Karim Sadjadpour, in Foreign Policy, takes the old “two cows” Central European joke and has a go at applying it to the contemporary Middle East.
You know the joke. In its original form, it goes:
Socialism: You have two cows. The government takes one of them and gives it to your neighbor.
Communism: You have two cows. The government takes them both and provides you with milk.
Nazism: You have two cows. The government shoots you and takes the cows.
Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.
In the Middle Eastern context:
Saudi Arabia
You have two cows with endless reserves of milk. Gorge them with grass, prevent them from interacting with bulls, and import South Asians to milk them.
Iran
You have two cows. You interrogate them until they concede they are Zionist agents. You send their milk to southern Lebanon and Gaza, or render it into highly enriched cream. International sanctions prevent your milk from being bought on the open market.
Syria
You have five cows, one of whom is an Alawite. Feed the Alawite cow well; beat the non-Alawite cows. Use the milk to finance your wife’s shopping sprees in London.
Lebanon
You have two cows. Syria claims ownership over them. You take them abroad and start successful cattle farms in Africa, Australia, and Latin America. You send the proceeds back home so your relatives can afford cosmetic surgery and Mercedes-Benzes.
Hezbollah
You have no cows. During breaks from milking on the teat of the Iranian cow you call for Israel’s annihilation.
Iraq
You have three cows: one Sunni, one Shiite, and one Kurd. The first is milked by Saudi Arabia, the second by Iran, and the third smuggles its milk abroad. The United States picks up the manure.
Bahrain
You have three cows: two Shiites and one Sunni. Invite Saudi Arabia to come kill a Shiite cow and import another Sunni cow.
Yemen
You have two cows. Feed them khat instead of grass and neglect to milk them. Watch them fight each other.
Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt
You have 10 cows. Neglect to tend to them, but prevent them from fighting Israel in order to get milk from America.
Post-Mubarak Egypt
You have 10 cows who think they now own the farm. There’s still no milk.
Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s Tunisia
You have two cows. Beat them regularly and use the milk money for your wife’s shopping sprees in Paris. When the cows revolt, retire to Saudi Arabia.
Post-Ben Ali Tunisia
See post-Mubarak Egypt.
Libya
You have two cows. You wish they were camels. Feed them only your words of wisdom and kill them if they dare moo.
Turkey
You have two cows and one sheep. You claim that the sheep is really a “mountain cow.”
Qatar
You have one cow that has hundreds of udders. You use the limitless milk money to set up a television channel that broadcasts the other cows in the region being milked (except Saudi Arabia’s).
United Arab Emirates
You have two cows. You bring in Filipino nannies, South Asian laborers, and Russian prostitutes to make sure they’re well taken care of. Sell the milk to build the world’s biggest shopping mall.
Jordan
You have one cow, surrounded by wolves. Pretend that it’s a magic cow that has the power to pacify wild animals, and then ask America for milk.
Palestine
You had two cows that were lost decades ago. Lament them.
Israel
You have two bulls. Pretend they are helpless calves.
Robert Alexander Hillingford, Wellington at Waterloo
The Duke of Wellington disposed his forces with his customary prudence and intelligence, and Fortune came to his aid. The British victory at Waterloo left England triumphant and serene, supreme in Europe for a century.
Waterloo doomed, on the other hand, the hopes of France (and the rest of Europe) to achieve unity and pass from despotism into Modernity under the leadership of the hero of the age, who had cleansed the Revolution of its filth and covered it with glory.
(Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Gloomy plain!
Like a wave that ends in an urn too full,
In your circle of woods, hills, valleys,
Pale death mingled the dark battalions.
On one side was Europe and on the other France.
Bloody shock! God dashed these heroes’ hope
Victory deserted them, and the chance was lost.)
My Lithuanian ancestors fought on the side of France, hoping to achieve the restoration of the freedom and independence of Poland-Lithuania, partitioned and fully occupied by Russia, Prussia, and Austria in three stages: 1772, 1793, and 1795. Napoleon’s defeat condemned my ancestral homeland to occupation by Russian despotism for a century.
Waterloo was a great battle and a great victory for Britain, but not for Europe.
Why has liking Sarah Palin become a litmus test of one’s conservative bona fides?
It seems to me that I have a duty to respond to this one.
