KIKO'S HOUSE

The Sarahcudda: What They're Saying

2009-11-21T00:10:00.001-05:00

If you're ever stuck for something to write about, then Sarah Palin sure is the gift that keeps on giving.

This week has seen a tsunami of coverage because of Going Rogue, her new autobio, and the crush that right wingnuts have with her despite the fact that she has huge negative polling numbers (among women in particular) and would unite Democrats like no one else in the (unlikely) event that she grabs the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

Herewith some of the chatter:

Michelle Cottle in The New Republic:

This is clearly a woman who has neither forgotten nor forgiven the many injuries she feels were unfairly visited on her last year by the media, the Democrats, the McCain campaign, and other "haters." It's possible she realizes that she made some significant mistakes, but that realization is clearly buried under a massive glacier of resentment and irritation at others.

Allahpundit at Hot Air:

[A]s things stand, [Palin is] a threat to win the GOP nomination but an almost certain loser in the general election unless economic conditions have deteriorated to the point where any Republican would be a threat to knock off Obama. . . . . The more beatable Obama looks, the greater the temptation will be to nominate an inoffensive "electable" candidate like Romney and make the election a referendum on The One's record; the less beatable Obama looks, the greater the temptation to roll the dice and nominate a lightning rod like Palin who can draw media attention away from Obama.

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight:

Although I doubt that Palin can clear the conservative half of the GOP field, someone like a Huckabee could very well decide to go ahead and let Palin run her course, re-entering the field in a 2016 climate that is liable to be more favorable to Republicans.

Damon Linker in The New Republic:

Criticism has its place, of course. And yet, on Palin I've come to favor a different approach—one that refuses to collude with the media-driven farce. To respond to an opponent, even harshly, even rudely, is to accord her a certain respect—to treat her as worthy of a response. But Palin is worthy of no such thing. She stands for nothing beyond her own self-promotion. She craves attention, and negative attention is a form of attention. Even ridicule can be a form of flattery. Better to bow out, to decline the provocation, since responding to her perpetuates and legitimates the illusion that she’s a serious player in our nation’s politics.

Richard Cohen in The Washington Post:

The Institute for the Study of Sarah Palin might conclude that she represents the exact moment important Republicans gave up on democracy. She was clearly seen as an empty vessel who could be controlled by her intellectual betters. These include the editorial boards of the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal, neither of which would hire Palin to make an editorial judgment but both of which would be thrilled to see her as president of the United States. It does not bother these people in the least that the woman is a demagogue -- remember "death panels"? -- and not, on the face of it, very responsible. If she quit as governor of Alaska in the noble pursuit of money, might she quit as, say, vice president or president for the same reason? From what I hear, one can never be too rich.

Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune:

Who needs policy? In her world -- and the world of legions of conservatives who revere her -- the persona is the policy. Palin is beloved because she's (supposedly) just like ordinary people, which (supposedly) gives her a profound understanding of their needs.

That attitude used to be associated with the left, which claimed to speak for the ordinary folks who get shafted by the system.

Daniel Larison at The American Conservative:

An American right led by or identified with Palin is one that [Democrats] can very easily ridicule and discredit, and at the same time they can be confident that a Palinized GOP poses no threat to anything they value. Palin is not going to bring the party out of the minority, and were she to lead the party it would more or less guarantee continued Democratic ascendancy for many years to come. Her content-free pseudo-populism ensures that the legitimate political concerns of her constituency remain irrelevant to real policy debates. Media outlets also thrive on controversy and conflict, both real and manufactured, and Palin continues to give them plenty of opportunities for both.

Greg Sargent at Who Runs Gov:

Palin and her ghostwriters have successfully resorted to the most harsh and lurid attacks on Obama to break through into the national conversation (the death panels being only the most prominent example). But those same tactics are severely complicating her ability to broaden her appeal, to the degree that she even wants to do this in the first place.

