Far East Cynic

Steelers vs Ravens. Not even work is more important than this, today.

UPDATE! 21-7?! WTFO?

Oh and for the record-it was NOT a fumble!

UPDATE to the UPDATE. The Steelers of the second half were not the team that pissed it away in the first half. Thank goodness! Steelers Win!

The I-Pad is a handy thing-especially when you are waiting around to take a beating.

Today is Martin Luther King’s birthday. That may be all well and good-but more important to me, it is my mother’s birthday. She would have been 93 this year. Now as far as I am concerned THAT’s reason enough for a holiday.

Nonetheless- this little ditty by Tom Lehrer comes to mind on MLK day:

I had looked forward to a nice easy Friday night, drink a few beers, eat some dinner-maybe watch a movie. Then the phone rang:

“Listen, the leadership is going to be swamped with the rest of all the proposals that are due next week, you look like you are pretty far along-the VP wants to go over yours tomorrow at noon. Any problems?”

Well, I can think of more than a couple, I mean besides the fact that I loathe working on weekends:

Unfortunately, “no” was not really an option-especially when they might be looking to send people to the bread lines in a few months. And -to tell the truth- he really IS going to be swamped next week with proposals.

This is not going to end well.

The S.O. summarized:

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.- Oscar Wilde Irish dramatist, novelist, & poet (1854 – 1900)

Thus the dilemma of living with a woman-and reason 298 why marriage is outmoded.

As the four horses of the apocalypse come thundering into town. Grover Norquist and I actually agree on something:

Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist said he wants to build a center-right coalition to advocate for considering pulling out of Afghanistan in order to save the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars being spent there.

As the United States grapples with the government’s fiscal crisis, the huge investment in Afghanistan just isn’t wise, Norquist argued at a private salon dinner in Washington on Tuesday evening to a group of foreign-policy minded academics and journalists. He also pointed to the opportunity cost of devoting so much national attention and resources to Afghanistan, which takes focus away from other international challenges.

It only took him 30 years to get something right………..

One can only hope.

A certain segment of the American people love Governor Palin because she’s attractive and represents the final triumph of ignorance in political discourse. She speaks almost entirely in bumper sticker sized soundbites, which is fine with them because they have no desire to even think in anything more complicated than slogans.

She’s often compared to Reagan, which is profoundly unfair to the late president. While Ronald Reagan mastered the soundbite, if you asked him to explain why he believed what he did, he could. For most of his career, Reagan wrote his own speeches and syndicated a political column in the years between his being governor and president. Sarah Palin wrote a powderpuff of a book who’s main hypothesis was that nothing is ever her fault.

I think we saw, for all intents and purposes, the beginning of the end of Sarah Palin yesterday afternoon with her videotaped response to this past weekend’s shooting in Tucson..

Sadly though-the bitter “dead enders” who created her in the first place,  will not let her just go quietly into that great good night.

I think John Cole got this one right:

This post is a direct response to Phib’s post at his place.

When I get this project over-I am going to do a long post on why the argument that heated political rhetoric does not beget violence is wrong-and forcefully attack those who think they get some sort of a free pass from the ridiculous analogies told again and again to us by our Tri Corner hat wearing friends and all their blogger buddies.

For the record-it is perfectly legitimate to discuss whether the anti-government rhetoric has created a problem for this country, regardless of whatever the particulars of the Tucson shooter turn out to be.

Get over it-the right has gone too far, just as the left did 30+ years ago. Just because both sides did it-does not make it right.

Read:

On Debating Our Debate.

As we debate what kind of rhetoric is and isn’t objectionable, it would help if we could make some specific distinctions and keep some important things in mind. To that end:

Every gun metaphor is not created equal. Military metaphors infuse our talk about politics; the only thing that comes close is sports. The word “campaign” only relatively recently began to be used to refer to politics; its original use referred to military endeavors. But there is a difference between using metaphors that invoke violence (“We’re going to fight this battle to the end!”) and using rhetoric that invokes violence specifically directed at your opponents (like this), or even speaks literally of people arming to take on your opponents or the government (like Sharron Angle‘s infamous discussion of “Second Amendment remedies” to not getting the result you want at the ballot box). One is perfectly ordinary; the other ought to be condemned.

