AdamSmith

Davey Wavey in our dreams!

Note that it was actually The Onion.

Nation’s Single Men Announce Plan To Change Bedsheets By 2019 News • News • ISSUE 49•35 • Aug 28, 2013 A coalition of single men emphasize that their sheets don’t even really smell and should hold up fine for another 6 or 7 years at least. WASHINGTON—Emphasizing that their bedsheets have no major stains and look completely fine except for a “couple flakes of skin here and there,” the nation’s single men announced Tuesday that their goal is to change their bedding by 2019. The country’s bachelors, who last changed their sheets in November of 2003, told reporters that though their linens are faded and slightly itchy at times, they are completely fine for sleeping in, and at this point barely even smell. “As of now, our plan is to strip the bed of its sheets and wash them by either June or December of 2019,” said unmarried Atlanta man James Bolter, who reportedly sighed and said he guesses that means pillowcases, too. “The hottest part of this summer is nearly over so we’re not going to be sweating as much at night, which means we just don’t see any immediate need to change and wash our sheets.” “Washing our comforters—be it the sheets that cover them or the comforters themselves—is not part of our 2019 timeline, and I believe it will stay that way,” the bachelor added. “The earliest we would even consider washing our comforters would be 2035, if ever.” According to the nation’s single men, many of whom have resorted to spraying a light layer of Febreze over their beds once a week for the last decade, their sheets haven’t gotten nearly “fuzzy” or “wrinkly” enough to be changed. Moreover, within the last 10 years, the bachelors have made certain to alternate the side of the bed on which they sleep so that one section doesn’t get more soiled with dead skin than the other. In addition to sleeping on different sides of their pillows, the bachelors have also made sure to “flip over” the mattresses’ fitted sheets and top sheets once a year to “keep things fresh.” “We believe that as long as you change your sheets once or twice a decade you’ll be fine,” said 27-year-old Delaware man Jeff Kugler, who doesn’t have a girlfriend, and later added that he’s heard of how dust mites, mite excrement, and bacteria can build up if sheets aren’t laundered but said all of that is “bullshit.” “My sheets have a few stains on them, but they’re all dried now. You can’t see them unless you are really looking for them. The outlines of the stains are there, but that’s it. So everything will be okay for the next six years or so.” Saying that crumbs and hair have become so embedded in the sheets that you can’t even tell they’re there, the unattached men listed several other factors as to why they’ve avoided changing their sheets. First, they told reporters, their sheets are navy blue so it’s “not like they look dirty.” Second, changing them “will be really fucking annoying” and “take up a long fucking time.” And third, the bachelors said, they are “just too busy with other stuff.” Perhaps most important, the single men noted, is the fact that they only have one pair of sheets, meaning that any linen change would necessitate sleeping on their mattress pads for up to six months while they put off removing their bedding from the laundry. “The next laundry day is in 2019, so that’s when I’ll do my next load of sheets,” said 34-year-old Martin Rhodes while removing magazines, Kleenexes, and plates from his bed. “But it just depends on what things are like then. Maybe it won’t be necessary. I haven’t really had to wash these sheets since college and they’re fine.” http://www.theonion.com/articles/nations-single-men-announce-plan-to-change-bedshee,33656/

Like I said, that copy ain't even mine anymore. I feel an O.J. coming on...

