Archive
May 3, 2009 - May 9, 2009
Saturday, May 9, 200909 May 2009 08:20 pm Attention David Lynch FansBuzzfeed collected five movie mashups inspired by the famously twisted director. This one is pretty brilliant: 09 May 2009 07:28 pm Why Fear The Racist? CtdNoah Millman rounds up all the links to the Saletan and McWhorter back and forth over the racial achievement gap. Millman interjects: I want to ask a question with more complex ramifications. How committed should we be, as a society, to the identification of fairness with meritocracy? “Fairness” is a bedrock principle for a healthy society; a society that abandons any pretense at treating members fairly won’t be a society at all for very long. But “meritocracy” means much more than this: it specifies how rulers are to be chosen, and how goods are to be distributed, and, in our society, says that it is right and fair for rulers to be chosen and goods to be distributed according to a scale in which talent, and particularly talent at passing tests, predominates. Continue reading "Why Fear The Racist? Ctd" » 09 May 2009 07:01 pm The Drunkest Nation
A map showing world drinking habits. No Irishmen were punched in the face in the compiling of this survey. 09 May 2009 06:26 pm "The Front Fell Off"A classic bit of Australian comedy. 09 May 2009 05:50 pm Beer Pong RingersDon't ever play drinking games with these guys. 09 May 2009 05:27 pm Buy American Nothing?Nate Silver suggests that America's car culture is over: ...there is some evidence that more Americans are at least entertaining the idea of leading a more car-free existence. Between October 2004, when gas prices first hit two dollars a gallon, and December 2008, when they fell below this threshold, three cities with among the largest declines in housing prices were Las Vegas (-37 percent), Detroit (-34 percent), and Phoenix (-15 percent), each highly car-dependent cities. Conversely, the two markets with the largest gains in housing prices were Portland, Oregon (+19 percent), and Seattle (+18 percent), communities that are more friendly to alternate modes of transportation.
09 May 2009 04:51 pm Why Fear The Racist?In the wake of a report showing how No Child Left Behind has failed to close the black-white performance gap, John McWhorter and William Saletan went back and forth over Saletan's notion that racial data should not tabulated in the first place. In the latest salvo, McWhorter makes an important point:
Continue reading "Why Fear The Racist?" » 09 May 2009 04:35 pm Employing MillionsAppleyard thinks I'm wrong about Murdoch and paying for content online. 09 May 2009 04:20 pm Mental Health BreakCreated using vintage photography of New York City (be sure to wait for the falling piano):
Hauschka - Morgenrot from Jeff Desom on Vimeo. 09 May 2009 03:26 pm Tariffs Are Bad, Mkay?Matt Steinglass breaks with some of his fellow liberals: There are few areas where I agree with the CATO Institute crowd, but this is definitely one of them: long-term tariffs on manufactured goods are really, really stupid. Germany and Japan are still competitive shipbuilders and the US isn’t, and that’s in large measure because of the 1920 Jones Act, which bars foreign ships from US internal waterways and has created a protected market for US shipbuilders that has gradually destroyed their ability to build anything the rest of the world wants. And Germany and Japan are still competitive automakers, while the question of whether the US remains one is very much up in the air, apparently for some of the same reasons. Agricultural tariffs are equally damaging. They distort markets – making products like high fructose corn syrup economically feasible – but they also limit agricultural exports from developing countries. And agriculture tends to be a major source of GDP in under industrialized nations. You want more global poverty? Keep your ag tariffs and subsidies. 09 May 2009 03:13 pm Lost Letters
A Finnish company rescues letters from discarded neon business signs and re-purposes them: When company signs and logos are taken down, they get demolished. We recycle the characters into individual design objects. We dismantle the letters, clean them up, add a new transformer, LED lights and the power cord, and put them back together. Very hipster chic. 09 May 2009 02:18 pm Googling The FluGoogle Flu Trends aggregates search data to track the spread of infection "up to two weeks faster than traditional systems." Time explains: The reasoning is that if people are searching for information on the flu, they're probably sick themselves or know someone who is — and a geographic cluster of like-minded Googlers could represent a