The fact that someone criticizes your rhetoric doesn’t mean they’re “blaming” you for the Arizona shooting. Right now, Sarah Palin‘s defenders are angrily denouncing people for “blaming” her for the shooting, because people have pointed to her now famous crosshair map of candidates she was targeting for defeat in 2010, including Gabrielle Giffords. But no one is saying this guy committed his massacre because he looked at this map. What people are saying is that this kind of thing goes too far. Certain things contribute to an atmosphere in which violence becomes more likely; criticizing those things doesn’t mean you’ve said that in the absence of one particular statement or Web posting this event wouldn’t have occurred.

If you think your rhetoric is above reproach, you have an obligation to defend it on its merits. Naturally, many on the right are going to attempt to turn the criticism of them around on the left: See how they’re playing politics! But if you think it’s perfectly fine for you to say what you’ve been saying, explain why. Attacking the motives of those criticizing you doesn’t qualify.

Asking you to tone it down is not censorship. Over at Slate, Jack Shafer defends inflammatory political speech by saying, in part, that “any call to cool ‘inflammatory’ speech is a call to police all speech.” As someone who has spent many years tangling with conservatives over their rhetoric, I’ve heard this argument a million times. When you criticize some talk-show host for something he said, he inevitably responds, “You can’t censor me!” The First Amendment guarantees your freedom to say whatever idiotic thing you want, but it doesn’t keep me from calling you out for it. No one is talking about throwing anyone in jail for extreme rhetoric, but we are talking about whether people should be condemned for certain kinds of rhetoric.

The rhetoric of violence is not the only kind of rhetoric that encourages violence. The apocalyptic rhetoric we’ve seen from some on the right, most notably Glenn Beck, should be part of this discussion too. When Beck portrays Barack Obama as the head of a socialist/communist/Nazi conspiracy whose goal is the literal destruction of America, he is implicitly encouraging violence. If that really were the nature of the administration, and our liberty really were on the verge of being snuffed out, violence would be justified.

If you’re going to say “Liberals do it too” then you ought to provide some evidence. No one disputes that there has been a tide of extreme and violent rhetoric from some quarters of the right in the last couple of years. But any journalist who characterizes this as a bipartisan problem ought to be able to show examples, from people equal in prominence to those on the right (i.e. members of Congress, incredibly popular radio hosts, etc.) who have said equally violent and incendiary things. ( Skippy note-this is key, finding some mean posters from an anti-war rally does not count. The protests of 2003 are not the same as those of 2009-period)“Harry Reid once called George W. Bush a liar” doesn’t qualify, nor does a nasty comment some anonymous person once left on a blog.

UPDATE!

Clive Crook over at the Atlantic has some good words too:

“What? Surely we can manage subtler distinctions than that. You know, “persuade” is not the same as “command”–that kind of thing. Still, he is right that you cannot legislate civility, and that it would be wrong (as well as plainly unconstitutional) to try. His big mistake, I think, is to see ceaseless anger and contempt as the formula for a healthy polity. Spirited, he calls it.

The problem with anger is that it makes it harder to think clearly. It’s just bad practice. You might not want to outlaw it, but it can’t hurt to understand the drawbacks. Also, in the end, we have to get on with people whose views we do not share. If we work ourselves up into mutual loathing, or antagonize the other guy to the point of incoherence, then we are unable to communicate. We cripple our ability to govern ourselves or live together happily. Even if the result is not physical violence, it is exaggerated political turbulence and discontent. Shafer seems to want as much of these as we can get, without actually coming to blows. Those African countries riven by tribe? They’re so spirited! Basically, aim for civil war, then pull it back just a notch.

It doesn’t sound like “a more perfect union” to me.

Sorry Phib-somethings are just wrong and need to be acknowledged as such. Trying to say that the stupidity of our politics over the last two plus years is all “the left’s” fault-and that this is “exploiting” the situation, is just not right.

And if we need any further proof of the futility of the equivalence arguement- or why there is no passable reason to be “disgusted” with those who are raising our current level of discourse as a subject for discussion-I give you this little tidbit to chew on. ( Because now I have to go back to spreadsheets and try to find a way to allocate a whole boatload of hours……to keep real people from getting screwed).

I don’t really blame conservatives for being upset at liberals trying pin the blame for the Giffords shooting on them, but the furious defensiveness of their counterattack says all that needs to be said about how uncomfortable they are with their own recent history. The big difference between right and left, as I and others have noted repeatedly, isn’t just in the amount of violent rhetoric, but its source. On the liberal side, it only occasionally comes from movement leaders. On the right, it regularly does. It comes from opinion leaders, political leaders, and media leaders, and the more heated they get, the more popular they get. As David Corn says, “Republicans have institutionalized their side’s craziness.” This is the big difference between the two sides, and the right could really stand to engage in a wee bit of soul searching over this.

