The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Rule 5 Sunday: Transfer Station Blue

Posted on | December 22, 2013 | 19 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I was strongly tempted to put this off until tomorrow due to sheer inertia and a lack of gumption, but you folks have been good this week and deserve your b00bies. As usual, take care not to click the links where & when you shouldn’t.

Randy’s Roundtable leads off this week with Sarah Mutch, followed by Laughing Conservative with Candice Swanepoel, Fishersville Mike with some Duck Dynasty Rule 5, and Goodstuff with some Twisted Christmas stuff including Kate Moss. Ninety Miles From Tyranny checks in with Morning Mistress, Hot Pick of the Late Night, and Girls With Guns; Blackmailers Don’t Shoot takes it in a different direction with Inked Girls. Lowering the Boom spotlights Lt. Amy Washburn, former Eagles cheerleader, now working intel for the Army; we don’t know if any of these Estonian ladies noted by First Street Journal are former cheerleaders, but I think they’d make the cut.

EBL’s herd of notable heifers this week includes Denise Richards and Alyssa Milano, some of the gals from Duck Dynasty and Petticoat Junction, and Bad Santa (allegedly for the ladies); also, a double serving of vintage Hollywood Christmas Rule 5.

A View From The Beach has Santa’s Little Helpers, You Want Fries With That?, George Washington’s Fish, Maybe Drew Carey Was Onto Something, World To Remain Mens’ Oyster (with cavegirl content), Breaking News: Charlie Sheen Still An A$hole, RIP Joan Fontaine and Peter O’Toole, Au Revoir To A Bad Girl, The Great Inter-generational Dance-Off, and The Mommy Warriors.

At Soylent Refuge, it’s a good to remember that with breakfast (and other meals) presentation counts. The Monday Motivationer has some mirror mirror action, followed by Tuesday Titillation Sandra and Sublime Cameltoe Too. Humpday Hawt window shopping follows, with Evening Awesome Tyran, Falconsword Fursday Vroom, Overnighty Jennifer, Corsetcare Castanets, T-GIF Friday Isometrics, Afternoon Awesome Irish, and the weekender – 50 Shades Of Pink.

American Power returns with Alessandra Ambrosio, Kate Upton, Rosie In Red White And Blue, Andrea Tantaros, Rhian Sugden, Kelly Brook, and its own version of Rule 5 Sunday.

Proof Positive’s Babe of the Week is Michelle Borth, his vintage babe is Joan Fontaine, Sex in Advertising is once again covered by Victoria’s Secret, and of course there’s the obligatory 49ers cheerleader. Dustbury goes for the trifecta with Tatyana Rodos, Angie Harmon, and Nicole de Boer; Three Beers Later chips in with Rachel Washburn.

The DaleyGator’s DaleyBabes this week included Akina Aoshima, Hideo Kamibayashi, Amanda Roadmen, Cassidy Hubbarth, Erika Medina, Ayumi Hayama, Diana Morales, Megu Fujiura, and Nina Minami. Also, BIKINIS!, Christmas Babes, and Asian Women.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for next week’s Rule 5 Sunday will be midnight Saturday, December 28.


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Category: Rule 5

A Positive Aspect Of The “Duck Dynasty” Kerfuffle: Identifying The Fools

Posted on | December 22, 2013 | 45 Comments

by Smitty

Such as O. Wesley Allen Jr.:

But other Bible experts said the Scripture Robertson cited isn’t quite clear about homosexuality.
“A lot of people misread this text because it’s so complicated,” said O. Wesley Allen Jr., an associate professor at Lexington Theological Seminary in Kentucky.
First, scholars say, we have to look at the context surrounding Paul’s letter.
The Christian leader is trying to get the quarreling Corinthians to stop taking each other to civil courts and being judgmental. “The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already,” Paul says.
Things were supposed to be different after they became Christian believers, Paul continues; they were supposed to stop their sinful ways.

There are plenty of areas for conjecture about the Bible, especially the beginning of creation and the apocalyptic end.