Jessica Valenti at Comment Is Free America:

When the magazine ran an extreme close-up picture of the former governor last year, conservatives criticised the publication for not airbrushing out Palin's flaws. Newsweek pointed out that Photoshopping pictures are for fashion spreads, not political cover stories, and that the picture represented the candidate as she was. And this presents the general problem with Palin today -- she's upset that people won't airbrush away who she really is, and that no one believes her when she tries to do the same.

Marc Ambinder on CBS News:

The key to making a political comeback is to have somewhere to come back from -- and somewhere to return to. Sarah Palin can't make a comeback because she didn't go anywhere. Not up, not down. Not sideways. Aside from a brief and totally artificial post selection bounce last year, Palin remains a fixed political commodity.

Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic:

There are times, in this business, when I am incredibly aware that I'm the black dude in the room. One of those moments is whenever I hear conservative writers announcing that Sarah Palin has been persecuted, or that one of her virtues is that she annoys liberals. You see that sort of thing and it occurs to you that Palin attachment, has little to do with Palin, and a lot to do with intellectual insecurity.

And finally, Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish:

[T]he book is emblematic of late degenerate Republicanism, which is based not on actual policies, but on slogans now so exhausted by over-use they retain no real meaning: free enterprise is great, God loves us all, America is fabulous, foreigners are suspect, we need to be tough, we can't dither, we must always cut taxes, government is bad, liberals are socialists, the media hates you, etc etc. . . .

Move on and forget about her? If only. Not just because she is a vital figure in this country's politics right now and one of the most dangerous demagogues this country has seen in a long time, but because I just want to know. I want to know what really lies under that facade.

Cartoon du Jour

2009-11-21T00:09:00.001-05:00

Chris Britt/Springfield (Ill.) State Journal-Register

When Pigs Fly, Bill. When Pigs Fly

2009-11-21T00:07:00.000-05:00

Bill Kristol, who gets substantially more wrong than he gets right but shamelessly plunges ahead, is predicting that Sarah Palin will campaign for John McCain next year in the already hotly contested Arizona Republican senatorial primary even though his challenger's views are more closely aligned with the Quitter From Wasilla.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

2009-11-21T00:00:00.003-05:00

AERO TANGO
By Mikesi

A Dead Friend & My Five Stages of Grief

2009-11-20T00:10:00.006-05:00

I awoke the other day to the news that a dear if distant friend had been struck and killed by a car backing up a one-way street. From the outset, I was very aware of how my grief caromed from feeling to feeling, and while the fit was not perfect, I pretty much went through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's classic Five Stages of Grief.

I am an intermittent but extremely vivid dreamer, so it took a while to work through DENIAL and realize that Dick was indeed dead, I had not dreamed that he was dead and I had in fact spoken to my sister on the phone about him being dead.

Dick had lost his beloved mate of many years to a horrible death from cancer. He had rebounded and married a wonderful widow about his age, so I was quite ANGRY that the love of his life had been taken from him and then he from his second love.

BARGAINING typically applies to someone who has been diagnosed with a fatal malady and tries to forestall the inevitable, but I did wonder whether he wouldn't have been standing standing in that street if he had been somewhere with me.

I next lapsed into DEPRESSION , was snippy with loved ones who tried to console me and had sick headache. All I wanted to do was be alone.

And then I segued into ACCEPTANCE. I still wanted to be alone, but understood that fate had dealt Dick a cruel hand and that it was better to cherish his specialness than dwell on the senselessness of his passing.

Cartoon du Jour

2009-11-20T00:09:00.000-05:00

Ted Rall/Universal Press Syndicate

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

2009-11-20T00:00:00.003-05:00

PLAYING WITH BEST FRIEND
By Ndae Iskandar

Book Review: The Man Who Unlocked The Mysteries of China's Middle Kingdom

2009-11-19T00:10:00.001-05:00

1281: Chinese throw gunpowder bombs at charging Japanese

(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN OCTOBER 2008)
Chinese claims that they were responsible for hundreds of mankind's most familiar inventions -- including explosives, the catapult, printing, the compass, hydraulics, ceramics, suspension bridges, irrigation and even toilet paper -- were long viewed with skepticism by Westerners who were smugly certain that these ancient people were incapable of such advanced innovations.

That was until Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham came along.

