Mark Steyn checks the status of the jihad.

For strange psychological reasons that archaeologists who sift through the rubble of our civilization will long ponder, the biggest story of our time cannot be reported honestly.

For example, the Islamic State’s rapidly growing Libyan branch office has just held a mass execution of 21 men. The Government of the United States deplored it thus:

Statement by the Press Secretary on the Murder of Egyptian Citizens

“Egyptian citizens”? They didn’t die because of their passports; they died because they were Coptic Christians – or, as their executioners put it, “followers of the cross”.

Read it.

You know you want one.

Read it.

Gee, I wonder why?

The Clinton Foundation has dropped its self-imposed ban on collecting funds from foreign governments and is winning contributions at an accelerating rate, raising ethical questions as Hillary Clinton ramps up her expected bid for the presidency.

Somehow I don’t associate ‘ethics’ with Hillary Clinton.

Steven Hayward at Powerline proposes a useful new term.

The term “Fisking” apparently originated with someone’s takedown of a really bad column by British journalist Robert Fisk about 10 years back.  I never read anything by Fisk, but this is what the Urban Dictionary says:

The word is derived from articles written by Robert Fisk that were easily refuted, and refers to a point-by-point debunking of lies and/or idiocies. 

So we need a similar term for debunking the serial nonsense of the Obama Administration. Fortunately an obvious term comes to mind: “Harfing.”  After you know who.  Helps that it rhymes with a certain act of retching that is also symbolically accurate for the kind of nonsense Marie Harf (and the ironically named “Josh Earnest,” if that is his real name) peddle on a daily basis.  I mean really—who knew that “Allahu akbar” means “We want jobs!”  Glad we have Harf around to explain it to us.  So maybe we can get the headline—at least here on Power Line—”More Harfing from the White House Today.”  Almost as good as “More Mush from the Wimp.”

Read it.

There is a recurrent fantasy within the Obama administration that they could get away with anything, if only that damn Fox News would shut up.

The Other McCain ignores the Narrative.

The liberal media generally ignore sex scandals unless they involve a Republican politician or a Catholic priest, so maybe you didn’t hear about Mohammad Abdullah Saleem, the Illinois imam who allegedly perpetrated “decades of assault and child sex abuse . . . within the community of Indian and Pakistani Muslim immigrants.”

…

Tony Jones became a progressive religious celebrity, touring like a rock star on the “emergent” speaking circuit while his marriage was falling apart. If we are to believe the allegations of his ex-wife, Julie McMahon, Tony Jones developed a pornography habit and “starting in 2007, Mr. Jones began asking her repeatedly for sexual behaviors she found repellent, including anal sex.” Of course, this is the progressive gospel of “emergent” theology: “Thou shalt watch porn and do it in the butt.”

Read it.

Cops told sledders on the southwest side of the Capitol to pack it in on Tuesday, according to The Wall Street Journal, which also noted that the sledding ban has existed since 9/11. But if American children aren’t allowed to enjoy a bit of fun on public property, surely the terrorists have already won.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Now that’s public service.

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In hindsight, perhaps the headline “Scott Walker Needs An Eraser” wasn’t the best idea.

In a recent column about the Wisconsin governor, a conservative Republican, New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote that Walker had cut state aid to education, causing teacher layoffs in 2010. But Walker didn’t take office until 2011.

Whoops.

Read it.

So the problem is “religion”? Hmm. Let’s see. These are the incidents that CNN cites; which of these is not like the others?

* Monday: Boko Haram, the Muslim militant group based in Nigeria, attacked several towns in neighboring Cameroon, kidnapping 20 people. The Islamic extremists also detonated a car bomb in Niger….

* Tuesday: Craig Stephen Hicks, an ardent atheist who railed online against religion, was accused of killing three young Muslims in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

* Wednesday: ISIS, the Muslim militant group that calls itself the “Islamic State,” launched several attacks across Iraq, striking Kurdish forces in the North and Iraqi civilians in Baghdad.

* Thursday: Al Qaeda killed four Yemeni soldiers while seizing a critical military base in the town of Baihan, taking control of its weaponry, according to local security officials.

* Friday: Boko Haram continued its cross-border attacks, killing four civilians and a soldier in neighboring Chad.

* Saturday: A gunman opened fire at a free-speech forum in Copenhagen, Denmark, where a Swedish cartoonist who had depicted the Prophet Mohammed was scheduled to speak. … Hours after the cafe attack, police said, the gunman made his way to a Copenhagen synagogue and once again opened fire.

