Sea World’s “killer whale” death: I agree with PETA

I don’t agree with PETA on very much of anything: I had bacon at breakfast and hamburger for lunch today. I think fur coats can be kind of ostentatious, but I’ve worn a leather jacket in my time. I simply don’t think animals have the same moral and cognitive standing as humans — though I think wanton cruelty is evil — and I’m fine with that.

That said, I think they might, might be onto something — just a little bit — here:

Debbie Leahy, PETA’s Director of Captive Animals, says the death of SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau didn’t have to happen, and if SeaWorld keeps holding their killer whales captive “it will happen again.”

“It was only a matter of time that something like this would happen,” Leahy told CBS News’ Crimesider in a Thursday interview. “It was a very angry, very frustrated orca who snapped and decided to take it out on a person.”

I’m not going to try divine the orca’s motives in killing Brancheau. But I think Leahy is right that another incident will happen, though for the wrong reasons.

The real reason is this: Animals don’t have the same moral and cognitive standing as humans. Sea World and outfits of its ilk are built, to some extent, on the anthropomorphic qualities of the animals they exploit. Shamu becomes a “friendly” whale who loves to do tricks! Some of this is ok: It’s why so many of us have and find comfort in pets.

But Shamu isn’t anybody’s buddy. Shamu is a “killer whale,” prone to do killer whale things like eat tons of fish, swim in wide open spaces and attack perceived threats. There’s only so much socializing into the human milieu that can be done. As long as we try, accidents are going to happen from time to time.

Jobless numbers increase; we are all going to die and be depressed

The snow is coming down in Philadelphia — again. And while talk of a “snowicane” is apocalyptic enough, now we have to worry about losing our jobs because of it:

The number of Americans filing for initial unemployment insurance surged to just below the 500,000 level last week, and have climbed more than 12% over the past two weeks, the government said Thursday.

Over the past few weeks, the Northeast, particularly the Washington area, has been hit with snow storms, putting people out of work and resulting in a backlog of claims that the Labor Department wasn’t able to process until this week.

Which is depressing news on the same day the New York Times ran this story about how a manufacturing plant closing apparently triggered a series of fatal heart attacks among its former workers:

A growing body of research suggests that layoffs can have profound health consequences. One 2006 study by a group of epidemiologists at Yale found that layoffs more than doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke among older workers. Another paper, published last year by Kate W. Strully, a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Albany, found that a person who lost a job had an 83 percent greater chance of developing a stress-related health problem, like diabetes, arthritis or psychiatric issues.

And if you survive your layoff? Well, The Atlantic’s cover story this month lets you know you probably face a lifetime of poor earnings and chronic depression as a result!

If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years.

Ohgodohgodohgodohgod.

Reading all this actually makes you wonder how the United States survived The Great Depression. The obvious answer: World War II. That answer is often framed in economic terms — building all those tanks, bombers and ships was a real shot in the arm for our manufacturing sector — but I wonder now, too, if Pearl Harbor didn’t serve as a kind of bracing slap in the face to Americans of the time. My generation has already had its Pearl Harbor and we don’t need another one. But it’s possible that to get ourselves going again, we’re going to need a pick-me-up of some sort. It’s going to be so much harder to get out of a recession if we’re all afflicted with depression.

Andrew Breitbart’s conservative “journalism”: Letting Frank Gaffney race-bait the president

Conservative impressario Andrew Breitbart was held up recently as an intellectually honest conservative, of sorts, for his stand at the National Tea Party conference against Joe Farah’s “birther” speech against Barack Obama.

“It’s self-indulgent, it’s narcissistic, it’s a losing issue,” Breitbart said. “It’s a losing situation. If you don’t have the frigging evidence — raising the question? You can do that to Republicans all day long. You have to disprove that you’re a racist! Forcing them to disprove something is a nightmare.”

Good stuff. But if he’s serious about that stance, why on earth is he publishing Frank Gaffney’s Big Government blog post suggesting that Obama is putting missile defense under the control of the Muslim hordes?

