I always have a strange and some would say heartless view of tragedies like the Boston Marathon bombing. It is not that I am not engaged by such events. Rather, it is that I feel that it is wrong to elevate such events above the tragedy that we allow day after day. If this is like most days, 25 people were murdered throughout the country. Countless others were badly injured because of violent acts. I don’t think any of these are more or less tragic, although obviously I would if any of them directly affected me. If there is anything good about such events, it is that it reminds me (at least) of all the people harmed every day. Unfortunately, especially after Sandy Hook, I have come to think that as a nation, our only response will be to make matters worse.

Of course, I am interested in what is going on. One or more people went to great lengths to kill three people and injure at least 140 more. And unlike most murders, which are crimes of overwrought passions, a crime such as this is not only premeditated, but carefully calculated. It is hard to imagine it being the result of anything but that bizarre ability that people have to place ideology (politics, religion, whatever) above human life. I think such people must justify it by thinking that they are willing to die for their “cause” so it is all right to kill for it. Of course, such people never die for their causes willingly. That’s why people like Thich Quang Duc are so remarkable: because they are so rare.

But I don’t know, of course. The whole thing could just be the result of some disaffected teens who thought that detonating some bombs and killing some people would be cool. That’s just the point: other than the perpetrators, no one knows at this point. But that didn’t stop the news of the day after 3:00 pm from being made up almost exclusively with much wringing of hands by reporters and pundits. I managed to see one press conference which explained in great detail that the authorities don’t know anything and can’t comment on all the things they don’t know.

As I write this, I’m interested why someone would do such a thing. But when it is finally sorted out, I doubt it will be very edifying. I suspect that it will come down to some group of people who were mad about something that had nothing to do with the Boston Marathon, much less any of the people who were harmed. There never is a good reason why we kill each other. It’s always some variation on, “She slept with my husband.” It’s all just a big property rights conflict. But there is something about the wringing of hands and looking for simple reasons for pointless acts that strikes me as unsavory.

I think it gets much easier on the TV news staff to have such tragedies. It is 12 hours after the bombing, and other than a better casualty count, we don’t know any more. Yet cable news has been jawing away that whole time. And I suppose I find the parts where they say that their hearts go out to the victims the hardest to stomach. I just don’t buy it—not any more than if they said their hearts went out to all the other victims today.

What is audacious about hope? In general, I think the answer is nothing. There could be something. If you combine hope with a strong will and commitment, then it can be audacious indeed. But I’ve never gotten the idea that Obama means this. Instead, he seems to offer nothing more than the hope that we will all come together and sing Kumbayah. Sure, his perfect world is likely very similar to mine. But is he willing to fight for it? No.

In most ways, what the last four years have shown is that Obama goes along to get along. That is nowhere more clear than in his continued prosecution of the supposed war on terror. Glenn Greedwald wrote an article that documents the many ways that Obama is primarily responsible for the injustice that is the Guantanamo prison. To start off, he notes that Obama never wanted to close it; he only wanted to move it to Illinois. And an Obama task force that looked into the prisoners decided that “48 detainees were determined to be too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution.” In other words: people we will never release. I don’t even understand this. It seems to me that most of the evidence that has been used to convict these people in the past is pretty bad. If they don’t even have evidence that is that good, how can they possibly believe that these detainees are dangerous? This just sounds like, “I don’t like the cut of your jib so I’m never letting you out.”

By far the biggest sin that Obama continues to commit is his ban on releasing any detainees to Yemen. More than half of the detainees are from Yemen. Most of these have been cleared for release—many, long ago. And yet they sit in prison because Obama freaked out about a terror attack. I guess that he is hoping that there will never again be any terrorism so that he will be free to release people who are even innocent by the “cut of your jib” standard.

This last bit is totally on Obama. I think there are two ways to see Obama when it comes matters like these. Either he is committed to the same world view as Dick Cheney or he is a coward. I tend to think it is a mix of both. Certainly we know that Obama has no iconoclastic tendencies. The installed power structure has been very, very good for him. But the bigger issue is that he is afraid. And that’s nothing short of evil. Placing your own political power above the very lives of innocents is evil. It is also the very basis of United States foreign policy.