The story of how Needham confirmed the provenance of many of these inventions is told to great effect in The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom by bestselling author Simon Winchester. The story of Needham himself is almost as good.

Needham was no cloistered Cambridge don, and in fact was precisely the sort of person who could have pulled off such a stunning feat: A freethinking intellectual, folkdancer, practicing nudist, lower case "c" communist and married womanizer who fell in love with Lu Gwei-djen, a visiting Chinese student and then with China itself.

Although a biochemist by training, Needham is best known for his extraordinary Science and Civilization in China, a 24-volume encyclopedia cataloging the breathtaking range of China's achievements in science and technology.

Needham left behind the comfy confines of Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge in 1943 when he was tapped, probably on the orders of Winston Churchill himself, to establish a Sino-British cultural and scientific exchange behind the lines in Japanese-occupied China.

Balancing the interests of the Nationalist government and emerging Communist Army, he provided struggling scientists with laboratory equipment and textbooks while taking a series of lengthy trips, some of them under daunting and dangerous circumstances.

These included a months-long trek to the Dunhuang caves in Western China where he was first inspired to undertake the encyclopedia project. This is where the Diamond Sutra, a woodblock book printed six centuries before come latelies Johannes Gutenberg and William Caxton cranked out their first books, was discovered in 1907 by Marc Aurel Stein, a trailblazing archaeologist deservedly vilified in China for his extraordinary plundering of the sutra and other great treasures.

Winchester writes that by the time Needham left China at the end of the war:

"[H]e had visited 296 Chinese institutes, universities, and research establishments; he had arranged for the delivery of thousands of tons of equipment and chemical and scientific journals; he would read, endlessly and voraciously, the various thousands of documents which he had collected and which he felt certain would enhance his knowledge of China; and he spent much of his final months laying the foundations for a diplomatically privileged organization to support Chinese science -- an organization that would continue to function without him long after he had left."

After a two-year stopover in Paris to help start UNESCO, Needham returned to Cambridge and began work on the encyclopedia, which was originally intended to be a mere two volumes. It had reached 18 volumes by the time of his death in 1995 and has sprouted six more volumes since, and while Lu Gwei-djen and others collaborated with Needham, he surely was the greatest one-man encyclopedist ever.

As Needham himself wrote:

"What a cave of glittering treasures was opened up! My friends among the older generation of sinologists had thought that we should find nothing -- but how wrong they were. One after another, extraordinary inventions and discoveries clearly appeared in Chinese literature, archaeological evidence or pictorial witness, often, indeed generally, long preceding the parallel, or adopted inventions and discoveries of Europe. Whether it was the array of binominal coefficients, or the standard method of interconversion of rotary and longitudinal motion, or the first of all clockwork escapements, or the ploughshare of malleable cast iron, or the beginning of geo-botany and soil science, or cutaneous-visceral reflexes, or the finding of smallpox inoculation -- wherever one looked, there was 'first' after 'first.' "

But before the first volume of the encyclopedia was published, Needham's legendary scientific detachment failed him and he temporarily fell into disgrace when as head of an international investigative commission he was hoodwinked by the Communist regime into believing that the U.S. had dropped plague-infested rodents on northeast China during the Korean War.

Needham's usual detachment likewise left him in his unquestioning support of the Communist takeover, which was cemented by a close friendship with Zhou Enlai that had been fostered during his time in China and subsequent return visits.

It was not until Needham traveled to China in 1972 and saw the horrific violence and suffering visited upon his beloved Chinese as a result of the Cultural Revolution that he finally began to have second thoughts. He would later write -- although well after Mao Zedong's death -- that the great leader's policies toward science had been "disastrous."

Winchester also writes of an oddly chilling coda to a visit Needham made to Northwestern University in 1978 where he gave a lecture on the origins and uses of gunpowder.

Among those in the audience was a wild-haired loner by the name of Ted Kaczynski, who all likelihood was inspired to fashion an explosive device made of gunpowder and match heads six weeks later that injured a Northwestern campus security guard in the first blast in the so-called Unibomber's 27-year reign of terror.