burgeoning outbreak or, worse, the roots of a new pandemic. ... [The] benefit is that they rely not on hospital data but real-time information from people who are in the process of getting sick. "What we are seeing are trends of what people are thinking about at home, perhaps before they might go to see a doctor," says Jeremy Ginsberg, lead engineer of Google Flu Trends. But Alexis Madrigal shows how they missed the swine flu. 09 May 2009 01:15 pm What The Dems Knew About TortureJosh Marshall doesn't want us to kid ourselves: I'd be very surprised if the key Democrats at the time weren't briefed on a lot of this stuff. And to the extent that they didn't know the details, that it might have been not wanting to know rather than having been kept in the dark. Drum has a simular response, as does Marc: Pelosi last week said she had no idea that EITs were even being used and insisted that the subject of waterboarding never came up. That's hard to swallow, even if you believe the claim about waterboarding. Why would the CIA even brief Pelosi about EITs if it had no intention of using them? "Hard to swallow" is probably a metaphor worth avoiding when it comes to water torture. I don't doubt that a few Dems were clued in. And they should be held responsible for their share as well. This was a collective failure on the part of the political leadership of both parties - although obviously the lion's share belongs in the executive branch. But the Congress is co-equal; they were briefed; we deserve to know exactly what they knew and what, if anything they did to stop it. Continue reading "What The Dems Knew About Torture" » 09 May 2009 12:51 pm The View From Your Window
Yokosuka, Japan, 6.03 pm 09 May 2009 12:29 pm Helmet Or No?E.D. Kain revisits the bicyclist's dilemma: Personally, I’m a helmet guy. However ineffective helmets may be, I still appreciate the contents of my skull enough to do whatever I can to protect them, including donning the rather clumsy foam and plastic encasement even at the risk of forsaking the “sublime.” Then, too, I’m a parent and one who doesn’t subscribe to the “do as I say, not as I do” approach to parenting. When it all comes down, I’d prefer to see my daughter wear a helmet when she’s of a biking age. I just can't do it. I like the rush of wind in my hair ... oh never mind. They can be pretty effective, mind you: Continue reading "Helmet Or No?" » 09 May 2009 12:18 pm The Morning ShaveMore here. (Hat tip: \\\) 09 May 2009 11:56 am The New York Times And "Torture"Here's proof positive that what was once considered routine to call torture in the pages of the New York Times has now been changed, to accommodate the Bush administration. An obit, obviously written before Bill Keller decided to take his editorial cues from Dick Cheney, describes the torture undergone by an American Korean War airman at the hands of the Communist Chinese. Not the most sadistic or comic book type of torture - just open-ended solitary confinement in a damp, cold cell, with meager food and regular piercing alarms to enforce sleep deprivation. No one, including the NYT, called this anything but torture - until they had to accommodate the US government's attempt to torture prisoners without moral accountability or legal authority. 09 May 2009 11:51 am The Book Project Of AlexandriaDavid Post defends Google: The Google Books project has the potential to become one of the great information-gathering activities in human history -- every book (just about), at everyone's fingertips, searchable and instantly accessible from any corner of the globe. And we want to deter that?? Because that will decrease "respect for IP laws"? Talk about putting the cart before the horse!! Because it will inflict some sort of terrible "harm" on copyright holders? I'm not terribly sympathetic. Copyright, as Jefferson stressed so long ago, is a "social right" -- given by society because we feel it serves useful ends (incentivizing authors to produce new creative works). When it ceases to serve those ends, it should be eliminated. The Google Books project is another example of how copyright interests, these days, do little more than obstruct useful innovations. There are 7 million (or more) out of print books that Google would like to place on-line where they can actually be accessed and read. I'm sorry if that infringes someone's copyright, but really -- in what way is society better off, exactly, from recognizing the copyright holder's rights in this circumstance?
09 May 2009 11:12 am "A Gallery Of Default Anonymity"Rob Walker is collecting the various default icons used by web services to represent, er, you. Feel human yet?
