Pruning Shears

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

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Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims.

This report (very graphic) on the effects of depleted uranium (DU) is absolutely horrifying. Reports on the effects of DU from other sources here and here. Older report from the Guardian here. DU and white phosphorous are new munitions in our wars and haven’t gotten much attention (in the US anyway), but it’s hard to imagine reports like this - if true - remaining quiet forever.

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Combat operations have concluded for:

1. Army Brig. Gen. Terence J. Hildner, 49, of Fairfax, VA.
2. Marine Lance Cpl. Edward J. Dycus, 22, of Greenville, MS.
3. Marine Sgt. William C. Stacey, 23, of Redding, CA.

Via.

Days since Washington Post has updated its Faces of the Fallen site: 17.

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US military bases aren’t really popular outside of the US. Drones don’t appear to be popular anywhere.

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US terror drone crashes in Somalia. Here is your updated drone crash scorecard:

• US terror drone crashes in Somalia
• US spy drone crashes in Afghanistan
• US spy drone crashes in Somalia
• US drone crashes in central Somalia
• 2 US terror drones crash in Somalia
• Two US drones crash in south Somalia
• Two US drones crash in south Somalia
• Three US drones crash in Somalia
• US drone goes down in Afghanistan
• Another US drone crashes in Pakistan
• US drone crashes in Pakistan
• US spy drone crashes in Afghanistan

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Signs of the times.

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Via Avedon, Anglachel:

My interest in Apple is as a signifier of a particular mentality among the cultural elite - let’s call them Whole Foods Nation - that wants others (like me) to ratify their consumer purchases (phones, canned beans, presidents) as markers of cultural, moral and intellectual superiority.

Use whatever gadget you want, but don’t lie to yourself about the very brutal world of global manufacturing where it was produced.

Some thoughts from Molly Wood. My own proposal, posted at Corrente.

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digby: “I’m glad the president finally realized that he was trying to govern a nation that didn’t actually exist.”

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Bipartisanship is dead! Long live bipartisanship!

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blogroll amnesty day is here again!

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This week in Oakland. Hannah:

Last week, a special inquiry into the Oakland, California Police Department’s operating procedures concluded that they had been grossly inappropriate, especially in their dealings with citizen protesters. So, the casual observer might expect that a chastened OPD would react to a sense of guilt with restraint and institute some reforms. That’s not, however, how guilt often works. What happens more often is that individuals and corporations “double down” or do it again, as if to prove there was no wrong in the first place. I think that’s an example of the deadly sin of pride - obviously self-defeating.

Via lambert, this:

The fact that all of these “journalists” repeat the same ridiculous crowd number, march times, etc isn’t just an indication of their tendency to downplay activist mobilization; its an index of their basic and fundamental worthlessness as news sources. . They’re just copying and pasting.

[snip]

It isn’t just that there are errors, or that these errors are small and pointless; it’s that the level of non-knowledge required to produce these texts is huge: these articles are what they are as a function of the total distance and disconnect from what actually happened and a total dependence on being told what happened by the Police press officer (and an inability to do anything more than write that down, and slightly change the word order to cover their tracks).

Susie Cagle:

Best post-mortems I’ve seen of #OO #J28 #moveinday — so far at least — have been done by occupiers, not journalists. #newsdesert

I know it’s considered beyond laughable to suggest that someone like Cagle - whose primary medium is Twitter - be considered for some kind of journalism award, but that says more about the debased quality of mainstream journalism than Cagle. She’s been reporting from the scene for weeks, even getting arrested once. One would hope the Pulitzer committee would be impressed by such passionate commitment to the trade!

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Also from lambert, this on Europe’s lost generation.

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At Balloon Juice, something serious from DougJ: “It’s a tragedy, plain and simple, one that has real victims and real perpetrators.”

Some snark from mistermix: “Isn’t it about time for one of Scheiffer’s kids to take over that show?”

Sarah Proud and Tall singles out this from National Review:

(For the uninitiated, Gawker’s imperative role on the Internet is that of the mother bird, partially digesting the work of others with the enzymes of bored irony and the gastric juices of sarcasm, and regurgitating stub articles fit for the consumption of the shrieking, featherless hatchlings that comprise my doomed generation.)

Which is actually pretty great.

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Your weekly Pierce:

Mike Lee, the Tea Party rookie from the Beehive State, a Tenther extremist whose views on the Constitution dead-end somewhere on the wrong side of Cemetery Ridge. Which, of course, doesn’t prevent him from waving the document around as though he picked it personally at Ollivander’s two days ago. (“The Constitution chooses the senator, Mr. Lee.”) The New Republic sees Lee as the amiable intellectual face of the Tea Party. Among his other amiable intellectual pursuits, Lee wants to do away with the federal income tax and with birthright citizenship. He does so, however, in a way that, as TNR puts it, “doesn’t scream crackpot.” This is true. Rather, it says “crackpot” in clearly audible, measured tones.

Now, though, the senator is having a bit of a snit over the president’s recess appointments, which the president made because the Republican party has abandoned government entirely for a career in legislative mime.

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ECONNED EXCERPT from pp. 272-3:

It should come as no surprise that the exams were roundly and deservedly derided by anyone who knew much of anything about banks and was not in on the con job. Bill Black, former senior bank regulator, put it bluntly: “There are no real stress tests going on.” The “adverse” scenario that determined how much dough the bank might need if things turned out badly was far from dire enough. Mainstream economists increasingly came to the view that the downside case looked like a middle-of-the-road forecast. The process also made insufficient allowance for the just-starting avalanche in commercial real estate.

Not only was there not enough stress in these “stress tests,” they were not much of a test either. The normal practice in a regulatory exam is for the supervisor to sample loan files. The authorities made no review of these documents. In the past, it has taken well over a hundred examiners months to go over a single loan portfolio of a large bank. But here, roughly 200 examiners were allotted to 19 banks, a mere ten examiners on average across a broad range of businesses. Moreover, the authorities punted on evaluating the exposures most likely to cause havoc if the economy weakened further, meaning the trading books of the big capital markets players, Citigroup, Bank of America (the reluctant new owner of Merrill), J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman. They were simply asked to run scenarios using their own risk models, the same ones that had performed to dismally and were the very reason they were in this fix!