But to try to say that the Bible, at any point, is less than clear when it comes to sexuality is a public confession of unreliability. The human form is the human form. The reproductive system is not the digestive system. Sexual activity outside of marriage (which I should not have to state means the heterosexual context, not any of the current ‘novel’ geometries) means falling short of the optimal.

The clarification is welcome. We know whom to ignore. The other good news, as with the Chick-Fil-A blowback, is that the tolerant, easy-going Christians in this country are awakening to the danger of getting pushed around by the godless Commie sodomites who’ve trashed our culture and politics.

This is a crucial step in recovering the situation.

Category: Culture

Crime Is a People Problem

Posted on | December 22, 2013 | 19 Comments

How many times have I said this? A lot: The key to crime prevention is to identify, apprehend and imprison criminals. People who commit serious crimes also usually commit petty crimes, and by the time you actually catch a criminal and convict him on a serious charge, he’s probably already gotten away with numerous minor crimes.

It’s the Al Capone Principle: The infamous mobster was responsible for a vast criminal enterprise, but all they could convict him for was federal tax evasion. OK, fine, lock him up on this relatively minor crime but please, for the love of God, lock him up!

This came to mind as I read the news from New Jersey:

Nearly a week after 30-year-old Hoboken lawyer Dustin Friedland was gunned down in a deadly carjacking while returning to his vehicle in an upper level parking deck of the Mall at Short Hills, police this morning arrested four men on charges of murder.
The four, were identified as Karif Ford, 31, Basim Henry, 32, Kevin Roberts, 35, all of Newark, and Hanif Thompson, 29, of Irvington. All were being held at the Essex County Correctional Facility on $2 million bail each.

 New Jersey resident Mandy Nagy writes:

The four have been charged with murder, felony murder, carjacking, conspiracy, possession of a weapon and possession of a weapon for unlawful purpose, according to FOX News.
Friedland and his wife, Jamie, had returned to their parked 2012 silver Range Rover after an evening of holiday shopping on December 15th.  Friedland had opened the car door for his wife and was said to have been walking behind the vehicle to the other side when he was confronted by several of the alleged carjackers.  After reportedly getting into a scuffle with one of them, Friedland was shot once in the head and later died in a Morristown, NJ hospital.

(The reported “scuffle” — Bruce Friedland resisting the robbers — may well have saved his wife’s life.)

The stolen Range Rover was found the following morning in Newark, NJ. Acting Essex County Prosecutor Carolyn Murray said in a press conference today that the crime is believed to have been motivated by the vehicle, according to the Star Ledger.
The state of NJ has been battling carjacking crimes in Essex County. Earlier this summer, a joint NJ state and federal task force launched an anti-carjacking public awareness campaign, aimed in part at warning would-be carjackers of serious consequences for related offenses.

From the Task Force announcement:

Since 2009, more than 200 carjackings have taken place in Essex County, and each year that number continues to climb. . . .
In the 1990s, Essex County led the nation in car theft. With advances in technology, vehicles are better equipped with sophisticated anti-theft devices, making it almost impossible for an amateur to steal an unattended car. As a result, carjackings have been on the rise.
In recent years, there have been more than 400 carjackings in the county. These crimes occur in the early morning hours and late at night.

Again proving my point that crime is a people problem: People who want to steal cars cannot ultimately be deterred by “anti-theft devices,” but will resort to whatever means are necessary to their felonious intentions because they are criminals.

It’s who they are, it’s what they do, and they’re going to keep committing crimes at every opportunity, until you lock them up:

The four thugs accused of savagely killing a young Hoboken lawyer in a New Jersey mall’s parking garage have extensive criminal histories — and one had been released from jail just four days before the slaying. . . .
All four — who face possible life sentences — have rap sheets stretching back years that include multiple burglary and drug counts.
Thompson, who has done more than a dozen stints in the Essex County Jail, was released on Dec. 11 after serving time on a burglary charge.
Roberts has been arrested 13 times on narcotics and weapons offenses.
Both Ford and Henry were sent to prison in 2003 — Ford for burglary and Henry for bank robbery, records show.
Henry finished federal prison time eight months ago for a robbery in which he put a gun to the head of a Union Township bank employee.