* Sunday: In a new video released Sunday by ISIS, the militant group claims to have beheaded over a dozen members of Egypt’s Christian minority on a Libyan beach.

What we have here is a series of atrocities carried out by extremist members of one religion, Islam. You could compile a similar list just about any week out of the year. What makes this a story about “religion,” rather than about Islam? The gratuitous inclusion of liberal Democrat Craig Hicks. But Hicks wasn’t motivated by religious extremism; he is an atheist. And there is zero evidence that the fact that his victims were Muslims had anything to do with his crime. If the victims had been Catholics, we never would have heard of Hicks.

Freeberg connects the dots.

The consumers have been losing their voice. We have quite a few transactions being closed, only for the benefit of the supplier, many of them without the consent of the consumer or only with consent from the consumer that has been somehow perverted. It’s either been regulated when the will is not there, or given freely but without due consideration, more as a conditioned response.

While that’s happening, we have a decline in masculinity, almost as if there was some orbiting radioactive source breaking down our stores of testosterone. Our culture is not what it was before. Too many women have a need to scold men, and because consumers are tailoring their orders around the whims of suppliers and learning to like it that way, too many men are manufacturing a need to be scolded.

Read it.

Since it is so cold and miserable outside, I’ve been spending some time indoors, curled up in front of the computer watching comedy. No, not the 40th anniversary program of Saturday Night Live, but The New York Times newspaper coverage of climate change, which in this context is bitterly humorous.

There was the February 9, 2014, Times article headlined “The End of Snow,” which ran on the front page of the paper’s Sunday Review section, and which the ever-shrewd Matt Drudge remembered, and linked from his Drudge Report site, amid the snowmaggeddon roughly a year later. “In the Northeast, more than half of the 103 ski resorts may no longer be viable in 30 years because of warmer winters,” the article warned. “It’s easy to blame the big oil companies and the billions of dollars they spend on influencing the media and popular opinion. But the real reason is a lack of knowledge. I know, because I, too, was ignorant until I began researching the issue for a book on the future of snow…. This is no longer a scientific debate. It is scientific fact.”

Lion of the Blogosphere reminds us of what we’re up against.

There came to him (the Holy Prophet) a woman from Ghamid and said: Allah’s Messenger, I have committed adultery, so purify me. He (the Holy Prophet) turned her away. On the following day she said: Allah’s Messenger, Why do you turn me away? Perhaps, you turn me away as you turned away Ma’iz. By Allah, I have become pregnant. He said: Well, if you insist upon it, then go away until you give birth to (the child). When she was delivered she came with the child (wrapped) in a rag and said: Here is the child whom I have given birth to. He said: Go away and suckle him until you wean him. When she had weaned him, she came to him (the Holy Prophet) with the child who was holding a piece of bread in his hand. She said: Allah’s Apostle, here is he as I have weaned him and he eats food. He (the Holy Prophet) entrusted the child to one of the Muslims and then pronounced punishment. And she was put in a ditch up to her chest and he commanded people and they stoned her. Khalid b Walid came forward with a stone which he flung at her head and there spurted blood on the face of Khalid and so he abused her. Allah’s Apostle (may peace be upon him) heard his (Khalid’s) curse that he had hurled upon her. Thereupon he (the Holy Prophet) said: Khalid, be gentle. By Him in Whose Hand is my life, she has made such a repentance that even if a wrongful tax-collector were to repent, he would have been forgiven. Then giving command regarding her, he prayed over her and she was buried.

Read it.

Hm. That’s a puzzler. Perhaps because they shoot people, cut their heads off, and blow them up? That’s just a guess, you understand.

An ambitious 81-page document, Fear, Inc. 2.0: The Islamophobia Network’s Efforts to Manufacture Hate in America, just appeared from the Center for American Progress, a liberal Democratic organization. Unlike its first iteration, in which a group with a $40-million annual budget and deep ties to big business had the nerve to claim that seven much smaller institutions were overpowering the country through their financial clout, this one looks at what the alleged “Islamophobia network” actually does.

I have never understood why the Left is so eager to serve as a Fifth Column for the jihad. Perhaps they think that thereby their heads will be cut off last?