Now, thanks to an astute observation by Christopher Logan of the Logans Warning blog, we have another possible explanation for behavior that — in the face of rapidly growing threats posed by North Korean, Iranian, Russian, Chinese and others’ ballistic missiles — can only be described as treacherous and malfeasant: Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte. They seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah.

What could be code-breaking evidence of the latter explanation is to be found in the newly-disclosed redesign of the Missile Defense Agency logo (above). As Logan helpfully shows, the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo.

This is paranoid nuttiness of the first order. And it does exactly what Breitbart suggested was exactly the wrong thing to do: It “raises the question” of Obama’s loyalties without any evidence — only speculation — of intent.

Breitbart clearly wants to have it both ways: He gets to stay somewhere in the vicinity of respectable opinion by taking down the clearly nutty Joseph Farah. But he’s also happy to let writers on his site continue to plant baseless “Manchurian Candidate” seeds of doubt among his readers. The proof, I’d say, is in the publishing.

Torture advocate and Inky columnist John Yoo advocates killing unarmed civilians

Near the end of today’s Wall Street Journal “vindication” piece, John Yoo says that he wrote the torture memos to give presidents the latitude to fight the war however they see fit. And though he doesn’t say so directly, he suggests that presidents should be allowed to let soldiers execute unarmed noncombatant civilians in the name of military necessity.

Here’s how Yoo puts it:

Mr. Obama is fighting three wars simultaneously in Iraq, Afghanistan, and against al Qaeda. He will call upon the men and women serving under his command to make choices as hard as the ones we faced. They cannot meet those challenges with clear minds if they believe that a bevy of prosecutors, congressional committees and media critics await them when they return from the battlefield.

This is no idle worry. In 2005, a Navy Seal team dropped into Afghanistan encountered goat herders who clearly intended to inform the Taliban of their whereabouts. The team leader ordered them released, against his better military judgment, because of his worries about the media and political attacks that would follow.

In less than an hour, more than 80 Taliban fighters attacked and killed all but one member of the Seal team and 16 Americans on a helicopter rescue mission. If a president cannot, or will not, protect the men and women who fight our nation’s wars, they will follow the same risk-averse attitudes that invited the 9/11 attacks in the first place.

This is a vague piece of writing. What really happened in 2005? A long piece in the Army Times describes a book by Michael Luttrell, the sole Seal survivor of that incident.

According to his book’s account, the SEALs thought they had only two choices: kill the three goatherds, or let them go.

As Luttrell relates in “Lone Survivor,” Murphy first tried to raise the SEAL tactical operations center at Bagram on the radio for guidance. He couldn’t connect. Then Murphy made an “on-scene call”: He put the decision to a vote. He would not impose his decision on the others.

Axelson voted to kill them, Luttrell said. “We’re on active duty behind enemy lines, sent here by our senior commanders,” the book quotes him as saying. “We have a right to do everything we can to save our own lives. The military decision is obvious. To turn them loose would be wrong.”

Murphy voted to let the Afghans go. Dietz abstained. “I don’t really give a s— what we do,” Dietz said, according to Luttrell. “You want me to kill ’em, I’ll kill ’em. Just give me the word. I only work here.”

Then, Luttrell said, Murphy then warned his men that if they killed the goatherds, they would have to report the deaths, and the Taliban would publicize them, as well.

“[T]he U.S. liberal media will attack us without mercy,” Luttrell quotes Murphy as saying. “We will almost certainly be charged with murder.”

Even at the time he made the decision, Luttrell said, he would have voted to kill the three goatherds if he was assured that he and his teammates would not get into trouble.

Within two hours of letting the goatherds go, the special operators found themselves in a fight for their lives, all but surrounded and massively outnumbered by an estimated 140 Taliban fighters.

So the Seals had a choice: Kill three unarmed civilians who’d demonstrated no hostile intent? Or do nothing and risk detection? Luttrell now says they should’ve killed the goatherds. But forget about the “liberal media” — a convenient if unlikely scapegoat: Would the Seal team have been legally justified in executing the unarmed civilians?