So two of the accused carjacking killers had only recently gotten out of the slammer and evidently none of them has ever done anything for a living except deal dope and steal stuff. Career criminals, one and all, and nobody is safe as long as such criminals are on the streets, not even the affluent residents of Short Hills, New Jersey, a community 22 miles west of New York City. The population of Short Hills is 81% white, the median household income is $235,799 and if you’re a criminal from Newark looking for rich people to rob, Short Hills is a target-rich environment.

The irony is that the cops on the Anti-Carjacking Task Force actually know who commits these crimes: Today’s dope bust or burglary suspect is tomorrow’s armed robber or murderer, but our legal system has been perverted by decades of liberal jurisprudence so that courts and cops are required to pretend that crime happens utterly at random and 30-year-old lawyers get shot dead at the shopping mall by criminals who had no business being anywhere near that mall because they should have been behind bars. Our legal system has been hijacked by radical ideologues who apparently believe that criminals have a monopoly on “rights,” but in the immortal words of Inspector Harry Callahan: “Well, I’m all broken up about that man’s rights.”

 

 

(Via Memeorandum with more blog commentary at Weasel Zippers, Gateway Pundit, Scared Monkeys and Hinterland Gazette.)

 


Category: Crime

Where We’re Heading

Posted on | December 22, 2013 | 46 Comments

If you don’t want to be accused of homophobia . . .

The director of a new film featuring gay themes and characters is blasting the movie ratings board for giving the comedy an R rating.
G.B.F., set for a Jan. 14 debut, earned the rating for “sexual references.” Director Darren Stein feels the film should be a PG-13 affair. . . .
Stein, in a previous chat with The Huffington Post, described the film as a departure from other teen features.
“G.B.F.” has a gooey emotional center . . .

“Gooey emotional center”? No, thanks, but if you don’t want your 12-year-old to see that movie, you’re a homophobe. The requirements to avoid accusations of homophobia keep increasing:

Be sure to read Mark Steyn’s excellent essay on the “tolerant” left’s intolerance of mainstream Christian beliefs, and their intolerance of the temerity that anyone might express them.
See, “The Age of Intolerance” (via Memeorandum).
And because he’s a bleedin’ idiot (and epic asshole), LGM’s Scotty Lame-ieux attacks Steyn on free speech grounds (although Steyn’s not making a free speech argument). See, “And David Duke is the New Fred Shuttlesworth!“

There are probably worse people on the planet than Professor Scott Lemieux, but none whose names immediately came to mind.

See, this is what the Left’s “homophobia” game is about: Pointing the accusatory finger, and requiring that we all join them in destroying the targeted hater, so as to validate and increase the power of the accusers. If you say, “Hey, wait a minute! I don’t think the targeted person should be destroyed,” your dissent from the gay lynch mob forms the basis of an accusation that you share the homophobic guilt of the accused target. Even silence — or a failure to shout loudly enough at the target — could be proof of your guilt, if any grounds of suspicion previously existed.

Trying to “argue” with totalitarians like Professor Scott Lemieux is a waste of time, because hate-filled radical monsters like that don’t want to persuade you, they want to destroy you.

What is necessary is to expose the fact that Professor Scott Lemieux has zero authority to accuse anyone else of moral failure.

What acts of humanitarian philanthropy does he claim as evidence of his moral authority? Does Professor Scott Lemieux have a reputation for generosity, courage and honesty or, as I strongly suspect, is he one of these selfish lying cowards who populate academia nowadays, pharisaically displaying their “progressive” politics as an ersatz substitute for actual virtue?

So while I have no specific reason to suspect that Professor Scott Lemieux is currently planning genocide, if any gay youth go missing in Albany, N.Y., the police might want to check his freezer, just to be on the safe side. He is Canadian, you know.