The report, written by Matthew Duss, Yasmine Taeb, Ken Gude, and Ken Sofer, makes for interesting reading. Its premise is that critics of Islamism (1) are really anti-Islamic and (2) have single-handedly distorted a the fundamental American value, namely a “basic respect for the rights of minority groups throughout the country.” According to the CAP study, “the views of anti-Muslim actors stand in stark contrast to the values of most Americans.”

That could have something to do with the fact that Muslim actors stand in stark contrast to the values of most Americans, and indeed of civilized people everywhere.

By dint of hard work, however, “a well-funded, well-organized fringe movement can push discriminatory policies against a segment of American society by intentionally spreading lies while taking advantage of moments of public anxiety and fear.” This effort “takes many shapes and forms”: a general climate, cynical political efforts, and institutional policies. Despite some setbacks, continues the CAP narrative, the network’s efforts “continue to erode America’s core values of religious pluralism, civil rights, and social inclusion.”

So now we’re talking about the Democrats? They’ve lost me.

Another way of putting it: the United States hosts about as many Buddhists and Hindus combined as it does Muslims. Yet, when did Buddhists or Hindus try to change the existing order or engage in violence on behalf of their faiths? Who ever hears about them? Who fears them?

Indeed.

Read it.

Footage emerged of a student asking Sheikh al-Khaibari whether the Earth was stationary or moving.

The Saudi Sheikh confidently told the young academic the Earth is “stationary and does not move”.

Freeberg reminds us of some inconvenient truth.

These days you really have to live in a cave, or something, in order not to see it. The conflict isn’t between right-wingers and left-wingers arguing about how they should sit in the French Parliament relative to King Louis XVI. The argument is, and has been for awhile, about who should have a greater influence on the direction in which the country is taken: Those who believe next year should yield more bountiful rewards than this year did, or those who don’t believe in that and want everything “equal,” which really means, miserable.

I guess my counter-question would have to be something like: How can anyone pay attention these days, and not see all this?

And that is my question as well.

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University of Maryland researchers have programmed a robot to learn basic cooking skills from YouTube videos, a feat that could eventually be expanded into other skills like equipment repair.

I can recall several instances of restaurant food that tasted as if they had been prepared by robots taught by YouTube videos. But that was probably just me.

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Yet another thumbsucker from the New York Times. Distinguishing characteristics:

1. Tongue-bath for Obama’s socialist/fascist ‘domestic program’. (As if Obama’s ‘program’ were anything other than the standard Democrat ‘Vote for us and we’ll give you free stuff’.) That’s the first paragraph.

2. First priority is equality, not quality, in education. (Either ‘everybody can’t have one so nobody ought to have one’ or ‘everybody can’t afford one so the government ought to provide everybody with one’; ‘progressives’ don’t care which one you pick, so long as you stick to one of those two choices.) That’s the second paragraph.

3. First concern is how technology affects politically-fashionable ‘disadvantaged middle-school students’, not anybody from a more, say, productive stratum of society. That’s the third and fourth paragraphs.

4. Highest concern is for ‘weaker students’ (and, if you aren’t hip to the jive, this is spelled out: ‘boys, African-Americans’ — and that’s the only positive word about boys, if you can so characterize it, that you’ll find in the New York Times the day). That’s the fifth paragraph.

5. Supreme objective is not to draw any conclusions. ‘We don’t know why this is, but we can speculate.’ Okay, I’ll speculate: Who thought it was a good idea to give kids whose priorities, according to all the available evidence, never include ‘learning how to read or do math’ (acting White, don’t you know) an appliance that provided a universe of distractions that don’t depend on knowing how to read or do math?

6. Fill up with a lot of alarmism about the impact of technology on modern life. (Sky is falling. Film at 11.)

There you go. Now you know the formula for getting published in the New York Times. Go forth and lead us all to the Great Socialist Promised Land.

Read it.

There’s this video, which at least a dozen people have forwarded to me, is circulating the Internet at the moment purporting to “demolish every Hollywood myth” about archery and “prove that Hollywood archery is not historical.” Since apparently hundreds of sites have uncritically repeated its many preposterous and unsupportable claims, with the result that many people have asked me about it, I thought I should offer a detailed analysis.

The question really comes down to three separate categories; (1) the claims made in the narration; (2) the trick shots shown, and (3) Andersen’s actual archery ability.

I must admit I was impressed by Andersen.

Read it.