Let Me Explain Why Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance Was Our Top Story This Morning Commentary • Opinion • news media • ISSUE 49•35 • Aug 26, 2013 By Meredith Artley, Managing Editor Of CNN.com Over the years, CNN.com has become a news website that many people turn to for top-notch reporting. Every day it is visited by millions of people, all of whom rely on “The Worldwide Leader in News”—that’s our slogan—for the most crucial, up-to-date information on current events. So, you may ask, why was this morning’s top story, a spot usually given to the most important foreign or domestic news of the day, headlined “Miley Cyrus Did What???” and accompanied by the subhead “Twerks, stuns at VMAs”? It’s a good question. And the answer is pretty simple. It was an attempt to get you to click on CNN.com so that we could drive up our web traffic, which in turn would allow us to increase our advertising revenue. There was nothing, and I mean nothing, about that story that related to the important news of the day, the chronicling of significant human events, or the idea that journalism itself can be a force for positive change in the world. For Christ’s sake, there was an accompanying story with the headline “Miley’s Shocking Moves.” In fact, putting that story front and center was actually doing, if anything, a disservice to the public. And come to think of it, probably a disservice to the hundreds of thousands of people dying in Syria, those suffering from the current unrest in Egypt, or, hell, even people who just wanted to read about the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. But boy oh boy did it get us some web traffic. Which is why I, Meredith Artley, managing editor of CNN.com, put the story in our top spot. Those of us watching on Google Analytics saw the number of homepage visits skyrocket the second we put up that salacious image of Miley Cyrus dancing half nude on the VMA stage. But here’s where it gets great: We don’t just do a top story on the VMA performance and call it a day. No, no. We also throw in a slideshow called “Evolution of Miley,” which, for those of you who don’t know, is just a way for you to mindlessly click through 13 more photos of Miley Cyrus. And if we get 500,000 of you to do that, well, 500,000 multiplied by 13 means we can get 6.5 million page views on that slideshow alone. Throw in another slideshow titled “6 ‘don’t miss’ VMA moments,” and it’s starting to look like a pretty goddamned good Monday, numbers-wise. Also, there are two videos—one of the event and then some bullshit two-minute clip featuring our “entertainment experts” talking about the performance. Side note: Advertisers, along with you idiots, love videos. Another side note: The Miley Cyrus story was in the same top spot we used for our 9/11 coverage. Now, let's get back to why we put the story in the most coveted spot on our website, thereby saying, essentially, that Miley Cyrus’ suggestive dancing is the most important thing going on in the world right now. If you clicked on the story, and all the slideshows, and all the other VMA coverage, that means you’ve probably been on CNN.com for more than seven minutes, which lowers our overall bounce rate. Do you know what that is? Sorry for getting a little technical here. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. If we can keep that bounce rate low, and show companies that people don’t just go to CNN.com but stay there, then we can go to Ford or McDonald’s or Samsonite or whatever big company you can think of and ask for the big bucks. So, as managing editor of CNN.com, I want our readers to know this: All you are to us, and all you will ever be to us, are eyeballs. The more eyeballs on our content, the more cash we can ask for. Period. And if we’re able to get more eyeballs, that means I’ve done my job, which gets me congratulations from my bosses, which encourages me to put up even more stupid bullshit on the homepage. I don’t hesitate to call it stupid bullshit because we all know it’s stupid bullshit. We know it and you know it. We also know that you are probably dumb enough, or bored enough, or both, to click on the stupid bullshit anyway, and that you will continue to do so as long as we keep putting it in front of your big, idiot faces. You want to know how many more page views the Miley Cyrus thing got than our article on the wildfires ravaging Yosemite? Like 6 gazillion more. That’s on you, not us. To be sure, I could have argued that Miley Cyrus’ performance merited the top spot on our website because it was significant in terms of what’s happening in the world of pop culture, or that her over-the-top theatrics are worth covering because they are somehow representative of the lengths to which performers must go to stand out in the current entertainment landscape. But who the fuck are we kidding? Truth be told, anything at last night’s VMAs short of Lady Gaga beheading Will Smith with a broadsword belongs tucked away in our entertainment section, far from the homepage, far from the top spot, and far from the eyes of anyone who logged on to our site this morning to see what was happening in the world. But then not nearly as many people would have seen it, which wouldn’t get us the page views we want, which wouldn’t get us the money we want, which wouldn’t get me the congratulations I want. So you see, there’s no stopping this. And what is this, you ask? Modern-day journalism. And what is modern-day journalism? Getting you to click on this link. http://www.theonion.com/articles/let-me-explain-why-miley-cyrus-vma-performance-was,33632/

That argument has been made. I don't agree with it; as posted before, my views run instead in these directions... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation ...and to such as calling myself "queer" if a label is required. Etc., again as discussed here several times before, for instance: http://www.boytoy.com/forums/index.php?/topic/11712-im-not-gay/

I think this goes back to the discussion we had here about language such as "fag" and so forth. My view is that Suckrates calling Davy a shrieking queen is not the same as someone on the street calling him that, with intent to convey discrimination, possibly hatred and even implied threat. Others here have expressed and argued for the opposite viewpoint. I respectfully disagree. "In community," my dissing Davy is a question of judgment and taste. I am far from disliking all shrieking-queen demeanor, just in this case Davy's particular style thereof.

