"His almost zealous commitment to moderation rankled some progressives, who had assumed that his soaring campaign rhetoric meant he was a visionary bent on overturning the status quo."

"Whenever he felt stuck, he fell back on empathy and 'process.' They sound like incommensurate traits — one is inventive and literary, the other is bland and technocratic. But for Obama — who in this book demonstrates an almost compulsive tendency to imagine himself into the lives of others (whether it’s Hillary Clinton, John McCain, or, in one passage, a Somali pirate) — a sound process 'was born of necessity.' Decisions that were made after taking into account a variety of perspectives reassured him that he wasn’t blinkered by his own...."

I'm reading "In ‘A Promised Land,’ Barack Obama Thinks — and Thinks Some More — Over His First Term" (NYT). This new book review, by the regular NYT nonfiction book critic Jennifer Szalai. 

The book is 700 pages long and only goes up to May 2011 — which means it includes "his roasting of Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 30 and the killing of Osama bin Laden the day after" but does not reach "the 2016 election, his abdication of his own 'red line' in Syria, the entrenchment of the surveillance state and a discussion of drone strikes." But, Szalai assures us, "This isn’t to say that 'A Promised Land' reads like a dodge." Ironically, that reads like a dodge. Szalai could be thinking that cutting off at May 2011 was a dodge, but the dodge was well-shrouded in contemplative prose so that it doesn't read like a dodge.

A South Koren court rules that a South Korean temple can keep a statue of Buddha that is known to have been stolen from a Japanese temple.

The statue was stolen by South Koreans in 2012...

But a South Korean temple, Buseoksa, which says the Buddha statue was made there in the 14th century, won a court injunction in 2013 preventing its return until it could be determined whether it had originally been brought to Tsushima legitimately.

The statue, of the Buddha in the lotus position, has been in the government’s custody since then, and on Thursday a district court in Daejeon, a city south of Seoul, ruled that it should be given to Buseoksa...

The temple’s chief monk, the Venerable Wonwoo, hailed the ruling as a milestone that should inspire South Koreans to try to bring home what he claimed were 70,000 ancient Korean artifacts that had been looted and brought to Japan.

So... steal things now, bring them back to their place of origin, and the fact of the known recent theft is overridden by the possibility that they were stolen long ago?

It's not quite that easy. There was some evidence that it was stolen — a document inside the statue showed its time and place of origin but not a record of transferring ownership, Japanese pirates were active at the relevant time and place, and there's some burn damage on the statue, possibly caused by pirates. The South Korean judge said that was good enough to rule that the statue belongs to the South Korean temple.

But what happens now? Venerable Wonwoo seems to be openly encouraging South Koreans to swipe their artifacts back from Japan. He's saying there are 70,000 of them. And yet the modern-day thieves still face criminal charges for theft. Buseoksa got to keep this statue. That doesn't mean the men who lifted it from Japan didn't face criminal charges.

I'm sorry, I just got distracted looking back at the story of why O.J. Simpson is in prison. But that happened in Nevada. I have no idea how a South Korean court would analyze such matters, nor do I have a good grasp of the current political sensibilities in South Korea about Japan.

Maybe it was named after the buccaneer Peter Wallace.

Belize — our "History of" country today. It's a legend, that the Spanish pronunciation of "Wallace" was Ballis and hence Belize. Belize. Do you know where it is? It's crammed in between Mexico and Guatamala.

In places that today look like this...



... the Mayans flourished and then they were gone. We don't really know why. You can blame the Spanish. (Why not? They deserve it.) But Mayan civilization had collapsed by the time the Spanish got there. Then the English arrived, by shipwreck, in 1638. Squabbling between the Spanish and the English went on for a long time, and there was a lot of piracy and "indiscriminate logging."

"I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it."

"But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it."



Today, the "History of" project brings us to...

"The good thing is that this is so insipidly solipsistic that I think she's going to have ruined the Vagina book like Cutthroat Island destroyed the pirate film."

"Might be 15 years before someone gambles with Vaginas of the Caribbean."

Also at that link: "My Vagina is Large; It Contains Multitudes. Who knew the female sex-organ was so chatty?"

***

The passage...

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

... has 19 highlighters in my Kindle version of "Leaves of Grass."

Hey, remember the role of "Leaves of Grass" in the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal?

Feb. 28: After she attended the taping of Clinton's radio show, she had her picture taken with him. He told her to see his secretary Betty Currie because he had something for her. Currie accompanied Lewinsky into the study next to the Oval Office. Then Currie walked into the nearby pantry, where she waited for about 15 minutes while Lewinsky and the president had a sexual encounter -- their first in 11 months. Then he gave her a hat pin and Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." Lewinsky later discovered that the blue dress she had worn that day was stained with his semen.

Speaking of containing multitudes!

"American commandos raced into Somalia early Wednesday and rescued two aid workers..."

"... an American woman and a Danish man, after a shootout with Somali pirates who had been holding them captive for months."

