Here’s the headline on the NYT’s big Stuxnet piece: “Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran.”

The first half of the story is then an account of the bold President Obama using Stuxnet to cleverly cripple Iran’s uranium centrifuge operation. Our hero.

You have to read the second half to get to the other stuff: That Stuxnet was conceived by some random military guy and approved by some other president. This other president was skeptical that the plan could work, but he gave it the go-ahead anyway. Stuxnet was designed, tested, and sent into the field on his watch. When this other president left office, he personally asked President Barack Obama to let it continue, because he thought it would bear fruit.

So sure, technically Barack Hussein Obama didn’t come up with Stuxnet. And no, he didn’t, technically, oversee the successful build of the weapon. And sure, fine, he didn’t–again, technically–make the call to deploy it. But he didn’t pull the plug on it! So he’s the hero!

Do we really have to wait until 2017 to put him on Rushmore?

So Galley Friend X sent me the following clip from a cable TV show. It’s funny in the sense that it’s a near perfect example of adolescent wish fulfillment. But what’s really funny is that, if the watermark is correct, this is from ABC’s Family network.

Cinemax is dead! Long live ABC Family!

Yeah, Beevis, he did. And it is awesome.

In this week’s Weekly Standard Newsletter I talk about how seemingly insignificant events can sometimes be determinitive:

The Battle of Denmark Strait pitted the British Royal Navy against the German Kriegsmarine. It was supposed to be an ambush set by Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. It ended in disaster.

The Brits found two German vessels, the battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, the day before. In the area the Brits had twice the force—two heavy cruisers (the Norfolk and Suffolk) and two battleships (the Hood and Prince of Wales). The Germans were sailing with the Bismarck in the lead; the plan was for the British to split the opposing force and overpower them. It was a good plan.

Only several small, seemingly inconsequential events took place.

When the British first made contact the day earlier, on May 23, the Bismarck fired her main guns, once. When they did so, something went wrong and the action damaged the Bismarck‘s forward radar.

That night, the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen exchanged positions—they wanted the smaller ship’s functioning, forward-facing radar to be in the lead, making up for the Bismarck‘s blind spot. At the same time the Germans were executing this maneuver, a snow storm blew in. The snow caused the British radar to display all sorts of false readings. The result being that the Brits never realized that the German ships had exchanged places. As dawn drew near, the British proceeded under the belief that the Bismarck was in the lead and they positioned themselves accordingly. She was not.

Instead of being able to cross the “T,” with overwhelming force, the British were now in an unfavorable position. Their cruisers were too far away to get quickly engaged. Their battleships were caught with their guns trained on the smaller German ship and totally exposed to the Bismarck‘s big guns. Five minutes after the Bismarck opened fire, the Hood exploded. She would sink in minutes.

By the time the shooting was finished, the Germans would suffer only minimal damage while the British lost the Hood and had their other battleship, the Prince of Wales, crippled. All because of random radar damage and a snow squall.

The obvious lesson—for war, politics, and life—is that very small events can be decisive.

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Galley Friend J.E. sends along this fantastic story about a 4-year-old boy with some pretty severe physical problems who has to wear a hearing aid. He decides he doesn’t want to wear it anymore, because he’s a comic book junkie and superheroes don’t need hearing aids. His mom writes to Marvel. The guys at Marvel create a superhero, just for him, named the Blue Ear. If this doesn’t make you tear up a little, you’re already dead.

And on the subject of disabled superheroes, over the weekend I caught up with a really, really great Daredevil book from a few years back: Joe Quesada’s Daredevil: Father.

It’s really great. It’s a noir-ish mystery and a meditation on imperfect parenting and its Superhero Specific Content is so low that I’d almost recommend it for general audiences.

If you haven’t read Joel Engel’s amazing true-crime thriller, L.A. ’56, treat yourself now. It’s a perfect beach book.

Over the weekend, the L.A. Weekly ran a story about it that’s straight out of a movie. Here’s Joel setting the scene:

Shortly before one of my signings, at the sensational Book Soup in Hollywood, the store received a call from a woman who said she wanted to talk to me.  Why?  Because, she said, she was “the daughter of the rapist” whose crimes are at the heart of the incredible story that takes place in Los Angeles in the summer of 1956.

I wondered whether my life was in danger and whether I should cancel the event.  Then I returned her call…and learned that this 69-year-old woman had known nothing about her father, not even his name, until recently.  Her mother, still alive at 91, had always refused to tell her anything about him, as had her aunts and uncles.  So all that she knew about the man whose genes she carried was that he hadn’t exactly been Martin Luther King.

When, just weeks before, she finally learned his name, she began Googling and was led soon enough to links about my book, then eventually to the free sample chapter on Amazon.  As it happens, the first three words of the entire book are “Willie Roscoe Fields”–her father’s name.  Thus did she learn that the man she’d wondered about all her life had in fact been a serial rapist.

“Linda” confronted her mother with what she’d read–and her mother confirmed the whole story plus additional details that she passed on when she and I sat at a cafe near the bookstore with the L.A. Weekly reporter listening in.

As bizarre as that is, the turn of events forms a sensational bookend with the daughter of the man who was falsely accused of the crimes.  Until I tracked her down for an interview, nearly 55 years after the events, this 57-year-old woman had believed all her life that the father she’d met only twice, when she was an adult, had in fact been a rapist.

You couldn’t make it up.

Half Larry Johnson’s Grandma-ma, half the Six Flags Old Guy. All awesome. Stay for the full 4 minutes. You’ll thank me.

I had no idea that Morton’s was being morphed into something grotesque and awful. Thanks to Galley Friend Vic Matus, now I do:

There is no prime rib special on Thursdays. The cheesecake no longer comes from the S&S Bakery in the Bronx. The key lime pie is gone from the Prime Lunch Specials. They’ve ceased offering complimentary cordials after a big dinner. The butter is no longer a thick square but rather a wavy garnish. The plates are now square. In a few months, the downtown D.C. location will shut down for renovations, in which the dark-wood paneling will be replaced with black and silver. Multiple Morton’s locations considered redundant have been closed.

The fall of an American institution hasn’t been this macabre since Brooks Bros. went down market in the late 1990s.