* * * * *
The Man Who Loved China is not one of Winchester's best works.

I would reserve that honor for his book about two other eccentric British intellectuals, the marvelous The Professor and the Madman. But The Man Who Loved China is a solid and easy read, in the Winchester tradition is not a particularly long one, and the sections on Needham's travels through China are riveting. No surprise here since Winchester is an old China hand himself.

While Needham's greatest achievement is Science and Civilization, it is the so-called Needham Question that makes his legacy even more important 13 years after his death.

Why, Needham asked, for all of its achievements in science and technology, did China fail to industrialize when Europe did? The short answer is that the Chinese took a diffusionist approach because of the impact that Confucianism and Taoism had on the pace of discovery as opposed to the independent inventiveness of the West.

Which begs a most contemporary question: As China becomes an industrial powerhouse after centuries of stagnation, will it draw on the traditions that Needham unearthed? Or as Winchester puts it in the closing pages of The Man Who Loved China:

"How quickly and competently will the new China now manage to capitalize on its early, historical promise? Needham expressed the greatest confidence that in time it would. And he always knew that the great strength of his books lay precisely in their ability to catalog what that early promise was, and so to indicate to a fascinated world just where and how the new China and the new Chinese will now seek their best advantage."

IMAGES (From top): Joseph Needham; Diamond Sutra; Marc Aurel Stein; Trebuchet catapult to launch explosive bombs; Two-person loom; Interior diagram of astronomical clock tower; Bracket arm clusters containing cantilevers; Foundry works; Needham with Zhou Enlai; First volume of Science and Civilization.

Cartoon du Jour

2009-11-19T00:09:00.000-05:00

Tom Toles/Universal Press Syndicate

The Most Implausible Candidate Evah

2009-11-19T00:06:00.005-05:00

Hitch nails it: Sarah Palin's "problem" is that she cynically incites a crowd that she has no real intention of pleasing. Oh, and someone needs to tell Andrew to calm down.

Another Dumb Hunter, Another Death

2009-11-19T00:03:00.001-05:00

It is hard to understand how a hunter could have mistaken three Ferrum (Va.) College students collecting frogs along a wooded trail for a biology class could be mistaken for deer.

But yet another hunter apparently did so, leaving 23-year-old Jessica Goode dead and one shot in the hand in an annual fall ritual.

This is because for some hunters anything that moves and is not wearing hunters' blaze orange is literally fair game.

Jason David Cloutier was charged with manslaughter, reckless handling of a firearm and trespassing.

Police said the 31-year-old Ferrum resident was the first o call 9-1-1.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

2009-11-19T00:00:00.003-05:00

FOG
By Ivica Jandrijevic

Another Breast-Cancer Bombshell Lands Amidst The Health-Care Reform Debate

2009-11-18T00:10:00.002-05:00

Hard on the heels of a study revealing that the benefits of breast cancer screenings have been overstated and risk overtreating small cancers while missing cancers that are deadly comes another earthquake: Most women should start regular screenings at age 50, not 40, women age 50 to 74 should have mammograms every two years, rather than every year, and self-breast examinations are not what they're cracked up to be.

These latest findings are from a different research group than that which had earlier studied the benefits of screenings for the American Cancer Society, but like that study found the benefits of mammograms have been overstated in light of the fact that more women are dying for breast cancer-related reasons despite the increasingly sophisticated screenings that they undergo.

Both studies are political hot potatoes coming as they do amidst the debate over health-care reform.

Researchers worry that the new report will be interpreted as a political effort by the Obama administration to save money on health-care costs. There also is the question of how many women -- as well as doctors -- long schooled in the benefits of mammograms and getting annual screenings will follow the new recommended guidelines.

Many women do not think screenings can be harmful although medical experts now say the risks are real. This is because screenings can trigger unnecessary further tests like biopsies, invasive radiation treatments and painful needle biopsies.

The surgeries that often result are a multi-billion dollar industry that gets filthy rich on overdiagnoses. Then there's this: Too many women who have been treated for breast cancer cannot get health insurance or are dropped by their insurers. Being a woman can be a pre-existing condition in and of itself, of course, while having breast cancer is often a health-insurance knockout punch.