And I have no hope at all that it will change.

Steve Stockman is a funny guy, but I am still compelled to go all pedant on his ass. A “fetus” with a gun could shoot it’s way out. After which it would be taken to a lab where it would be studied, very carefully.

However, Stockman’s droll theory is inaccurate. A baby with a gun can’t abort an abortion any more than it could use it to protect the right to have a gun fetish – a constitutional right that, despite mass paranoia, is in no danger of being taken away from (hardly) anyone.

On the other hand, a child with a gun can accomplish a lot. Accidental suicide and murder for example. Children have an uncanny ability to shoot people right in the head. They’re like freakin’ Navy Seals.

Of course not everyone has access to weaponry at such a young age, so by the time they can get their hands on a gun they often turn to semi-automatics. When lacking the skill for accuracy, go for quantity.

So if you can’t legally abort a fetus, just wait until it’s a toddler and then leave a gun lying around. You’ll have a 50/50 chance that the kid will self-deport himself, but if he misses and shoots someone else, he’ll be taken off your hands before you can say, “I only looked away for a minute”.

On this day in 1707, one of the greatest mathematicians ever, Leonhard Euler was born. The great novelist Henry James was born 1843. Muralist Thomas Hart Benton was born in 1889. Nikita Khrushchev and Bessie Smith were born in 1894. The iconoclastic psychologist Thomas Szasz was born in 1920. And Elizabeth Montgomery was born in 1933.

Conductor Neville Marriner is 89 today. Roy Clark is 80. And Emma Thompson is 54.

But the day belongs to Leonardo da Vinci who was born on this day in 1452. Truly, I would have liked to give the day to Euler, but really, it’s da Vinci. Just look at that image above: in addition to everything else, he studied fetus development. What could I do?

Happy birthday Leonardo da Vinci!

Have you seen the opening to this weekend’s Saturday Night Live? The skit makes fun of what I wrote about last week: The Great Liberal Gun Policy Victory. In the end, I argued, what we would get is a law that is almost useless. I’m never one to avoid accountability, so let me lay it on the line: I was wrong.

The law will be worse than useless.

Karen Tumulty and Ed O’Keefe reported at the Washington Post, Gun Debate in Senate Likely to Feature Amendments to Weaken or Strengthen Laws. They pointed out that the gun lobby and their pals “are working on a series of amendments that could have the opposite effect—loosening many of the restrictions that exist in current law.”

What kind of amendments? Things that far outweigh anything positive in the bill:

You may be wondering, what are those amendments that could “strengthen” the law that the title of the article refers to. Well, in the article, they only mentioned one: the assault weapons ban. And they noted that it has effectively no chance of passing. But that concealed carry reciprocity? Last time the Senate voted on it, it got 58 votes.

Things are not quite as bad as it seems, however. Everyone thinks that if these amendments get passed, it will just kill the bill. And maybe that is for the best. As Jonathan Chait noted this morning, “Any real effort to address the plague of mass gun violence will require not a catalyzing event, or even a string of them, but years of organizing and effort.” I would only add that the liberals have to stop meeting conservatives 90% of the way. The worse case scenario, as we see with concealed carry reciprocity, is much worse than 100% failure. Wouldn’t it be sad if our response to Sandy Hook was to make such tragedies more likely.

Found this on the Doonesbury site:

“Our campaign bumper sticker: If babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted.” —Rep. Steve Stockman

Of course not. An armed fetus is a murder-suicide waiting to happen.

When I was a kid, I loved the film Zulu. I still do. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to be painfully aware of its ethnocentrism. So when I saw that Zulu Dawn, the film about the events that led up to the Anglo-Zulu War, was available for Instant Watch on Netflix, I was very pleased. Cy Endfield, the man who directed Zulu, was lead author of the screenplay for Zulu Dawn. And as much as there are historical inaccuracies in Zulu, it was exceptionally accurate for its time. Zulu Dawn, produced in 1979, is still considered historically accurate.

