[Re-posted from earlier today. Blogosphere response to the pivotal speech here.]

The challenges that Barack Obama faced upon taking office were, even his critics would admit, daunting: an economy tail-spinning toward a second Great Depression, two continuing, draining and tragically self-defeating wars, and an apparatus of vastly expanded executive power (including torture) which had only just begun to be checked by the judiciary. More to the point, the United States was formally at war in a conflict which seemed to have no conceivable end.

And so easily the most important thing the presidents said today, it seems to me, was the following:

We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us, mindful of James Madison’s warning that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” … The AUMF [Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists] is now nearly twelve years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. Groups like AQAP must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States.

Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states. So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate. And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further. Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.

“Ultimately repeal the AUMF’s mandate”. I wish the word “ultimately” were not there. But the announcement of an eventual, discrete, concrete end to this war may have been a step enough for now. For my part, I think it should be a critical goal of this administration to repeal that AUMF by the end of its second term. Our goal must not be an endlessly ratcheting of terrorist and counter-terrorist violence that creates more enemies than friends. Our goal must be normalcy and freedom, even as we continue strong counter-terrorism strategies outside of the context for warfare.

I’m glad the president defended the strike against Anwar al-Awlaki as forcefully as he should:

When a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America – and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens; and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot – his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a swat team.

My view entirely. I’m struck too by his Niebuhrian grasp of the inherent tragedy of wielding power in an age of terror – a perspective his more jejune and purist critics simply fail to understand. This seems like a heart-felt expression of Christian realism to me:

It is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, a risk that exists in all wars. For the families of those civilians, no words or legal construct can justify their loss. For me, and those in my chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live, just as we are haunted by the civilian casualties that have occurred through conventional fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. But as Commander-in-Chief, I must weigh these heartbreaking tragedies against the alternatives.

Indeed he must. And in the aggregate, I think history will look back on the balance he struck and see more wisdom in it than the purism on the civil liberties left and right or the lawless violence and torture of the Bush-Cheney years.

A few more key points: he will end the moratorium on releasing Yemeni prisoners at GTMO; he has appointed a figure to expedite the closure of the former torture camp (perhaps his newfound friendship with John McCain can accelerate the process). But he offered no real solution to the 50 or so prisoners deemed still dangerous to the world but who cannot be tried for lack of admissible evidence. He had noting really on that – except a self-evidently vain appeal to a Congress unwilling to give an inch on anything.

But the broader framework of the speech was the most important: the possibility of a return to normality, to a point where the understandable trauma of 9/11 no longer blurs our ability to construct a realist but restrained counter-terror strategy. That’s the promise of his presidency: the healing of a giant wound to this country’s psyche and values. And here’s where it came through most tellingly for me:

The scale of [the current] threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11. In the 1980s, we lost Americans to terrorism at our Embassy in Beirut; at our Marine Barracks in Lebanon; on a cruise ship at sea; at a disco in Berlin; and on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. In the 1990s, we lost Americans to terrorism at the World Trade Center; at our military facilities in Saudi Arabia; and at our Embassy in Kenya. These attacks were all deadly, and we learned that left unchecked, these threats can grow. But if dealt with smartly and proportionally, these threats need not rise to the level that we saw on the eve of 9/11.

We can envisage a world in which this war is over, and yet our counter-terrorism continues “smartly and proportionally”. It is a tough and usually lonely task to make these calls. Which is why a president is ultimately accountable for them. Today, he stood accountable; and he neither shirked from responsibility nor apologized for the inherent tragedy of any armed conflict.

From this hard realist assessment, however, came a light at the end of a psychological and political tunnel; a small flicker hope at the end of a long dark night of fear.

(Photo: US President Barack Obama speaks about his administration’s drone and counterterrorism policies, as well as the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, May 23, 2013. By Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.)

A reader writes:

If only Americans appreciated how hard this was to do, given the institutional resistance, and how singularly the President himself, within the government, actually understands this in its broader context.  I was there at the speech, and moved to tears.  Even the interruption by the Code Pink woman turned out to be a blessing in disguise — instead of the usual bromides about the virtues of free speech, after a full minute or two of interruption, in one of the most important speeches of his tenure, he responded:  “the voice of that woman is worth paying attention to.”  Can you imagine any other chief of state extemporizing with that line in those circumstances? — acknowledging the power of her concerns and honoring them?

And then at the end, it occurred to him to incorporate the incident again, once more because he realized it helped make his point:

Now, we need a strategy – and a politics –that reflects this resilient spirit. Our victory against terrorism won’t be measured in a surrender ceremony on a battleship, or a statue being pulled to the ground. Victory will be measured in parents taking their kids to school; immigrants coming to our shores; fans taking in a ballgame; a veteran starting a business; a bustling city street; a citizen shouting her concerns to her President.

Wow.

I’m with my reader who was there. We remain lucky to have him, as we long have been.

Researchers have finally discovered the precise pathogen that caused the Great Famine. Why it matters:

The study is the first time that the genetics of a plant pathogen have been analyzed by extracting DNA from dried plant samples, opening up the possibility that researchers can study other plant diseases based on the historical collections of botanical gardens and herbaria around the world. Better understanding the evolution of plant diseases over time, the team says, could be instrumental in figuring out ways to breed more robust plant varieties that are resistant to the pathogens that infect plants today.

(Photo of the Dublin memorial to the Irish Potato Famine by Tim Sackton)

The nation’s powerful alcohol lobbies have managed to rebuff any federal alcohol excise tax increase, last raised in 1991. States should be on the lookout for what will inevitably happen: the marijuana industry will go along with taxation as part of the grand bargain for legalization – just as the alcohol industry did in the 1930s – and then over time change its position to be anti-tax. They will claim that taxes are bad for business and bad for consumers, neither of which is true, given that products like alcohol, gasoline, marijuana and tobacco have a fairly inelastic demand. Here’s a bit of advice to states: index marijuana taxes to inflation, and you will avoid a lot of big debates over raising taxes.

Among other suggestions, Kleiman recommends a strict advertising rules:

Don’t allow marketing. The legal marijuana industry, like the alcohol, tobacco and gambling industries, will have a financial interest directly opposite to the public interest. Responsible use is the goal, but dependent use generates sales volume. A public monopoly would probably work best; short of that, tight limits on advertising (the Supreme Court permitting) and keeping the industry fragmented to minimize its lobbying power might limit some of the damage.

Former US Representative Anthony Weiner speaks to voters in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City on May 23, 2013 after he announced he is running for New York City Mayor. By Timothy Clary/AFP/Getty Images.

[L]anguage can express a concept from various angles, positively or negatively, or with a noun or a verb. For example, a journalist once marveled that an obscure language of India has a verb referring to how a baby is fat and treats this as evidence of a unique “way of seeing the world”—neglecting that our term baby fat refers to exactly the same concept, just with a different part of speech.