 

Category: Education, Gays, Intellectuals

So, Justine Finally Landed …

Posted on | December 22, 2013 | 141 Comments

The unfortunate Justine Sacco, whose Friday tweet inspired the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet, went into full grovel mode:

Today Sacco spoke to ABC News, saying, “My greatest concern was this statement reach South Africa first.” After sending her statement to South African newspaper The Star, Sacco shared the following apology:
“Words cannot express how sorry I am, and how necessary it is for me to apologize to the people of South Africa, who I have offended due to a needless and careless tweet,” Sacco said. “There is an AIDS crisis taking place in this country, that we read about in America, but do not live with or face on a continuous basis. Unfortunately, it is terribly easy to be cavalier about an epidemic that one has never witnessed firsthand.
“For being insensitive to this crisis — which does not discriminate by race, gender or sexual orientation, but which terrifies us all uniformly — and to the millions of people living with the virus, I am ashamed.
“This is my father’s country, and I was born here. I cherish my ties to South Africa and my frequent visits, but I am in anguish knowing that my remarks have caused pain to so many people here; my family, friends and fellow South Africans. I am very sorry for the pain I caused.”

As Ace accurately observed Friday, Sacco is a liberal, and her joke was actually a self-deprecating reference to white privilege. No one can deny that it was tasteless and, as she says, “insensitive,” but it scarcely justified her public crucifixion. Her apology, while no doubt sincere, is also a signifier: “I get it! I’m a liberal, too!”

But her liberalism (like all liberalism) is misguided, assuming as it does that the problem of AIDS in Africa (or any similar social problem) results from a shortage of caring. This is a species of Magic Thinking: “We could solve this problem, if only we cared enough.” And from this delusion, we get a lot of empty gestures that do nothing to solve problems, but make people feel good about themselves.

Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book about this, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy — a book that no liberal has ever bothered to read, because if they bothered to read it, they wouldn’t be liberals anymore.

If you think that every problem of black people can be explained by racism, or that every problem of gay people can be explained by homophobia, certain conclusions are inherent in those premises, no matter how you construct your syllogism. One example is the way in which we monitor speech for “proof” that others secretly harbor forbidden sentiments, and immediately pounce upon anything that looks like such “proof,” like Justine’s tweet:

“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS.
Just kidding. I’m white!”

Twelve words, and let’s get her fired from her job for making a bad joke on Twitter, as if getting her fired will purge the world of racism and thereby end AIDS in Africa. The Daily Mail reports.

The PR executive who was summarily dismissed after her racist Tweet sparked a revolt on social media has apologised – as her own father called her a ‘f****** idiot’.
Justine Sacco said that she was ‘ashamed’ over her actions and said she had been ‘cavalier’ in making her tasteless joke about the AIDS crisis in Africa.
But her father, who has not been publicly named, was more forthright and said that what she did was ‘unforgivable’.
He also apparently backed the campaign to name and shame his daughter as, in an ironic twist, it emerged he moved his family from Cape Town to the US in 1994 to escape racism at the end of Apartheid. . . .
Losing her job as a communications director could also mean losing her US work visa -potentially forcing her to leave America.

Well, I’m sure we’re all glad Justine’s father called her a “f**king idiot,” but did you notice something about that article?

So pervasive is what Sowell called The Vision of the Anointed that most people didn’t even notice this dishonest assumption. To say her tweet was “offensive” is one thing, but to label it “racist” is to assume to know Sacco’s intent when, as seems evident, her actual intent was anti-racist: “Sacco is a young, professional, New York woman. Chances are about 99.9% that she’s a BuzzFeed-loving, Obama-voting, MSNBC addict.”

If anything, Sacco’s tweet betokened the arrogance of a young liberal who assumes that all her friends (and she had fewer than 200 Twitter followers before Friday) understand she is not racist, whereas if she were a Fox-watching, Limbaugh-listening conservative Republican, she would understand that she is constantly suspected of secretly hating everyone who is not rich, white and heterosexual. Remember when Rush Limbaugh got kicked off ESPN? Even I have forgotten exactly what he said, but it was something about a black quarterback and the lesson was obvious: No Republican is ever allowed to criticize a black person, which has worked out rather nicely for Democrats since 2008, eh?