I’m not that interested in the film itself. It isn’t that well made. The dialog scenes are not recorded well, and it is hard to understand what is being said without subtitles. The battle scenes that make up most of the second half of the film are well done, but not all that important if the viewer doesn’t understand what went before. I think it is a problem of direction. And I say this with due respect to the director, Douglas Hickox, who made one of my very favorite films, Theatre of Blood. (Admittedly, from my perspective, it would be hard to go wrong combining Shakespeare and gore.)

For those of you not familiar, I guess I should clarify. The film takes place in 1879 in British South Africa. The colony there is surrounded by Zululand. But the Zulus and the colonists are happy doing their own things. They get along fine. Unfortunately, Sir Henry Bartle Frere and Lord Chelmsford (Peter O’Toole) want to start a war. So Brere sends a letter to Cetshwayo, King of Zululand. It says, more or less, we don’t like how you run your country so do things our way. Or else.

Cetshwayo responds: screw you. But he says he won’t do anything as long as they don’t come into his territory. Anyway, Cetshwayo has more important things to do: it’s harvest time. But of course, Chelmsford (who is also a general) uses this as a pretext to invade. Chelmsford thinks that the Zulu army is just going to move around and refuse to engage him. But he’s wrong. And the locals tell him so. Colonel Durnford (Burt Lancaster) tell him that Cetshwayo wants to push the conflict so he can get to the harvest. But the general doesn’t believe him. What’s more, rather than trusting Durnford’s intelligence about where the main Zulu forces are, Chelmsford splits up his army and goes after what turns out to be a Zulu feint. Need I note that the insightful colonel is where the big attack comes and the foolish general is where all is calm?

What I was most taken with was Cetshwayo. This isn’t in the movie, just history. He knew that he was screwed. Even though he needed to defeat the British and get on with what really matters in life (eating), he knew that a British defeat would only make the British attack them all out. He was doing his best to avoid this, however. He gave strict instructions that his people should not cross the river into the colonial land. So he was extremely angry at the following attack on Rorke’s Drift that is dramatized in Zulu. But as he predicted, the British later attacked with a well-armed force of 15,000 men and deposed him.

The postscript is that the British actions threw the region into civil war. Only four years later, the British tried to put Cetshwayo back in power, but it was too late. As they say in the military, it was FUBAR. And one way or another, it stayed that way for over a hundred years.

I don’t mean to be too hard on the British. For one thing, it wasn’t the people generally (or even the government) who wanted the war. But that’s how it usually is, right? Very few people in America wanted the Iraq War—at least until it was sold to them. But what we see in both wars is what we see in all wars: going in it seems like a great idea; coming out it seems like a catastrophe. And only this week, we had a liberal historian calling for a new glorious war in North Korea. Will we ever learn?[1]

[1] No.

When we find we must spend time disabusing students of Christian origins of the red herrings strewn about with gleeful abandon by apologists, we critics of traditional supernaturalism find ourselves in a strange and seemingly ironic position. We view ourselves, contrary to the perspective our own critics and debating opponents have on us, as the true champions and friends of the Bible. We are viewed as insidious villains seeking to undermine the belief of the faithful, trying to push them off the heavenly path and into Satan’s arms. But this is not how we view ourselves at all. Whatever religious or nonreligious convictions we have, we find ourselves entering the field, as we see it, as the champions and zealots for a straightforward and accurate understanding of the Bible as an ancient text, and of the resurrection accounts as natural accoutrements of such literature. In our opinion, it is the fundamentalist, the apologist for Christian supernaturalism, who is propagating false and misleading views of the Bible among the general populace. We are not content to know better and to shake our heads at the foolishness of the untutored masses. We want the Bible to be appreciated for what it is, not for what it is not. And it is not a supernatural oracle book filled with infallible dogmas and wild tales that must be believed at the risk of eternal peril.

