That was a really anti-climactic Game of Thrones.
No spoilers, people.
by John Cole| 96 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
That was a really anti-climactic Game of Thrones.
No spoilers, people.
This post is in: Open Threads, Get off my grass you damned kids
(Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com)
Do not get on the wrong side of Judith Martin:
DEAR MISS MANNERS: The time for school graduation ceremonies is upon us again. Unfortunately, I’ve been witnessing that in recent years, polite applause and inward pride are steadily losing ground to ear-piercing whistles and hooting and hollering like banshees upon hearing a loved one’s name read.
Some students have taken to unashamedly making assorted gestures intended to elicit additional outbursts from the audience. Moreover, they are being fully indulged by their friends and relatives…
It’s all so tasteless and rude. What might you suggest be done to bring decorum back to these increasingly unbecoming spectacles?
GENTLE READER: Well, the school principals are trying, as you may have noticed. If it weren’t for all that noise, you would be able to hear them pleading for the applause to be withheld until all diplomas have been handed out.
It never works. The principals have lost whatever small authority they had left after college acceptances were received. Furthermore, they have little inclination to put a damper on a celebratory day.
Yet for some graduates, it does just that. Turning a mass celebration into a popularity contest might remind them how relieved they are to be leaving high school.
If Miss Manners were in charge of such a ceremony, she might say: “Now I realize that those of you who didn’t expect to make it through high school will be tempted to let loose and holler when you receive your diplomas, and that your families may be so overcome with relief that they will chime in. But you did make it, and your diplomas are just as good as everyone else’s. So I ask you to accept this honor with dignity, and not draw attention to how surprised you are.”
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What’s on the agenda for the end of the weekend, as we wait for Cole to promote this evening’s TV viewing?
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, War on Terror aka GSAVE®, Daydream Believers
(Jeff Danziger’s website)
Tom Junod, “The Lethal President Sends His Regrets”:
… President Obama was not the first representative of the Obama administration to offer a thoughtful and rather tortured public apologia for drone strikes. He was merely the latest and possibly the last, and as such his speech was remarkably consistent with what has come before. When administration officials have spoken of targeted killing, they have always spoken in the language of limits. They have never spoken in the language of expansion. But expand targeted killing they have, to an extent that has made some of their characterizations of a program marked by “precision” and “deliberation” sound like either a folly or an outright falsehood. To an extent unimaginable just a year ago, the president yesterday took ownership of his own Lethal Presidency. But while he took ownership of the policy that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, he did not take ownership of the policy that killed al-Awlaki’s son Abulrahman. And while he took credit for the policy that has killed “dozens of highly skilled Al Qaeda commanders, trainers, bomb makers, and operatives,” he never came close to taking credit for — or acknowledging — the policy that has killed people by the thousand.
The speech, then, was not only notable for what the president said. It was notable — primarily notable — for the fact that he said it. The danger of the Lethal Presidency has always been its assurance that its killings are moral because they are accomplished by moral men. And so what critics of the president’s drone policy might have hoped from yesterday’s speech was that he would not merely portray himself as a moral man but rather offer to do the moral thing and submit to legal structures outside himself and the power of his office. He did some of that, saying that he asked his administration to “review” the feasibility of “a special court to evaluate and authorize legal action” or “the establishment of an independent oversight board in the executive branch.” He also said that he was declassifying information pertaining to the four Americans killed by drone strike and promised not to sign any bill that would extend the Authorization for Use of Military Force. But mostly he did what he so often does, at his best and at his worst, using his own moral standing to advance an overarching moral vision instead of a simply political one — in this case, the end of the “war on terror” that he did not invent but has done so much to amplify and advance…
Alex Pareene, at Salon:
… Hopefully the end of the CIA’s drone program will mean the end of “signature strikes,” in which anonymous foreigners who merely look like they’re up to no good are murdered, with bombs, by our intelligence agency. The Times says Obama has signed a new “classified policy guidance” that “will sharply curtail the instances when unmanned aircraft can be used to attack in places that are not overt war zones.”
But the president also “plans to offer a robust defense of a continued role for targeted killings.” We already know the basic rationale for drone strikes: They necessitate less risk (of American lives) than conventional military action and they remove the apparently uncomfortable question of what to do with terrorists who can’t be charged with conventional crimes. For the Obama administration, drones provide a handy replacement for the Bush administration’s use of indefinite detention, which was highly problematic, as various inmates at our Cuban military prison could tell you.
Sunday Spinach Reads: Not Everybody Agrees Drones Are A PanaceaPost + Comments (183)
This post is in: Because of wow., Open Threads
Actual headline at the International Business Times site yesterday [photo at the link]:
Far-Right Extremists Chased Through London by Women Dressed as Badgers
Can you top that? I can’t. (More photos here w. bonus Brian May sighting.)
Consider this another open invitation to document the weirdness in your corner of ten dimensional reality.
Image: Shibata Zeshin, Badger Studying a Sutra before 1872.
Annals of Absurdity: Why There Will Always Be An England DepartmentPost + Comments (135)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 71 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs
Does anyone have a better analysis of what’s going on in Turkey than this rambling thing from Josh Marshall? (Here’s the Guardian and the Times). From what I’ve gathered from my vantage point of ugly American indifference and ignorance, Erdogan is not secular enough, cracks down too hard on the press, and is generally disliked by urban Turks.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 82 Comments
This post is in: Teabagger Stupidity
Grover Nordquist is a secret Muslim because he has a beard. (via)
This post is in: Garden Chats, Open Threads
From commentor Bob H:
Attached are some pictures from my NJ backyard… Lots of hostas, phlox, goldflame spirea…
I was wondering if you or the commentators can identify a new tree that has arisen where a massive, lightning-killed oak used to be. It is probably obvious, but I just can’t find the name anywhere:
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The last of my mail-order tomatoes were delivered Friday, just in time for our first official heat wave of the summer. Everything seems to have survived transplanting so far, and if we get the promised break in the heat next week, I might even have the energy to re-arrange all the new 10- and 20-gallon rootpouches so the ‘tomato garden’ (driveway extension) looks more deliberate and less like a neighborhood eyesore…
What’s going on in your gardens this week?