In the same way, if Americans use the word decency less than before, since the sixties we have marked our awareness of exactly that concept with none other than asshole. As Geoff Nunberg’s clever book taught us last year, the word refers precisely to someone who transgresses rules in cognizance of doing so, such as cutting people off in traffic. The asshole transgresses decency, in which we are interested as the Victorians. We just happen to refer to it with a noun, and a negative one, and also with a certain pungency, because the sixties happened and changed how we process profanity.

As we discover more details about the DOJ’s investigation of Fox News journalist James Rosen, former FBI agent David Gomez compiles a list of best practices for journalists:

Take a lesson from the Mafia and never use phones for anything other than the most innocuous conversations — i.e., “Meet me at our usual spot” or “We need to talk.” Better yet, “I’m going out for pizza, so I won’t be around to meet you today ” — the last part being previously arranged code for “Meet me at our usual spot.” …

Like the phone, the Internet is a sieve, and a goldmine for lawful and unlawful penetration through technical means by law enforcement. Never use the Internet or email for any kind of contact with a source if your beat is national security because it creates too many electronic trails, all of which are traceable and usually recoverable by even the newest rookie FBI cyber-agent. Social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook are the worst because they are public, and even though you may direct message your source or delete a contact tweet, it can be recorded by any number of interested followers, including the FBI, and preserved for all time on Google.

A number of IRS employees developed criteria that was politically biased both in appearance and in effect. They were reined in once by their superiors, and then they changed the criteria again, and had to be reined in a second time. Their actions called the fairness of the agency into question and kicked off a national scandal. Even if their intent was pure, they showed bad judgment, more than a bit of incompetence, and perhaps even a touch of insubordination. That is reason enough to fire people, even if the process is difficult.

Daniel Foster doubts that Lois Lerner, director of the misbehaving IRS office, will get axed:

Statistically speaking, the firing of a federal employee is a rare event. A Cato Institute study showed that in one year, just 1 in 5,000 non-defense, civilian federal employees was fired for cause. A widely cited analysis by USA Today found that in FY 2011, the federal government fired just 11,668 out of 2.1 million employees (excluding military and postal workers). That’s a “separation for cause” rate of 0.55 percent, roughly a fifth the rate in the private sector.

And the firing of employees who fit Lerner’s profile is rarer still. Lerner is very much a “white-collar” employee, and the same analysis found that blue-collar employees (such as food-service workers) were twice as likely to be fired.

Conor Friedersdorf zooms out:

There are many more examples [of misbehaving employees] at the local, state, and federal level. None so far has prompted Democrats or progressives to acknowledge that public employees are so well-protected that the ability to run well-functioning institutions is sometimes being compromised. In one way, the IRS controversy is sure to be unrepresentative since it is getting so much more press than almost any other act of wrongdoing by federal employees. But it will afford us a high-profile opportunity to watch the process play out.

The Boy Scouts of America will accept openly gay Scouts but not gay adult Scout Leaders. Because who wants kids to grow up to be leaders?

— LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) May 23, 2013

How Chait understands Obama’s remarks (seen above):

President Obama’s speech today defending his conduct in the war on terror was notable for what he was defending it against — not against the soft-on-terror (and maybe sorta-kinda-Muslim) attack that Republicans have lobbed against him since he first ran for president, but against critics on the left. … Politically, if not substantively, Obama’s speech today represents a watershed moment. For the first time in the post-9/11 world, the domestic political threat in the war on terror comes from the left rather than the right.

Matt Welch wants more than a speech:

There was much to like in Obama’s speech today if you like words, and share the broad worries he outlined above. And it is surely true that changing policy becomes easier after you make public arguments about changing policy. But the fact is Barack Obama is the president of the United States, and according to both the Constitution and especially the way executive power has accrued over the past century, Obama actually has quite a bit of latitude to impose his values on the waging of American war. After 52 months in office, it’s long since past time to stop judging the man by his words alone.

Max Fisher focuses on the case Obama made for drones:

Although there’s a complexity to Obama’s moral case for drones, it reduces down to a binary: Using drones can kill civilians, but not using them would lead to even more civilians being killed. There are many, many more moral, ethical and legal issues related to drones, some of which are in the speech and some of which aren’t. And there is a wide range of gray areas in how they’re implemented, against whom, under what circumstances and what guidelines. But it’s this basic proposition – taking lives to save others – that seems at the heart of Obama’s case.

Ackerman’s bottom line:

Obama’s new approach to the drones in Year Thirteen of the war on terror should feel familiar. It contains an echo of how he wound down the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: not by drawing a hard and fast end to them, but by allowing military commanders to very slowly reduce the size of their forces. If it worked well enough for flesh-and-blood troops, Obama is basically saying it’ll work well enough for robots.

PM Carpenter praises the speech:

One phrase deployed by Obama really struck home. In America’s continuing battle against terrorists, there is “no moral safe harbor.” Not, anyway, for a president, this one or the next. Virtually every counterterrorism path that a president pursues is a trade-off–a little security here for a piece of your liberty there; 10 innocents killed in exchange for a thousand later saved–and it’s just so damn refreshing to hear a president admitit rather than suppress it through a fog of uberheroic, hyperpatriotic neocon bullshit. Wars do compromise our values; we eventually become what we hate; and President Obama appeared to be running the clock back. He knows where this is headed, and it ain’t good.

Allahpundit heard little new:

He’s offering a robust defense of drone warfare to a public that already accepts it. The speech is really just an unusually exhaustive compendium of the foreign-policy establishment’s favorite counterterror bromides. Foreign Policy magazine has a Cliff’s Notes version of the four major takeaways, but none of them are actually major. He wants to close Gitmo, which we knew; he kinda likes the idea of independent oversight on drone strikes but maybe not too much, which we could have guessed; he wants to codify drone practices to make sure they’re used as narrowly as possible, but an Obama official couldn’t tell FP how that differs from the current policy; oh, and he thinks it’s time to stop thinking of this as a “boundless” global war on terror and start thinking in terms of discrete actions, which is semantic nonsense.

Kilgore was stuck by how often Obama blamed Congress:

One thing is fairly clear: the speech poses a challenge to congressional Republicans that may not be that easy for them to meet, distracted as they are and as divided as they tend to be on national security policy these days. As Slate’s Dave Weigel quickly noted, Obama four times shifted responsibility for current dilemmas at least partially to Congress: on drones (where he insisted the appropriate congressional committees have known about every single strike); on embassy security; on the 9/11-era legal regime that still governs anti-terrorist efforts; and on Gitmo (where Republicans have repeatedly thwarted effort to transfer detainees to U.S. prisons).

And Benjamin Wittes thinks Obama is more powerful than he lets on:

Obama does not need Congress to narrow or repeal the AUMF or to get off of a war footing. He can do it himself, declaring hostilities over in whole or in part. And Obama, needless to say, did not do anything like that. To the contrary, he promised that “we must finish the work of defeating al Qaeda and its associated forces” and while he used a lot of nice words about law enforcement and a lot of disparaging words about perpetual states of war, he also promised to continue targeting the enemy with lethal force under the AUMF. In other words, he promised—without quite saying it directly—to keep waging war

My thoughts here.

