While surfing for something else, I came across a reference to a battle I’d never heard of. Did you know that the English Navy bombarded Copenhagen just over two centuries ago for, as far as I can tell, no bloody reason whatsoever? Details here.
Thomas Erskine’s quoted line “if hell did not exist before, Providence would create it now to punish ministers for that damnable measure” pretty much sums it up. (Erskine seems to have been a good guy in other respects as well.)
What’s wrong with this story?
Andrea Phillips, the wife of Capt. Richard Phillips of Underhill, Vermont, said her husband had sailed in the waters off Somalia “for quite some time” and a hijacking was perhaps “inevitable.” …
Merchant crews aren’t supposed to fight pirates, short of using high-pressure hoses to try to stop them from climbing aboard, said John F. Reinhart, president and CEO of Maersk Line Ltd. “They (the crews) don’t have any weapons ….”
Check out this 1916 poem by Amy Lowell (of the same family as fellow poets James Russell Lowell and Robert Lowell).
Israeli soldiers are wearing t-shirts that celebrate rape, murder, and infanticide against Palestinians. (See here and here; conical hat tip to LRC.) Of course they don’t just wear warcrime, they actually commit it, but the wearing is certainly evidence – if anyone needed it – of mens rea.
Pete Seeger wrote this song as an allegory for LBJ and the Vietnam War. But it applies just as well to Bush and Iraq – or to Obama and the Stimulus.
I’m watching Maddow interviewing Pelosi on security briefings that Pelosi received but was not allowed to reveal.
Pelosi says that thanks to security requirements, she could not speak out against policies she disapproved of. Duh, of course she could. Has she never heard of civil disobedience?
Maddow compares Pelosi to Spider-man and Dr. Manhattan, both lonely because they cannot reveal their secret identities to anyone. Okay, Maddow wins a point for the Watchmen reference (though she would have earned more points if she’d made it a year ago) – but loses two points because, um, Dr. Manhattan’s identity is never secret.