Recruiting Animal

Tony Blair

From The Daily Mail

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a former Foreign Secretary and chairman of the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, said: ‘Much of what Tony Blair says is sensible.

‘The Islamic terrorists who kill people have the silent support of many more in their community who share their ideology, if not their methods.

‘But even combined, they represent only a small minority of British Muslims, and we must never forget that.

‘However, he appears to be still trying to justify the Iraq War rather than acknowledging that that war provided an unprecedented opportunity for the Sunni and Shia extremists to slaughter so many of their co-religionists.’

An Excitable Leader

From: Glenn L. Carle, The Evil Genius of Fidel Castro

... it was Castro who urged Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to launch a nuclear war against the U.S. in response to the deteriorating situation that the Cuban dictator had engineered.

“Castro suggested that in order to prevent our nuclear missiles from being destroyed, we should launch a preemptive strike against the United States,” Lattell writes, quoting Khrushchev’s memoirs, which are backed up by quotes from Cuban defectors and other Russian officials.

One shares the horrified reactions of successive Soviet officials to the man they called their “excitable,” communist ally, who was apparently willing to see us all killed to serve his ego.

Only a megalomaniac would vehemently argue for Armageddon so that he could survive in a bunker, the revolutionary hero presiding over an irradiated hemisphere.

But then, in Lattell’s account, this is Castro through and through: a sociopath from early manhood, who in the barrios of Havana after World War II, gunned down rivals, shooting them in the back from a distance.

See: Thirteen Days  and The Missiles of October: Part 1 - Part 2 and Defcon 2: The Cuban Missile Crisis - Declassified: The Cuban Missile Crisis

A Grown Man Cried

From: Daniel Gordis, A Dose of Nuance

The three of us were seated on the sofa – my grandfather, my grandmother and I – and we watched.

The plane landed. The red carpet was rolled out. Sadat emerged. Menachem Begin and his entourage greeted him.

The anthems were played. Begin stood at attention for Egypt’s anthem. Sadat, an erstwhile enemy of the Jewish state, stood in respectful attention during “Hatikva.”

It was pretty heady stuff.

Suddenly, in the midst of all of this, I heard a sound that I couldn’t quite identify. At first, I thought it was coming from the TV. But it didn’t seem to be.

I looked around the room but saw nothing that could have been making the strange sound.

And then I looked to my left and saw my grandfather weeping. He was a large person, not only in reputation but physically too, and to this day, I remember his blue button-down shirt, soaked with tears.

 

American Leaders

From Peter Hitchens: A Louse vs A Flea (edited)

My interest in US politics has been fading ever since I lived there, and saw it at first hand.

But it sank to near-zero during the last Presidential election, when the Obama campaign became a show business frenzy, devoid of reason and much more like the early, screaming years of the Beatles than like a bid for office

As Clarence Darrow once said ‘I was told as small boy that anybody could become President of the United States. As I grew older, I realised that this was absolutely true’.

Beware of Visionaries

From: Failing The Mentally ill (heavily edited)

The destruction of our mental health system started with the idea that mental illness does not exist because the mind cannot be diseased.

But, in fact, the brain is just as susceptible to malfunction as any bodily organ.

And, even now, when the consequences of radical deinstitutionalization should have become clear to everyone, the bad idea lives on.

How could it become so influential?

The idea began with Thomas Szasz and would have remained a fringe curiosity had the counter-culture and political radicals not taken him up along with the similar misconceptions of R.D. Laing.

The mentally ill became a group to be liberated.

Indeed some countercultural intellectuals went so far as to claim that the sane were mad and the mad were sane because they so radically rejected the corrupt established culture.

Deinstitutionalization was also attractive to people eager to cut costs.

The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 1967 inaugurated a wave of state legislation sharply restricting the grounds for involuntary hospitalization and its length.

It passed both houses without a single dissenting vote. Conservative Republicans saw a way to save money, liberal Democrats a way to expand civil rights.

The promise of saving money by doing good was irresistible.

Unfortunately, the humane community treatment for the mentally ill that was supposed to replace institutionalization never materialized and the families of mentally ill people are forced to navigate a hopelessly fragmented system where the “right to refuse treatment” far outweighed the right to receive it.

 

Best Foot Forward

Selling is putting your best foot foward.

And that implies that you're hiding the other one.

Here's a good example. Mona Eltahawy is a well-known journalist.

She went to the subway to spray-paint a sign she didn't like and got arrested.

You can see videos of the action here and here.

When a woman tries to stop her Mona says that she is practicing free speech.

And she is practicing free expression of her ideas but what she's hiding is that it's not exactly the legal kind.

Then while the police are cuffing her she yells to bystanders that she is being arrested for non-violent protest.

And it's true that she didn't hurt anyone but she's hiding the fact that defacing property is not peaceful protest.

This is sales in action.

It reminds me of a scene from Guide For The Married Man.

Woman Bites Dog

Disrespect for positional authority

From: Jeff Weintraub (edited)

Iranian cleric, Hojatoleslam Ali Beheshti, insulted one woman too many. And he seems to have pushed this one past her breaking point.

According to Beheshti's account, he encountered a woman with a bad hijab (head covering) and told her to cover herself up.

She responded that he could just close his eyes. When he wouldn't stop bothering her, she knocked him down, beat him up, and put him in the hospital.

Question For David Frum

I left this on David's Facebook page:

Dave, I saw you speak at the Holy Blossom Temple before the Iraq War.

It was a big night for you. A packed house and Robert Fulford gave you an Incredible introduction and greeting - yet I felt, later, that you misled us with your confidence about Iraq's readiness for change and I've wondered how you felt about what you said after the invasion went awry.

General Knowledge Is Useful

From: SFWeekly

Lowell Turpin was arrested last week after he glanced at his girlfriend's Facebook page and saw a picture of another man -- a clean-cut, white dude that he knew for sure wasn't him.

Instead of calmly asking her about the mysterious man, the 40-year-old allegedly grabbed her laptop, smashed it against a wall, and hit her in the face, according to news reports.

Turns out that romeo in the photo was Romney, you know the guy who is running for president.

 

The Prejudice of Scientists

From: Beware the Fausts of Neuroscience, George Walden, Standpoint, April 2012 (edited)

As a minister for science, had I been able to rely on scientists for rational and detached advice, things would have been simpler.

But my impressions of those I met convinced me of two things:

1. their awesome intelligence and real achievements

2. in some cases an equally awesome propensity to overweening ambition and incurable condescension towards the common man.

I arrived with my own prejudices. I was a diplomatic specialist in Communism.

In China and the Soviet Union I had witnessed at first hand the biggest live experiment in history, as more than a billion human beings, caged in their own countries like laboratory mice, were subjected to the parascientific creed of dialectical materialism and Marxism-Leninism.

Of the outcome — some hundred million dead, three million in China during 1966-69 the years I was there — there is little more to be said, except to recall how many Western scientists, some eminent, went along with the experiment.