[U]sing social media to crowdsourced grassroots disaster response efforts serves to create social capital and strengthen collective action. This explains why the Chinese government (and others) faced a “groundswell of social activism” that it feared could “turn into government opposition” following the earthquake (6). So the Communist Party tried to turn the disaster into a “rallying cry for political solidarity. ‘The more difficult the circumstance, the more we should unite under the banner of the party,’ the state-run newspaper People’s Daily declared [...], praising the leadership’s response to the earthquake” (7). …

Aided by social media and mobile phones, grassroots disaster response efforts present a new and more poignant “Dictator’s Dilemma” for repressive regimes. The original Dictator’s Dilemma refers to an authoritarian government’s competing interest in using information communication technology by expanding access to said technology while seeking to control the democratizing influences of this technology. In contrast, the “Dictator’s Disaster Lemma” refers to a repressive regime confronted with effectively networked humanitarian response at the grassroots level, which improves collective action and activism in political contexts as well. But said regime cannot prevent people from helping each other during natural disasters as this could backfire against the regime.

Earlier Dish on crowdsourced disaster efforts here.

(Hat tip: Duck of Minerva)

Catbeards here.

(Photo by Laura Blanc)

The messages from [Independent Television Service] ITVS officials grew confusing. [Vice-president of programming] Aguilar again praised the film as “great,” and said, “I think you’ve preserved the anger of the film, which I love.” Other officials, though, kept urging the filmmakers to change the title, add negative material about Democrats, and delete an opening sequence that showed Sarah Palin speaking at a rally sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, the Kochs’ main advocacy group. Several times, [filmmakers] Lessin and Deal asked ITVS officials if Koch’s trusteeship at WNET was a factor. During the phone meeting on December 7th, Vossen said, “I can absolutely assure you that ITVS does not want your film to be buried.” She said of the title, “I think you understand why it’s problematic. . . . We live in a world where we have to be aware that people with power have power.”

Alyssa questions the limits of true independence in public broadcasting:

Disputes like this one highlight the extent to which making PBS reliant on private charity calls into question the meaning of “public” television. A state of affairs in which television content is determined by the government is obviously undesirable and subjects programming to a partisan agenda in a way that would serve members of both parties ill by turns, and the public poorly at all times, given how timid the content choices would likely be. But a “public” television regime that’s established to give extremely wealthy people another way to buy programming power other than by purchasing affiliate stations is “public” only in a business sense, rather than serving a broadly-defined public interest.

[Anjan Contractor] sees a day when every kitchen has a 3D printer, and the earth’s 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store. Contractor’s vision would mean the end of food waste, because the powder his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30 years, so that each cartridge, whether it contains sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or some other basic building block, would be fully exhausted before being returned to the store.

Ubiquitous food synthesizers would also create new ways of producing the basic calories on which we all rely. Since a powder is a powder, the inputs could be anything that contain the right organic molecules. We already know that eating meat is environmentally unsustainable, so why not get all our protein from insects?

Also, CNN reports on how a 3D printer saved the life of an infant with breathing problems:

“We can put together a complete copy of a body part on the 3-D printer within a day,” [Dr. Glenn] Green said. “So we can make something very specific for a patient very quickly.”

Green then took the splint, measuring just a few centimeters long and 8 millimeters wide, and surgically attached it to Kaiba’s collapsed bronchus. It was only moments before he saw the results.

“When the stitches were put in, we started seeing the lung inflate and deflate,” Green said. “It was so fabulous. There were people in the operating room cheering.”

It’s tempting to assume that climate change is responsible for an increase in the number devastating tornadoes, like those that ravaged Joplin, Missouri, in 2011, and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in February. But if these tragedies are indeed becoming more common, it’s mainly because of population growth. Sixty years ago, yesterday’s tornado might not have killed anyone at all: Moore had a population of 942 in 1950, but today has more than 56,000 residents.

There has been an increase in the number of reported tornadoes: Since 1950 (or even over just the last two decades), the U.S. has added Doppler radars capable of detecting tornadoes, and population growth has increased the number of on-the-ground observations. But it’s unclear whether tornadoes have become more frequent, let alone because of climate change.

Enten has more on the subject.

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If the cap is adopted, it would be a major step for the world’s top CO2 emitter, which desperately needs to slow its carbon production. China is experiencing the world’s fastest growth in energy production and CO2 emissions, while production and emissions in the U.S. and Europe are flat-lining or decreasing. China uses 47 percent of the world’s coal, a number that’s only going up: in 2011, China’s coal consumption grew by 9 percent, accounting for 87 percent of the world’s 374 million ton increase in coal consumption that year. …

The possibility of a carbon cap in China has been hailed as “potentially transformative” in the fight against climate change, as other major emitters such as the U.S. have historically cited China’s inaction on climate change as reason to avoid implementing meaningful greenhouse gas regulations. Previously, China has shied away from cuts in emissions, saying its main priority was the growth of its economy. In November 2012, the state-owned Xinhua quoted Xie Zhenhua, China’s chief negotiator to the UN climate change talks, as saying it was “unfair and unreasonable to hold China to absolute cuts in emissions at the present stage, when its per capita GDP stands at just 5,000 U.S. dollars.”

Claire Thompson agrees that the move “seriously weaken[s] one of the U.S.’s go-to excuses for climate inaction”:

Like sparring siblings, China and the United States — the world’s two biggest carbon dioxide emitters — keep passing the climate-action buck back and forth: “Why should I cut emissions if they don’t have to?” Well, China is either the more mature of the pair, or just majorly sucking up to Mama Earth.

A reader writes:

The video and story of Mohamed Assaf reminded of something I’ve been meaning to send you. It’s a music video by activist Israeli-Palestinian hip-hop group DAM, for a song called”If I Could Go Back in Time.” DAM is Tamer Nafar, Suhell Nafar and Mahmoud Jreri, who are from the wrong side of the wall in Lod, a town southeast of Tel Aviv where most of the Palestinians were expelled in 1948. (Yes, there’s an actual wall now separating Arabic and Jewish neighborhoods in Lod, although it was built just a few years ago.) For more than a decade they’ve been rapping about Israel-Palestine issues – home demolitions, discrimination, being painted with the terrorist brush – about drugs and violence in their community and more.

“If I Could Go Back in Time” is beautiful and heartbreaking protest song about a girl who is honor-killed by her father and brother for refusing to marry the man chosen for her. The chorus is sung by the wonderful Amal Murkus, a Christian Israeli-Palestinian who has long been a highly vocal advocate for women’s rights, thereby pissing off both extremist Muslims and extremist Jews.

It’s in Arabic, so be sure to turn on the closed captioning. Know tissues.