It has taken me a little while to get around to this-but I did not let want to let it pass by without a comment.

Long time readers here may have noticed that the number of posts about my former employer and lifelong vocation, the United States Navy-has dropped.  It’s not for lack of interest, nor any regrets about my time in the Navy, but simply a feeling-not quite explainable-that it represents a part of my life that is now past. To be savored in my memory to be sure, but since I am not in the middle of it anymore, it is something that I cannot arouse great passion about now. I’ve not really explored the why of this-I just know  the feeling has changed. Perhaps it is just the living proof of the adage, “where you sit, determines what you see”. I’m sitting outside the stadium now-so it is hard to see the action on the field.

Nonetheless, every once in a while something so ridiculous comes along, that it arouses my anger at the stupid people who think they have a right to cast judgment on those of us who have been to sea.  This is one of those events:

That was fast. Sunday, the Virginian-Pilot posted a montage of lewd, “morale-boosting” videos that Capt. Owen P. Honors starred in, directed and broadcast to the crew of the USS Enterprise dating back to 2006-2007 when he was the ship’s executive (number two) officer. Tuesday, the Navy fired Honors, now captain of the ship, citing a “profound lack of good judgment and professionalism.”

Not, take note, conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.

So, now what? With the Navy, the Washington Post reports, set on a “broader investigation into whether senior Navy officials knew about the 4-year-old videos, and why they failed to take disciplinary action against Honors,” we once again seem to be embarking, rudderless, into the dangerous waters of the hydra-headed purge, gathering, sharpening, steeling, lusting for suspects. But of what crime? Not the one I would charge the unfortunately named Capt. Honors with.

The post-Tailhook Navy fetish, of course, remains sexually oriented — or, more accurate, sexual-orientationally oriented. (In the guise of an aviator persona, Honors lets fly some homosexual putdowns in the video, and later encounters same-sex couples in  the shower.) As one retired vice admiral put it to the Post, “What bothers me is that Capt. Honors’ behavior set a standard that allowed for sexual innuendo.”

Funny. What bothers me is that Capt. Honors’ behavior didn’t set any standard at all.

This should come as little surprise. Perhaps the greatest triumph of [feminism] in the last 25 years has been the junking of military standards regarding the sexes, a set of traditional attitudes that was slow to dismantle itself in the wake of the 1960s sexual revolution. Indeed, the military could be, and was, seen as a bulwark against the social changes wrought by a metastasizing feminism in the civilian world that would go on to kill, among other things,  such concepts as “mixed company” and its prohibitions on “bad language” and other social shields. These had allowed for the existence of now-lost refuges such as reticence and discretion, which, in turn, provided shelter for a kind of privacy and intimacy that is all but unimaginable in our over-exposed world of TMI (too much information)..

 

Now my first reaction as one of surprise-most “ Big XO’s” that I know of would never have even tried to make a video like this, nor would they have –in my observation-had the time . But at the same time-there is nothing in this video that is really offensive, when it is viewed from the standpoint of the average person who has and / or continues to serve on a Navy warship. Calling a SWO “Fagboy “ was de rigeur during my time, I assure you they had much worse names for us brown shoes. But woe be unto the outsider who calls my friendly neighborhood SWO a “fagboy”. Only we can do that to our pledges. That outsider would have quickly been escorted to the door of the bar-and thrown through it.

Furthermore, as I understand it, the Captain(s) involved curtailed these when it began to make certain powers that be uncomfortable. They are not a reason to curtail the career of a bright young officer who appears to have grasped how relate to a generation reared on video games. There used to be other, more discrete, ways to deal with transgressions that displeased the powers that be. Today, however, everything is solved with a summary execution.

Nor does the columnist above have it right either-the comments are not “anti” or “pro” sexual orientation as much as they are a back handed (and clever) negative commentary on the social engineering that is occurring within the armed services primarily to appease the demands of those who haven’t or won’t serve anyway. Don’t kid yourself, for all the talk about repeal of DADT or serving with gays,  ”it doesn’t matter”-trust me there is a sizable group who are not happy about yet another upheaval within the military culture. They will be professional and do their jobs-but it will exact a cost.

The service  today seems to prefer public whippings. I, for the life of me,  don’t understand why. The Navy could have instead treated more gently-for what is essentially a mild,  but localized distraction, while quietly ensuring it would not have happened again. Does short touring or letters of instruction not even happen anymore?  How many carrier CO’s and XO’s are there? 22. The grapevine word would have gotten out.