I will not even get a royalty. Rare first edition of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations goes on saleCopy of book dating from 1776 is expected to fetch £50,000 at auction in Edinburgh Press Association The Guardian, Thursday 29 August 2013 13.37 EDT Simon Vickers, a book specialist at Lyon & Turnbull, with the edition of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Photograph: David Cheskin/PA A rare first edition copy of Adam Smith's work The Wealth of Nations, which has been valued at up to £50,000, is to be sold at auction. First published in 1776, the book by the Scottish economist and philosopher is one of the world's first assessments of what creates wealth within a nation. The work reflects on economics at the beginning of the industrial revolution and explores issues such as the division of labour, productivity and free markets. The book, which has as its full title An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, helped earn its author the label of father of modern economics and is still held in high regard. Simon Vickers, a book specialist at the auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull, said the book was written over a 10-year period. "[He] challenged the prevailing mercantilist economic philosophy, in which people saw national wealth in terms of a country's stock of gold and silver and imports as a danger to a nation's wealth, arguing that in a free exchange both sides became better off." The copy is to go under the hammer in Edinburgh next Wednesday. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/29/adam-smith-wealth-of-nations

Wonder how, though? Without simply strengthening his hand internally.

I agree with RA1. We have had this very discussion about Davy before. My position then as now is that he is no doubt a fine person. Well, I have no idea, but I have no reason not to think so. My dishing is specifically as critique of the style he chooses in enacting and deploying a public persona, as performer and entertainer, in a public medium. The notion that his and our both being gay somehow puts his artistry, pageantry, or what you will beyond our right to judge it and comment on it, as performance, seems very odd. I don't usually like to invoke the self-ghetto-ization concept, but that seems to me exactly what it would be if we were to declare his public performance work hands-off from any such comment simply because he is gay. For the record, Ryan could do me any day.

Argentina Rape Victim Stunned by Phone Call From Pope Wednesday, 28 Aug 2013 04:58 AM By Joel Himelfarb Alejandra Pereyra, 44, said she felt she had been “touched by the hand of God” after receiving the phone call from Pope Francis. Pereyra wrote to the Pope, who was archbishop of Buenos Aires before being elected pontiff in March, about 10 days ago. She said that after she had been raped by a policeman, Argentinean authorities tried to suppress her complaint and that the perpetrator had received a promotion. She was amazed to hear from the 76-year-old Pope personally when he called her on Sunday using a landline from the Vatican. “My mobile phone rang and when I asked who it was, he responded, ’The Pope’,” Pereyra told an Argentinean television network. “I just froze.” They talked for approximately 30 minutes, during which time they discussed issues of “faith and trust,” according to the London Daily Telegraph. “The Pope listened to what I said with much attention,” she said. “He told me that I was not alone and that I must have faith in the justice system.” The Pope “told me that he receives thousands of letters a day but that the one that I wrote had touched his heart,” Pereyra added. She said she would “do everything possible” to travel to Rome to meet the Pope in person. “He said he would receive me,” said Pereyra, who comes from Rio Segundo, located about 450 miles northwest of Buenos Aires. http://www.newsmaxworld.com/newswidget/pope-rape-victim-call/2013/08/28/id/522584?promo_code=13074-1&utm_source=13074The_hill&utm_medium=nmwidget&utm_campaign=widgetphase1 Pope calls Argentinian rape victim with words of comfort The Pope has struck again with his habit of telephoning ordinary people who have sent him letters, calling a woman in his native Argentina who was allegedly raped by a policeman. By Nick Squires, Rome 3:46PM BST 27 Aug 2013 Alejandra Pereyra, 44, said she felt she had been “touched by the hand of God” after receiving the phone call from Pope Francis, who as on previous occasions telephoned her on a landline from the Vatican. Ms Pereyra wrote to the Pope, who was archbishop of Buenos Aires before being elected pontiff in March, about 10 days ago, saying that she had been raped by a policeman but that the authorities in Argentina had tried to suppress her complaint and that the officer had received a promotion. She was amazed to hear from the 76-year-old Pope personally when he called her on Sunday. “At about 3:30pm, my mobile phone rang and when I asked who it was, he responded, ’The Pope’,” she told an Argentinian television network. “I just froze.” They had a conversation of about half an hour, during which they discussed “faith and trust”. “The Pope listened to what I said with much attention,” she said. “He told me that I was not alone and that I must have faith in the justice system. He told me that he receives thousands of letters a day but that the one that I wrote had touched his heart.” She said she would “do everything possible” to travel to Rome to meet the Pope in person. “He said he would receive me,” said Ms Pereyra, who comes from the city of Rio Segundo, about 450 miles northwest of Buenos Aires. Aside from rejecting much of the pomp and splendour of the papal office, Pope Francis has struck a relaxed, informal style and established a reputation for making personal phone calls to people who have written to him. Last week he called an Italian teenager who had written him a letter. Stefano Cabizza, 19, an information technology student from near Padua in northern Italy, was stunned to have the leader of the world’s 1.2bn Catholics phone him up for a chat. Five days after his election, the Pope called his local news kiosk in Buenos Aires to ask the owners to cancel his newspaper subscription. He also called his shoemaker, telling him not to start making the soft red loafers favoured by Benedict XVI but to continue producing his favourite but very ordinary black leather shoes. On Monday he called the mother of an Italian petrol station owner who was shot dead in a robbery in June. The calls have become so frequent that Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s leading newspapers, recently ran a humorous front page article containing advice for people who find the Pope on the other end of the line. Resist the temptation to be too informal, wrote Beppe Severgnini, a noted author and humorist. “Don’t call him ‘Franci’ or ‘Cecco’ (a diminutive of Francesco). But don’t call him ‘Magnifico’ or ‘Megagalattico’ either.” Avoid talking about the scandals that have shaken the Vatican in recent years, but mention his predecessor, 86-year-old Benedict, whom Francis often fondly refers to, the paper said. “Don’t be afraid to just be normal. If he had wanted to be bored, he would have called a government minister.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/10269017/Pope-calls-Argentinian-rape-victim-with-words-of-comfort.html

