THIS MODERN WORLD

1. This has been zipping about, but if you haven’t seen it already, don’t miss the take of Craig Murray, the former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, on the latest terror plot. (Murray was fired by the British Foreign Office for criticizing Uzbekistan’s routine torture, thereby mucking up England’s highly moral and extremely rational foreign policy.)

I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.

So this, I believe, is the true story…

The rest.

2. Dennis Perrin takes his son to the water park:

The boy and I were diving through a chlorinated waterfall running down a faux rock face when I surfaced and saw a Nazi tattoo on a big white arm. I couldn’t believe it. Open militarism is one thing, part of Americana, a disease you somewhat get used to; but an actual swastika is a deeper statement. The guy wearing it was large and muscular, looking like a bodyguard or bouncer, his head shaved, his goatee closely trimmed. The swastika was surrounded by two tiny American flags with an eagle atop…Check please!…

We moved through the parking lot choked with SUVs, Hummers, and pick-ups, many boasting “Support Our Troops,” “These Colors Never Run” and “USA Number 1” bumperstickers. I couldn’t wait to get home, lock the door, and drain a stiff drink. But my son strolled along, oblivious to the raw nationalist sentiment on all those gas-guzzling symbols of our collective arrogance and greed, and thanked me for taking him to the park, saying “This is one of the best days ever. I had a blast, Dad!”

This filled me with happiness, love, and fear. Poor kid. Look at the world that awaits him.

More.

3. Internet legend Dooce writes hilariously and movingly about post-partum depression, her own and others.

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For some time now Billmon has been engaged in a series of posts I call Things I Wish I’d Written. (Of course, I’m one of many in this regard.) He’s now at #4529.

#4529 points out the weird, um, undertones of a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed blasting the “secular transnational professional class” who supported Ned Lamont.

After all, we’ve heard about the secular transnational professional class before, haven’t we? They’re always up to no good. As Billmon says:

I think its obvious that the big problem here is all the liberal doctors.

You gotta figure there’s some kind of conspiracy behind it.

Read it all.

“I’m worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don’t appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us — more evil, or as evil, as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet Communists we fought during the long Cold War,” Mr. Lieberman said.

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I’m sorry, but this is just a deranged, or at best deeply confused and manic, thing to say. It shows a lack of perspective and reality and responsibility, even in its lack of clarity about what exactly the threat is and how to defeat it. Why does anyone accept that this kind of blather can be considered taking the threat more “seriously”? It’s not. It’s hugely unserious in its trivialization of the great moral challenges of the Twentieth Century and it’s bald politicization of the current challenge.

More.

I have mentioned before that the New Haven Register is perhaps not the gold standard by which journalism should be judged. A small example: for two days running, the paper has featured on its front page a small controversy brewing in the nearby town of Milford:

City veterans’ groups are calling on the public to boycott a River Street liquor store because the store’s owner has a small poster in his window that the veterans say demeans soldiers, particularly those serving in Iraq, by suggesting the unemployed should join the Army.

But TJ’s Package Store owner Thomas Jakubisyn, who served in the Navy aboard the USS Des Moines before and during the Vietnam War, says his poster has been misunderstood and he won’t take it down. He says it was put up as a simple protest to the war in Iraq.

The small poster of a political cartoon, depicts a camouflage-clad soldier and says, “Out of Work? Undereducated? No Health plan? Join the Army and see Iraq.”

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The cartoon, by artist Chivast, originally appeared in the New York Times; Jakubisyn says he’s had it up since the war started in 2003.

Okay, so here’s the thing: although he is mentioned in both articles, there is no “artist Chivast”. There is a very well known artist named Seymour Chwast, cofounder of the legendary Pushpin Studios and a frequent illustrator for the New York Times, whose signature features a stylized “W” that — I’ll be charitable here — might be misinterpreted as an “I” and a “V”. Chwast is, of course, the illustrator who created the image in question, to accompany a Frank Rich column from 2003.

Took me about five minutes to track that down, using information from the Register’s own article. I was able to pinpoint the date of the initial illustration with Google, and then tracked down the actual image with a little help from my wife the academic, who has access to some specialized databases. (They’ve blocked off a small part of the illo “due to copyright” but Chwast’s signature is still clearly visible). Now, presumably the Register has resources at least comparable to those of a cartoonist sitting at home on his butt in front of a computer screen, but even if they don’t, you’d think they might have called someone at the Times to track the artist down, maybe get a quote from him. Front page news, two days running, you’d think a comment from the artist responsible for the controversy would be of some relevance.

At the very least, you’d think they’d try to get his name right.

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Incidentally, kudos to Mr. Jakubisyn (assuming they got his name right) for not backing down. If you’re in the area, you should throw some business his way.