It’s a telling commentary on the gutlessness of our senior naval leadership that they refused to stand up and back up one of their own-and deal with the matter internally. ( Goes back to the “only we can beat our pledges” thing.). Rather the subliminal message they sent loud and clear to the JO’s and to the Chief’s mess is this ( Italics are Phib’s words, not mine):

“We disapproved, counseled our Shipmate, corrective action taken with remediation, and we moved forward.   And then,  at  the first sign that it might impact us-we cast him aside like broken toy. We really did not have any loyalty to him-only to ourselves and our perks. That he had obviously shown us that he had the smarts and the capability to lead and do his job since then-because we rewarded him with two subsequent commands-matters not a whit.”

Smiling they then walk off to their next appointment -thinking all the while that their Sailors didn’t hear that message.

But don’t kid yourself-the JO’s, the Chiefs, and the rest all heard loud and clear: Don’t trust your leadership to care about you.

Remember that when they walk out the door-or do only the minimal effort required to get by. You flags will have no one to blame but yourselves.

To be holed up inside the house because of this:

I needed the time to get caught up on this project. I spent most of the weekend holed up in my “man cave” writing draft after draft of a proposal and taking the occasional break to bang my head against the wall.

It is not that the work is that hard-but it is quite serious. In a lot of ways, the defense contracting business is similar to the world’s oldest profession. How to figure out how to get as much ass in your service-for the lowest possible price the market will bear.

Except, these are real people we are talking about here-and no matter how this turns out, real people are going to get screwed. People I know personally ( and possibly myself), and don’t deserve this kind of disrespect.

So this project weighs on me a lot. I know we have to get it right-and in a normal world we would have well over 60 days to so. With that kind of time this would be a relatively straightforward task and the weekends would be free.

But not our erstwhile task master. Who thinks its a good idea to staff a multi million dollar project in less than two weeks? I don’t-and I don’t know anyone else in the trenches who thinks it is either.

But such is the world we live in.

Snow keeps the phone from ringing-and that’s a good thing. Back to the salt mine……………

Steelers vs Ravens.

Somehow,  you just knew it would come down to this.

But hopefully not for long.

Yesterday was Laguna’s last day. Anyone who has ever made the walk up and down Jaffe Street and Lockhart Road in Hong Kong, knows how sad a development this is.  As Spike relays to us-even the South China Morning Post took notice:

“Maids’ Day at the ‘guna was one of the great attractions of Hong Kong. The room would be rocking on a Sunday afternoon,” one customer said. “I guess another place will come along eventually to replace it. But it seems like the fun police have had their way again.”

I’ll say- Laguna on a Saturday (Indonesians)or Sunday ( Filipina) afternoon was a thing of wonderment.

Fortunately-hope springs eternal:

The good news is that they’re taking over a new location, the space above Joe Banana’s that was formerly the home of Rockschool.  The concept will be the same, 90% of the staff will be making the move, but they will have a new name.  Look for the opening probably at the end of February.

Good! If by the grace of God, I am able to get back to Hong Kong this year-I don’t have to worry about getting run over by a taxi stumbling across the street from Joe Banana’s………….

Scott Adams sums up Curtis’ dilemma in reading this blog ( I’m Dilbert in the cartoon):

Shooting? What shooting?

Judging from the front page of the Shopping Mall USA fishwrapper, there was no shooting yesterday. That story was tucked down at the bottom of the front page in the lower right hand corner-with just two paragraphs. It was a very small block.

Why?

BECAUSE AUBURN PLAYS OREGON TOMORROW FOR THE DAMN BCS CHAMPIONSHIP!

After all-in Alabama what else could be more important than that? THAT was the entire front page today. (And a one sentence mention of the fact that we are going get 4+ inches of snow tomorrow. You would think the bumpkins here would be more than a little interested in that).

Morons.

Completely despicable.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head by a gunman at a public event on Saturday. There are conflicting reports about whether she was killed.

The Pima County, Ariz., sheriff’s office told member station KJZZ the 40-year-old Democrat was killed. At least nine other people, including members of her staff, were injured.

Giffords, who was re-elected to her third term in November, was hosting a “Congress on Your Corner” event at a Safeway in northwest Tucson when a gunman ran up and started shooting, according to Peter Michaels, news director of Arizona Public Media.

And when the finger pointing starts about what creates an environment that allows folks to do such terrible things-the rhetoric is going to get really ugly.

UPDATE: The shooter has been identified and the search of his My Space comments has begun.