 1% risks, which is definitely not to say that i'm taking a 100% risk. you'd have to show that the risk is very high, that reducing it or eliminating it is possible, that reducing it or eliminating it is not prohibitively costly, that responding does not render it impossible to respond to other similar risks, etc. if you wanted to show that this was "the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced," &c, you'd better show that it's quite likely, and you'd better compare its likelihood to the other 99 problems that might kill us all. this hints, of course, that all debate must be cut off so that total instant mobilizaton can take place. good luck with that, cause we gonna hack your emails.

friedman's piece does show why the emails were devastating, despite protestations, and despite the fact that, of course, they don't show that there is no warming etc. but the day before yesterday, tom friedman was one hundred percent certain that the world was getting hotter. two days later it's down to even-if-it's-only one percent, but all the same conclusions follow, all the same policies are rational.

man sinking into cesspool. i know just how he feels.

so like i say, the party-crash was funny and harmless, and i always admire a good con etc. but you know it is also very pathetic, and more and more pathetic as details of the salahis' lives emerge. they spent all their time and energy pretending to be rich and beautiful and important. they tried to get into any and every event that they thought lent them some kind of prestige, she pretended to be a former redskins cheerleader (?!), e.g.. the fakery was at times ingenious, but the motivation is disgusting: it doesn't matter what i am or what i do: what matters is that other people think i have cachet of some kind.

it's not only pathetic because they were constantly simulating a social prestige they didn't have: it's pathetic also when people do achieve it. really this is true of many people: all they really care about is that other people think they are...rich, famous, beautiful, important. there is never a moment when they confront themselves, or when they're alone in their head assessing their lives from ther own point of view. astonishingly, they have no point of view, no subjectivity that isn't an imagination of how theyappear to others. i think of, perhaps, bill clinton this way. but i have actually known a number of people along these lines. it's an invitation to evil, but it's also just really sad, pointless, stupid, futile, self-refuting: empty empty empty.

well what the hell, let's blog about scandals. this is a nice piece about why the mistress/groupie/bimbo always looks the same: spitzer, tiger etc: the girl is invariably a "warm-blooded blow-up doll." now i am not an expert on this. i am not a celebrity, or rich person, a governor, or a famous athlete. i've never conducted an affair when i was married, except once and then i left my wife immediately for the other woman. what i am, however, is an expert on beauty - indeed, the world's greatest, along with roger scruton and alexander nehamas.

anyway, in six names of beauty i defined beauty as "the object of longing." and beauty since plato or perhaps long before has been connected to love. but if you are a married governor or a golf superstar having an affair, you don't want to long for someone. you want to have sex. that's why you want the girl to be sexy, but definitely not beautiful. the last thing you want is to fall in love. so you're looking for the girl whose looks are about sex and not about love, and who is neither lovely nor interesting enough to have you thinking about her all the time or wanting her to have your babies etc., but who is sexy enough in a nice cliched way to get you...going. you want to have intense sex, then roll off and forget about the whole thing. best if she doesn't even look distinctive, or if you might confuse her with all the others.

it's perhaps not surprising that i can see what the dude is trying to accomplish. what puzzles me is what the girl is trying to accomplish: how she sees herself, what she wants to be.

it seems obvious that the go-kick-al-qaeda's-ass-where-they-actually-are approach would be popular with the military people: an actual objective; an actual enemy; actual tactical planning; the possibility of actual victory, and so on. if you go to someone like mcchrystal and say: alright: we need you to secure this set of towns/villages, x hundreds of square miles, find and destroy the nerve center, erase osama and mullah omar: that has the advantage of sounding like a job for the u.s. army: a finite, definite, justified military action, as opposed to: propping up a corrupt regime, rebuilding a vast country, training an army of hundreds of thousands, all of which are also nondoable.

i was gonna try not to live-blog the afghanistan speech.but let me say this: if the basic reason we're doing all this is to crush al qaeda, then we should mount a direct, immediate invasion on their headquarters in pakistan. what the argument he's giving  justifies is a large direct attack on the "tribal regions," etc. just secure that border region and forget the rest and kill osama, already.. how can we be dicking around here and there and all around when obama says "we know their location"? he really gives no other reason we are there. ok then.  you can't tell me we can't defeat these people in a direct military clash. so do it already.

it makes you wonder, what is it we don't know? we're engaged in a decade-long dance on the periphery because we don't want to offend the government of pakistan? don't be silly. do it now. or withdraw.

oh i don't know.  i'm a lot less worried about a professional athlete being assaulted by a tiny blond person than i would be about a tiny blond person being assaulted by a professional athlete, like i'm more worried about bigotry against black people than bigotry against white people. the kneejerk reaction is always: what if it were the other way round? well, if it were the other way round, it'd be different, because not all persons and situations are the same. you know bad things can happen in gender-inverted abuse: i knew a couple once where she hit him with a car and pinned his hand to a counter with a steak knife. but there are kind of overall actual differences between men and women, etc.

yo, assmonkeys. time to chill out about the whitehousegatecrashers. they must be punished! it's outrageous! um, whatever. it's funny. it's harmless. and it's good that no one lives, or can live in perfect lockdown security. bizarrely, there is still a human element.