I have children, I love children, and imaginations need food. The world is big. The world is wonderful. But it is also terrifying. It is an ocean full of paper boats. For many children, the only nobility, the only joy, the only strength and sacrifice that they see firsthand comes in fiction. Even when children have plenty of joy in their lives, good stories reinforce it. As long as I'm dealing in honesty, I may as well admit that I have been more influenced (as a person) by my childhood readings of Tolkien and Lewis than I have been by any philosophers I read in college and grad school. The events and characters in Narnia and Middle Earth shaped my ideals, my dreams, my goals. Kant just annoyed me.
Top Afghan Shiite cleric Mohammad Asif Mohseni speaks during a press conference in Kabul on April 11, 2009. Afghanistan's top Shiite cleric defended a new law said to oppress women and accused Western critics of the controversial legislation of 'cultural invasion' and violating the democracy they introduced. Mohammad Asif Mohseni also rejected a ministry of justice review of the law ordered by President Hamid Karzai, saying any changes would violate a constitutional provision for Shiites to have their own jurisprudence. By Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images.
For a great majority of Denby’s years as a professional writer, he was effectively firewalled from his critics. In the Age of the Internet, hipster bloggers are baying for the fusty critic’s blood. Denby wants things as they once were, when American culture was effectively a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; when the Ivy League guardians of “our conversation” ruthlessly protected it from contamination by the jealous and uncouth.
Camilo Jose Vergara photographs paired houses –one abandoned, one occupied. He explained his work to Slate:
In Camden, N.J., perhaps the poorest American city I regularly visit, I photograph what I call paired houses: two dwellings, side by side, one occupied, the other empty. Those living in the occupied home often have their lives made more difficult by what happens on the other side of a shared wall. If I see a neighbor or meet the resident of one of the occupied houses, I ask how they're coping. They tell me that people throw trash in the front and back yards of the vacant unit, causing foul smells and attracting rats. Physical problems in the empty shell cause accelerated decay in the occupied house. Water may be left running in the unoccupied unit, causing moisture to migrate next door. In cold weather, pipes burst. Joists rot and collapse, tearing bricks out of the shared wall. And if the empty dwelling is not properly sealed, prostitutes and drug addicts may break in and start fires.
Macy Halford reviewsPride and Prejudice and Zombies:
The experience of reading it is like taking a walk in a park on a beautiful day and knowing that a thunderstorm or something else deeply unpleasant (say, a zombie) might spring up at any moment and ruin everything. In this instance, the something unpleasant is Grahame-Smith’s writing. But perhaps I’m being too harsh: I met a fan of the book last weekend who praised it as “an intelligent fart joke.”
...there’s a certain class of rhetoric I’m going to call the “one way hash” argument. Most modern cryptographic systems in wide use are based on a certain mathematical asymmetry: You can multiply a couple of large prime numbers much (much, much, much, much) more quickly than you can factor the product back into primes. Certain bad arguments work the same way—skim online debates between biologists and earnest ID afficionados armed with talking points if you want a few examples:
Felix Salmon wants some price sanity after the recession ends:
My hope is that the world which emerges from the present crisis will be one where goods, in general, have a price which is commensurate with their cost. I remember walking down Broadway last year, in Soho, and overhearing a woman coming out of H&M explaining to her friend that the clothes there were great: they were so cheap that you could wear them once and simply throw them away, without having to worry about how they stood up to washing or dry-cleaning. And although it was easy to conjure up lots of high moral dudgeon to direct at the woman in question, the fact is that incentives matter, and the prices at H&M were clearly incentivizing her to feel that way: as a general rule, it’s not good for the planet when a frock costs roughly the same as the cost of dry-cleaning it.
I can't help but assign the tea protests a place in my view that the Right is generally going through the same convulsions that overtook the Left in the late 1970's and continued into the 1990's.
The Left of that era grew to be increasingly insular, ideologically rigid, and dyspeptic. Identifying as a liberal during the Reagan era was a bit of a badge of honor, but the complete lack of power lead to all sorts of nuttiness. With nothing but a record of losing, it became possible for the anyone on the Left to come up with ridiculous policy prescriptions, and the lack of anyone in power listening made the advocate look bold and daring, rather than unstable and silly.