09 May 2009 11:11 am Release The OPR ReportIt's the closest thing we have right now to a Truth Commission, and Americans have a right to know and understand how a secret law allowed illegal torture came to pass. Even the establishment WaPo agrees: Investigations of this type are usually kept secret unless and until the investigating entity determines that wrongdoing has occurred. There's a certain logic and decency to this: Mere news that someone is under investigation is often enough to tarnish that person's reputation -- even if charges ultimately are not brought. Yet the existence of the investigation and many details of the OPR report have already found their way into the public arena. Continue reading "Release The OPR Report" » 09 May 2009 11:10 am The Krugman Syndrome?
Bennett Gordon summarizes Arthur Herman's article on professional pessimists (the full article isn't online): The professional pessimist is able to “not only make past successes look like failure, but can present catastrophe as condign punishment for past sins.” Unfortunately for their home countries, these pessimists can convince other people to panic, or to blithely accept a bleak future, making the decline of their civilization unavoidable. (Photo: Paul J Richards/Getty.) 09 May 2009 10:17 am Free-Range KidsLenore Skenazy wants to let kids be kids: There is a 1 in 1.5 million chance that your kid would be abducted and killed by a stranger. It is hard to wrap your mind around those numbers, and everybody always assumes: What if it's my 1 in 1.5 million? If you don't want to have your child in any kind of danger, you really can't do anything. You certainly couldn't drive them in a car, because that's the No. 1 way kids die, as passengers in car accidents.
09 May 2009 09:16 am The Morality Of FoodMax Fisher explores the tension between vegetarians and vegans: Vegans are statistically minuscule--about one quarter of one percent of Americans--and can seem most significant for the questions they raise about the rest of us. For a vegetarian like me, they are a blow to any confidence I feel in my chosen lifestyle. If I really cared about animal welfare, wouldn't I be vegan? If I don't have it in myself to live as a vegan, does that make the sacrifice of vegetarianism insignificant in comparison? Worse, does it make me a hypocrite?
09 May 2009 08:19 am Snake Oil And AutismDan Summers, a doctor, tackles Jim Carrey and the anti-vaccine crowd: Carrey simply expects us to trust that the evidence supports his claim, that pediatricians and public health experts are in thrall to the vaccine industry, all the while blithely assuming that nobody will bother to sift through the science his organization has thrown at the wall like so much spaghetti. The simple (if time-consuming) act of checking what he says makes his dishonest, uninformed grandstanding apparent.
Friday, May 8, 200908 May 2009 08:15 pm Inhaling Your CocktailThis sounds fun:
The concoction was top-shelf--Hendrick's gin and Fever Tree tonic--and
when shot through a humidifier the gin's cucumber and juniper aromas
came through to full effect. It was a pleasant scent, and I could
imagine the boozy facial being a hit at a girl's spa weekend. But in a
small subterranean room, lit by a single, bare bulb and filled with
strangers in baggy white jumpsuits, it made for a decidedly strange,
Willy Wonka Saturday night bar scene.
Where's my golden ticket? 08 May 2009 07:09 pm The Marriage and Marijuana MomentDavid Boaz sees glimmers of hope for libertarianism: The “shift to the left” that we seem to observe on economic policy is
depressing to libertarians. But that’s mostly crisis-driven. When the
results of more spending, more taxes, more regulation, and more money
creation begin to be visible, we may see the kind of reaction that led
to Proposition 13 and the election of Ronald Reagan at the end of the
1970s. Meanwhile, this cultural “shift to the left” is far more
encouraging. And don’t forget, at 90 days into the Obama
administration, Americans preferred smaller government to “more active government” by 66 to 25 percent.
08 May 2009 06:49 pm Brand StretchingLeave it to Virgin. 08 May 2009 05:51 pm Nothing Spells Awwwkward ...... like the family photo. 08 May 2009 05:48 pm Hockney's iPhoneHe's turned it into art. 08 May 2009 05:42 pm And The Winner Is ...