“The killing of non-combatants under the circumstances described is never legally justified unless as an act of self-defense,” Bolgiano said. “Use of deadly force in self-defense is reasonable when responding to demonstrated hostile intent, or a hostile act, which presents an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury. While imminent does not mean immediate, it is quite a stretch to say that since the shepherds may tip off local Taliban as to the presence of the SOF [special operations forces], then it would be OK to kill them in self-defense.

“On the other hand, if the SOF had a reasonable belief that, in fact, these shepherds were acting as Taliban lookouts or sentries, then deadly force may be authorized. Once, however, any threat (combatant or non-combatant) becomes a prisoner, then one can’t simply execute them for convenience.”

Listen: Luttrell and his colleagues faced a crappy situation. But killing unarmed goatherds would’ve been murder. And in any case there’s a saying: Bad cases make bad law.

And in any case, Yoo is once again being disingenuous: He didn’t write his memos to help the president give legal and political cover for individual decisions made in the heat of the moment by a few individual soldiers — the memos never contemplated such situations. His memos instead helped justify torture in a non-combat situation, where terrorist suspects were already under the control of American officials … who had the time and wherewithal to draft lengthy legal memoranda. It’s a different situation, one that had relatively bright lines until the Bush Administration got Yoo to help muddy them up.

Torture advocate and Inky columnist John Yoo is a big fat liar

Torture advocate (and Inquirer columnist)  John Yoo takes to the pages of the Wall Street Journal today to crow about his “vindication” in a Justice Department investigation that decided he was merely incompetent, not willfully unethical, in signing off on the Bush-era torture memos. And true to Yoo’s style, he distorts and politicizes the situation to create an entirely false narrative of his own victimization.

Obama came to office, he said, planning to break sharply with Bush-era precedents on torture:

In my case, he let loose the ethics investigators of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) to smear my reputation and that of Jay Bybee, who now sits as a federal judge on the court of appeals in San Francisco.

This would seem to suggest that Obama launched the OPR investigation of Yoo and Bybee. But that’s not true: Yoo’s work was so bad that the OPR investigation started during the Bush Administration — and the initial, much more devastating findings, were also reached during the Bush Administration, as Yoo himself demonstrates when talking about the timeline:

Attorney General Holder could have stopped this sorry mess earlier, just as his predecessor had tried to do. OPR slow-rolled Attorney General Michael Mukasey by refusing to deliver a draft of its report until the 2008 Christmas and New Year holidays. OPR informed Mr. Mukasey of its intention to release the report on Jan. 12, 2009, without giving me or Judge Bybee the chance to see it—as was our right and as we’d been promised.

Get this straight: The so-called “smear job” came under the Republican president. The so-called “vindication” came under the Democratic president. I have my disagreements with that, but for Yoo to portray this process as “fighting off an administration hell-bent on finding scapegoats for its policy disagreements with the last president” is purely and completely dishonest.

Why is Apple taking away my iPhone pornography?

Well, not mine of course. But the blogosphere is up in arms today because  Apple is purging the app store of “over 5,000 boobs, babes and bikini apps.” Me? I can truly and honestly tell you with a straight face that I’ve never purchased or downloaded one of those apps. So you can call me a prude, if you like.

What’s more, it’s Apple’s store. We don’t get angry because WholeFoods doesn’t sell skin mags, do we? That wouldn’t be all that rational. If we want to buy a skin mag, we go to the store where they sell skin mags. And we still buy our organic apples — heh — at WholeFoods. (Unless we’re boycotting, but that’s another story.)

On the other hand, if you’re Apple, you risk undermining your reputation of providing the most useful mobile device when you suddenly decide entire categories of content are off-limits. It’s possible you lose business that way. Since I’m skeptical that Apple did this out of any abiding moral convictions, though, I’m guessing somebody decided that the best business decision was to erase the apps rather than be seen as a purveyor of smut. There are other mobile phones in the world, after all.