You could give them the external catheter with a bag that straps to their ankle, which in San Francisco used to be called the 'trolleyman's friend.'

Doctor Who: the rediscovered William Hartnell interviewA 1967 TV interview with the actor who played the first Doctor, previously thought lost, has resurfaced. What does it reveal about the show's history? William Hartnell in 1966, shortly before he stood down as Doctor Who. Photograph: REX/Jon Lyons Lost for over four decades, a newly rediscovered filmed interview with the original star of the BBC's Doctor Who series is set to shed new light on the early years of the show. William Hartnell played the first Doctor from the programme's inception in 1963 through to the start of its fourth season in 1966. In those days, the show regularly had up to 12 million viewers but for years it was believed that not a single TV interview with Hartnell, who died in 1975, had survived. Now, as the programme's 50th anniversary approaches, candid film of the actor has finally come to light in a local news archive in Bristol. The interview was filmed for the BBC regional news programme, Points West, and broadcast on 17 January 1967, mere months after an enforced retirement from Doctor Who because of ill health. It was shot in Hartnell's dressing room at the Gaumont Theatre in Taunton, where the actor was appearing in the panto Puss in Boots. The three-minute-long black-and-white film was actually discovered in 2009 by researcher Richard Bignell, working on behalf of BBC DVD. "While I was over at the [bBC] Written Archives [Centre], doing some stuff for the DVDs, I thought it would be worth going through the programme logs for regional news programmes," explains Bignell. "So, I had a look through for the four weeks [that Hartnell toured with Puss in Boots] and there were two interviews. There was one for Look East, for the first week of the pantomime at Ipswich and one for Points West from the last week when he was at Taunton … I got in contact with the Look East archive and found that their stuff didn't exist anymore… So, that one's definitely gone. But, I dropped the Bristol library an email, and about 20 minutes later, they got back to me with an email: 'Yes, we've still got it. I've got the can of film sitting on my desk here. What would you like me to do with it?'" The film was transferred to a digital format at the BBC's Television Centre in the summer of 2011. However, it wasn't until this year that a suitable window arose for the material to be released. It will appear on November's BBC DVD release of The Tenth Planet – Hartnell's final Doctor Who story. "It's been quite a difficult thing not to say anything about it," says Bignell. The interview was conducted by the director, Roger Mills, who, in 1967 was reporting for Points West. Mills recalls: "I wasn't really a reporter – I was more of a behind-the-camera man – but down in the regions you do everything." "It's a fascinating insight into Hartnell as a person," says Bignell of the newly recovered film. "You get to appreciate that Hartnell was very much just playing a character. Just like [Patrick] Troughton … Because we're very used to [Hartnell's] very fluffy bumbly first Doctor character, I think that there's a tendency to think that perhaps that's what Bill was like – especially when you hear all the stories about how he fluffed his lines etc. But on this, he's quite lucid and quite clear and quite well-spoken." Hartnell played the Doctor as an impossibly elderly man, with long white hair and a habit of forgetting people's names. However, in reality, the actor was just 55 when he was cast, with his own short greying hair covered by a long white wig. In fact, when new Doctor Peter Capaldi begins shooting the next series of Doctor Who in the new year, he will in fact be a little older than Hartnell was when he first started on the show. The interview is an occasionally terse one. "I do remember that he didn't want to be interviewed. He was extremely grumpy," recalls Mills. "He really wanted us out as quickly as possible …I don't think he liked the press very much." "His reputation for being a grumpy old so-and-so really does come over in this particular interview," adds Bignell. "The interviewer says to him at one point, something along the lines of: 'Is pantomime something you'd like to continue doing in the future?' And he sort of goes: 'Ooh, no, no, no, no, no.' So, he says: 'Oh, why not?' And he says: 'Well, I'm a legitimate actor. Pantomime is for the sort of person who is used to variety and going on the front of the stage, but I'm a legitimate actor. I do legitimate things.' He very much comes over with that sort of gruff manner. In fact, towards the end of the interview, the actual interviewer says to him: 'You're actually quite a grumpy man. Why do you think that people like the Doctor so much?'" "I was someone who didn't hold back," explains Mills. Doctor Who's gruelling production schedule produced up to 46 weeks of broadcast television a season and eventually proved too much for Hartnell, who was in the early stages of a debilitating form of arteriosclerosis. When his Doctor returned to Doctor Who as a one-off guest-star in 1972, his health had noticeably deteriorated further and he died less than three years later. http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2013/aug/22/doctor-who-rediscovered-william-hartnell-interview