New Orleans, 9.03 am. And, yes, this was my favorite too. The runner-up - for the back cover - is after the jump. Continue reading "And The Winner Is ..." » 08 May 2009 05:22 pm Hoekstra Challenges PelosiThis is getting more involved. Sargent:
We should all reserve judgment on the specifics at this point, I suppose. But the emergence of the possibility of Pelosi's and Rockefeller's enmeshment in the torture program could have, to my mind, a salutary effect on the debate. Continue reading "Hoekstra Challenges Pelosi" » 08 May 2009 05:01 pm Saving The GOPJon Henke makes a start: The Republican brand does not merely need a little tinkering. The Republican brand is not the victim of Democratic rhetoric and framing. The Republican brand is so bad because people accurately perceive the state of the Republican Party. Rhetorical contrition and promises are insufficient. Fixing that problem requires actual, painful, reform.
08 May 2009 04:48 pm !Stuart Jeffries considers the exclamation mark: Carol Waseleski's unexpectedly diverting paper, Gender and the Use of Exclamation Points in Computer-Mediated Communication, found that women used more exclamation marks than men. But why was this?...[Waseleski] concluded that exclamation marks were not just marks of excitability but of friendliness, and suggested that one reason women use them more than men is because they were, as a gender, less likely to be socially inept, funless egotists ... Ha!! 08 May 2009 04:20 pm Mental Health BreakMeet Dominic, the two-legged Greyhound with the heart of a champion:
08 May 2009 03:16 pm The Willful Ignorance Of Lindsey GrahamDoes he really believe that all Gitmo inmates are enemy combatants? Can he read? 08 May 2009 02:44 pm Joe The PlumberKinda like Glenn The Blogger:
Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, tells TIME he's
so outraged by GOP overspending, he's quitting the party — and he's
the bull's-eye of its target audience. But he also said he wouldn't
support any cuts in defense, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid —
which, along with debt payments, would put more than two-thirds of the
budget off limits. For a serious grappling with fiscal imbalance, check out Bruce Bartlett's latest column. Money quote: David Walker of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation suggests that the
retirement age (both early and normal) must rise, the formula used to
calculate initial Social Security benefits should be revised and the
index for calculating cost-of-living increases be reduced. Walker also acknowledges that higher revenues will be necessary, a view endorsed, somewhat surprisingly, by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who was chief economic adviser to John McCain last year. As he said at the bipartisan conference, "The era of tax-cutting is over." 08 May 2009 02:37 pm Malkin Award Nominee"I don't understand how we're going to raise young men to be good family men in a culture where the government tells them that the idea that a child has a father as well as a mother is an example of hateful bigotry -- but, that's what gay marriage is about," - Maggie Gallagher. I'll be sure to let my mum and dad, brother and sister, and niece and nephews know. They somehow missed this lesson in my wedding ceremony. 08 May 2009 02:37 pm Can A Blog Make Facts Matter?Ezra Klein makes a common point about the need for newspapers:
Continue reading "Can A Blog Make Facts Matter?" » 08 May 2009 02:35 pm Cool Ad WatchElectrabel is a Belgium-based energy company:
08 May 2009 02:33 pm The President WritesI'm impatient, but he's real and this kind of thing reminds me of Reagan:
08 May 2009 02:29 pm They Call Him PlaxicoAlexis Madrigal points to a study on baby name fads: It turns out that a name’s sad tumble into obscurity is tightly correlated with the speed of its rise. And that principle — what goes up quickly, must come down quickly — could be applicable to a broader set of memes.