Apologies for contradicting bad ideas are never going fix any problem, especially not problems caused by liberalism itself.

NAACP investigating sheriff who
refused to lower flag for Mandela’s death

The Thought Police are always watching, aren’t they?

 

 

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! I liked this from the comments:

There was a time when even the Left considered Lord of the Flies a cautionary tale. Now they treat it like an instruction manual.

And finally someone got the allusion!

Ah yes, If the author of Justine were alive today he most certainly would be heading a modern media organization rather than staging his plays inside an insane asylum.

 


Category: Culture, Racism

Special Snowflake Syndrome

Posted on | December 22, 2013 | 77 Comments

A frightening report from the front lines of the Culture War:

Amy (not her real name) sat in my office and wiped her streaming tears on her sleeve, refusing the scratchy tissues I’d offered. “I’m thinking about just applying for a Ph.D. program after I graduate because I have no idea what I want to do.” Amy had mild depression growing up, and it worsened during freshman year of college when she moved from her parents’ house to her dorm. It became increasingly difficult to balance school, socializing, laundry, and a part-time job. She finally had to dump the part-time job, was still unable to do laundry, and often stayed up until 2 a.m. trying to complete homework because she didn’t know how to manage her time without her parents keeping track of her schedule.
I suggested finding a job after graduation, even if it’s only temporary. She cried harder at this idea. “So, becoming an adult is just really scary for you?” I asked. “Yes,” she sniffled. Amy is 30 years old.
Her case is becoming the norm for twenty- to thirtysomethings I see in my office as a psychotherapist. I’ve had at least 100 college and grad students like Amy crying on my couch because breaching adulthood is too overwhelming.

Key phrase: “Amy had mild depression growing up.”

Re-written: “Amy was diagnosed with mild depression growing up.”

That is to say, Amy was introduced to therapeutic culture at an early age, because she grew up in an affluent society that can afford for its more privileged youth to get thousands of dollars worth of psychiatric treatment to deal with their feelings. Does anyone ever stop to wonder what became of such people before the rise of the psychotherapy industry in the 20th century?

What happens is that people become defined by their diagnoses, so that sometimes you meet someone at a reception who tells you, within the first five minutes of your introduction, that they suffer from depression, bipolar disorder, ADD or whatever.

To digress: Why don’t we ever meet any really interesting nuts? I mean, it might be interesting to meet someone at a cocktail party who says, “Yes, I’ve been diagnosed with sado-masochistic compulsions stemming from an unresolved Electra Complex.”

But old-fashioned Freudian categories are out of fashion, so you never meet anyone who describes themselves as being in the throes of an oral fixation or nymphomania or something like that. Neither, for that matter, does anyone ever describe themselves as a psychopath or a lunatic — “Hi, I’m Phil and I’m certifiably insane” — but instead these people usually confess to suffering from mood disorders which, to the contemporary way of thinking, means that they are sympathetic victims, rather than outright kooks.

Ever since Prozac started making headlines back in the 1990s, I’ve been dubious about the “brain chemistry” approach to treating mood disorders with SSRIs, because of a common-sense skepticism toward the claims of scientific “experts.” Is it really a smart idea to be loading people up on complex chemicals with all kinds of potential long-term effects? I mean, how many people who start on anti-depressants in their teens or 20s ever actually get well?

That is to say, shouldn’t the goal of psychiatric treatment be to get patients to the point where they don’t need treatment any more?

And yet I can’t remember anyone ever saying, “Yes, I was diagnosed with chronic depression, but I took these pills for six months and it went away, so now I don’t need the pills anymore and I’m as cheerful as a songbird all the time.” But I digress . . .

