On the NFL's Behavioral Issues

The same people who helped drive Tim Tebow out of the nation's spotlight for being too "God-y" and nice are upset the NFL's full of thugs.
— Hugs n Kisses (@Coondawg68) September 20, 2014

Subversive LOLs

Smile and laugh on, you gorgeous women of Turkey!

Headline: "Russia Needs to Learn the Value of Human Life"

Good luck with that.

Word of the Day: "Kafkatrapping"

Heh.  More here (by the way, I am Model T all the way, babe).  

Chinese Nerd News: Exams, Cheating, and Riots, Oh My!

*facepalm*

Mark Steyn on the Benghazi Debacle

Pretty much what I want to say, only with far more flair. A bon mot: 

"The government dispatched more firepower to arrest Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in Los Angeles than it did to protect its mission in Benghazi."

From Russia With Love

Via Neatorama comes this great collection of video clips from Russian dash cams.  You know, the news lately has been so full of awful reports, so jammed with terrible people doing terrible things.  We could all use a reminder that (a) there are good people out there doing good things, and (b) we should be among them.  Pretty darn fitting for a Sunday, actually.  Enjoy some lovely video, stay positive, and go do some good, gentle reader!   (PS: Chivalry lives!)

I think I have something in my eye.

Nerd News: the Atlanta Cheating Scandal

From earlier this week, which I missed because I was busy: SHAME:

Thirty-five Atlanta educators are expected to surrender Tuesday after being indicted in the biggest alleged cheating scandal involving standardized testing in American history. The list of suspects includes everyone from the former superintendent to principals and teachers. 

... Investigators say Atlanta's school district orchestrated a culture of cheating to benefit those at the top. 

Nearly 200 educators admitted to taking part in the massive scandal: they tampered with students' standardized tests and corrected answers to inflate scores. Some teachers had pizza parties to erase wrong answers and circle in the right ones. One principal allegedly handled altered tests wearing gloves to avoid leaving her fingerprints.

Book Review: "The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza" by Eyal Weizman (2012)

The book (or at least its intent) sounds interesting, and this review even more so since it actually uses the delightful and grossly underappreciated word "defenestrated" a few paragraphs in. Anyway, here's a blurb:

For Weizman, instead of regulating or limiting violence, international humanitarian law (that is, the laws of war) actually legitimates certain manifestations of it. This is due to the utilitarian logic that pervades our thinking about violence caused by states and their agents, reasoning that sees “the sphere of morality as a set of calculations aimed to approximate the optimum proportion between common goods and necessary evils.” According to Weizman, deeming certain evils “necessary” provides the conceptual cover for further acts of cruelty. What begins as a “pragmatic compromise” between two terrible choices becomes an acceptable logic in less than exceptional circumstances. The logic of the exception is widened; the infliction of suffering is made civilized and inevitable. Weizman focuses largely on the concept of proportionality.

Quote of the Day: Insta-Prof on Communists

The eminent law prof seems rather peppery:

Communists are no better than Nazis. Refusing to hire Communists is on the same moral plane as refusing to hire Nazis. Which is to say: It’s a good and admirable thing, not a sin. Go broke and starve, commies. It’s what you deserve for being eager, willing servants of totalitarianism.

Don't hold back, now.  Tell us what you really think!

In Flagrante: Scandal and Skulduggery

Having trouble keeping up with all this?  Me too. 4 thoughts:

• Lance Armstrong, David Petraeus, and now Elmo?
• L'affaire Petraeus gets stranger and stranger to the point that ...
• This is now a headline: "CIA Director David Petraeus Is The Only Sane Person In His Own Sex Scandal."
• Something from history: Allen Dulles as comparison.  

UPDATE 1: So ... Paula Broadwell, Jill Kelley, David Petraeus, some FBI agent, General John Allen, all muddled up with military and security concerns.  One gloriously snarky wag just quipped: "It's not a love triangle. It's a love Pentagon."

UPDATE 2: The Onion strikes again with this fake headline: "Nation Horrified To Learn About War In Afghanistan While Reading Up On Petraeus Sex Scandal."