So when are you going to be back in my neighborhood?

Silicone lube is hard to get out of anything. Stays on my skin for days, it seems like. But well worth the trouble!

Search me!

Never really left them, of course.

"Hundreds of thousands of tons" of contaminated cooling water are stored at the site. And are what is leaking. http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/27/world/asia/japan-fukushima-leak-warning/index.html?c=homepage-t And now the Japanese government is going to take charge. Well, THAT will sure solve everything. Eek.

LOL I will split the royalties with you.

Oy. Wonder if there would be money in running a Davy Closed Captioning service? For those of us who prefer to watch him with the sound OFF.

For U.S., Syria is truly a problem from hell By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst updated 8:53 AM EDT, Tue August 27, 2013 Editor's note: Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a director at the New America Foundation and the author of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden -- From 9/11 to Abbottabad." (CNN) -- What is widely recognized as the most authoritative study of the United States' responses to mass killings around the world -- from the massacres of Armenians by the Turks a century ago, to the Holocaust, to the more recent Serbian atrocities against Bosnian Muslims and the ethnic cleansing of the Tutsis in Rwanda -- concluded that they all shared unfortunate commonalities: "Despite graphic media coverage, American policymakers, journalists and citizens are extremely slow to muster the imagination needed to reckon with evil. Ahead of the killings, they assume rational actors will not inflict seemingly gratuitous violence. They trust in good-faith negotiations and traditional diplomacy. Once the killings start, they assume that civilians who keep their head down will be left alone. They urge cease-fires and donate humanitarian aid." This is an almost perfect description of how the United States has acted over the past two years as it has tried to come up with some kind of policy to end the Assad regime's brutal war on its own people in Syria. The author who wrote the scathingly critical history of how the United States has generally dithered in the face of genocide and mass killings went on to win a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for her book "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide." A decade after winning the Pulitzer, that author is now the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Her name, of course, is Samantha Power, and she is a longtime, close aide to President Barack Obama. She started working for Obama when he was a largely unknown junior senator from Illinois. Power called her 610-page study of genocide "A Problem from Hell" because that's how then-U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher referred to the Bosnian civil war and the unpalatable options available to the U.S. in the early 1990s to halt the atrocities by the Serbs. One of the U.S. officials that Power took to task in her book is Susan Rice who, as the senior State Department official responsible for Africa, did nothing in the face of the genocide unfolding in Rwanda in 1994. Rice is quoted in the book as suggesting during an interagency conference call that the public use of the word "genocide" to describe what was then going on in Rwanda while doing nothing to prevent it would be unwise and might negatively affect the Democratic Party in upcoming congressional elections. Rice later told Power she could not recall making this statement but also conceded that if she had made it, the statement was "completely inappropriate, as well as irrelevant." Rice is now Obama's national security adviser. In 2012, at Power's urging, Obama announced the creation of an interagency task force to help stamp out atrocities around the world. Called the Atrocities Prevention Board, it was led by Power during its first year. Meanwhile, the body count in Syria kept spiraling upward. For the past two years, Obama hasn't wanted to intervene militarily in Syria. Who would? The country is de facto breaking up into jihadist-run "emirates" and Alawite rump states. It is also the scene of a proxy war that pits al Qaeda affiliates backed by Qatar and Saudi Arabia against Hezbollah, backed by Iran. Whoever ultimately prevails in this fight is hardly going to be an ally of the U.S. It's an ungodly mess that makes even Iraq in 2006 look good. It is, in short, a problem from hell. Power, Rice and Obama today face some of the very same unpalatable choices that have confronted other U.S. national security officials as they tried to prevent mass killings in other distant, war-torn countries. They can continue to do little as the Syrian civil war drags on into its third year with 100,000 dead and rising. It's a state of affairs now compounded by the fact that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad appears not only to have crossed the "red line" with its use of chemical weapons but seems to have now sprinted past