Lyrics after the jump:

Suhel Nafar:
‏Before she was murdered, she wasn’t alive
‏We’ll tell her story backwards from her murder to her birth
‏Her body rises from the grave to the ground
‏The bullet flies out of her forehead and swallowed into the gun
‏The sound of her echo screams, she screams back
‏Tears rise up from her cheeks to her eyes
‏Behind the clouds of smoke, faces of her family appear
‏Without shame, her brother puts the gun in his pocket
‏Her father throws down the shovel and wipes the sweat off his forehead
‏He shakes his head, satisfied from the size of the grave
‏They pull her back to the car, her legs kicking
‏Like a sand storm, she’s erasing her own tracks
‏They throw her in the trunk, she doesn’t know where she is
‏But she knows that three left the house and only two will return
‏They reach the house; throw her to the bed in violence
‏”So you want run away huh?” they wake her with violence

‏Amal Murkus (Chorus)
‏If I could go back in time
‏I would smile
‏Fall in love
‏Sing
‏If I could go back in time
‏I would draw
‏Write
‏Sing

‏Mahmood Jrere:
‏She dreams before falling asleep
‏We’ll tell her story backwards, maybe understand
‏The clock hands move right to left
‏She reconstructs her steps as if she were lost
‏She sleeps prepared, money for the taxi
‏Plane ticket and passport under her pillow
‏Answer: leave the clothes in the close; she plans to wear a new life
‏Question: what if they ask what the suitcase is for?
‏She went to bed, leaves table
‏Eats well, she must act today
‏Her nose stops bleeding, that’s what they see
‏But it’s a fresh wound; before they will beat her she will beat them
‏Her mom says “your life is like heaven”
‏She’s right, if you taste the forbidden you better know someone is watching
‏Two hours before dinner, the phone hangs up
‏Her mom is shocked “the flight is delayed”
‏Phone rings

‏Amal Murkus (Chorus)

‏Tamer Nafar:
‏Before she answers, she isn’t even asked
‏The story is like the logic in her life, all backwards
‏Her hands up in the sky, begging for help
‏Their hands up in the sky reciting the Fatiha (ceremony before marriage)
‏The calendar page moves one day back, the time is
‏Afternoon, the argument is over, her brother commands her
‏Blood flows from her lips to her nose
‏A sound of a fist, his hand jumps from her face
‏It’s the first time in her life that she says “NO!”
‏Her mom announces happily “tomorrow you will marry your cousin”
‏If I look through the album of her life
‏I won’t see a photo of her standing up for her rights
‏It’s hard, the pages are stuck to my hand
‏Her past full of blood and tears
‏But we promise you, from her murder to her birth
‏Their expressions filled with anger as if someone announced a crime
‏”Congratulations, it’s a girl”
‏The beginning.

Let me explain why I remain genuinely baffled by the framework of the current discussion of the IRS scandal. There is little doubt, after the Inspector General’s report, that the Cincinnati office in charge of 501 (c) 4 scrutiny unfairly and unreasonably – even outrageously – seemed to apply political criteria for screening such groups. The question remains why they did this, what their motivations were, to what extent scrutiny of such groups was actually an important task to accomplish, how far that got distorted, and how far up the chain this decision went. These are very important questions, which is why I hope hearings can uncover more evidence than the actual report – and hold specific people accountable, apart from the resignation of the acting head of the IRS (which nonetheless has occurred).

But here’s where I do a double-take, which is roughly what happened as I was curled up on the couch last night watching Bill O’Reilly argue – with no evidence whatsoever – that the Obama administration had decided after the 2010 mid-terms to target Tea Party groups by using the IRS as a politicized bludgeon. This utterly unsubstantiated claim (see above) is now the dominant meme, the working assumption of the propagandists at Fox News. When pressed to defend this extraordinary reach, O’Reilly admitted he was purely speculating – or in his weasel words, “educated speculation.”

Then I read Mitch McConnell arguing that the GOP and its donors are “intimidated” by the Obama administration – because of its desire to see that those exercizing explicitly political speech after the Citizens United decision actually be identified by name. It’s funny, but “intimidated” is not the first adjective that springs to mind when contemplating the Senate Minority Leader. For McConnell, the First Amendment includes protection for extremely wealthy people’s total anonymity even as they funnel unlimited funds toward a political campaign. And the idea that the House Republicans or the Tea Party or the 501 (c) 4s or Karl Rove were in any way seriously intimidated does not seem, shall we say, to be reflected in their extravagant expenditures in 2012 and their evident joy in attacking their sinister, coffee-colored pinata one more time right now. And it’s worth pointing out that getting that 501 (c) 4 approval was not necessary for the entities to spend their money from the get-go. Which they did. To little avail.

Then we hear pundits like George Will and Peggy Noonan actually bring up Watergate as the closest historical analogy – which is, to put it bluntly, deranged. Remember, for example, that this scandal was not exposed by Woodward and Bernstein (although anecdotal complaints were aired in the press at the time) – but was exposed by the IRS itself. The IRS moreover also attempted to end this practice, and when that failed, set up an Inspector General report into the outrageous screening. In such an investigation, the Obama administration properly maintained an ethical distance for fear of seeming to affect the investigation’s findings. Watergate? Are they out of their fricking minds? Or cynics trying to gin up a story in a not-so-great season for ratings?

Then comes the Wall Street Journal with the coup de grace: because the White House kept itself scrupulously distant from the IG report, there is, apparently, no accountability in government:

Alexander Hamilton and America’s Founders designed the unitary executive for the purpose of political accountability. It is one of the Constitution’s main virtues. Unlike grunts in Cincinnati, Presidents must face the voters. That accountability was designed to extend not only to the President’s inner circle but over the entire branch of government whose leaders he chooses and whose policies bear his signature.

What you immediately notice is that under this scenario, Obama cannot win.

If he had interfered with the IG investigation, we would have a shit-storm of major proportions as he would be accused of unethically and improperly meddling in an investigation designed to be independent. Yes, the president runs the executive branch including, say, the Justice Department and the IRS. But his political relationship to those ideally neutral bodies is rightly constrained. And how could the president have intervened before the facts were fully known and weighed by an independent investigation anyway? He’s damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. Which is why his legal counsel was well advised to maintain that wall before the evidence was fully known.

This then becomes, in the eyes of the Washington Post, “shielding” Obama, as if this affair were about plausible deniability, as opposed to ethical government. The very attempt not to interfere is described as some kind of illicit political interference. In the pincer movement from Fox and the WaPo, there is no way Obama himself can come out shining.

I don’t get it. But then I am not working from a conclusion to a premise. I do not believe that the Obama administration is some kind of terrifying left-wing tyranny, exercising lethal political powers to punish its opponents, rifle through their tax returns, and take away everyone’s guns. But for some, all this is a given. Michelle Malkin knew all of this as far back as 2010, when she published her tract, “Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies.” If you point out that the first Obama term had a historically minuscule numbers of “scandals”, they will presumably just reply that it’s because they are so brilliant at never getting caught.

The paranoid style is not new in America. But it finds its locus in exactly those populations who feel marginalized by the tectonic cultural and social and economic shifts in the Obama era. And the syndrome is not new. Here’s a passage from Richard Hofstadter’s classic definition of the pseudo-conservative in America:

The restlessness, suspicion and fear manifested in various phases of the pseudo-conservative revolt give evidence of the real suffering which the pseudo-conservative experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics for the past twenty years. He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is disturbed deeply by American participation in the United Nations, which he can see only as a sinister organization. He sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world — for instance, in the Orient — cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.

