"Nicholas Mevoli on Sunday upon surfacing from a record attempt. He died a short time later."

Photo caption.

“Water is acceptance of the unknown, of demons, of emotions, of letting go and allowing yourself to flow freely with it,” Mr. Mevoli wrote in a blog post in June. “Come to the water willing to be consumed by it but also have confidence that your ability will bring you back.”

Confidence... but there is a rapture of the deep, nitrogen narcosis, which "may have prompted Mr. Mevoli to disregard symptoms of danger and suddenly renew his quest to dive deeper."

He paused and seemed to turn back toward the surface at 68 meters, or 223 feet, but then turned around and proceeded to dive deeper. 

"Please forgive me, we are not monsters," said the terrorist to the 4-year-old boy who had called him "a very bad man."

This Daily Mail item forefronts the daring, outspoken little boy, Elliot Prior. Your heart is supposed to tingle at the boy's courage as he "protected his mother, Amber, who had been shot in the leg" in the Kenyan mall massacre and was the reason the terrorist "took pity." But scroll down and see:

The terrorists said if any of the kids were alive in the supermarket they could leave. 'Amber made the decision to stand up and say "yes".'... After discovering [that Amber Prior] was of French origin, the men began to plead with her and claimed that the Muslim faith ‘was not a bad one.’

‘He told me I had to change my religion to Islam and said “do you forgive us? Do you forgive us?’, the mother told The Independent. ‘Naturally, I was going to say whatever they wanted and they let us go.’

It's nice to think about the boy, but it was the mother, who figured out how to tell the right lies convincingly. She gains pride through the boy, who, at 4, had no way to use strategy and guile, like his mother, who continues to use strategy and guile as she talks to the press and diverts attention away from whatever shame and humiliation she may feel over the lies she chose to tell to save herself and her children.

Presumably, if she had stood tall, proclaimed herself a Christian, and brought death to herself and her children, her courage would have been celebrated at the top of the article. I'm saying this to celebrate Amber Prior.

"The heckler wrote: 'After years of these lonely, isolating and dehumanizing experiences...'"

"'... I’ve only recently been able to find the strength to advocate for myself and millions of others.'"

So basically she waited until laws were changed, the political battles were fought, and even TV commercials and marketing ads contain openly gay themes in people presented as normal Americans. Then, when gay marriage and family life is normalizing legally and socially, she comes out of the closet as an aggressive, rude activist.

Sounds like she waited until it was safe, and now she is jumping on the wagon after it's left the barn, trying to be loud and attract attention to her false pretense of bravery.

Top-rated comment on the WaPo column "Why I confronted the first lady."

"Are women who want to join the military now more afraid of being raped by their brothers in arms than dying for their country?"

Asks Maureen Dowd, reacting to this quote from John McCain:

"Just last night a woman came to me and said her daughter wanted to join the military, and could I give my unqualified support for her doing so. I could not."

I don't think John McCain was talking about fear. I would presume that for McCain, the courage of those in the military is understood. The question is equal opportunity in one's career, and a capable, ambitious woman choosing a career path should take account of the obstacles ahead. If one line of work is notorious for hounding women for sex and even forcing it on them and that those in charge were failing to take the problem seriously, you might decide to do something else with your life.

The Dowd column goes on to discuss the legal question of how sexual assaults should be prosecuted — inside or outside the military:

Eugene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School, told me the arguments of the brass “boiled down to an almost mystical notion of the commanders’ responsibility. Why can’t we cut the strings to the British system we inherited from George III? The British are baffled by us. They gave control over major crimes to professional prosecutors years ago. It’s an institutional structure that has outlived its utility and credibility.”

Does Fidell want us to copy the British or to stop copying the British? We're copying the old British approach and failing to change it to what the British do now. Imagine applying that legal argument across the board. Forget all the legal principles inherited from the British at the time of this country's founding and switch to what the British have devolved into over the years. I have no idea what the right answer is about prosecuting serious crimes, but I hate the general argument about giving up our legal inheritance from the British because the British themselves have tossed it out.

Dowd continues:

As Sarah Plummer, a beautiful ex-Marine who served in Iraq and says she was raped by a fellow Marine who was never prosecuted, explained to NBC News’s Jim Miklaszewski: “Having someone within your direct chain of command handling the case” is like “your brother raping you and having your dad decide the case.”

Why specify that she's "beautiful"? I get the impression it's supposed to boost her credibility. Or do you think it's a random detail? And dad deciding the case between sister and brother is a vivid and memorable analogy, but it's not completely apt. There's an issue here to be decided — how to deal with sex assaults and sexual harassment in the military — and it should be decided with sober rationality, not iffy analogies, deference to Brits, or emotional manipulation.

"In the time it would have taken him to go get a teacher, could that kid’s throat have been slit?"

