George Eliot

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

-- George Eliot, “Middlemarch”

The Obama Doctrine

President Obama has nominated former Senator Chuck Hagel to become Secretary of Defense and John Brennan to be the director of the CIA, and Ross Douthat does a nice job synthesizing these nominations with a quick and dirty summation of Obama’s foreign policy, or the Obama doctrine. Hagel was relatively quick, for a Republican in high office, to call Bush’s Iraq war a debacle and to call for an out, while Brennan is notorious for overseeing the use of drones to assassinate terrorist enemies.

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To the extent that it’s possible to define an “Obama Doctrine,” then, it’s basically the Hagel-Brennan two-step. Fewer boots on the ground, but lots of drones in the air. Assassination, yes; nation-building, no. An imperial presidency with a less-imperial global footprint.

This is a popular combination in a country that’s tired of war but still remembers 9/11 vividly. Indeed, Obama’s foreign policy has been an immense political success: he’s co-opted foreign policy realists, neutralized antiwar Democrats and isolated Republican hawks.

-- Ross Douthat at The New York Times

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Gender Violence as a Global Problem

Gender violence is one of the world’s most common human rights abuses. Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined. The World Health Organization has found that domestic and sexual violence affects 30 to 60 percent of women in most countries.

-- Nicholas D. Kristof at The New York Times

Kristof offers us another provocative piece on rape and sex trafficking. He opens with a few incidences that have been big in the news lately.

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a walk

Well, I finely went out on a walk. Unfortunately, it is Sunday and the weather was fine enough that my bread was wasted again. A lot of people were there. But you have to count that a good thing: a sign of a somewhat healthy neighborhood.

I was happily surprised when Socks came to me. When I was still regularly taking my walks, for about the last month of that, the cat would seem to ignore me. he would just watch me and not bother.

But the street is filled with more doggy danger. This time I met those two dobermans on what I suppose may be their own ground, as they stood their territory and would not scurry away. They may not be the biggest dogs, but they look so incredibly strong, like they are composed of pure muscle and blood-letting jaws.

A little further down the street, I came across a much bigger dog, and this dog was even more frightening, as it seemed to want to keep coming, but for the owner being there to call him off.

I don't suppose this situation with the dogs is going to get better. I kind of wished I had a gun.

And you just have to hope that the cats can manage.

Daily Fun

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