Fox News has made pseudo-conservatism very lucrative, and as I watched the pure cynicism of Bill O’Reilly, making even more millions from yet another “book”, and wrily winking that he knows this is all paranoid bullshit, but, hey, it’s what he gets paid for, I felt little but nausea.

Let’s keep the government honest. Let’s get to the bottom of it. But let us not descend into the pseudo-conservative mindset that assumes Watergate-style malevolence purely because it feels good and makes money.

Update from a reader:

I agree 100% with your post. I’ve made the same general argument about Malkin with friends. However, your 2010 date for her book was the paperback edition. The original came out in July 2009, SIX MONTHS AFTER HE TOOK OFFICE. A minor point, perhaps, but it remains stunning to me.

Hors d’oeuvres! I’ve seen much worse. But James Hamblin gets queasy:

Some will mention that cicadas are arthropods, like shrimp and lobster. Eating them is just a step away. Just like how cats and cows are both mammals, so it’s okay that you eat cats. Cats that have been living underground for 17 years. And that really is the thing. I’m sure I’ve eaten things that have been underground for 17 years, but not knowingly, not happily.

Cultural differences and social etiquette aside, are they safe to eat?

How many chemicals do they absorb underground? Entomologist Jenna Jadin, a fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, wrote a book of cicada recipes, so she’s not impartial, but she says they’re probably fine in small doses. Still the first page of her book reads: “The University of Maryland and the [cicada interest group] Cicadamaniacs do not advocate eating cicadas without first consulting your doctor.” That caveat seems extreme, but, their words, not mine. It may refer to the possibility of a shellfish allergy. If you have a shellfish allergy, cicadas may not be for you. Meanwhile the site Cicada Mania warns that even dogs should be wary: “Pets can choke on the rigid wings and other hard body parts of the cicadas; pets will gorge themselves on cicadas, and possibly become ill and vomit; pets who consume cicadas sprayed with copious amounts of pesticide can and will die.”

Speaking not just as a law professor but as a citizen: It would be nice to know if President Obama thinks the [Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF)] authorizes him to use military force in Boston, wouldn’t it? Not whether he would as a matter of policy refrain from using military force in Boston, but whether as a matter of law he believes that Congress has authorized him to use military force in Boston if “the enemy” turns up there. … President Obama should tell us if he agrees that the 2001 AUMF gives him open-ended authorization to send U.S. troops into combat anywhere on Earth, as long as he asserts that their mission is to fight al Qaeda or “its associates.” Or does he think there is some limit — geographical, functional, or temporal — on the scope of his authority under the AUMF? And: If there are some limits, how can Congress and the American public be sure his administration is abiding by those limits?

And, Mr. President? “Trust us, we have very careful procedures” is not the right answer here. Convince me that “checks and balances” refers to something other than the federal budget.

Stay tuned. I’ll be listening closely.

Indian Wells, California, 8.54 am

There is a particular horror associated with low-grade or homemade violence of this kind. The bombs used in the attack on the Boston Marathon were, as has become clear, frighteningly easy to construct; but there remains something hideous about the use of weapons that are, to other people, barely weapons at all, but household or kitchen implements. That was true of the box-cutters used by the hijackers on 9/11, and it is no less true, though of course on a far smaller scale, of the blades employed [yesterday].

He continues:

Cheap weaponry is also likely to cause concern to the security services; you can track the purchase and handling of explosives, but how on earth do you prevent someone from buying a few steak knives at a hardware store or a supermarket? Why should such a purchase even come to your attention?

The ordinariness and randomness of the act – requiring no gun or bomb – is what makes its terror so powerful. But it also, it seems to me, backfires massively against the perpetrators. The barbarism of hacking a human being’s body to pieces in the middle of the street cannot possibly win any converts to the cause, and will not prompt stoic Brits to see the world from the Pakistani Islamist’s point of view.

It’s nihilism. Which will, in due course, annihilate itself – as it has done even in largely Muslim countries like Iraq and Jordan, which saw al Qaeda up close and rightly recoiled. We should not feel fear of these lunatics. We should feel a form of baffled contempt. This is a form of human behavior that belongs in the dark ages.

Despite the fact that “Canadian teens were the most likely to smoke pot of all teens in the developed world,” Soraya Roberts isn’t ready to start toking:

Call it reefer madness, but I don’t trust my already-precarious anxiety-addled brain to survive pot intact. Particularly these days—this ain’t the pot my parent smoked. In the ’60s, you got high off a doobie with a potency of 4 percent. These days a hit peaks at 25 percent; such is the strength of “Dr. Grinspoon,” a strain named after the Harvard psychiatrist who wrote several books on cannabis, including 1970’s Marihuana Reconsidered and Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine.  “If you take hold of Dr. Grinspoon and smoke a lot of it, you could probably have quite a reaction,” its namesake told me. Like insanity?, I didn’t reply. Research shows that people who have predisposition for schizophrenia can experience early onset from smoking marijuana. My genetic loading for mental health isn’t ideal. I wouldn’t want to rock the brain boat.

There is an irony to this thought process, stemming from the fact that I have taken prescription medication for years—for anxiety (peanut gallery: “Of course!”).

I don’t deny the paradox. But there is a certain security to be found in taking a legal drug that the government has tested. Even if the FDA’s methods are not up to snuff, that’s some kind of standard. With pot being illegal, there is no standard. Marijuana may be “healthier than anything you can buy from the pharmaceutical industry,” according to Grinspoon, but how could I ever ensure I was getting the real McCoy? “I’ll try it if you can assure me it will be clean,” I told an acquaintance recently. “Clean? Like, you want it to be washed?” he quipped. Um, no, but I don’t want it to be laced with meth or cut with those synthetic cannabinoids that leave seizures and high blood pressure in their wake. I don’t have any scruples about smoking an illegal joint, but I’m not willing to risk my health for it.

Update from a reader:

Weed laced with meth? Had there been liquid in my mouth when I read that line, I would have done a spit-take. Does she really believe weed dealers put meth in their product so you’ll smoke it and stay up for three days? Clearly Soraya Roberts hasn’t the first clue what she’s talking about when it comes to marijuana. And of course she makes the same old tired objection about today’s cannabis being stronger than ‘my parent’s’ cannabis, with nary a nod toward the dose-response relationship – as though people decide the quantity of weed they will smoke and then do it without regard to the potency and resulting effect.

This is not, as many seem to believe, a debate about the short term versus the long term. It is a debate about both the short and the long term, because what we do in the short term shapes the long term. What is being done here in the UK and also in much of the eurozone is worse than a crime, it is a blunder,” – Martin Wolf (registration required), Financial Times.