But I like my iPhone. If anybody decides they need to go buy a Nexus One in order to have a richer and more convenient pornography experience, more power to them. Hardly seems worth it to me.

Liberals and Obama-loving teachers unions are at fault in the Lower Merion webcam spy scandal

Over at the conservative website Hot Air, the writer MadisonConservative suggests that the Lower Merion webcam scandal is the fault of liberals and Obama-loving teachers unions who want to usurp parental rights over their children. Seriously:

Tsk tsk. When are you foolish people going to learn that you are not the primary guardian of your children? You’re hardly as qualified as tenured NEA members. Don’t you know it takes a village?

This poor kid is being harassed and accused of criminal activity, but we all know situations that potentially could be far worse. Suppose cameras were turned on when students were getting dressed, or were just out of the shower. Suppose they were on when students were doing one of the many activities that becomes common during puberty. Lately, it’s become clear that some teachers are exploring “perks” of their profession. Hell, we’re lucky if we can undo the more and more common brainwashing being used on kids when they get home.

This is, of course, utter foolishness. It’s liberals who’ve spent most of the last decade yelling our heads off — fruitlessly, it seems — about the federal government’s expanded and often-illegal eavesdropping in the post-9/11 years. Conservatives have been tripping over themselves to defend such programs in the name of national security. What on earth — aside from the chance to try to score some illegitimate cheap shot points — would make MadisonConservative think that liberals hate the federal government spying on us but welcome it when the local school district does so? Not for nothing: The people suing the Lower Merion district happen to be bigwig Democrats. If MadisonConservative is right, shouldn’t they be thrilled by the school district’s intrusion into their home?

Let me suggest alternatively something that should be uncontroversial: Bureaucracies tend to accrue power to themselves. Because of this, I think there’s something to the conservative insight that larger government can and does intrude on the freedom of the people it governs. (But I don’t think that’s the end of the discussion.) A love of freedom, though, isn’t really confined to either side of our political debates, despite the rhetoric. Liberals and conservatives alike are shocked and offended by the Lower Merion webcam scandal. Trying to hang this around the necks of Democrats, though, is just plain dumb.

Samantha Bell thinks her father is a hero. She’s wrong.

You can’t blame a daughter for not wanting to think ill of her father. But there needs to be some gentle pushback against Samantha Bell’s contention that her father, Joe Stack, is a “hero” for flying his plane into that IRS building in Austin.

Joe Stack’s adult daughter, Samantha Bell, spoke to ABC’s “Good Morning America” from her home in Norway. Asked during a phone interview broadcast Monday if she considered her father a hero, she said: “Yes. Because now maybe people will listen.”

She said her father’s last actions were wrong.

“But if nobody comes out and speaks up on behalf of injustice, then nothing will ever be accomplished,” she told ABC. “But I do not agree with his last action with what he did. But I do agree about the government.”

This probably wouldn’t merit mentioning, except that some people are taking Joe Stack’s anti-IRS rant quite seriously. But I’m not sure they completely understand what they’re signing on to.

I have, from time to time, considered the example of Thich Quang Duc — best known as one of the Vietnamese monks who set himself on fire during the 1960s to protest the American-backed government of South Vietnam. I’ve wondered what it must be like, to believe so deeply that something needs attention that you’d kill yourself to draw the spotlight to the problem. I’m not always sure I know the difference between psychosis and savvy PR.

But gruesome as Thich Quang Duc’s actions were, there’s something important about them to note: He killed no other human beings in his protest.

Stack was a homicidal loon. He flew his plane on a suicide mission into a building with real human beings in it. He burned his home — apparently setting fire while his wife and daughter were in it. His manifesto was not a sophisticated political critique — it wasn’t even really coherent — but a lashing out of rage in a number of different directions. What ever he was “hinting” at he discredited through his actions. His story is very sad, but it is not heroic. Nobody should say so.