The second study was by the United State Preventive Services Task Force.

The task force, an independent panel of experts in prevention and primary care appointed by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, had recommended just seven years ago that women have mammograms every one to two years starting at age 40. It found too little evidence to take a stand on breast self-examinations.

The task force's new rationale about breast self-examinations is that there is no evidence that they yield significant medical benefits. Large studies in Russia and China found no difference in mortality rates between women assigned to perform self-exams and those who aren't.

Some breast cancer organizations are highly critical of the task force report, asserting that more lives will be lost because of later and fewer screenings. American women have the highest incidence rates of breast cancer in the world, 144 per 1,000 among white woman and 122 per 1,000 among African American women, although those rates have been declining in recent years.

Presidential Timber: Then & Now

2009-11-18T00:08:00.002-05:00

Sarah Palin's appearance on "Oprah" this week is being heralded as the kickoff of the 2012 presidential campaign despite the awful poll numbers that the smirking face of the Republican Party keeps getting.

That is one scary thought considering that Winfrey, as should have been expected, threw softballs during the hour-long gabfest.

While former not-son-in-law Levi Johnson, Katie Couric and the dregs of the McCain campaign came up, there was nary a peep about the issues that concern, uh . . . oh yeah, voters.

Contrast this with Senator John F. Kennedy's appearance on Jack Paar's "Tonight Show" in June 1960. The future president fielded more than 30 minutes of questions from Paar, comedian Peggy Cass and the New York studio audience. The subjects were the U-2 incident, failed Soviet summit, Cuba and JFK's Catholicism.

More here and here.

Cartoon du Jour

2009-11-18T00:07:00.001-05:00

Chris Britt/Springfield (Ill.) State Journal Register

Bigger Brains Aren't Necessarily Better

2009-11-18T00:04:00.001-05:00

MORE HERE.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

2009-11-18T00:00:00.003-05:00

AUTUMN COMPOSITION
By Deduar

You Know That Society Is Doomed . . .

2009-11-17T00:10:00.004-05:00

When civilian courts were good enough to try terrorists when Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush were president but they aren't now that Barack Obama is.

When a television comedian breaks stories that the mainstream media won't.

When Republicans say that human life is sacred. Until it's born. Or in a country they believe should be bombed because they don't like its leader.

When a dog sitter is charged with getting a puppy drunk on vodka.

When a pop singing star lumps up his girlfriend, semi apologizes and then takes a victory lap with a Fan Appreciation Tour.

When one of teevee's longest-running funnymen isn't exactly a hoot to work for.

When the Securities and Exchange Commission hires a former Goldman Sachs executive to head its enforcement unit.

When an airline crew overshoots a runway by 150 miles.

When FexEx and UPS pay the Postal Service to deliver packages to rural areas.

When young white guys are criticized for dressing too much like young black guys.

When the punditocracy compares Barack Obama to Richard Nixon.

When fat people are underrepresented as governors.

When a plagiarizing serial hypocrite who made his chops as a graffiti artist lies when it suits him and then gets all huffy when he's called out.

When teenagers are cited for rapping their order at a McDonald's drive-thru.

When the federal government orders gadzillionaire executives at big companies to give back some of the dough they're paid.

When any veteran who lends his name to addressing climate change is considered a traitor.

When Obama plays golf more than George Bush did.

When a man is arrested for driving a La-Z-Boy chair while drunk.

When guests on the Jerry Spring Show start fighting before they go on the air.

When a hotel tells Hispanic workers to Anglicize their names.

When drug makers pledge to cut costs but then surreptitiously raise the price of their prescription meds in anticipate of health-care reform.

When a drunk man calls 9-1-1 to report his marijuana missing.

When some blogs generate more traffic than cable news channels.

When swine flu is considered to be a secret plot.

When a woman calls police to report the theft of her marijuana plants.

When a senator whose state has a high proportion of people who don't have health insurance and has been given $3.3 million in contributions from the health care lobby declares that he'll vote his conscience -- against extending health insurance to his uninsured constituents.