Nowhere was this more evident than in what I call the "Protest Left."
Jonah Lehrer would like to tinker with one of the brain's features:
We're stuck with a mind that reacts to the mundane mundane worries of modern life - a falling stock market, a troubled marriage, taking the SAT - with a powerful set of primal chemicals that, once upon a time, were reserved for moments of "fight or flight". In other words, we treat everything like an existential threat, which is why a multiple choice exam can leave us panicky and breathless. The hypothalamus, it turns out, is an excitable drama queen, suffusing the bloodstream with adrenaline and cortisol whenever things get a little uncertain or unpleasant.
The problem with this blunt reaction to stress - it's too often all or nothing - is that, as I've written numerous times, chronic stress is really bad for you. It causes chronic back pain, weakens the heart and kills brain cells.
When you put people in a social-science experiment room and tell them, in the abstract, about the Israel/Palestine conflict, they are in “far” mode. This situation is totally unlike having to choose which side to join in an actual fight – where your brain goes into “near” mode, and you quickly (I predict) join the likely victors....
In a situation where there is an extremely unbalanced conflict that you are “distant” from, there are various reasons I can think of for supporting the underdog: but the common theme is that when the mind is in “far” mode, its primary purpose is to signal how nice it is, rather than to actually acquire resources. Why do we want to signal to others that we are nice people? We do this because they are more likely to cooperate with us and trust us! If evolution built a cave-man who went around telling other cave-men what a selfish bastard he was... well, that cave-man wouldn't last long.
"SOUTH PARK MURDERED ME LAST NIGHT AND IT'S PRETTY FUNNY. IT HURTS MY FEELINGS BUT WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT FROM SOUTH PARK! I ACTUALLY HAVE BEEN WORKING ON MY EGO THOUGH. HAVING THE CRAZY EGO IS PLAYED OUT AT THIS POINT IN MY LIFE AND CAREER. I USE TO USE IT TO BUILD UP MY ESTEEM WHEN NOBODY BELIEVED IN ME. NOW THAT PEOPLE DO BELIEVE AND SUPPORT MY MUSIC AND PRODUCTS THE BEST RESPONSE IS THANK YOU INSTEAD OF "I TOLD YOU SO!!!" IT'S COOL TO TALK SHIT WHEN YOU'RE RAPPING BUT NOT IN REAL LIFE. WHEN YOU MEET LITTLE WAYNE IN PERSON HE'S THE NICEST GUY FOR EXAMPLE. I JUST WANNA BE A DOPER PERSON WHICH STARTS WITH ME NOT ALWAYS TELLING PEOPLE HOW DOPE I THINK I AM. I NEED TO JUST GET PAST MYSELF. DROP THE BRAVADO AND JUST MAKE DOPE PRODUCT. EVERYTHING IS NOT THAT SERIOUS. AS LONG AS PEOPLE THINK I ACT LIKE A BITCH THIS TYPE OF SHIT WILL HAPPEN TO ME. I GOT A LONG ROAD AHEAD OF ME TO MAKE PEOPLE BELIEVE I'M NOT ACTUALLY A HUGE DOUCHE BUT I'M UP FOR THE CHALLENGE. I'M SURE THE WRITERS AT SOUTH PARK ARE REALLY NICE PEOPLE IN REAL LIFE. THANKS FOR TAKING THE TIME TO DRAW MY CREW. THAT WAS PRETTY FUNNY ALSO!! I'M SURE THERE'S GRAMMATICAL ERRORS IN THIS... THAT'S HOW YOU KNOW IT'S ME!" - Kanye West.
All caps in the original. The comments are even better. My faves:
You should be in the simpsons though, they would treat you respectively.
And:
dude it's ok, we accept you as a gay fish
And we do! We do! Relevant out-take from last Wednesday's South Park after the jump:
A British take on Keith Olbermann - and the strange comparisons between British and American TV news anchors. Wait till a Brit gets to discussing Fox News:
...the first meaningful test won't come until a major American city loses its only metro daily....That's because metro newspapers are taking up the market space in which the innovation he's looking for must occur. Newspapers may be failing, but most do a passable job of limiting serious competition in their markets. What succeeds in the shadow of an established metro, therefore, may not be what ultimately winds up contending for the market positions vacated by Old Media giants.