One American official said an assault team of Special Operations troops parachuted in from fixed wing aircraft, not helicopters, under cloak of darkness to a landing area about a mile’s walk from the actual target. The paratroopers landed, then walked to an encampment where the kidnappers where holding the two hostages.

Within minutes, shots rang out. The hostages were located and secured. Nine Somalis were killed and an unknown number wounded in the ensuing firefight with the commandos. No Somali prisoners were taken....

"Well, it's pretty embarrassing when you can't even handle pirates."

Instapunditry on the reason for the "muted outcry in Washington" after pirates kill 4 Americans:

President Obama did not issue a statement on the tragedy. White House spokesman Jay Carney said that the administration was "obviously outraged by the actions of the pirates."

"And the president, as you know, I believe, has expressed his sincere condolences to the families of the victims," Carney said at a press briefing. "But beyond that, I don't want to get into details."

Obviously... What counts as "obvious" these days? Apparently nothing more that the assumption that he must feel bad about it, even when he says nothing.

"How do you like to go up in a swing/Up in the air so blue?"

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside--

Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown--
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!

"The Swing," by Robert Louis Stevenson...



... from "A Child's Garden of Verses." I've known that poem by heart as long as I've known... anything.

Stevenson was born 160 years ago today, something I learned after noticing the Google-doodle, which is completely pirate- and not swing-oriented.

Bonus Stevenson material:

"The film begins moments after the sinking of the Titanic."

"All who have drowned are brought back to life by a futuristic race of mermaids, called the Mantocks, who welcome the humans to their underwater paradise. Soon after, JACK DAWSON is elected king of the underwater humans. DAWSON requests that all humans be returned above water, a request that is denied by KING MANTROCK. The humans are slowly brainwashed into worshiping their mermaid saviors. Meanwhile, the sunken TITANIC has become a haunted underwater wasteland inhabited by RAGGARO and his band of mermaid pirates. Will the humans ever free themselves from their mermaid slavery? Will the mermaid pirates wage war on Mantock?"

(Via Cinematical, via NY Mag.)

Nick Gillespie gets soooo intellectual about the basis for judging Reason Magazine's "Everybody Draw Mohammed" contest...

... that I was forced to look up his educational background. Turns out he has a PhD in English literature. Ah, it makes too much sense to me.

Now, they got 190 entries in the contest. (I disapprove of the "Draw Mohammed" day, you should know.) I would love to see what the whole pile of drawings looked like. How many were stick figures or crude scratchings on the level of the "Draw Me" pirate? How many were loaded with embarrassingly violent or racial fantasy? I wish someone had had the foresight to film a documentary of these Reason guys cooking up their contest and then opening the various envelopes? I wonder if there was a point — one particular drawing? — when they felt bad about what they were doing.  And then something pushed them in the direction of getting super-elitist intellectual about picking the winners.

In coming to a consensus, we discussed standard concerns such as originality of vision, playfulness, a sense of proportion (both in terms of craftmanship and message), and relevance to the goals of the contest.

See? Read between the lines! What were they looking at when they reached that consensus? How many pieces of paper went into the discard pile over "craftsmanship"? How much did they laugh as they did a first cut over craftsmanship, and what did they say as they tossed these things aside? I would love to have been a fly on the wall... or a vole in the corner. "Sense of proportion"... what were the drawings that made them frame that standard? "Originality"? What percent of the artists drew Muhammad as a dog or as a guy with a turban-bomb? "Playfulness"... throw all the gruesome, gory things over there. "Relevance to the goals of the contest"... ha ha... so many of you scribblers did not get it. You thought it was about telling Muslims their prophet is evil, and not that free expression is precious. You fools! Did you think Nick Gillespie went to grad school for this?! 

Okay, I'm picturing approximately 90% of the drawings eliminated over these standards.

So Gillespie reveals the true test of a proper "Draw Mohammed" drawing.

The single most important element...

It's one thing.

.... and the thing that ties these selections together–is that each image forces the viewer to do two things.

I mean... it's 2 things!

First, they consciously call into question the nature of representation, no small matter in fights over whether it is allowed under Islamic law to depict Mohammed (for the historical record, there is no question that the idea that is always wrong is only of recent vintage; there is a long history of sacred and superficial images of the Prophet). The homage to Rene Magritte below states "This is not a pipe. This is Muhammed"...

He's translating the French for us. (And respelling "Muhammad" as "Muhammed," splitting the difference between the contest-name spelling — "Mohammed"— and the artist's use of the presumably politically correct spelling — "Muhammad.")

... playing with the surrealist's famous statement about the necessary disjuncture between a picture and the thing it seeks to represent. 

An insight that somehow fascinated people who studied post-modernism circa 1990. (Gillespie received his English PhD in 1996. I'd love to know more about what he studied. Can we see his dissertation?)