"She said yes, but that’s beside the point. That we 'don’t condone heroics in this school.'"

Via Instapundit, who says:

IF YOU WANT TO RAISE MEN WITHOUT CHESTS, YOU HAVE TO START EARLY... This sort of behavior by “educators” needs to be stigmatized and punished, with names named. But bear in mind that “Sir John A. Macdonald junior high school does not ‘condone heroics,’” and that its principal’s name is Michael Bester, from whom we can be fairly certain to expect nothing in the least bit heroic, ever.

The school seems to hold the belief — often seen amongst strict gun control advocates — that the traditional role of self-defense and the defense of others ought to be relocated in government personnel. The police might not arrive the minute you need them, and yet it still seems best to train people to stand down and shelter in place. If only everyone were nonviolent, wouldn't that be nice?

IN THE COMMENTS: Mitchell the Bat said:

This is nothing new. When I was in grade school, anybody who got into a fight got punished. Period. That was the 1960's. Some students saw the policy as a convenient justification for pussing out. That was probably the whole idea, all along. That and the teachers and school principal didn't have to make any adjudicatory decisions that might get them criticized. That was probably the whole idea, all along, as well. 

Suddenly, I'm seeing this as the cause of the bullying problem. Everyone knows that the way to stop the bully is to hit him. To forbid self-defense is to empower the bully. The bully knows you pussies will keep doing what you're supposed to do.

"She just showed a bit of motherly love. She just did what any mother would have done."

"She felt that could have been me lying down there in the street. She just felt for the poor guy. No man should have to die like that in the street with no-one around him. She came home afterwards and she just sat down and had a cup of coffee. But she doesn't want to talk about it. She did what she did and wants to get on with her life again. Of course she is upset, it was a gory thing for anyone to see. But she just wants to get on with things."

ADDED: We are admiring these women, but implicit in our admiration is the question — let's speak it out loud — Where are the men?

"The impact dislocated his shoulder, but the Navy veteran just popped it back in and dragged his unresponsive wife to safety."

Surviving the Interstate 5 bridge collapse.

"This is courage of the highest order, it sounds as if these members of the public are not soldiers, not policemen, not people whose duties demand this..."

"... they are extremely courageous people and that courage deserves to be recognised at the highest level."

As the police took 20 minutes to arrive, some women did extraordinary things.

Mrs Loyau-Kennett was a passenger on a number 53 bus which was travelling past the scene, and jumped off to check the soldier’s pulse.

“Being a cub leader I have my first aid so when I saw this guy on the floor I thought it was an accident then I saw the guy was dead and I could not feel any pulse. And then when I went up there was this black guy with a revolver and a kitchen knife, he had what looked like butcher’s tools and he had a little axe, to cut the bones, and two large knives and he said 'move off the body’.

“So I thought 'OK, I don’t know what is going on here’ and he was covered with blood. I thought I had better start talking to him before he starts attacking somebody else. I thought these people usually have a message so I said 'what do you want?’... I started to talk to him and I started to notice more weapons and the guy behind him with more weapons as well. By then, people had started to gather around. So I thought OK, I should keep him talking to me before he noticed everything around him...."

Would you jump off a bus in this situation? Would you engage an apparent murderer in conversation in the hope of distracting him from other people?

With a "faulty" gene and an 87% risk of breast cancer, Angelina Jolie opts for a double mastectomy.

Explained and described in a NYT oped:

My own process began on Feb. 2 with a procedure known as a “nipple delay,” which rules out disease in the breast ducts behind the nipple and draws extra blood flow to the area. This causes some pain and a lot of bruising, but it increases the chance of saving the nipple.

Two weeks later I had the major surgery, where the breast tissue is removed and temporary fillers are put in place. The operation can take eight hours. You wake up with drain tubes and expanders in your breasts. It does feel like a scene out of a science-fiction film. But days after surgery you can be back to a normal life.

Nine weeks later, the final surgery is completed with the reconstruction of the breasts with an implant. There have been many advances in this procedure in the last few years, and the results can be beautiful.

This is a nicely written piece conveying the woman's courage and sensitivity. She has many children and her own mother died of cancer.

The piece is, however, marred by one sentence (and I would like to know the details of what lies behind this intrusion):

I acknowledge that there are many wonderful holistic doctors working on alternatives to surgery.

To what extent did Jolie pursue these alternatives? Does she credit the work of these "wonderful holistic doctors" or is that expression crafted to acknowledge the wonderfulness of the individuals — who might be well-meaning and socially pleasant — without saying that their treatments are any help at all? I note that she says these wonderful folk are "working on alternatives," not that they have any.