Sarah Palin vs. ‘Family Guy’

I’m not sure, but it appears that Sarah Palin is starting to base her campaign for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination on continually taking umbrage at slurs on folks with developmental disabilities. Let me stipulate: Nobody should be making fun of Palin’s minor children — let’s leave young children out of all slams on their dumb parents, shall we? — and casually tossing around words like “retard” is crass and impolite, at best.

Still, it’s weird to see people getting their panties in a bunch over a punchline on Family Guy. But that’s exactly what’s happening:

In a recent episode, the character Chris is dating a teenage girl with Down syndrome, and when he asks her what her parents do, she says, “My dad’s an accountant, and my mom is the former governor of Alaska.” Get it?

This gag was unfunny, unkind and unnecessary.

Unfunny because I doubt liberals would have found the humor in a bit showing President Clinton, one of their icons, having a heart attack.

Unkind because at the center of all this is a toddler with Down syndrome who, as Palin’s daughter Bristol wrote on her mom’s Facebook page, already has a hard life in store — filled with intolerance, prejudice and limitations imposed by others. David Tolleson, head of the Atlanta-based National Down Syndrome Congress, called parts of the gag “hurtful and stereotypical.”And unnecessary because there are a million different ways to have written that scene that wouldn’t have been so cruel.

And all I can say of Family Guy’s newfound critics is: Have they actually seen Family Guy? The show itself is “unfunny, unkind and unnecessary.” It absolutely would show Bill Clinton having a heart attack. And yes, there are a million different ways to have written the controversial scene that “wouldn’t have been so cruel.” But cruelty is often the point of a Family Guy joke.

I like transgressive humor as much as the next guy, but I don’t like Family Guy so much — because there’s no point, really, to its shock value. (And trying to interpret the gag as anything more than an easy shot, I think, would be giving the Family Guy writers way, way too much credit.) South Park still, after more than a decade, frequently crosses taste boundaries … and yet it often is saying something in the process. It’s not always something I agree with, but still.

I don’t really want to be in the position of defending Sarah Palin. She’s shallow, shrill and silly. Just like Family Guy. They shouldn’t be fighting like this — except that it’s good for both brands. They’re made for each other.

John Yoo is ‘vindicated’: Presumably he gets to keep his Inquirer job

Back when torture advocate John Yoo started writing columns for the Philadelphia Inquirer, opponents were given one hope: If Yoo ended up facing criminal charges or professional sanction for his discredited advice allowing the torture of terror suspects, the Inquirer might — maybe — reconsider publishing him. Inky editorial page editor Harold Jackson told me as much last year:

“We have not reached that point. The description of him as a war criminal would not be accurate. He’s a member of a distinguished university faculty with interesting things to say,” Jackson said. “If at some point it goes beyond that, we’ll have more concern about our relationship to him.”

So much for that. Late on Friday afternoon, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility announced that Yoo didn’t commit “professional misconduct” — i.e. there’s not enough proof he acted unethically — and thus won’t face penalties or disbarment initiated by the Justice Department.

The Wall Street Journal claims in an editorial today that Friday’s decision amounts to “vindication” for John Yoo; the upshot of the Justice Department memo is that John Yoo didn’t commit ethical violations — it was a “close question”: Instead he produced a “flawed” justification for torture because he was too blinded by his own ideology to provide a fair legal analysis. The money paragraph:

The reason that John Yoo became famous enough to get his op-ed job at the Inquirer is because of his work on the torture issue in the Bush White House. But the Bush White House eventually conceded Yoo’s memos were flawed and withdrew them; the Justice Department has now pretty firmly repudiated the work and castigated Yoo’s judgement. It would seem that the Inquirer could find a smart conservative writer whose qualifications for the job don’t include clumsy and discredited justifications for war crimes. But maybe those folks are in short supply these days.

Then again, maybe the Justice Department memo enhances John Yoo’s standing. After all, the memo above suggests Yoo put “loyalty to his own ideology” above professional competence. That might well be why Brian Tierney has John Yoo writing for the Inky op-ed pages.