A reader balances this reader’s rage:

I am a Muslim and I was never taught that violence is acceptable. I went to a mosque to study Quran between the ages of 7 and 9. All I know about Islam is to forgive, be patient, love your family, friends, neighbor and be good to people. What the pope says is awesome and most Muslims I know are following just that. The prophet taught humility, forgiveness and love. He forgave people who treated him badly and forgave people who killed his family members. There are a lot of “mullahs” who preach jihad (which doesn’t necessary mean kill the infidel, more like that struggle for the better society with your words, your pen and deeds). The violence that is perpetuated is wrong and is not true to the core of Islam.

It seems Islam is going through its Dark Ages, where lack of education and a confusion of tradition with religion in Muslim countries is causing their people to be manipulated by false sermons of violence against the West as some good deed when it’s a sin and a sin alone.

All I know about Islam is that killing a human being is as if killing the whole humanity. The mindless menace of violence has a grip over the Muslim world right now and hopefully with a better-educated younger generation, where people like me can disagree, will help improve this problem. Killing in the name of “the most merciful and benevolent” God (Allah) is not true. The merciful god in Quran says that no human has a right to take another’s life as it is not his to take, even his own. Muslims aren’t even allowed to commit suicide. Combining that with killing innocent people is beyond my capacity to understand.

Islam is not a monolith. Westboro Baptist Church does not represent every Christian. These people who killed an innocent person in Bahrain are no Muslims; they are Muslims in name and have committed a grave sin against their fellow human being and god.

Another:

A reader wrote, ”X number of bombs and deaths a year is a normal part of modern life that only unmanly hysterics bother to get upset about. This is something we have never actually experienced in the civilized world.” This is simply not true.  This reader acknowledges that “[p]ast revolutionary groups killed hostages, planted bombs and committed all manner of violent mayhem to try and destabilize the societies they hated.”  There have been bombings and killings going on in the United States – even suicide bombings - throughout the history of this country and unrelated to Islamism.  The killing in London is a terrible tragedy, but so is this one, and this one, and this one, and these two, and all the rest of these.

Those lefty Muslim apologists at Townhall have listed the 10 worst bombings in U.S. history.  Only one of them (1993 WTC bomb, coming in at #10) was committed by Islamists (another remains unsolved). If violent radical Islam magically ceased to exist today, there would still be “X number of bombs and deaths a year.”  That’s not to say that Islamist terror is somehow excusable, just that your reader may in fact be a “hysteric” on the subject.

(Photo: Flowers lay outside Woolwich Barracks on May 23, 2013 in London, England. By Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.)

From an evolutionary perspective, the fact that short-term stress revs up the immune system makes sense. Consider a gazelle fleeing a lioness. Once the gazelle’s eyes and ears alert its brain to the threat, certain brain regions immediately activate the famous fight-or-flight response, sending electrical signals along the nervous system to the muscles and many other organs, including the endocrine glands—the body’s hormone factories. Levels of cortisol, epinephrine, adrenaline and noradrenaline rapidly increase; the heart beats faster; and enzymes race to convert glucose and fatty acids into energy for cells. All these swift biological changes give the gazelle the best chance of escape. At the same time, [Stanford University's Firdaus] Dhabhar and others’ research suggests, the brain’s recognition of a threat prompts the immune system to prepare for potential injury. The spleen and other organs release immune cells specialized for identifying and destroying invaders and healing damaged tissues. After all, even if the gazelle escapes with its life, it may need to heal wounds sustained during its flight and prevent them from becoming infected.

What we spend on our pets:

Americans spent approximately $61.4 billion in total on their pets in 2011. On average, each U.S. household spent just over $500 on pets. This amounts to about 1 percent of total spending per year for the average household.

Timothy Taylor puts this in perspective:

[T]he World Bank often uses a poverty line of $1.25/day in consumption to measure deep destitution in developing countries. Nearly one-third of the population of South Asia and nearly half the population of Africa has a consumption level below this line.  Over 365 days in a year, $1.25/day works out to $456.25.  Thus, the average U.S. household spends more on pets than the poverty line for humans in the developing world. And the statistics don’t include the fact that pets live rent-free.

(Photo: Henry the dog talks to his owner through Skype on May 13, 2012. Luxury pet accommodation group Hanrob Pet Hotels is launching Petskype so people can watch and even chat to their cats and dogs while travelling interstate or overseas. By Tess Follett/Newspix/Getty Images)

Jared Keller summarizes findings from a new report by Pew and the Berkman Center for Internet Society:

The joint paper found that teenagers are sharing more and more personal information online: 91 percent of teenagers post at least one photo of themselves (up from 79 percent in 2006), while 71 percent post their school name (up from 49 percent), 53 percent post their email address (up from 29 percent), and 20 percent post their cell phone number (up from two percent). At the same time, teenagers are more and more cautious as to who sees this information: about 60 percent of teen Facebook users set their profiles to private (friends only), and most report high levels of confidence in their ability to manage their settings, with 56 percent of users noting that it’s “not difficult at all” to set privacy controls (while only eight percent say it’s “somewhat difficult”).

Danah Boyd comments:

My favorite finding of Pew’s is that 58% of teens cloak their messages either through inside jokes or other obscure references, with more older teens (62%) engaging in this practice than younger teens (46%). This is the practice that I’ve seen significantly rise since I first started doing work on teens’ engagement with social media. It’s the source of what Alice Marwick and I describe as “social steganography” in our paper on teen privacy practices.

While adults are often anxious about shared data that might be used by government agencies, advertisers, or evil older men, teens are much more attentive to those who hold immediate power over them – parents, teachers, college admissions officers, army recruiters, etc. To adults, services like Facebook that may seem “private” because you can use privacy tools, but they don’t feel that way to youth who feel like their privacy is invaded on a daily basis.

Graphic from Pew.

Much of the book looks at the way Internet technology threatens to destroy the middle class by first eroding employment and job security, along with various “levees” that give the economic middle stability. “Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”

Bill Herman disagrees with this thesis:

The best explanation that I’ve seen of America’s growing wealth inequality is Winner-Take-All Politics, in which Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson start with a simple look at other industrialized countries to show that inequality isn’t an inexorable outcome trade and automation. The Germans and Swedes certainly have similar chances to outsource their manufacturing and use technology to reduce labor forces.

Not only does the rest of the industrial world have the internet, too, better telecom policy means they generally have faster connections and cheaper prices. Yet as measured by the Gini Coefficient, a measure of economic inequality, their economies have far more equal distributions of income in take-home pay and wealth.

The wealth distribution in particular is just shocking — the US has a wealth Gini of .801 (where 1.000 is “one person owns everything”), the fifth highest among all included countries and almost exactly the same as the distribution of wealth across the entire planet (.803). Think about that for a second; we have the same radically unequal distribution of capital within the US as among the entire population of the world across all countries — from Hong Kong and Switzerland to Nigeria and Haiti.