Sarah Palin’s unique combination of political star quality with her open and unabashed display of non-U (in the American sense) taste, life-style, and habits of speech; her lack of establishment affiliations and credentials; and her explicit challenge to the regime of political correctness and the national consensus of the community of fashion make Sarah Palin a potent symbolic emotional trigger in America’s contemporary regional and class conflicts and culture wars.
Her very presence on the national political scene constitutes a direct challenge to the hegemony of everything American U: to looking at the world from the 9th Avenue perspective of the New Yorker, to the definitional authority of the mainstream media, to the factual and moral consensus of the elite on everything from Global Warming to Gay Marriage.
The potential nomination for the presidency by a major party of somebody like Sarah Palin, her celebrity status, and her self-appointed role as national political authority constitutes not only a threat to the American establishment’s political power. It represents also a grave social insult.
The typical American haute bourgeoisie of 2012 would be as offended by the election of Sarah Palin as his counterpart in Philadelphia or Boston was in 1828 by the election of Andrew Jackson and as the Southern aristocracy was by the election of the frontier attorney referred to by his adversaries as “the Illinois ape.”
No one doubts the intelligence of President Lincoln today but, at the time, his intellect also was dismissed on the basis of his speaking with a regional accent different from that of the Eastern metropolitan elite.
They sang mockingly, at the time:
Jeff Davis rides a white horse,
And Lincoln rides a mule,
Jeff Davis is a gentleman,
And Lincoln is a fule.
In the American context, the disdain of the formally-educated elites for unpolished leaders with rustic accents is a very old story. And, in the contemporary context, the alleged intellectual inferiority and general unworthiness of political leaders with strongly conservative views is also getting to be an old story.
Ronald Reagan is remembered today as a great president. Some people would argue he was the greatest president of the last century. But the establishment elite held Ronald Reagan in little less contempt during his lifetime than it holds Sarah Palin today. Reagan was stupid, the left remarked constantly. He was a primitive, just a Hollywood actor (and of B movies at that), simplistic, incurious, banal, and naive.
The conservative thing to do is always to ignore the noises of the tribal culture of the establishment. The political and economic positions supported by conservative political leaders like Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin are well-founded intellectually and are historically supported by considerable empirical evidence.
It is too soon to decide whether the Republican Party ought to choose Sarah Palin as its nominee next year. She has not made it clear, so far, whether she actually intends to seek its nomination.
Were she to try to run, I think she has exhibited both potential major strengths and weaknesses that give one hope for her possible success, but leave one also uncertain of her ability to succeed. If Sarah Palin fails to convince most of us that she can perform consistently at a higher level of eloquence, I’d say that she ought not to be the nominee.
Palin has already carved out for herself a useful, practically effective, and very prominent role as a political commentator. It is possible that remaining free to be herself and operating in that capacity would be more congenial to her and more compatible with her talents and inclinations than campaigning for the presidency.
In the final analysis, of course, if she were to be nominated and run against Barack Obama, she clearly comfortably passes Glenn Reynolds’ test for preferability to Barack Obama. Though I attended an Ivy League school, I grew up in the mountains of Pennsylvania hunting deer, and I retain enough of my native Alabama-of-the-North redneck identity to view the possible discomfiture of the American community of fashion by the election of Sarah Palin to the presidency with relish.
Republicans electing Sarah Palin would be in the position of Conan the Barbarian experiencing the Cimmerian best thing: “To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.” Those lamentations would be louder, in the case of the election of Sarah Palin, than in any other case imaginable.
What exactly do mummies from Ancient Egypt, Chile, Peru, deceased Hungarians, and the body of a dog discovered in a peat bog in Germany have in common? Not much, beyond being dead and provoking in the living a morbid fascination on the basis of inevitable “as I am now, so you shall be” reflections.
Strict considerations of substantive factual relationship have not deterred Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, however, from offering “the largest exhibition of real mummies and related artifacts ever assembled.â€
There are 150 objects on display, most on loan from German museums. They include not just the expected relics of ancient Egypt, but also unexpected relics of that time and place: mummies of a falcon, an ibis, a crocodile; a mummified foot separated from its companion limbs during an era when mummies were plundered for their parts; a startling Egyptian head from the Roman era, half wrapped in embalmer’s linen.The sensations accumulate, for displayed here too are far less well-known mummies of South America, where, over thousands of years, multiple cultures honed embalming techniques, from the ancient Chinchorros in Peru to the 13th-century Chiu-chiu in Chile, leading up to the Incas, with their human sacrifices and death celebrations. And here, too, are the members of a single family from 18th-century Hungary, the ill-fated Orlovitses, who perished when tuberculosis ravaged the small town of Vac. Their bodies were rediscovered in 1994, naturally mummified, their paper-thin skin pocked with small holes left by stray bugs in a forgotten church crypt.
