Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Pansies, because they are pretty and these are the ones that make me laugh:
No more news or blogs for me until tonight’s open thread or I will spontaneously combust in a ball of incoherent rage and angst.
And Now For Something Completely DifferentPost + Comments (66)
Really smart piece by David Leonhardt in the Times:
n retrospect, the pattern seems clear. Years before the Deepwater Horizon rig blew, BP was developing a reputation as an oil company that took safety risks to save money. An explosion at a Texas refinery killed 15 workers in 2005, and federal regulators and a panel led by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, said that cost cutting was partly to blame. The next year, a corroded pipeline in Alaska poured oil into Prudhoe Bay. None other than Joe Barton, a Republican congressman from Texas and a global-warming skeptic, upbraided BP managers for their “seeming indifference to safety and environmental issues.”
Much of this indifference stemmed from an obsession with profits, come what may. But there also appears to have been another factor, one more universally human, at work. The people running BP did a dreadful job of estimating the true chances of events that seemed unlikely — and may even have been unlikely — but that would bring enormous costs.
***Similarly, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan liked to argue, not so long ago, that the national real estate market was not in a bubble because it had never been in one before. Wall Street traders took the same view and built mathematical models that did not allow for the possibility that house prices would decline. And many home buyers signed up for unaffordable mortgages, believing they could refinance or sell the house once its price rose. That’s what house prices did, it seemed.
Read the whole thing.
Hoocoodanode- Not Just for Bankers AnymorePost + Comments (19)
Two smart pieces from Daniel Larison- the first on the intent of the blockade, and the second, which I will focus on, about the reaction from the most fervent Israel supporters:
The people who should be most furious about this are Israel’s reflexive defenders. They are reduced to making excuses for the inexcusable consequences of a bungled raid carried out in support of a misguided blockade policy that has been damaging Israel’s reputation every day since it began. It ought to make them more critical of the recklessness and stupidity of the Netanyahu government, but on the whole this has not been their response.
***Perhaps most galling about the overall defense of the raid is the constant invocation of self-defense. Everything Israel does is always done in self-defense, no matter how excessive, disproportionate, unnecessary, wrong or aggressive it is. When everything becomes a matter of self-defense and the proper distinctions between actual legtimate self-defense and reckless excesses are erased, pretty soon most of the rest of the world won’t pay any attention to Israeli claims of self-defense even when they are legitimate. There was not much of a reservoir of goodwill for Israel in the world after the war in Lebanon, but successive Israeli governments have done everything they can to exhaust what little remains in that reservoir. We are not watching Israel defend itself. We are watching Israel slowly destroy itself.
Why is this not transparently obvious to everyone? Rather than admit that this has been an absolute disaster and the Israeli raid has done more for the cause of Hamas than anything Hamas could ever hope to pull off on their own, instead we are greeted with excuse making, farcical invocations of “self-defense,” and then called anti-Semites or useful idiots for even daring to question the wisdom of this sort of behavior.
What has Israel accomplished other than to mortally wound their public image, likely leading to the end of the Gaza blockade, inflame anti-Israeli sentiment all over the Muslim world and beyond, destroy her relationship with Turkey, put the United States in a horrible bind, and put on clear display the fecklish and irresponsible nature of her current government. What was accomplished here that is good for Israel? Can anyone think of anything?
I know, I know. I’m an anti-Semite for asking that.
It’s not just a meal — it’s an adventure!
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When our papillons do this, we call it “The Tap Dance of Gratitude”.
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Tried desperately to find some good news, and came up short, so here is a crappy open thread for you.
