Archive for the ‘politics’ Category
Iraq and Afghanistan, February 2010
March 2nd, 2010 at 9:58 pm
US military deaths in Iraq stayed low last month.
US military deaths in the Afghanistan war went up and passed the 1000 mark. I don’t recall seeing anything in the news about this sad milestone.
Strictly speaking, these numbers are for the whole of Operation Enduring Freedom, not just Afghanistan and the neighboring countries. The folks at icasualties.org point out that this includes deaths in (or due to wounds received in) Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Guantanamo Bay, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Philippines, Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Yemen. I’ll continue to refer to OEF as the Afghanistan war—the war started in response to the attacks of September 11.
I’m increasingly pessimistic about our chances of being out of Afghanistan before September 11, 2011.
Tags: afghanistan, iraq, politics, war
Post #1187 in politics | No Comments
Iraq and Afghanistan, January 2010
February 2nd, 2010 at 6:35 pm
Military deaths in Afghanistan ticked up last month; military deaths in Iraq stayed very low.
The war in Afghanistan is now well into its ninth year. We’ve been there longer than the Soviets were in the 80s.
Tags: afghanistan, iraq, politics, war
Post #1165 in politics | No Comments
I’m nonnonplussed
January 11th, 2010 at 11:24 pm
You may have seen some of this AP story about Sarah Palin. When I read this part,
In an interview with the CBS news magazine “60 Minutes,” Steve Schmidt described Palin as “very calm — nonplussed” after McCain met with her at his Arizona ranch just before putting her on the Republican ticket.
I had that weird feeling I sometimes get when I realize I’ve made some horrible, embarrassing mistake. Is nonplussed a synonym for calm? Have I had it exactly wrong my whole life? Have I used it that way in front of people who know better?
I opened the Dictionary program on my Mac, the definitions in which are taken from the New Oxford American Dictionary, and went to the entry for nonplussed. It said, basically, that it means surprised, which is what I thought. Then, below the definition, was this:
USAGE In standard use, nonplussed means ‘surprised and confused’: : the hostility of the new neighbor’s refusal left Mrs. Walker nonplussed. In North American English, a new use has developed in recent years, meaning ‘unperturbed’—more or less the opposite of its traditional meaning: : hoping to disguise his confusion, he tried to appear nonplussed. This new use probably arose on the assumption that non- was the normal negative prefix and must therefore have a negative meaning. Although the use is common, it is not yet considered standard. The preferred spelling is nonplussed.
In other words, Americans (and maybe even Canadians?!) have become such dumbasses that we use words that mean the opposite of what we think. And Steve Schmidt, like all Republicans, is a Great American.
Tags: language, media, politics
Post #1151 in media, politics | No Comments
Iraq and Afghanistan, December 2009
January 1st, 2010 at 7:33 pm
In Iraq, the number of US and coalition military deaths in December were the lowest in its 6½-year history.
In Afghanistan, the number of US and coalition military deaths was nearly the same as November—distinctly lower than in the summer months, but high compared to the rest of that war’s 8-year history.
The Vietnam War was the constant background of my childhood. I was 15 when the US finally pulled out, and I had no memory of a time when the country wasn’t at war. I can’t believe my sons are going to look back and say the same thing about their childhoods.
Tags: afghanistan, iraq, politics, war
Post #1142 in politics | No Comments
Climate bullshit from Forbes
December 7th, 2009 at 12:20 am
You may have seen “The Fiction of Climate Science,” a short article at forbes.com that tells us we should ignore the current warnings of climatologists. It’s an astonishingly dishonest (or possibly stupid, but I’m betting on dishonest) article, and it bothers me that so many people seem to be linking to it uncritically. It doesn’t take much digging to learn that the author, Gary Sutton, is lying to his audience.
The overarching theme of the article is that global warming has no scientific basis, that it’s just something the government wants us to believe. Which government is that? you might ask. The government that was, until recently, under Republican control? The government that wouldn’t sign the Kyoto Protocol? The government that has refused to take the steps climatologists say are necessary to slow or halt global warming? Yes, that’s the government Sutton says is egging on the scientists to make up climate change stories.
There are, no doubt, plenty of people willing to put their brains on hold and believe this patent nonsense. Global warming is seen as a liberal cause, and therefore something that good conservatives—most Forbes readers, I imagine—must reject. Sutton knows his audience’s prejudices and knows he can get away with dopey arguments.
Not surprisingly, Al Gore makes an appearance in the article. Conservatives take it as an article of faith that Gore is the evil international head of the global warming conspiracy. Sutton says Gore “thought he might ride his global warming crusade back toward the White House.” How Gore expected to be elected without actually running in either 2004 or 2008 is a detail that Sutton knows he can safely ignore.
Perhaps my favorite part of the article is its opening, which tells us that the government now pushing a global warming lie was, in the mid-70s, pushing a global cooling lie. I do, in fact, remember stories from back then about the possibility of a coming Ice Age, but they were popular accounts and pretty speculative. I’m pretty sure I read a Science Fact article about it in Analog. I don’t want to slag on Analog, but one of its earlier Science Fact pieces—back when it had the much cooler name Astounding Science Fiction—was L. Ron Hubbard’s original Dianetics article, the founding document of the Church of Scientology. Hail, Xenu!