UPDATE 3: How bad is this train wreck?  Professor Drezner has gotten sucked in and is watching this mess as if it were a soap opera.  Yup:

Look, let's be blunt -- as a responsible foreign policy blogger, I should be trying to divert your attention away from the tawdriness that is the David Petraeus scandal.  There's no shortage of other interesting stuff happening in the world.  Things like Argentina's slow-moving debt debacle, or the discord between the EU and IMF over Greece, or even the possibility of the United States overtaking Saudi Arabia as the world's top oil producer.  

The thing is, I can't, I just can't.  I'm weak, and the way this scandal has metastasized is friggin' incredible. 

What the hell.  If you're going to watch, you might as well call in some pizza!

FREE ADVICE: Don't send stupid emails. Especially (a) do not send threatening emails to some other girl if you yourself are indulging in some big-time double-adultery, and (b) do not send 30,000 emails to whomever you're carrying on a fling with.  (Still, 30,000 emails?)  

RELATED: The Secret Service's not-so-secret services.  Insta-Prof - um- nails it.

Totalitarian Communism Loses Another Useful Idiot

My opinion of historian and unrepentant Communist cheerleader and apologist Eric Hobsbawm is a matter of public record here.  Two weeks ago he shuffled off this mortal coil, and I didn't bother saying good riddance.  Still, here's an interesting little piece wondering whether you can be both a good historian and a Stalinist.  I think the real issue is how so many people didn't think that Hobsbawm's Communist totalitarian sympathies mattered.  Imagine, if you will, if he were an unrepentant Nazi apologist or Holocaust denier.  Nobody respectable in his august academic circles would dream of giving him the time of day ... well, almost nobody.

Film Culture Commentary: the 10 Worst Chick Flicks Ever Made, Or "Turn Off That Slop and Watch Buffy Instead"

Hear, hear!  You're already familiar with my critiques of The Notebook (#10) and Twilight (#1) the book, the actual movie, and also the entire phenomenon.

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey on the Moral Case for Capitalism

Take a look.  I love how Mackey starts off by noting the nannyish desires of those meddling busybodies who think they "know best."  Don't you also find the politicization of food to be terribly tiresome?  I know I do.

Fareed Zakaria, Plagiarist

SHAME ON YOU. On the up side, he can now try to excuse his idiotic analyses by saying that they weren't really his.

Thoughts on the HHS Mandate

I meant to post this when the mandate went into effect last week, but I was a bit distracted.  The issues are as relevant as ever, though.  This isn't about contraception.  This is about the state coercion of religious institutions, and this is not okay.  Hey, Sebelius et al - religious freedom?  You're doing it wrong.  (And as I think I've said before, we're all Catholics now.)

A Law Prof Ponders the HHS Mandate Catholic Lawsuit

You recall the recent slate of lawsuits filed by 43 Catholic institutions.  I had previously linked to an opinion by a Hahvahd law professor.  

Now here are some thoughts by a professor of constitutional law at the Catholic University of America as he eviscerates the New York Times' editorial on the subject: "The Times is wrong in every conceivable way about the mandate, religious-liberty law, and the lawsuits."  Oh, my!

The HHS Mandate, the Catholic Lawsuit, and "We're All Catholics Now"

Here are a few more thoughts about the massive slate of 12 lawsuits filed yesterday by 43 Catholic institutions including the University of Notre Dame. Blurbs:

Thoughts on North Carolina: "How to win a culture war and lose a generation"

Here is a pretty darn sensible blog post about the recent uproar about North Carolina's voting to amend its state constitution.  Here's a piece of it:

Despite the fact that the North Carolina law already holds that marriage in the eyes of state is only between a man and a woman, an amendment was put on the ballot to permanently ban same-sex marriage in the state constitution. The initiative doesn’t appear to change anything on a practical level, (though some are saying it may have unintended negative consequences on heterosexual relationships), but seems to serve primarily as an ideological statement. 

... an expensive, destructive, and impractical ideological statement.  

... it should be clear that amendments like these needlessly offend gays and lesbians, damage the reputation of Christians, and further alienate young adults—both Christians and non-Christian—from the Church.  

So my question for those evangelicals leading the charge in the culture wars is this: Is it worth it? 

Besides, I don't like the idea of tampering with constitutions, period.  Also a side effect of culture wars: everybody comes out looking and feeling worse, and everybody comes out more radicalized in one direction or the other - and this makes everything even worse than they were in the beginning.

Three Cups of Skulduggery: Greg Mortenson

Pay up.  Read the whole thing.