Pivoting off Dreher’s recent musings on the suburbs, Alan Jacobs considers our dissatisfaction with them:

Suburbs are diverse not just in age but also in population density. There are no “empty” suburbs, of course, or else they wouldn’t be suburbs, but while some disperse their people into spacious lots, others pack them in in city-like ways. The lots here in the older part of Wheaton are large enough, it seems to me, but I can easily walk downtown to have a drink at the pub or buy pastries at the bakery or eat various cuisines. It’s like a gently exploded version of a city neighborhood.

It’s too easy to drive, though, as Rod recently noted. Often I do when I really should walk. In the country you have to drive when you want to go anywhere; in a big, dense city people get around on foot and via public transport. Suburbs are in this respect in-between. And in other respects too. Which is why, I suppose, suburbs are never perceived as either divine or demonic. “Nothing too much,” the suburb seems to say, which means that, though its human dramas exist, and are as meaningful as they are anywhere else in the cosmos, they remain largely inaccessible to our myths.

The researchers took pictures of study participants and, using a computerized procedure, produced more attractive and less attractive versions of those pictures. Participants were told that they would be presented with a series of images including their original picture and images modified from that picture. They were then asked to identify the unmodified picture. They tended to select an attractively enhanced one.

Epley and Whitchurch showed that people display this bias for themselves but not for strangers. The same morphing procedure was applied to a picture of a stranger, whom the study participant met three weeks earlier during an unrelated study. Participants tended to select the unmodified picture of the stranger.

The bottom line:

[W]hat Dove is suggesting is not actually true. The evidence from psychological research suggests instead that we tend to think of our appearance in ways that are more flattering than are warranted. This seems to be part of a broader human tendency to see ourselves through rose colored glasses. Most of us think that we are better than we actually are — not just physically, but in every way.

Allen Frances bemoaned, “About half of Americans already qualify for a mental disorder at some point in their lives.” Roughly 100% of Americans already “qualify for” a somatic disorder at some point in their lives.  Does that mean we have too many somatic disorders on the books?   Or does it mean the human body and its interaction with the physical environment is a highly complex system in which there are a lot of things that can go wrong? Consider how complex the brain is as an organ, and how complex the mind is, and how complex the interactions between those things and human culture are.  How many places and ways are there for a system that complex to malfunction?  And how far is our understanding of that system behind our understanding of the human body?   I’m not sure why anybody would be surprised that we’re finding a lot of new mental disorders.

Another:

As someone who seriously studied Foucault as an undergraduate philosophy major, its hard to believe I am about to make what amounts to a defense of the new DSM, but here it goes. One of the reasons some of the definitions have been expanded has to do with insurance reimbursement.

Insurance companies need a diagnosis in order to pay clinicians to treat individuals. This is even more important for low-income individuals, because there is a select set of disorders, referred to as “serious mental illness for which individuals can be eligible to receive treatment. It happens that major depressive disorder is one these illnesses. We also know that the loss of a loved one is an event that can trigger major depressive disorders in individuals who may have not show clinical symptoms prior to the loss. So hypothetically, with the old “bereavement exception” (experience clinical depression symptoms after the loss of a loved one), an individual who may be in serious need of help and cannot afford to pay out of pocket, would not be eligible for services under the old criteria.

Were the motivations to change the criteria primarily driven by concerns for the poor? Probably not. Under these new guidelines, pharmaceutical companies will certainly benefit from physicians prescribing anti-depressants for what has traditionally been understood as the normal grieving process. But I have trouble with people, especially clinicians, laying the blame at the foot of the APA and DSM. Like any diagnosis, the new guidelines are intended to be made by experienced professionals using clinical judgement. They are not meant to be read like a laundry list or a cookbook that is then juxtaposed on an individual.

No, gluttony is not “binge eating disorder” if it’s a conscious choice that you are okay with. But it is an issue if it causes you distress, feels uncontrollable, causes you to gain weight and could lead to a host of other physical and mental health issues. That is why most disorders come with the qualification that they cause distress and impair functioning.

But the larger point is dealing with how our society views mental illness. It seems that implicit in Dr. Frances’ post is the notion that somehow mental illnesses are reserved for the “other”. Sure, about one half of individuals qualify for a mental illness at some point. How many qualify for a physical illness? I am sure the number is much higher. It is true that physical illness is typically much easier to understand that the complexity of the brain and its interactions with the body, and not to mention other individuals and society as whole. But if that is the case, it seems that the more productive conversation is about how our understanding of the brain and mental illness is only emerging and if we think a medical model is appropriate for both capturing and treating human suffering in its various forms.

A reader writes:

I live in Moore about a block south of the corner of SW 19th and S Santa Fe, less than 2 miles south of where Plaza Towers Elementary used to be. I drove past Moore Medical Center every day on my way home from work. If the tornado had turned east toward Santa Fe just a quarter of a mile sooner than it did, our home would have taken a direct hit. Our power has been restored, and though our yard is filled with trash (a familiar refrain: I have found strangers’ family photos on our lawn), our house is largely untouched. Almost everything north of us has been obliterated. I came very close to losing everything, yet came out largely unscathed. What I keep returning to in my mind is that just a few blocks away, seven kids lost their lives.

Another:

I just wanted to make sure that you know that, although the tornado warning was issued with 16 minutes warning, we had multiple days of warning that Sunday and Monday were high risk tornado days in our area. Scroll through the Facebook posts from the US National Weather Service in Norman (just south of Moore) and you will see what I am talking about. On Monday morning they warned that the risk in our area would be maximal at about the time kids were to be let out of school, and that we might need to make different plans. I picked my children up from their elementary school in Oklahoma City early that day in response to their video update from around 11 AM. Had I waited until close to their usual 3:10 pick up time, I would not have been able to get them, as the school was on lock down due to the tornado warning. My kids’ school does not have underground shelter. With an F5 tornado, that’s what they need. I know the schools need improved safety, but with that monster coming I was glad we had an in-ground shelter in the floor of our garage.

Anyway, the National Weather Service has been the unsung hero of this, and I wanted you to know about them and their relatively new foray into social media. (They are facing sequester cuts, which is terrible.) Oh, and on the subject of shelters, I wanted to add my curmudgeonly two cents.

My family has a small in-ground shelter in our garage. I got it after we moved into a new house and realized that it had no good interior rooms for shelter and no basement (they all leak around here). One tornado siren with my husband, my newborn and my 20-month-old, huddled in a hallway under a mattress, was enough to make me bite the $5000 bullet and get one. That was five years ago.

My neighbors saw the shelter crew jackhammer the hole in our garage floor and put it in. They took interest, but none of them bought one.

On Monday as the sirens blew, and while I was upstairs keeping close track of our excellent meteorologists on TV and frantically trying to think of the things I needed to grab that would be crucial to us if the house blew away, my bicycle-helmeted kids were safely in the shelter. So were my two crated cats, my two dogs, my computer hard drive and my wedding album, along with our prescription drugs, several lanterns, a battery operated fan, my kids most favorite stuffed animals, and my plastic tub containing our emergency supplies (crowbar, blankets, water, food, emergency contact information, cash, etc.). It was pretty jam-packed down there.