It’s been horrifying to watch Twitter evolve into a medium used for important (if not serious) communication. First and foremost, I am appalled by our legislators’ embrace of a time-suck communication medium that is necessarily superficial, and (more perniciously) one that is so convincingly fake-democratic while actually just facilitating communication with rich, Apple-computer-owning white people like myself.
...is Twitter a bubble? For those of you who think bubbles are easy to spot while they're happening, you need to answer Right Now. And show your work, please. In a couple of years we'll find out which of you was right.
Henry Blodget is on the record saying that Twitter will be worth more than a billion eventually. My sense is that it jumped the shark the minute John McCain started tweeting about beavers. Or, if not then, whenever it became possible to measure your "Twitter e-penis." I'm generally an early adopter of new technologies. But this one: not so much.
Storage costs are falling
exponentially. So while users keep adding content, the cost of storage
is declining at an even faster rate.
Older videos while still costing storage space, do not cost bandwidth because nobody is looking at them.
If it ever became a problem, google could just start charging
users who upload more than a certain amount. Countless sites have
policies like this and it would be pretty reasonable to do that. So
this would provide another way for Google to make money off of YouTube.
A penitent takes part in the 'El Descendimiento' brotherhood procession of the Holy Week in Cordoba on April 10, 2009. By Philippe Desmazes/AFP/Getty Images.
Yes, there are major financial challenges in America's future precisely because of the issues [Medicare, Medicaid, social security, defense] Sullivan cites. Therefore, isn't it logical that driving up the debt several times whatever Bush did is worthy of protest? And all that while mortgaging our children's futures with more and more bail outs and a budget that will break generations of tax payer's backs? And all before we've even begun to think about tackling the big ticket items Sullivan so half-heartedly laments?
But Riehl's notion that Obama is "driving up the debt several times whatever Bush did" doesn't make any sense. Take the biggest tranch of the future debt - $32 trillion of a new Medicare drug entitlement - that Riehl ascribes to Obama. Nuh-huh. Obama inherited that commitment, with no provision for funding it, from the Republicans. To blame Obama for it is like blaming him for the future costs of the Iraq war. Yes, they will be incurred after Obama took office - but they were guaranteed before then, when the GOP legislated the spending explosion, with the avid support of Fox News.
But again, if this is a protest in favor of slashing Medicare, Medicaid and social security, great. Where do I sign up? But those rallies do not exist. Which leads to an inescapable conclusion:
These people are unserious. But we knew that already.
There is no such thing as winning in this new kind of war. The war is ongoing, with periods of more violence and periods of less violence, during which the enemy regroups and plans his next attack. When we feel the enemy is getting strong, we must be prepared to make preemptive strikes, hard and fast at key targets, with viciousness, as the enemy would do to us. Only then can we acquire, not peace, but sustained periods of relative calm.
This concern is not really about gay marriage, as others have noted. It's about whether those who are opposed to homosexuality itself on the basis of their religious beliefs have a right to discriminate against gay people in the public sphere. Even Rod agrees, confirming that this concern is not about whether churches have to marry gay couples or whether priests can get in trouble for anti-gay sermons.
Sorry, folks, but this issue is settled. Romer v. Evans has been the law for 13 years now. This sort of discrimination is not allowed.
Wells Fargo (WFC) indicated that it made about $3 billion in the first quarter of the year and declared its buyout of the deeply troubled Wachovia to be a success. Wells Fargo (WFC) said that the low cost of money from the government combined with a surging demand for mortgages was all the medicine that it required. ...
Oddly absent from the discussion of how well Wells Fargo did is why the government was in the midst of testing bank balance sheets at all. The experts at the Treasury had been thrown off the scent and consequently had missed the fact that there was not need to test what is already working well. The same holds true for the Geithner plan to take toxic assets off bank balance sheets. It is academic now. What banks are earning from the difference between the cost of capital and the income from lending is now great enough for the banking system to be self-sustaining again.