When a woman offers sex for a World Series ticket.

When a man dressed as a Breathalyzer for Halloween is arrested for DUI.

When schoolchildren believe that Adolph Hitler was the manager of Germany's national soccer team.

Click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here for previous installments of You Know Society Is Doomed. Hat tip to Obscure Store for many of the links.

Cartoon du Jour

2009-11-17T00:09:00.000-05:00

Mike Luckovich/Atlanta Journal Constitution

This Behemoth Actually Flew

2009-11-17T00:04:00.000-05:00

HONEST.

Earl Cooley (1911-2009)

2009-11-17T00:02:00.000-05:00

MORE HERE.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

2009-11-17T00:00:00.005-05:00

MOVING IMAGES
(Osaka, Japan -- 1998)
By Jean Gaumy/Magnum Photos

Some Musings On The Writerly Life

2009-11-16T00:10:00.002-05:00

I have written perhaps 12,000 pieces in my writerly life and that's just a rough guess. But I do know that the most difficult thing I ever wrote was among the very shortest -- album liner notes for a rock band. The next hardest is by far the longest thing that I've ever written -- a forthcoming book.

To novices or non-writers, these polar opposites of 500 words and 50,000 might seem paradoxical. Why is writing short more difficult than writing long?

In the instance of those liner notes, for two reasons: Most notably, because confining oneself to a few well chosen words is far more difficult than prattling on at length.

But there also is a second reason specific to this task: Writing well about music is extremely challenging even for someone like myself who surrounds himself with it. The brain's processing of aural stimuli is one thing, but describing that stimuli in the King's English is quite another.

The book has presented altogether different challenges.

Central to this effort -- titled The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder -- is the 1981 murder of popular bar owner and community leader in the Pennsylvania Poconos that investigators didn't give a crap about solving because by their crude social calculus he was from the wrong side of the tracks.

That murder has led me to three others -- two also unsolved and the third lacking a believable motive -- but every time I have pronounced my tome ready for prime time I get a new piece of information that sends me back out into the field or some musty courthouse archive.

That has been the easy part.

The hard part has been trying to maintain enough emotional detachment from my primary victim, whom I now feel like I know very well and admire deeply, to be able to sift and assess information in a even-handed manner.

This has been made harder still because while there are a lot of good cops out there, the detectives who investigated the four murders ranged from indifferent to incompetent in all but one case.

I have to be fair to the cops, but my primary allegiance is to my victims.

Falling between the extremes of liner notes and a book is blogging. As Kiko's House closes in on its fourth anniversary I'm closing in on 7,500 posts. I kid you not.

Many of these have been throwaways, but I've been fairly successful in maintaining a pretty high level of original content, not to mention edgy opinionating. I couldn't have have done this without your support -- and we're talking readers from over 150 countries, territories and Milwaukee.

Which is why I am honored to again be nominated for an annual Weblog Award in the Best Individual Blogger category. Thanks, folks.

Images from Gustav Dore's illustrated edition
of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven (1884)

Republicans Really Stuck On Stupid

2009-11-16T00:08:00.003-05:00

The U.S. Constitution does not outlaw stupidity, so increasingly desperate Congressional Republicans are fully within their rights to argue that a key aspect of the health-care reform bill passed by the House and awaiting Senate approval is unconstitutional.

These Republicans are increasingly desperate because President Obama is edging ever closer to an historic victory that a large majority of Americans welcome. The Republicans' argument, which we'll be hearing a lot about in the coming days, goes something like this: The individual mandate, which will require people to have health insurance or be penalized, is not sanctioned by the Constitution.

The argument falls apart quickly when you consider that the individual mandate is a tax of a sort, which is constitutional. Then there's mandatory auto insurance, which is constitutional, and my favorite -- the Americans With Disability Act -- which requires businesses to install handicapped ramps and such even though the Constitution does not address the issue of entryways.

More here.

Cartoon by Tom Toles/Universal Press Syndicate

What Became Of The John 3:16 Guy?

2009-11-16T00:06:00.001-05:00

THE SHOCKING ANSWER HERE.