Did someone push Jolie to go at least that far, to smile in the direction of alternative medicine? Maybe she thought that her wan acknowledgement — alongside her own dramatic choice of the surgery — is saying (in so many words) to any sensible reader that the "holistic doctors" are a dangerous distraction. But I don't think people are that good at picking up inferences. Those who want to believe in alternative medicine are already weak on science and strong on wishfulness. I suspect that they will read that sentence and think Angelina Jolie thinks holistic doctors are wonderful. That sentence is a shiny light of hope amidst the scary — scene out of a science-fiction film — images of surgery.

Jolie deserves admiration for her bravery and her smart choice, both in getting the surgery and telling us about it. Perhaps as time goes on, she'll say more about the meaning and value of science and its alternatives. She is giving a beautiful performance in the theater of public education, and she has a fabulous opportunity to deliver a profound message that will reach the very people who most need to hear it.

"Howard Kurtz leaves Daily Beast following Jason Collins column mistake."

Kurtz, whose area of expertise is media criticism, made a mistake in the media that drew some criticism and what looks like swift retaliation.

... Kurtz mistakenly accused Collins of leaving out “one detail” in Collins’s Sports Illustrated essay disclosing his homosexuality. The detail, Kurtz said, was that Collins “was engaged. To be married. To a woman.”...

Kurtz initially amended his Daily Beast story, saying Collins “downplayed” the engagement and “didn’t dwell on it.” But the Daily Beast retracted the story entirely after the mistake and subsequent amendments drew heavy criticism from several Web sites.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bill said:

But Collins did attempt to obscure his engagement. This is what he wrote: "When I was younger I dated women. I even got engaged."

That sure sounds like someone who got engaged young, not someone who cancelled a wedding at the age of about 30 after an eight year relationship. While his statement was technically true (everything in our past was when we were younger), it had to have been intentionally misleading, especially coming from a Stanford grad.

I agree, and you put that so much better than Kurtz did in his correction. This is an important basis for criticism of Collins, who's being hailed as a hero. Giving up on living a lie is a good idea, but it's not heroic. Maybe 30 years ago, it was heroic to be openly gay, but even back then, if you chose to keep your sexual orientation quiet, it was still wrong to delude another person to the extent that Collins apparently did. Collins graduated from Stanford in 2001, and it's just ridiculous that someone who lived in that environment at that time — he roomed with Joe Kennedy and was friends with Chelsea Clinton — would be seriously burdened with backward ideas about sexual orientation. I'll refrain from lambasting the man for his deceit and cowardice, but extolling him as a hero is absurd. I think that's what Kurtz might have wanted to say, but he botched his attack.

It would be interesting to know which powerful Democrats, if any, interacted with Tina Brown over the downfall of Howard Kurtz.

"The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness."

"Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. Not for him the strenuous athleticism — which is the novelist’s daily task — of laying out his deepest griefs and shames before the world. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others."

Janet Malcolm, "The Journalist and the Murderer," page 159.

It's all beautiful fun and games until somebody leaves too much slack in the rope...

You've seen the famous largest swing in the world at Utah's Corona Arch:



"If you don’t do it exactly right, you can die," and, unfortunately, a young man did.

At the Ice Cold Café...

... we see the Wisconsin Capitol building reflected on the glassy clear and oh-so-thick ice of Lake Mendota, where hearty men fish and full-blooded dogs romp, while timid souls linger on the shoreline and fret about safety. It's America, baby! It's Wisconsin! There is room for the bold individualists and the hand-wringing collectivists. All contribute to the molten mush of human thought here in this moment we were made for. God bless Madison, Wisconsin, and God bless the United States of America.

ADDED: The full-blooded God dog:



The hearty men:




Closer:

"My mom would have given up every part of her body to be here for me, to watch me in the pageant."

"If there's something that I can do to be proactive, it might hurt my body, it might hurt my physical beauty, but I'm going to be alive."

After the Miss America pageant, contestant Allyn Rose will have a pre-emptive double mastectomy:

Rose said it was her father who first broached the subject, during her freshman year of college, two years after the death of her mother.

"I said, 'Dad I'm not going to do that. I like the body I have.' He got serious and said, 'Well then you're going to end up dead like your mom.'"

"Strangles"?

Really? Where's the strangling? Calling speech offensive is more speech, not censorship.

Via Instapundit, who quotes the headline that contains what I say is a deceptive metaphor: "Harvard, Legendary Home Of Harvard Lampoon, Strangles Campus Satire."

If the authorities are offended and express outrage and demand more circumspect speech, satire is not murdered. It is the opposite of murdered. It is given fertile ground in which to grow and prosper. What better foil for comedy than a bunch of dour, repressive authority figures? Since when is satire ruined when the superiors don't think it's funny? Seems to me their outrage makes it funnier.

If you don't have enough courage with your humor to keep moving forward, you were never very funny in the first place.