(source: Modemac on Wikipedia)
Sutton points to a book called The Weather Conspiracy, which he says was part of the government’s push to get us to believe in a coming ice age.
(source: LibraryThing)
As you might guess from the cover, this was not a government publication, as Sutton would have us believe,1 nor was it a weighty scientific tract. According to this contemporaneous review written by an actual scientist, The Weather Conspiracy was more of a “pot boiler” which didn’t acknowledge that “we just don’t know enough to chose [sic] definitely at this stage [1977] whether we are in for warming or cooling—or when.”
But wait! Sutton says global cooling wasn’t just in popular science accounts:
In 1974, the National Science Board announced: “During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end…leading into the next ice age.”
Well, that sure looks like scientists had come down strongly on the side of cooling. But, gosh darn it, Sutton seems to have had some trouble in copying that quote. First, it’s a synthesis of two quotes. The first sentence was written in 1974, the second in 1972. Let’s look at that 1972 quote as a complete sentence:
Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end, to be followed by a long period of considerably colder temperatures leading into the next glacial age some 20,000 years from now.
Had Sutton included the part about 20,000 years, it wouldn’t have seemed quite so alarmist and wouldn’t have supported his thesis so well. So he just left it off. Even less supportive of his thesis is the very next sentence:
However, it is possible, or even likely, that human interference has already altered the environment so much that the climatic pattern of the near future will follow a different path.
Well, shit, we can’t be quoting that. Best to just leave it out. After all, who’s going to bother looking it up? No one at Forbes, obviously.
By the way, researching this doesn’t take a staff of crack librarians. There’s a Wikipedia page with all the links you need.
So, in the end, what do we have? An article with a ridiculous conspiracy theory propped up by selective and dishonest quoting. Presented to us by a publication that can’t be bothered to do elementary fact checking. This is the face of climate change denial.
Update 12/8/09
There’s now a post up at fair.org that makes some of the same points I do using rather similar language. I hope it’s just coincidence.
-
It did rely on a couple of reports from the CIA, the folks who believed they could overthrow Castro with a poisoned cigar. ↩
Post #1126 in media, politics | 3 Comments
Afghanistan and Iraq, November 2009
December 2nd, 2009 at 9:20 am
November was a relatively good month. Military deaths underwent a big drop in Afghanistan and stayed low in Iraq.
November was also the month in which the right wing pushed hard on its talking point that “Obama’s dithering is endangering the troops.” You can always count on the right to be out of step with the facts.
Post #1123 in news, politics | 2 Comments
Iraq and Afghanistan, October 2009
November 3rd, 2009 at 6:38 am
Iraq and Afghanistan have switched places in news coverage and in our consciousness. The reason is no mystery. October was the worst month for US military deaths, with the total passing the 900 mark. Look for that count to become a big story in 2-3 months when, barring a significant policy change, it passes 1000. Military deaths for the coalition as a whole now stand at 1500.
Post #1091 in politics | No Comments
Iraq and Afghanistan, September 2009
October 4th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Iraq is sort of off the radar now and will probably stay that way unless the slow, steady toll of deaths makes a sudden jump.
Afghanistan, though, is very much in the news and none of that news looks good.
Post #1038 in politics | No Comments
Political science
September 21st, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Over the weekend, Merlin Mann wrote a post praising Randy Newman. He included YouTube videos of two songs, “Sail Away” and “The Great Nations of Europe.” The latter is similar in style to my favorite Newman song, “Political Science,” which has been rolling through my mind ever since. There are several versions of it on YouTube; here’s one from 1972.
There are so many things to love about this song. First, there’s
We give them money, but are they grateful?
No, they’re spiteful and they’re hateful.
which is such a perfect distillation of conservative thought—a conservative thought we’ve all had at one time or another—that you’d swear you heard someone say it in conversation.
Then there’s
Asia’s crowded, Europe’s too old.
Africa is far too hot, and Canada’s too cold.
When, during the recent eight-year unpleasantness, Don Rumsfeld said we didn’t need the support of “Old Europe” in our Middle Eastern adventures, this is what popped into my head. How perfect is satire when it anticipates it subject by three decades?
Finally, there’s
Boom goes London! Boom Paree!
More room for you and more room for me.
the poetry of which is too easily lost in the humor. Look at what he’s doing here. By using the rhyming words boom and room twice as the emphasis in each line, he ties the lines together in a way that the simple end rhyme of Paree/me couldn’t do on its own. This isn’t the half-line rhyme that Lennon and McCartney used so often, it’s something else—something my impoverished literary criticism vocabulary doesn’t have a word for. But it is wonderful.
Post #1018 in entertainment, politics | No Comments
Afghanistan, August 2009
September 13th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
I finally got around to grabbing the data from icasualties.org and graphing the fatalities in the Afghanistan war. The recent change is pretty dramatic, as was a sudden jump back in 2005, which I don’t remember reading about. Of course, back then Iraq was so bad it dominated the war news. Now the two have flipped.
Next month, I’ll start publishing the Iraq and Afghanistan graphs in a single post.
Post #994 in politics | No Comments