The Atlantic and Israel

I read the Atlantic every day, mainly for Goldblog and the unparalleled Ta-Nehisi Coates (who's so good he'll probably be asked to be a regular op-ed for the Times, which I hope he won't take, because that op-ed page has become dumber than a bag of rocks). At one point, I read Andrew Sullivan but stopped when he became a vicious anti-Zionist (which, as has been proven in every case in every way is the same as an anti-Semite). Sullivan left to spew his bile elsewhere, but in the past few months the Atlantic has added a number of new anti-Israel bloggers.

This morning, I saw an even newer post by another dude, Marc Lynch: Why the Arab Uprisings Will Force the U.S. to Rethink Israel-Palestine. You don't need to read it because you already know what it says: Israel is bad, Palestinians good.

This was the comment I was going to leave on the site:

Does the Atlantic really need another anti-Israel guy? Steve Clemons and Robert Wright are already on that popular bandwagon. Add something new - maybe there's another small ally of the US you can throw ire on. How about Taiwan? They continually resist China, and China is actually better with human rights than Israel's enemies.

Trayvon Martin Case: Comments

The Trayvon Martin case is very important for exposing some rotten aspects of American society (which, like all diseases, has gotten virulent soon after the cures have been located). Specifcally, our addiction to guns and a deep-rooted racism.

I've mentioned in previous posts on gun control, that the biggest fallacy the gun-nuts push is the idiotic idea that a person can tell the difference between a good guy and a bad guy. That's why this case demonstrates the anti-Black racism of America better than any I remember. Because here the victim was an unarmed and innocent black teenager who lived near where he was murdered and his assailant was basically a crazy violent loner with a gun. A crazy Hispanic loner. In every other scenario, were Zimmerman the victim and the shooter were White, the case would be the same. But in the US, blacks are hated more than Latins... need proof, here's your proof.

The key point is this: only if you hate and fear blacks could Zimmerman's actions be OK. And while I hate to credit an anti-Zionist slimeball with anything, Robert Wright of Atlantic makes my points so well, I need to cite him: "(1) A man with a gun pursued an unarmed teenager who had done nothing wrong. (2) The man with the gun initiated a confrontation with the teenager. (3) As a result of the confrontation, the man with the gun shot the teenager to death. "

As Wright points out, these facts aren't in dispute - they are part of Zimmerman's defense! But when seen without race, this is a clear case of an armed assailant attacking and killing an innocent teen. However, since many Americans are viscerally racist, the "innocent teen" is automatically worthy of being shot because of his race. That's why the Police are releasing Trayvon's misdemeanor record - to depict him as a walking criminal. However, and I feel this is so obvious that it's overlooked, Trayvon wasn't doing anything wrong when he was stalked and murdered.

This reminds me of the Toulouse Massacre (which I need to say more about) because in both cases, some disturbed individual with a gun decided that the object of his hate could be killed. Yet, while in France it is seen as a crime to kill children in cold blood, sadly in the US - or in the crazy province of Florida (home of voter suppression and hanging chads) - you can.

Megan McArdle on Health Care

Megan McArdle is an infuriating blogger at the Atlantic. The Balloon-Juice lexicon for "McMegan" is accurate:

Nickname for fact-free Atlantic blogger Megan McArdle, who predictably makes arguments that have less to do with reality and more to do with wild-ass assertions meant to lend credibility to her libertarian bona fides. A self-proclaimed “economic libertarian” whose first blog was called I Am Jane Galt. See also, “Technically true, but collectively nonsense” and “It wasn’t a statistic-it was a hypothetical.”

She's one of these people who uses all possible effort to be wrong about everything. It's stunning. In her latest column, though, I found that she was basically correct. Entitled "What Cutting Health Care Costs Looks Like" she describes how her mother was kicked out of the hospital before she had a chance to recover fully from a burst appendix.

McMegan still tries to spin the story into some libertarian squawk, but ultimately it shows a sympathy for how cruel cost-cutting can be. This naturally proves a point I made decades ago (on the State of the State, I believe) which is that while the joke goes that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, I add that a liberal is a conservative who lost his job. In this case, it's a similar indignity.

BTW, I do think the early-hospital-ejection is a major social problem in America and I think we can solve it. The first question to ask is, naturally, why hospital stays cost so much, but I am a practical man and I realize that there's no way to rebottle that efreet. I suggest a facility called a Recovery Clinic (RC) which would be like a 'nursing home' in the sense that it is a residence with 24/7 nursing care, but would allow the full recovery that the hospitals have overcharged out of their purview.