A Texas mother received a felony conviction, five years probation, parenting classes, a small fine, and a scolding from a judge who has vocabulary problems (“quarrel” for “era”) for spanking her two-year-old daughter.
A judge in Corpus Christi, Texas had some harsh words for a mother charged with spanking her own child before sentencing her to probation.
“You don’t spank children today,” said Judge Jose Longoria. “In the old days, maybe we got spanked, but there was a different quarrel. You don’t spank children.”
Rosalina Gonzales had pleaded guilty to a felony charge of injury to a child for what prosecutors had described as a “pretty simple, straightforward spanking case.” They noted she didn’t use a belt or leave any bruises, just some red marks.
As part of the plea deal, Gonzales will serve five years probation, during which time she’ll have to take parenting classes, follow CPS guidelines, and make a $50 payment to the Children’s Advocacy Center.
She was arrested back in December after the child’s paternal grandmother noticed red marks on the child’s rear end. The grandmother took the girl, who was two years-old at the time, to the hospital to be checked out.
Some people certainly think that spanking children is always inappropriate and excessive. Let’s hope that even more people think that intrusions by the state into relations between parents and children in circumstances not involving grave and serious injury are inappropriate and that everyone would think that a felony conviction over an ordinary spanking is outrageously excessive.
Walter Russell Mead argues that Barack Obama is starting to look much more like Herbert Hoover.
President Hoover brought some convictions with him to office about how the economy worked, how government worked, and what his role as President should be. As the Depression deepened, he did the best he could within those limits, but nothing seems to have made him reconsider the mix of progressive ideas that he brought with him to the White House. As months of failure and disappointment grew into years, he doesn’t seem to have questioned those core ideas or to think about ways in which the economic emergency might require steps that in normal times would not be taken. He not only failed to end the Depression; he failed to give people a sense that he understood what was happening. Over-optimistic forecasts issued in part to build confidence came back to haunt him. To the public he seemed fuddled and doctrinaire, endlessly recycling stale platitudes in the face of radically new economic problems.
That’s beginning to sound a little like the current President’s predicament. Unless Lady Luck should emerge from retirement to sprinkle some growth dust on the economy, the President could find himself looking more Hooveresque by the day. Worse, President Obama faces problems that Hoover did not have — notably the five shooting wars on his hands in Afghanistan, tribal Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and now, apparently, Yemen.
Jim DeMint: Your tax dollars at work: $2 million grant to build a “culinary amphitheater,” wine tasting room, and gift shop in Richland, Washington. That makes sense, with the federal deficit where it is, everyone needs a drink.
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Cedar Falls, Iowa wants keys to residents’ homes. It’s for their safety.
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Kayleigh via Jose Guardia: Keynesianism is the equivalent of pouring your can of soda into a glass and trying to claim that, because the soda is now in the glass, you have more soda than if you had not poured it into the glass.
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Michelle Malkin: Woe is Weiner: No skillz to pay the billz. But don’t worry, he has a job offer with a higher salary. And he has a pension.
Rafal Heydel-Mankoo commemorated the anniversary of the death of King John Sobieski of Poland-Lithuania by linking this video of his Relief of the Siege of Vienna.
Friday evening’s high point is the horn blowing competition.
Karen just got her photos of the first day of the Bryn Mawr Hound Show loaded on her web-site in time to coincide with the appearance of a few of her later photos in an article by Sarah Montague on the New York City NPR web-site.
Sarah’s article includes a recording of the horn blowing competiton.
The Bryn Mawr Hound Show, dating back to 1914, held on the grounds of the Radnor Hunt Club, is the oldest hound show held in the United States.
Barack Obama, Today show, February, 2009 (around 4:27): “Look, I’m at the start of my administration. One nice thing about the situation I find myself in is that I will be held accountable. I’ve got four years. … A year from now, I think, people are going to see that we are starting to make some progress. There’s still going to be some pain out there. If I don’t have this done on three years, then there’s going to be a one term proposition.”