There was a generation of Bible debaters who naively took for granted that the Bible made the claims that its misguided proponents made for it. But we belong to a newer generation. We do not hate the Bible or view it as another version of Mein Kampf, as some critics of religion have. We do not seek to debunk it, for it is not bunk, any more than the Iliad or Beowulf is bunk. To frame the issue in such terms is itself a foolish fundamentalism in reverse. The arguments of this book are not attempts to debunk the Bible but to understand it better as what it is: a great ancient text of mythology. When we attack the arguments of apologists, we believe ourselves to be doing the same sort of thing our Classicist colleagues would be doing if they had to reckon with an eccentric movement of apologists for the Olympian gods, zealots who wanted to convince people they must believe in Zeus and Achilles. Classicists would rally to the cause precisely because they loved the old texts and did not want to stand by and allow them to be distorted and made to look ridiculous by grotesque demands that they are literally true!

—Robert M. Price
The Empty Tomb (pp. 15-16)

Helen Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan was born on this day back in 1866. I didn’t realize it, but Keller outlived Sullivan by 32 years, but I suppose she was more critical at the beginning than the end. The great Shakespearean actor John Gielgud was born in 1904. And you thought he was just the butler in Arthur. Rod Steiger, actor in On the Waterfront and my favorite Sergio Leone film Duck, You Sucker! was born in 1925. Thunderbirds creator Gerry Anderson was born in 1929. And Richard Jeni was born in 1957.

Game theory economist Thomas Schelling is 92 today. Loretta Lynn is 81. Honest cop Frank Serpico is 77. Julie Christie is 72 (I loved her is McCabe & Mrs. Miller). And baseball great Pete Rose is also 72. Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling is 59. And actor Robert Carlyle is 52.

But the day belongs to the creator (more or less) of the wave theory of light. On this day back in 1629, Christiaan Huygens was born. But like many of that day, he did a lot more. I don’t feel like going into it, but click over. He was a very interesting guy.

Happy birthday Christiaan Huygens!

Jeremi Suri wrote a remarkable op-ed in the New York Times on Friday, Bomb North Korea, Before It’s Too Late. What I find so interesting is that Suri is not some Fox News shouter. He seems to be more or less a liberal, or at least what passes for one in modern America. He is also a history professor at University of Texas, Austin—despite what many people seem to think, one of the best schools in the world.

Let me see if I can break down his argument: (1) North Korea is going to launch a missile; (2) we should bomb it first; (3) Obama should state that this attack on a sovereign country is defensive; and (4) we will never have trouble with North Korea again! He also “knows” lots of stuff: “precise satellite reconnaissance” tells us where the missile is; “civilians face serious danger” from North Korea; the strike would “preserve regional stability”; it is “unlikely that Mr. Kim would retaliate by attacking South Korea”; and most shockingly of all, “the Chinese government would do everything it could to prevent” a counter attack from North Korea.

Suri goes on to admit that, well, maybe North Korea would counter attack, just to save face. But then he write—and this is important—”Under these unfortunate circumstances, the United States and its allies would still be better off fighting a war with North Korea today, when the conflict could still be confined largely to the Korean Peninsula.” You got that? He’s offering Bush’s great Iraq War justification, “We’re fighting them there, so we don’t have to fight them here.” I am shocked that an otherwise reasonable person would make this argument today.

What is most naive about Dr. Suri’s argument is that other countries will accept our assurances. The North Koreans are supposed to believe that we aren’t seeking regime change. The Chinese are supposed to believe that we aren’t going to occupy the Korean peninsula. And the world is supposed to believe that our attack is defensive. I have three answers to this assurances. First, attacking North Korea will make its government look bad and potentially cause a coup or some other form of destabilization. Second, if we go to war and win, we will have to occupy the Korean peninsula, at least for a while. Third, we said the Iraq War was purely defensive too.

It is only too easy for pundits and academics to call for war. They don’t have to fight and die. But given all that this country has been through the last 15 years, I can’t understand where Jeremi Suri is coming from. If bellicose rhetoric was a reason for war, we would have had World War III in the 1950s. People like Suri are dangerous. They need to be countered.

H/T: The Reaction