Shortly after Danish police killed terrorist Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, flowers appeared at the site where he was shot. Hussein had killed two people and wounded others in two random shooting incidents. His first random target was a forum on free speech; his second was a synagogue.

Not long after the flowers appeared, a dozen or so men appeared at the site. Declaring themselves Hussein’s “brothers” and randomly shouting Allahu akbar, they removed the flowers as contrary to Islamic teaching.

In place of the flowers, they left a printed leaflet randomly complaining about Denmark’s “double standards.” It noted that Hussein’s body had been left in a pool of blood but the body of the Jewish security guard killed at the synagogue had been quickly covered.

Imagine that: a dead cold-blooded killer gets treated with less respect by authorities than his innocent victim.

Read it.

Until now, I have been willing to go along with the conventional wisdom that Iraq did not possess significant stockpiles of WMDs prior to the 2003 war. Leftover chemical munitions were discovered here and there during and after the invasion, but it was plausible to think that they were odds and ends, not part of a usable stockpile subject to the regime’s control.

Today, however, the New York Times dropped a bombshell: in the aftermath of the Iraq war, the CIA purchased from an unidentified intermediary no fewer than 400 Borak warheads filled with sarin, a deadly nerve gas….

But Bush still lied. Facts don’t change the Narrative.

Read it.

WHEN Karen Pineman of Manhattan received notice that her longtime health insurance policy didn’t comply with the Affordable Care Act’s requirements, she gamely set about shopping for a new policy through the public marketplace. After all, she’d supported President Obama and the act as a matter of principle.

Ms. Pineman, who is self-employed, accepted that she’d have to pay higher premiums for a plan with a narrower provider network and no out-of-network coverage. She accepted that she’d have to pay out of pocket to see her primary care physician, who didn’t participate. She even accepted having co-pays of nearly $1,800 to have a cast put on her ankle in an emergency room after she broke it while playing tennis.

But her frustration bubbled over when she tried to arrange a follow-up visit with an orthopedist in her Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield network: The nearest doctor available who treated ankle problems was in Stamford, Conn. When she called to protest, her insurer said that Stamford was 14 miles from her home and 15 was considered a reasonable travel distance. “It was ridiculous — didn’t they notice it was in another state?” said Ms. Pineman, 46, who was on crutches.

She instead paid $350 to see a nearby orthopedist and bought a boot on Amazon as he suggested. She has since forked over hundreds of dollars more for a physical therapist that insurance didn’t cover, even though that provider was in-network.

How about that government-regulated health care, eh? God knows what kind of hell we’d be living in if we didn’t have that.

Read it.

There are no guarantees that smart people can’t do really really dumb things. (Consider how many of them voted for Obama….)

Jim Goad notices a disturbing trend.

There’s a fun new group for socially aware prepubescent girls of color in Oakland called the Radical Brownies. This fledgling organization is not affiliated with the Girl Scouts of America and was formed in December by a black woman and a Hispanic woman who describe themselves as “queer women of color and avid trans allies.”

Richad Fernandez lays out some inconvenient truth.

Max Fisher tweeted, “people who think Christian sectarian militias are the solution to Iraq’s problems could stand to read a history of the Lebanese civil war.”  I did, and the history of the Lebanese civil war reports that the Christian communities survived. That’s probably not what Fisher meant with the phrase “solution to Iraq’s problems” but survival is no mean feat.  Militias aren’t usually formed to do good or noble things.  They largely exist to maximize the chances that their members will wake to see tomorrow.

…

But what’s old is new again.  Lately we get a new snuff film for each day of the week from a bunch of masked guys we don’t even want to name. The subliminal message of each Islamist atrocity, whether it is burning people alive in cages or beheading them by the beach; the essential content of attacking schoolchildren in Peshawar or flying airliners into buildings in New York City; the inner punch line of “lone wolves” showing up at newspaper offices, cafes or synagogues is that the Great Father in Washington can’t protect you.  It’s every man for himself.

Joel Kotkin connects the dots.

Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Jewish communities throughout Europe are again on the decline. This time, the pressure mainly comes not from the traditional anti-Semitic Right but from Islamic fundamentalists, which include many European citizens.

A compendium.

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An industry-sponsored study said that the large companies spend an average of $136 million on the development of a genetically engineered crop, including $35 million in regulatory costs. The Agriculture Department once took two to five years to review applications, though it is trying to reduce that to 13 to 16 months.