I live in Kansas and have several family members who fit the mold of these Tea Partiers. The sense I get from them is much like what I felt after the 2004 election - absolute disbelief that this country could make such a decision. The reason that my relatives are so concerned is that Bush stood for everything they truly believed in - US primacy, nationalism, God (the Christianist version), guns, no gays, no illegals, where criminals get a fair trial before we hang them.
In their mind, Obama repudiates all of that.
These rallies are an effort by a group that feels highly marginalized to find some comfort in the company of others with similar beliefs, and to express their fear and frustration over what they see happening to their country. At least, that's why my uncles and grandparents will be there.
Being ahead of your time is never easy. As a community, you understand the importance of being progressive. It's not just a word. It's how you live your life. And as an insurance company, we work hard to live up to that name. It's how we think, and how we treat our customers. So while you're here, check out how far we've come, and more importantly, where we're heading.
Scott Horton's take on Leon Panetta writing that CIA officers “should not be investigated, let alone punished” for torture:
Leon Panetta’s promise of absolution is being implemented—by way of cover-up. And the Eric Holder Department of Justice is complicit at every step along the way.
It seems safe to assume that YouTube’s traffic will continue to grow,
with no clear ceiling in sight. Since the majority of Google’s costs
for the service are pure variable costs of bandwidth and storage, and
since they’ve already reached the point at which no greater economies
of scale remain, the costs of the business will continue to grow on a
linear basis. Unfortunately, far more user-generated content than
professional content makes its way onto the site, which means that
while costs grow linearly, non-monetizable content is growing
geometrically as compared against the monetizable content that YouTube
really wants and needs to survive. This means less and less of
YouTube’s library will be revenue-contributing, while the costs of
delivering that library will continue to grow.
Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,
The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other Spheares, by being growne
Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey:
Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit
For their first mover, and are whirld by it.
Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West
This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,
And by that setting endlesse day beget;
But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall,
Sinne had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I'almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for mee.
Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye;
What a death were it then to see God dye?
Maybe you mock Malkin et al. a bit too much. Seems to me that for much of last year's campaign, those on the right mocked and pooh-poohed Obama's internet strategy and the liberal netroots. Now they've discovered that there's something behind bottom-up organizing and social networking driven by the web. I think that's all to the good, don't you? I'm willing to give them time to find a message worthy of their newfound cybertoys and accept that there's nothing at all surprising about the incoherence and irrationality of their tea parties.
Let them try to gather the masses. Let them find out how easy it is to have things go viral and how hard it is to sustain something without a cogent message or an articulate messenger. The sooner they discover all of this, the sooner we might actually have a Republican party that can take a serious role once again in the governance of this nation.
My frustration is not with the manner of the protest, but simply the difficulty of discovering what it is exactly they are against and, more importantly, what they are for.
That photo of Larry Summers yesterday gave me a jolt - it is the classical Jew profile from every old European caricature (think Der Sturmer or the protocols
of the elders of Zion). So I found it very disturbing, particularly
given the classic European antisemitic association of Jews and money and given Summers's current position.
I found it even more disturbing when you actually linked to one of
those classic caricatures of Jews (the Bosch painting, traditionally
showing all those nasty Jews gloating over the Crucifixion)
effectively gloating about how Summers looks like them.
David Samuels thinks it would be rational for Israel to attack Iran:
An attack on Iran might be risky in dozens of ways, but it would certainly do wonders for restoring Israel's capacity for game-changing military action. The idea that Iran can meaningfully retaliate against Israel through conventional means is more myth than fact. Even without using nuclear weapons, Israel has the capacity to flatten the Iranian economy by bombing a few strategic oil refineries, making a meaningful Iranian counterstroke much less likely than it first appears.
Thomas Barnett doesn't buy all the apocalyptic economic reports:
I made a decision a long time ago not to make my career a bet on bad things happening. I think that approach simply corrodes your strategic thought capacity. Human history is progress, so if you're constantly having to screen out the good to spot the bad, your vision will be unduly narrow. If you bet on progress, you can easily contextualize the bad, because progress is never linear. But if you bet on retreat, you must consistently discount advances as "illusions" and "buying time" and so on, and after a while, you're just this broken clock who's dead-on twice a day.