Just as the drawing is not a pipe (it's a drawing of a pipe), it cannot be Mohammed even as it insists it is. Even more, it is plainly not even a drawing of Mohammed or of any human figure.

Similarly, the invocation of the popular Where's Waldo? series forces the viewer to ask Where's Mohammed?, and to begin a hunt for a figure in the midst of an overstuffed scene. One assumes the black-robed character in the upper right-hand quadrant of the image is our quarry, but then what does it mean to confer on a small dot any significance whatsoever?

Second, each of the images forces the viewer to actively participate not simply in the creation of meaning but of actually constructing the image itself. This is clearest in our grand prize winner, the image below, which pushes iman and infidel alike to do the work that would condemn them to death under the most extreme reading of injunctions against representing Mohammed.

I like the way the winner — with a connect-the-dots puzzle — avoided drawing Muhammad altogether. Man, if I entered a "draw Mohammed" contest and the winner didn't even draw Mohammed, I'd be kind of pissed... and reading Gillespie's revelation of the highly intellectual but previously secret standards would not calm me down. "Reason"?! Bah!

The 1960s look.

I was enjoying this selection of photos of women who exemplified 1960s style. Lots of iconic prettiness. But then I hit this one:



Ha ha.

And here's a bonus 60s style video — fashions by Elizabeth Taylor, with Patti Boyd modeling, and George Harrison, John Lennon, and Richard Burton gawking.

My secret is out!

(Thanks to Paddy O.)

"Sirs, the smiles will leave your faces when the walls come tumbling in..."

We lady pirates stick together.

"We may be No. 1, but there is sort of an insurgent quality to Fox News."

"And that's kind of our attitude: 'Hoist a Jolly Roger, pull out our daggers and look for more throats to slit.' This is tremendous fodder for us. My lord, we've been living on it."

Hunter was hired to make videos of Edwards, "but this one is said to have shown him taking positions that weren’t on his official platform."

The Daily News gossip column quipped about the report that there's a John Edwards/Rielle Hunter sex tape.

This sets Popehat off, riffing wildly on sexual wordplay, for example, here:

This brings us, of course, to pirates. How did it come to pass that “to take one’s foot” became an idiom for orgasm? Prior to the Revolution, and therefore prior to the metric system, the French used measurements akin to the imperial system. When corsairs went to divide their spoils after a stint of rapine, each would naturally demand his portion of the whole. The allotted part, by convention, was a foot-high mound of booty. No, really.

Taking his foot of gold was the pirate’s pleasure. Since not everything that happens in Tortuga stays in Tortuga, taking the foot gradually became anyone’s pleasure in anything... And just as a noble, sexy, piraty bit of bawd has by now been stripped bare by its broad overuse in French, so too has the vitality of allusiveness in English suffered under the weight of too popular a press. We’ve seen enough; it’s time to close your eyes and think of English.

Maybe you'd better go over there and see how this all fits together.

The pirate smiles the fabulous smile of celebrity.

Enlarge.

Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse, thinking I'm a big star in America now.

UPDATE: The pirate cries.

Is Rush Limbaugh really that hard to understand?

Some perfectly intelligent folks just don't see where the jokes are.

"The pirates could only lament their littleness befor[e] the vast number of dolphins. The spectacular scene continued for a while."

"Thousands of dolphins blocked the suspected Somali pirate ships when they were trying to attack Chinese merchant ships passing the Gulf of Aden, the China Radio International reported on Monday."

Obama's military victory.

Small, but nice.

[A] dramatic and successful rescue operation by U.S. Special Operations forces... left Obama with an early victory that could help build confidence in his ability to direct military actions abroad.

Throughout the past four days, White House officials played down Obama's role in the hostage drama. Until yesterday, he made no public statements about the pirates.

In fact, aides said yesterday, Obama had been briefed 17 times since he returned from his trip abroad, including several times from the White House Situation Room. And without giving too many details, senior White House officials made it clear that Obama had provided the authority for the rescue.

"The president's focus was on saving and protecting the life of the captain," one adviser said. Friday evening, after a National Security Council telephone update, Obama granted U.S. forces what aides called "the authority to use appropriate force to save the life of the captain." On Saturday at 9:20 a.m., Obama went further, giving authority to an "additional set of U.S. forces to engage in potential emergency actions."

Thanks to President Obama for the military victory and for giving us and himself confidence in his ability and willingness to use the military.

The operation pales in scope and complexity to the wars underway in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Obama's adversaries are unlikely to be mollified by his performance in a four-day hostage drama.

Hey, I'm mollified. (Or does that make me not an Obama adversary? I did vote for him, but I'm always dogging him for one thing or another.) Mollify me some more, Obama. Build on this victory.

Nonetheless, it may help to quell criticism leveled at Obama that he came to office as a Democratic antiwar candidate who could prove unwilling or unable to harness military might when necessary.

I'm quelled. I'm quelled. I'm mollified and I'm quelled. Now, more of the same, please.

Pirates defeated.

Captain freed.