that line, killing hundreds with neurotoxins in a Damascus suburb, according to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. He's blasted those attacks as something that "should shock the conscience of the world. It defies any code of morality." Doing nothing will not be treated kindly by future historians writing in the same vein as Power. The issue now in Syria is not simply that al-Assad is massacring his own civilians at an industrial rate, but he is also flagrantly flouting a well-established international norm by this regime's reported large-scale use of neurotoxins as weapons against civilians. It seems inconceivable that the United States as the guarantor of international order would not respond to this in some manner. But on what authority? There is scant chance of a U.N. resolution authorizing military action. When she was U.N. ambassador, Rice skillfully ushered a resolution through the Security Council that authorized military action in Libya in 2011. But Russia and China will almost certainly veto any similar kind of resolution on Syria. Russia is one of Syria's few allies, and Russia and China are generally staunchly against any kind of international intervention in the affairs of other countries, no matter how egregious the behavior of those states might be. That leaves the possibility of some kind of unilateral action by the United States. The U.S. regularly infringes the sovereignty of countries such as Pakistan and Yemen with CIA drone strikes on the novel legal theory that terrorists planning strikes on the U.S. are living in those nations and those countries are either unable or unwilling to take out the terrorists on their territory -- and therefore their sovereignty can be infringed by drone attacks. But making a claim that the Syrian regime threatens the U.S. is implausible, and therefore some kind of unilateral American action seems quite unlikely. In 1986, the Reagan administration launched air strikes at the homes of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, but only after an incident in which Libyan agents had bombed a disco in Berlin, killing two American servicemen. No such casus belli exists with Syria today. Since neither a U.N. authorized military mission nor a unilateral American strike seem likely, what options are left? One appealing option could be something along the lines of the Kosovo model. The Kosovo War in 1999 was entirely an air war in which no American soldiers were killed. The goal of the air campaign was to push Serbian forces out of Kosovo. Russia was allied with the Serbs so, as in the Syrian case today, there was no chance a U.N. resolution authorizing force would pass. Instead, the war was conducted under the NATO collective security umbrella. Kosovo is, of course, in Europe, and NATO is a Europe-focused security alliance while Syria is the Middle East, so NATO action there would be much more problematic. (A NATO force does fight in Afghanistan today, but that is only because one of its member states, the United States, was attacked on 9/11 from Afghanistan by al Qaeda, which triggered NATO's Article 5, the right to collective self-defense of the members of the alliance.) If an air war were to be launched against Syria, one scenario could be that Turkey, a member of NATO, could invoke Article 5 because Syria has fired into its territory on a regular basis. So far, Turkey has proved reluctant to invoke Article 5 but the reported large-scale use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime might change the calculus of the Turks. A further source of legitimacy for military action could be some kind of authorization by the Arab League. The Arab League is generally a toothless talking shop, which seemed to have surprised even itself two years back when it endorsed military action against Gadhafi. That endorsement gave substantial international legitimacy to the subsequent air campaign against Gadhafi, led by the United States and other NATO countries such as France. It is hard to believe that some kind of military action against Syria won't now take place, likely in the form of U.S. cruise missile attacks from ships in the Mediterranean. Such attacks have the merit that they won't put U.S. aircraft at risk, which could well encounter problems with Syria's well-regarded air defense systems. And the operation will likely have the blessing of some mix of NATO and Arab League authorizations, giving it at least some semblance of international legitimacy. http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/26/opinion/bergen-syria-problem/index.html?hpt=hp_t4

A 10-year-old Irish boy stands crying at the side of the road. A man passing by asks, 'What's wrong, lad?' The boy says, 'Me ma died this morning.' 'Oh bejaysus,' the man says. 'Do you want me to call Father O'Riley for you?' The boy replies, 'No tanks, mister. Sex is the last thing on my mind at the moment.'

I dislike American imperialism as much as any other loony lefty. But if the world is going to have a superpower imposing its will, I still want it to be us and ours.