Look what the government does for you: Increased the cost of food research by a third, and delays things by years. Thanks, guys.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Really — what has he got to lose? She doesn’t dare divorce him; that would hurt her political career far beyond any negative effect it would have on him. Indeed, if he were ‘single again’, it would open the floodgates. Manhattan would sink from all the females heading to Noo Yawk to get a piece of the ol’ horndog hisself.

Read it.

We propose a co-immunity theory of teaching, where attempts by a teacher to alter student neuronal structure to accommodate cultural ideas and practices is sort of a reverse to the function of the immune system, which exists to preserve the physical self, while teaching episodes are designed to alter the mental self.

An even more basic view is to look at ‘schooling’ as a means of sorting students by IQ — the farther you get, the higher your intelligence, so schooling credentials are a certification of intelligence more than a guarantee of specific knowledge.

Read it.

And I, for one, am prepared to believe it.

Read it.

Feel free to laugh uproariously.

Italian cultural critic and semiotician Umberto Eco made the connection between the metaphors of religion and technology in a famous essay in which he described “a new underground religious war which is modifying the modern world.” Eco’s tongue-in-cheek metaphor goes like this: The Apple Macintosh computer is Catholic and Microsoft Windows/DOS is Protestant.

Macintosh is Catholic because it is -counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach–if not the kingdom of Heaven–the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. “Everyone has a right to salvation.”

The DOS machine is Protestant because “it allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.” His analysis also includes the improvements made by Microsoft to upgrade DOS to Windows. Eco notes, “Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, tur there is always the possibility of a retum to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions: When it comes down to it, you can decide to ordain women and gays if you want to.”

— Brett T Robinson, Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs

Check it out.

I’m with Scott on this one. Every good thing that has ever happened to me is because of a system, not a goal.

Read it.

Following this afternoon’s murderous assault at a “discussion” on free speech in Copenhagen, there was a second attack this evening at a synagogue in the city near Krystalgade Street. One person has been shot in the head and another two injured.

Say, wait a minute: an attack on a “bunch” of artists and writers, followed by an attack on a “bunch” of Jews? Didn’t we run this story last month?

Why, yes, we did. But don’t worry, that was Paris. Whereas this time it’s Copenhagen. Two entirely separate cities. So, like President Obama says, it’s all just entirely “random”. “Bunches” here, “bunches” there, but they’re all just random bunches of random folks.

He who has eyes to see, let him see; he who has ears to hear, let him hear.

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The American Heart Association and the US govt have been recommending low cholesterol, low saturated-fat diets for over 50 years. However, mounting evidence is removing foods high in cholesterol from the “bad” food lists — and maybe someday foods with saturated fat won’t be perceived as unhealthy either.

Think about that the next time some whiner drones on about how All Right-Thinking Scientists Agree About Global Warming.

Take the test.

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One person has died after 200 bullets were fired into a cafe in Copenhagen in an attack on a cartoonist who was accused of insulting the Prophet Mohammed.

A man, aged 40, was killed when two masked gunmen sprayed bullets into the Krudttoenden cafe in the centre of the Danish capital this afternoon.

It is believed the target was Lars Vilks, the controversial Swedish cartoonist who drew the Prophet Mohammed as a dog.

Three police officers were also injured in the attack on the cafe, which was hosting a debate on art and freedom of speech when it was targeted.

Francois Zimeray, the French ambassador to Denmark, was at the meeting and compared the attack to the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris last month.

The kitchen was full of new tile, up to the pantry door.
The wife stood with arms akimbo, grinning at her new floor.
The tile had replaced the wood veneer, cheap plastic pad, and all,
And the tilework man came grouting–
Grouting– grouting–
And the tilework man came grouting, down through the long back hall.

He had pried up old linoleum, levered the baseboards free;
He had scrubbed the slab to lessen the lingering odor of old dog pee;
He had wrestled the washer and dryer out of the laundry room;
So the tilework man went grouting–
Grouting– grouting–
So the tilework man went grouting, sweeping before with his broom.

The wife was full of rapture, seeing the final look;
‘No longer need we feel ashamed of our kitchen and breakfast nook!’
The husband was just as happy to get rid of that cheap crap wood;
And the two of them went off dancing–
Dancing– dancing–
And the tilework man ignored them, since his English was not that good.

Yeah, flowers are nice, but you know what women really want.

Read it.