This Hilzoy post on why women stay in abusive relationships is eye-opening:
There are things that are comprehensible parts of the world, even if they're rare, like having your car stolen; and then there are things that are unexpected in a completely different sense, like having your car turn into an elephant before your eyes: things that make you wonder whether you're completely crazy. Being beaten up by someone who apparently loves you is one of those things.
What this means is that precisely when a woman needs as much confidence in her own judgment as she can muster, the rug is completely pulled out from under her. And it's not just that she questions her judgment because she got involved with this guy in the first place; she questions her judgment because something so completely alien to the world she thinks she knows has just happened.
I'm in my mid twenties, and a PhD student at the Ivy League university located in the hippie town of Ithaca, New York. When I came to the United States a little over three years ago -- I was born and raised in the Netherlands -- I had never tried smoking weed, despite it being readily available. American friends of mine (fellow graduate students) introduced me to it and thought it was hilarious they were teaching the Dutch girl how to use a bong -- the same Dutch girl who used to ask tourists looking for the nearest coffee shop, "Do you want a cup of coffee or a joint?"
It is weird not being able to talk to many people about weed, especially in a liberal town like Ithaca, for fear of risking my chances of ever getting American citizenship, or being send back to Pot Heaven Holland.
Another writes:
So about a year and a half ago, my cousin got married and invited the whole family - no mean feat, considering we're Irish-Catholic and thus have a ridiculous number of cousins. At the reception, I went outside to have a cigarette with another cousin. Suddenly, we were flanked by my little brother and nine of our other relations.
E.D. Kain documents Peter Wehner's break with reality. So does Massie:
There are plenty of Obama's policies that might cause some concern and he is, as he has never tried to deny, a new kind of old-fashioned liberal, but the notion that he is ashamed of the United States is a stretch too far and the sooner conservatives divest themselves of this delusion the sooner they may have a chance to regain some measure of respect and be listened to as though they were a serious political movement and not just a bunch of paranoid fools.
I spent the better part of an hour earlier today scanning the various sites and blogs to try and understand what specifically the Fox-Pajamas tea parties are about. Having absorbed about as much of the literature as I can, I have to say I'm still befuddled.
Option 1: It's a protest of the bank bailouts orchestrated by Bush and now Obama. But surely these tea-partiers understand what would happen if we didn't bail the banks out. Are they advocating letting major banks fail? Or are they advocating a Krugman-style government take-over? No idea.
Option 2: It's a protest against tax hikes. But there have barely been any! Are they arguing that the planned return to Clinton era marginal rates is an outrage worthy of the colonists ... only months after an election in which the winning candidate ran on exactly that platform? Is that postponed future increase so radical that it demands a protest modeled on one in which people were taxed with no representation at all? Truly bizarre. And when you consider that we have gone through a very long period of relatively low taxation for the very successful, and a very long period in which their wealth has soared, and after an election where a majority of such people voted for Obama, the extremism seems unrelated to anything substantive underneath it.
Option 3: It's a protest against illegal immigration. Ok, so why the tea? Weren't all the original tea-partiers illegal immigrants?
Option 4: It's a protest against government debt. Yay! I will leave aside the somewhat awkward fact that Fox News and Pajamas Media barely covered the massive debt racked up by the Republicans during a period of economic growth. Instead, I'll proffer a simple point: If the tea-partiers are concerned about debt and concerned about taxes, one presumes they favor drastic spending cuts. But what are the tea-partiers proposing to do to Medicare, Medicaid, and social security?
The true Resurrection is based not on the mythical lie of the guilty victim who deserves to die, but on the rectification of that lie, which comes from the true God and which reopens channels of communication mankind itself had closed through self-imprisonment in its own violent cultures. Divine grace alone can explain why, after the Resurrection, the disciples could become a dissenting minority in an ocean of victimization--could understand then what they had misunderstood earlier: the innocence not of Jesus alone but of all victims of all Passion-like murders since the foundation of the world.
April 5, 2009 - April 11, 2009
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