Encouraging kids to think of themselves as suffering from mental illness, e.g., Amy’s “mild depression,” is great for the pill merchants, but I’m not sure it’s really good for the kids. Helplessness is a learned condition, and if you start telling kids that they are helpless victims of their moods and feelings, well, maybe they’ll believe you. And if they are truly helpless . . .

“[T]herapeutic morality encourages a permanent suspension of the moral sense. There is a close connection, in turn, between the erosion of moral responsibility and the waning capacity for self-help . . . between the elimination of culpability and the elimination of competence.”
– Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979)

Describing the problems he sees with young people, psychotherapist Brooke Donatone writes that “the ability to address hardships is lacking in many members of this generation” who have had too much parental assistance and supervision:

The researchers suggest that intrusive parenting interferes with the development of autonomy and competence. So helicopter parenting leads to increased dependence and decreased ability to complete tasks without parental supervision. . . .
Rates of depression are soaring among millennials in college. A 2012 study by the American College Counseling Association reported a 16 percent increase in mental-health visits since 2000 and a significant increase in crisis response over the past five years.  . . .
If parents are navigating every minor situation for their kids, kids never learn to deal with conflict on their own. . . .
Amy, like many millennials, was groomed to be an academic overachiever, but she became, in reality, an emotional under-achiever. Amy did not have enough coping skills to navigate normal life stressors — how do I get my laundry and my homework done in the same day; how do I tell my roommate not to watch TV without headphones at 3 a.m.? — without her parents’ constant advice or help. . . .

Why is this happening? I blame the American micro-family, the two-income suburban household with one or two children. The parents are college-educated and expect — no, demand — that their children follow in their footsteps, without regard to the child’s own aptitudes or interests. This kind of high-pressure parenting is basically impossible with larger families, and the child with multiple siblings must necessarily rely more on his own resources.

High-achieving professionals quite naturally expect that their children should be able to replicate their success, but investing such hopes in just one or two kids puts unrealistic pressures on them, and fails to consider the problem of deviation to the norm.

The more exceptional a parent’s success, the less likely that their children will be able to match or exceed it. If you’re a Harvard-educated neurobiologist, the temptation to treat your child as a hothouse flower in an effort to make the child an even more exceptional achiever is likely to yield disappointment, simply because most kids — even those who inherit tremendous potential and who are provided with every advantage — aren’t exceptional.

Who are Amy’s parents? I’ll bet they’re well-educated, successful and affluent and are horribly disappointed in her. She’s 30 years old and says she has “no idea” what she wants to do, but I’ve got news for her: You’re already doing it, Amy. It’s called “failure.”

Lot of that going around lately.

 

Category: Culture, Education

Obama to #SouthSudan: Good Luck

Posted on | December 22, 2013 | 14 Comments

If you expected any determined U.S. action to end this civil war, my condolences on your Nobel Peace Prize disappointment:

“This conflict can only be resolved peacefully through negotiations. Any effort to seize power through the use of military force will result in the end of longstanding support from the United States and the international community.”

This is just noise, which any rebel leader or armed tribal mob will scornfully ignore, if they even bother to notice because, contrary to the president’s assertion, conflicts often are revolved violently through the use of military force, and without regard to a lot of diplomatic chatter from “the international community.” The man with a gun in his hand generally only stops fighting when confronted with superior force, and there is nothing in Obama’s statement that indicates any effort by the U.S. in that direction.

So we’re sitting this one out, I guess. Turning our attention away from irrelevant noise, let’s talk about what matters, i.e., the war:

Former South Sudan Vice-President Riek Machar has said rebel troops have captured the key oil-producing state of Unity and control much of the country.
Mr Machar also confirmed to the BBC that the forces fighting the government were under his command.
The country has been in turmoil since President Salva Kiir accused Mr Machar a week ago of attempting a coup. . . .

(Which, of course, he was.)