The Wall Street Journal mentions this morning that our now-socialized health care sector is filing panicked Supreme Court briefs in the upcoming King v. Burwell case that emphasize not legal arguments but the disruption to their business model if Obamacare’s state subsidies are struck down. In other words, they mostly submitted policy briefs to the Supreme Court—not legal briefs. I wonder if their lawyers gave them the appropriate policy wonk discount, since we work cheap compared to K Street lawyers. Somehow I doubt it.

Meanwhile, it is widely thought that in the first Obamacare case, NFIB v. Sebelius, the supporters of Obamacare “worked the refs”—specifically that a concentrated campaign to affect Chief Justice Roberts’s views worked to get him to change his mind by appealing to his jurisprudential minimalism, and to his concern for the political reputation of the Court. Who know if this actually contributed to Roberts changing his mind about the case and casting the deciding vote to uphold most of Obamacare, but that’s water under the bridge now.

Read it.

The Students Representative Council (SRC) and Progressive Youth Alliance (PYA) at Durban University of Technology in South Africa has stirred outrage at home and abroad after a local newspaper, the Daily News, reported they had demanded that Jewish students, especially those who “do not support the Palestinian struggle,” leave the school.

In a memorandum sent to the university’s management Tuesday, the SRC and PYA asked that students who support the state of Israel or are sponsored by the Israeli government de-register.

“As the SRC, we had a meeting and analyzed international politics,” Mqondisi Duma, secretary of the group, was quoted as saying in the Daily News report. “We took the decision that Jewish students, especially those who do not support the Palestinian struggle, should de-register.”

Further news about Satan’s plot to eliminate the Jews, commonly known as “Islam”.

David Friedman speaks for all right-thinking people.

Taking a shower this morning I was struck, not for the first time, by how badly designed the mechanism for controlling the temperature is. Turn it a little to the right and the shower is uncomfortably hot. Turn it just a little back to the left and it is uncomfortably cold.

What is going on is pretty clear. The controller maps its position to the amount of hot water in the mix in a roughly linear fashion. All the way to the left is straight cold, all the way to the right is straight hot, any intermediate position is a proportional mix.

In practice, almost nobody wants a cold shower or, unless the temperature of the hot water is pretty low, a straight hot shower. What almost everyone wants is a mix within a fairly limited range—say from .6 hot to .8 hot—with the exact range varying both with the temperature of the hot and the cold water and the preferences of the person taking the shower.

Read it.

The Lenborough Hoard, which consists of over 5200 coins from Anglo-Saxon times, is now on display at the British Museum. This discovery highlights the ongoing importance of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which just released its 2012 Treasure Report.

Steamship Silicone Pot Lid. No, the other kind of pot.

Maple Bacon Candle. Sweet dreams are made of this.

Preventing Eye Strain.

Cocoon Smart Home Infrasonic Detector.

Cancer-Detecting Bra.

Paverlight Solar Brick Lights.

Cold Brew Coffee Makers.

Pneumatic Porch Whistle.

Read it.

Totally coincidental, I’m sure. (But somewhere there’s an architect laughing his ass off….)

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Poetry in the twenty-first century is like pottery, woodworking, or the making of carrot carnations. Sophisticated verse was never a major art, and having lost even a small non-practitioner audience, it has lost its status as a minor art. At hobbyist conventions, celebrated practitioners of a craft address an audience made up of other practitioners of the craft, who will then go home and work at the art themselves. Poetry has more residual cultural prestige than carrot carnation making and other hobbies, but that is only because most of the poet-hobbyists are professors with MFAs, while there are no professors of table-setting.

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Executives are supposed to deal with or avoid problems. Barack Obama, elected U.S. president with essentially no executive experience, prefers to wash his hands of them.

He washed his hands of Iraq, though now he has been forced to dirty them there again. He’s trying to wash his hands of Afghanistan. He just washed his hands of Yemen, presiding over an ignominious U.S. exit during which, reportedly, American Marines turned over their weapons, apparently, as a condition of their withdrawal [see UPDATE below].

Today, Obama washed his hands of a totally predictable consequence of Obamacare — reduced staffing and reduced working hours for workers.

…

“Shaming” bad actors is fine for a fourth grade teacher. But the job of a leader is to anticipate the shameful — or in the case of companies that cut staffing or hours in response to Obamacare, the economically rational — potential behavior of those affected by his decisions, and to shape the decisions accordingly.