08 May 2009 02:12 pm FRC: Closet Cases Welcome On SCOTUSAnd that's an improvement. 08 May 2009 02:01 pm The Outrage Isn't Going Anywhere?Please. Count me alongside Ryan Avent in his swing at Simon Johnson and James Kwak: There is obviously a risk that when conditions improve the impetus for reform will be lost. But I think there’s a pretty substantial window in which reform can take place. It’s more important to do regulatory reform right than to do it quickly. I don’t see a vague concern that in the next year anger at and worries about the banking system will evaporate as a good reason to undertake a tricky and risky nationalization now. I have learned to judge Obama from the long view. And I bet banking regulation will be a lot tighter at the end of this first term than at the beginning. 08 May 2009 01:57 pm Malkin Award Nominee"And, you know, the mainstream media portraying this as Republicans desperately seizing on an issue as a way to embarrass the Obama administration. Well, that's what an opposition does. And it isn't as if terrorists running around in America is not a serious issue," - Charles Krauthammer on relocating terror suspects from Gitmo. Where exactly are terrorists going to be "running around"? 08 May 2009 01:57 pm The View From Your Window
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 11.50 am 08 May 2009 01:43 pm The Lesson Of PelosiScott Horton draws one conclusion from the ABC allegations: If anything, this helps make the case for an independent commission.
Congressional inquiries are in fact subject to manipulation by the
leadership. A commission would have the resources and time to get to
the bottom of the question. And yes, what the Congressional leaders
were told, and exactly what they did when presented with such
information, is a critical point of inquiry. The Congressional leaders
do need to be held to account for their inaction. Also, the current
classified briefing process needs some careful review. Why are staff
who have security clearances excluded? How can the restrictions imposed
on Congressional leaders about discussing briefings be reconciled with
the Constitutional role of Congress? The system failed over the last
eight years. We need to ascertain exactly how it failed in order to
prevent future incidents. Jon Rauch makes a sober, reasonable case against legal prosecutions here. I think it's a serious engagement with the problem, even though I think Jon still under-estimates the scale and scope of the lawlessness - though not as much as he once did (for which I am as grateful as I am unsurprised - Jon is as honest an intellectual broker as you'll find in this town). I certainly am persuaded that a rush to prosecute would be imprudent. Which is why, like Horton, I support an independent commission with money and time to cool emotions and gather facts. Among those facts should be a chance for the last president to explain where he was coming from. Then we should make a calm decision on the legal consequences. 08 May 2009 01:13 pm Now RockefellerOne awaits an explanation for this. 08 May 2009 01:13 pm Palin's FortunesNate Silver makes a prediction: [A]t least one serious contender for the Republican nomination in 2012 will be someone newly elected to his or her state's governorship in 2010. Assuming that the economy has begun to turn around by that point, that person stands to get credit for a recovery that they had little to do with -- they will be able to cut taxes or to restore services, and will inevitably be hailed as a genius for having turned a billion-dollar deficit into a surplus. But for gubernatorial incumbents, for whom the opposite dynamics hold, it may be rough sledding ahead.
08 May 2009 12:58 pm Carbon Tax v. Cap And Trade, CtdDrum goes another round. Avent also replies: Cap-and-trade can be structured to behave almost exactly like a carbon tax, it has some advantages over a carbon tax, and in basically all the ways that matter it is every bit as good as a carbon tax. It’s the implementation that’s crucial. Those holding out for a carbon tax need to explain why they think Congress would suddenly be less ignorant or craven in debating a tax than they are in debating a cap-and-trade plan, AND they need to explain why the difference in outcome would be large enough to justify the cost of delaying action by a year or several as a new bill was rolled out, sold, defeated a few times, and then eventually passed.
Over to you, Jim Manzi? 08 May 2009 12:57 pm "Uneasy"Jeff Sessions predicts how Americans would respond to a gay Supreme Court Justice. I preferred his first answer. It is and should be completely irrelevant. And yet, for some Republicans, it obviously isn't. Do they know how insulting and anachronistic they sound? Does the GOP really believe it will win back the next generation by fronting Thune and Sessions?
May 3, 2009 - May 9, 2009
|
The Emptiness Of Karl Rove"The View From Your Window": First Run Sold OutThe Mormon MoveWe Have A PresidentGlory
Andrew SullivanAndrew's Bio | E-Mail AndrewDish PrepPatrick AppelChris Bodenner The View From Your Window Book A Speaking Engagement Add this RSS Feed 
Site Meter 
Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott 
|
Copyright © Andrew Sullivan. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. TheAtlantic.com