Mr Machar, whose claim to control Unity could not be independently verified, told the BBC that a senior military commander, Gen James Koang, had gone over to the rebels earlier in the week.
However, government forces say Gen Koang defected alone and did not take any troops with him.
Unity, a state on the border with Sudan, produces much of South Sudan’s oil, which accounts for more than 95% of the country’s economy.
Mr Machar added that he was prepared to negotiate with the government if politicians arrested this week were released and transferred to a neutral country such as Ethiopia.
Mr Kiir also agreed to negotiations after meeting African mediators on Friday.
But government troops are currently trying to retake Bor, in one of the most volatile regions in the country.
Troops backed by helicopter gunships were advancing on the town, army spokesman Philip Aguer told AFP news agency.

More talk, talk, talk:

The African Union called on Saturday for an immediate ceasefire in South Sudan, where U.N. staff say hundreds of people have been killed in nearly a week of fighting.
In a statement, it described the killing of U.N. peacekeepers and civilians at a U.N. camp as a war crime.
Fighting that began on Sunday in the capital Juba has swiftly spread to other parts of the country, fuelled by ethnic divisions between the main Nuer and Dinka tribal groups.
The African Union said in a statement that its chairwoman, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma “calls for an immediate humanitarian truce for the Christmas season, as a sign of a commitment by all concerned to the well-being of the people of South Sudan”.

The New York Times provides background:

Like many conflicts in this tenuous nation, the fighting has taken on an ethnic dimension, human rights workers say. Mr. Machar, the former vice president removed over the summer when Mr. Kiir summarily dismissed his entire cabinet, is a Nuer. The president belongs to the majority Dinka ethnic group.
In the capital, South Sudanese forces have targeted members of the Nuer ethnic group, killing many and detaining others, including soldiers, lawmakers and students, rights workers and refuge seekers say.
But outside the capital, in Jonglei State, the reverse has occurred as well, with Nuer militiamen targeting Dinka, descending on United Nations compounds where thousands of civilians have fled for safety and carrying out attacks on oil facilities that have resulted in what the Security Council called “the heavy loss of life” among workers.
“We are deeply concerned that ethnically based attacks on all sides will lead to revenge attacks and more violence,” Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.
Other observers have said that politics, not ethnicity, are driving the conflict.
“It is a power struggle,” said Zacharia Diing Akol, an analyst at the Sudd Institute in Juba. “Ethnicity is an afterthought.”

UPDATE: A young Heritage staffer works weekend:

 

PREVIOUSLY:

 

Category: Barack Obama, Sudan

Fred Reed Encounters Maureen Dowd; Demolition Ensues

Posted on | December 21, 2013 | 27 Comments

by Smitty

Reed mostly predates the blogging phenomenon. While this is not National Offend a Feminist Week, I think Stacy will permit our loyal readers a little taste of a first-rate spleen dump (emphasis mine):

Listen, Corn Flower. Let’s think over this business of obsolete men. Reflect. You live in New York, in which every building was designed and built by men. You perhaps use the subway, designed, built, and maintained by men. You travel at in a car, invented, designed, and built by men—a vehicle that you don’t understand (what is a cam lobe?) and couldn’t maintain (have you ever changed a tire? Could you even find the tires?), and you do this on roads designed, built, and maintained by men. You fly in aircraft designed, built, and maintained by men, which you do not understand (what, Moon Pie, is a high-bypass turbofan?)

In short, as you run from convention to convention, peeing on hydrants, you depend utterly on men to keep you fed (via tractors designed by men, guided by GPS invented, designed, and launched by men, on farms run by men), and comfy (air conditioning invented…but need I repeat myself?)

I do not want to be unjust. It is not in my nature. While men may be obsolete (unless you want to eat) I cannot say, Apple Cheeks, that feminists are obsolete. They are not. Obsoleteness implies having passed through a period of usefulness.

I do get tired of your hissing and fizzing about the noble sex to which I belong. Mercy, I cry. It is not my fault that Michael Douglas didn’t marry you. He didn’t marry me either, but I don’t hate men because of it. (In fact I am grateful to him, and doubtless he to me).

Read the whole righteous thing.

Category: Blogging, National Offend a Feminist Week
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