I would have tossed everything but my kids out without hesitation to save my neighbors if that tornado had come to our house (some neighbors have come over in past storms). But I have to admit that I am just a bit ticked off that none of them have gotten their own shelter. Not everyone can afford them, but my neighbors could. They all have their places to go in the event of a tornado, but when it is an EF5 and you know you won’t survive above ground, you need an underground plan. I don’t mind if my shelter is someone’s accidental plan. I just don’t want it to be the place they depend on. I feel guilty saying it, but I want to be able to keep my wedding album and my hard drive and my kids’ stuffed animals, and especially my pets!

Want I want to say but never would is this: “Get your own damn shelter!”

Another:

One of your OKC subscribers writing in. We are all devastated. Seeing this type of destruction in your own city is a difficult feeling to describe.

My husband was huddled in an underground room of his school with high school students not far from the storm. When our local weather man said that the storm was taking the same path as the May 3, 1999 storm, I shuddered. That would have meant it was coming for my husband’s school, which was hit by that storm. Fortunately for us, the storm went east instead of north this time, thereby missing Tinker AFB and Midwest City.

What we spoke about last night, though, as we watched our local anchor report the gut wrenching news, was what will change now? When we grew up here as kids they told us go to an interior closet or bathroom, put on a helmet, put a mattress over your head if you can. But after May of 1999, they knew yesterday to tell us on the TV, “Get underground or get out of the way.” They kept repeating it, knowing they were trying to save lives. These “grinders,” as they call them, are different. They literally scour the earth. With a storm that can go from nothing to EF5 in under an hour, what about those parents who do work far from their kids schools? Many times growing up I was huddled against a hallway wall in duck and cover position, and that was not enough to save some of those kids.

What do we do? I can tell you that it is a conversation many of us are having right now. We have always dealt with tornadoes here – they are a part of life. But we are all thinking about what types of emergency plans we need to reconfigure, how our mindset will be different the next time. For a state full of people already extremely knowledgeable about what to do during a tornado, what can we do to be better prepared?

(Photo: Debris litters what remains of a classroom at Plaza Towers Elementary School after it was destroyed by a tornado that ripped through the area on May 22, 2013 in Moore, Oklahoma. Seven children died in the school during the tornado. The tornado of at least EF4 strength and two miles wide touched down May 20 killing at least 24 people and leaving behind extensive damage to homes and businesses. U.S. President Barack Obama promised federal aid to supplement state and local recovery efforts. By Scott Olson/Getty Images)

The first guy goes for the female fed with the machete and she not even ramping she took man out like robocop never seen nutn like it

— Boya Dee (@BOYADEE) May 22, 2013

I’m feeling things today in the wake of this act of religious barbarism on the streets of London that I haven’t felt for a while. The monster who paraded around on the street after hacking a soldier to pieces is chilling in many ways. But everything points to a religious act of terror, motivated by the same Jihadist rage that captured the Tsarnaev brothers. For these men, “our land” is not Britain; it is the land of Islam in their minds. Here’s the full quote of the Jihadist:

We swear by the Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone. The only reason we have killed this man this is because Muslims are dying daily. This British soldier is an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth … We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth. I apologize that women had to witness this today but in our lands our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government. They don’t care about you.

This eye-witness account shows that even in the midst of this Islamist barbarism, some shred of humanity remained:

“I saw a guy with no head lying on the ground. He had been decapitated. There were two black guys walking around his body saying ‘This is what God would’ve wanted’. My friend and her mum were walking up the hill and the mum came straight to the victim. She asked the black guys ‘can I help him?’ And one of them said he was already dead but she could go. Then one of them said ‘No man is coming near this body, only women’. She was so brave, she didn’t care what happened to her – she knelt down by his side and comforted him. She held his hand and put her other hand on his chest. I think she might have been praying.”

There is no formal confirmation that the victim, who was run over on the sidewalk by the Islamists’ car, was actually a soldier, but he was wearing a t-shirt that referred to a charity for veterans, and was near a barracks. Mercifully, the response from the Muslim community in London has been unequivocal:

This is a truly barbaric act that has no basis in Islam and we condemn this unreservedly. Our thoughts are with the victim and his family. We understand the victim is a serving member of the armed forces. Muslims have long served in this country’s armed forces, proudly and with honour. This attack on a member of the armed forces is dishonourable, and no cause justifies this murder.

A girl scout leader, Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, was on the scene and managed to talk to the butchers as they hung around, bragging for the cameras, their hands dripping with blood:

I spoke to him for more than five minutes. I asked him why he had done what he had done. He said he had killed the man because he [the victim] was a British soldier who killed Muslim women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was furious about the British army being over there.

There was blood on the pavement by the car where the man on the ground had been hit by it. At first there was no blood by the body but as I talked to the man it began to flow which worried me because blood needs a beating heart to flow. But I didn’t want to annoy the man by going back to the body.

I asked him what he was going to do next because the police were going to arrive soon. He said it was a war and if the police were coming, he was going to kill them. I asked him if that was a reasonable thing to do but it was clear that he really wanted to do that. He talked about war but he did not talk about dying and then he left to speak to someone else.

Two things are true here. The first is that this was a religious sacrificial murder, authorized by God in the eyes of the killers. The second is that this is clearly motivated by blowback from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The first is indefensible on any grounds. The second is a reminder that in the war against this religious barbarism, occupying Muslim countries is not an answer.

A primer on the Juggalo subculture:

The term originated during a 1994 live performance by Insane Clown Posse. During the song “The Juggla”, Violent J addressed the audience as Juggalos, and the positive response resulted in Bruce and Shaggy 2 Dope using the word thereafter to refer to themselves and their friends, family, and fans, including other Psychopathic Records artists. The fanbase boomed following the release of their third album, Riddle Box, in 1995, leading Insane Clown Posse to write the songs “What Is A Juggalo?” and “Down With The Clown” for their 1997 album The Great Milenko.  According to Utsler, “[Juggalos come] from all walks of life – from poverty, from rich, from all religions, all colors. [...] It doesn’t matter if you’re born with a silver spoon in your mouth, or a crack rock in your mouth.”

Susan Karlin previews an upcoming PBS documentary about the “artistic sleight-of-hand” that helped the US defeat the Germans in WWII:

This is the astonishing true story of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, nicknamed the Ghost Army, a group of 1,100 handpicked American G.I.s who tricked the German army with rubber artillery, sound effects, fake radio transmissions, and psychological illusions during the summer of 1944. Many of these young soldiers were art students who would go on to illustrious careers in art, design, and fashion–including fashion designer Bill Blass, painter Ellsworth Kelly, and photographer Art Kane. But during quiet moments, they would often sketch and paint their surroundings, offering a fine-art chronicling of the mission. …

The Ghost Army devised more than 20 deceptive operations, phony convoys, and phantom divisions–each impersonating a different (and vastly larger) U.S. unit–to fool the enemy about the strength and ubiquity of American units. Soldiers even hung out at local cafés, spinning yarns for eavesdropping spies. The effort culminated along the Rhine in the final days of the war, in which thousands of lives depended on a convincing performance.